Levon Ter-Petrosian gave no "consent"
Samson Ozararat, representative of Armenia in the BSEC business council, will attend the Turkey-Armenia football match for the 2010 World Championship on October 14.
Samson Ozararat was one of the first Armenian businessmen who seconded the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations.
In 1993, he arranged a meeting of Armenia's first President Levon Ter-Petrosian with the leader of Turkey's Nationalist Movement Party, Alparslan Türkeş. The meeting took place in Paris.
Sixteen years later, Samson Ozararat says the meeting hadn't been agreed upon in advance. The sides simply got acquainted with each other's approaches and stances. Mr. Ozararat also refuted the allegations of 2008 that Levon Ter-Petrosian had agreed with Turks on the surrender of the liberated territories to Azerbaijan.
"Despite the outcome of talks, the situation is bettering since it is better to be on bad terms than not to have ties at all," he says.
Samson Ozararat warns his Turkish friends against the linkage of the Karabakh conflict with the normalization of relations.
"Both issues should be addressed separately," he says.
Mr. Ozararat thinks Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan can take a decisive step and persuade his supports to agree to the frontier opening.
Asked how he evaluates the policy of Armenia's three presidents in the context of Armenian-Turkish relations, Samson Ozararat said: "Each of them has his specific style but the line continues without preconditions."
Note that Samson Ozararat was Adviser to Robert Kocharian.
Karine Asatryan
Istanbul
