Five aid trucks sent by Armenia to earthquake victims crossed the border with Turkey on Saturday, using the same passage used in 1988 to send aid from Ankara to Yerevan in similar circumstances.
According to the official Turkish agency Anadolu, this convoy destined for the victims of the earthquake that killed nearly 25,000 people in Turkey and Syria, took the border crossing of Alican, in the province of Igdir (northeast).
“Humanitarian aid sent by Armenia has crossed the Margara Bridge on the Armenia-Turkey border and is heading towards the earthquake-affected areas,” Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanayna tweeted, quoted by Anadolu, which also publishes a statement. convoy photo.
This border crossing, recalls the Turkish agency, had been specially opened in 1988 to send aid to Armenia, which had just suffered an earthquake that affected its capital Yerevan and whose death toll is estimated between 25,000 and 30,000.
The two countries, divided by the memory of the 1915 genocide and the Nagorno Karabagh conflict, began to reconnect in December 2021 with the appointment of special envoys who met on several occasions in Vienna to discuss normalizing their relations. Commercial flights also resumed in February 2022.
“Happy to have been able to help”
Turkish envoy Serdar Kilic thanked his “dear” Ruben Rubinyan, vice president of the Armenian National Assembly, on Saturday, also via Twitter, for his “kind efforts that made this operation possible.” “Happy to have been able to help,” the latter declared on Twitter.
Armenia has decided to “put aside” the issue of the genocide that Ankara does not want to recognize, admitting at most “massacres on both sides”.
The Armenians, supported in their position by many countries and experts, estimate that 1.5 million of their inhabitants were systematically killed by the troops of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, between 1915 and 1917.
The border, reopened in 1991 with the independence of Armenia after the collapse of the USSR, had been closed two years later due to the Nagorno Karabagh conflict that pits the former Soviet republic of Armenia against Azerbaijan, an ally of Turkey.
Source: BFM TV
