The “Civic aspect of the Turkish-Armenian dialog” conference has recently taken place in Istanbul. The media called the speech of Khars mayor Naif Alibeyoghlu at that forum sensational. The Mayor evaluated the consequences of the closed borders as a hard blow to the economy of the eastern regions of Turkey. According to him, Khars and neighboring cities are in severe crisis. The unemployment and migration of catastrophic scale increase. Meanwhile, according to the mayor, the Khars region dynamically had been developing until 1993 due to the Armenian open border. The initiative that a group of patriots took was quite natural in those circumstances. The supporters of the recommencement of trade contacts with Armenia have started the collection of signatures for the letter to head of the government Bulent Ecevit stating their demand to reconsider the decision on the border closing. According to Khars’s mayor, over 23 thousand (!) signatures have been already colleted.
According to Alibeyoghlu, the decision to close the border “was not political at all”. “ The Black Sea port mafia lobbied it in order to redirect trade flows”, the mayor thinks. It is possible that Alibeyoghlu exaggerates a little the importance of the economic background of the decision on the blockade against Armenia. But, it is obvious the closing of the border really let several forces make millions of dollars. It should be taken into consideration that the forces suffered from the border closing are not less influential than those who it makes for. Simply the political situation helped the latter ones and it seems that it changes now.
Scores of businessmen do not only speak in support of the recommencement of the relations with Armenia but also press for border opening. The head of the Union of stock exchanges of Turkey has recently stated about the necessity to establish trade relations with Armenia, noting that only economic relations with Armenia would allow mitigating the social tension in northwest provinces. The pressure on the authorities from the pragmatic oligarchs keeps on gathering momentum. The results of that pressure will be apparent soon.
