YEREVAN. Aug 31 (Interfax) - Armenia is willing to unconditionally normalize its relations with Turkey, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said, accusing Turkey of reluctance to have better relations with the neighboring country.
"Turkey must find the strength to respect commitments that it has made," Sargsyan said at a conference with senior Armenian diplomats.
Turkey has kept its border with Armenia sealed since 1993, demanding that Armenian armed forces leave Azerbaijan's disputed Armenian-speaking enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding Azeri districts, which they have been occupying since the 1990s Armenian-Azeri war over the disputed region.
Turkey is also trying to block Armenia's efforts to achieve the international recognition of mass killings of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I as an act of genocide.
Sargsyan warned at the conference with the diplomats that Armenia might disavow Armenian-Turkish protocols of intent to establish diplomatic relations and build up mutual ties signed in Zurich two years ago.
"Many of our friends are advising us to wait for the parliamentary elections in Turkey. So we'll be able to see in the next few months whether [Turkey's] position has changed after those elections, though the past two months have given us no reason for optimism," the president said.
"We will base our future moves concerning those protocols on those observations," he said.
In mid-August the Turkish parliament declared the protocols to be no longer valid.
The Protocol on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations and Protocol on the Development of Bilateral Relations were signed by the then Armenian and Turkish foreign ministers on October 10, 2009.
The two documents, brokered by Switzerland, were subject to parliamentary ratification in Armenia and Turkey. However, in April 2010 Sargsyan suspended the Armenian ratification process, accusing Turkey of presenting his country with unacceptable conditions and of effectively seeking to scrap the protocols.