Yerevan hosts historic game as Turkish, Armenian leaders attend

Although expectations are low for a major breakthrough in the frozen relations between the two countries during the football diplomacy, it is still seen as an opportunity to start taking steps toward the normalization of relations.

The game would start at 7.00 p.m. (GMT 1400). 

Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan has invited his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul to watch the game together in Yerevan to mark "a new symbolic start in the countries' relations". Gul had accepted the invitation.

Gul is scheduled to stay only a couple of hours in Yerevan. According to media reports, Gul and his accompanying delegation would fly to Yerevan two hours ahead of kick-off and to go directly the scheduled meeting with Sarksyan at the Armenian president’s office.

During the presidents’ schedule one hour meeting, Gul is expected to discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute and Turkey's proposal for establishing a Caucasus alliance with Sarksyan.

The two leaders are later expected to go to the stadium to watch the game. Gul and the Turkish delegation would leave Yerevan as soon as the game ends.

In Yerevan, the nationalist Dashnaktsutyun party said its activists will be present at the airport where Gul is due to arrive and at the football stadium to stage protests demanding Turkey recognize the genocide claims.

Extra security will be laid on at the stadium for Gul and the 150-strong Turkish delegation.

FIRST PRESIDENT VISITING ARMENIA

Gul will become the first Turkish leader ever to set foot in neighboring Armenia. He expressed his hopes that this match could lift the obstacles blocking the coming together of two peoples who share a common history and can create a new foundation, and said it means "an opportunity for a better mutual understanding."

Turkey is among the first countries that recognized Armenia when it declared its independency in the early 1990s.

However there is no diplomatic relations between two countries, as Armenia presses the international community to admit the so-called "genocide" claims instead of accepting Turkey's call to investigate the allegations, and its invasion of 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory despite U.N. Security Council resolutions on the issue.

Turkey hopes an enhancement of mutual relations would eventually help to bring an end to the so-called genocide claims with the establishment of a commission to investigate the true history and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

In 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan took a tentative first step towards resolving the thorny genocide issue by proposing that a joint commission of historians launch an investigation and publish their conclusions.

The proposal was rejected by Yerevan and expectations are high in Turkey that the warming relations would help Armenia to accept this proposal.

Armenia, with the backing of the Diaspora, claims up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in orchestrated killings in 1915. Turkey rejects the claims, saying that 300,000 Armenians along with at least as many Turks died in civil strife that emerged when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia.