Soccer Diplomacy Success

To follow up on my Sept. 1 post . . .

From the Eurasia Daily Monitor:

On September 3 Turkish President Abdullah Gul announced that he had accepted an invitation from Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian to attend the soccer match between the two countries in the Armenian capital of Yerevan on September 6 as part of the qualifying group stages for the 2008 World Cup. It will be the first time a Turkish head of state has ever visited Armenia.

The announcement followed weeks of speculation and has proved to be highly controversial inside Turkey. Opposition parties had called on Gul to decline the invitation in protest over Armenian support for the breakaway region of Karabakh in Azerbaijan and the continuing campaign by the Armenian diaspora for the massacres and deportations of ethnic Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire to be recognized as genocide.

For full article, click here.