RFE/RL reports that the Armenian President, Robert Kocharian, has congratulated his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, on his election this week. The BBC says that Gul “is the first politician with an Islamist background to become president since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey as a secular, Western-oriented state in 1923.”

RFE/RL also reports that congratulations were sent from the Minister of Foreign Affairs and opposition Heritage party leader Raffi Hovannisian.

Kocharian’s office did not release any details of what is a rare congratulatory message sent from Yerevan to Ankara.

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“There is much work to be done in this region, and I am sure you will bring your contribution to global peace and prosperity,” Oskanian said in a separate letter to Gul released by the Armenian Foreign Ministry.

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Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic relations, with successive governments in Ankara making their establishment conditional on a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and an end to the long-running Armenian campaign for international recognition of the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire. The current Turkish government, formed by Gul’s Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP), has essentially stuck to those preconditions despite showing signs of a softening of Turkish policy on Armenia.

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[…] Stepan Safarian of the opposition Zharangutyun party, predicted that Turkey will now come under stronger Western pressure to establish diplomatic relations and open its land border with Armenia.

Incidentally, Zharangutyun leader Raffi Hovannisian also congratulated the new Turkish president. “It is to be hoped that, during your tenure and that of the next Armenian president to be elected in several months’ time, Turkish-Armenian relations will enter a wholly new phase of reflection, exploration, discovery, and ultimate normalization,” Hovannisian wrote in a letter made public by his party’s press service.