RFE/RL -- President Serzh Sarkisian has suggested that Turkey will not unconditionally normalize relations with Armenia anytime soon and again threatened to annul the universally welcomed agreements signed by the two nations last October.

In an interview with the French daily “Le Figaro” published on Thursday, Sarkisian also warned that Ankara’s reluctance to ratify them is swelling the ranks of Armenians opposed to his conciliatory policy on Turkey.

“Our desire to establish normal relations is great,” he said. “However, recent statements from Turkey make me think that they will not ratify the protocols in the foreseeable future.

UPI.com -- Ankara is watching lawmakers in London as they get set to deliberate over a national day of remembrance for the deaths of Armenians during the Ottoman era.

Turkey pulled its ambassador to Sweden last week after Swedish lawmakers narrowly approved a resolution describing the killing of Armenians in World War I as genocide. The Turkish envoy to Washington was recalled when a similar measure narrowly passed March 4 in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs.

A measure is on its way to the British Parliament that if adopted would set aside an "Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day." British lawmakers are to review a draft of the measure this month.

RFE/RL -- Azerbaijan stepped up its threats to win back Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenian-controlled territories surrounding it by force on Thursday, with Defense Minister Safar Abiyev speaking of a growing likelihood of “a great war” with Armenia.

“For 15 years diplomacy has not achieved any concrete results and Azerbaijan cannot wait another 15 years,” Abiyev said, according to an Azerbaijani Defense Ministry statement reported by local and international media.

“Now it's the military's turn and the threat is growing every day," Abiyev was quoted as telling the French ambassador to Baku, Gabriel Keller. “If Armenia does not end its occupation of Azerbaijan's territory, the beginning of a great war in the South Caucasus is inevitable.”

RFE/RL -- Turkey is extremely unlikely to ratify its fence-mending protocols with Armenia at this juncture, a senior Turkish lawmaker and deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) said on Thursday.

In an interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian service in Yerevan, Suat Kiniklioglu made clear that Ankara continues to make the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations conditional on a Karabakh settlement. He said the passage of an Armenian genocide resolution by a U.S. congressional committee has rendered Turkish ratification of the protocols even “more difficult.”

“[Ratification] is very difficult right now,” Kiniklioglu said, speaking on the sidelines of an international seminar organized in the Armenian capital by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. “It’s almost impossible. Especially after [the progress of the House Resolution] 252, it’s almost impossible.”

RFE/RL -- Gagik Tsarukian, a wealthy businessman leading Armenia’s second largest governing party, on Monday lambasted and branded as incompetent a government minister who stated recently that the economic crisis in the country is over.

According to government statistics, the Armenian economy grew by 2.4 percent on the year in January after contracting by 14.4 percent in 2009. Trade and Economic Development Minister Nerses Yeritsian seized upon the figure to declare the end of a serious economic downturn that gripped the country more than a year ago.

“Nobody in the world is saying today that the economic crisis has ended, [what many are saying is] it’s possible that there will be a second phase of the economic crisis,” Tsarukian told journalists. “Even those states that have had economic growth … are not daring to say such a thing.”

Iran has its own considerations and views about a peacekeeping force that could be deployed in the Karabakh conflict zone, according to the Islamic Republic’s chief diplomat in Armenia.

Ambassador Seyed Ali Saghaeyan told a press conference in Yerevan on Friday that “Iran shares a common border with Karabakh and therefore we surely have our own considerations and views about the composition of a peacekeeping force that might be deployed in the conflict zone.”

The ambassador did not specify, however, the country whose participation in such a peacekeeping operation would be unacceptable for Iran. Nor did the Iranian ambassador specify what he meant by saying that Iran and Karabakh “share a common border.” Saghaeyan was speaking in Persian through his official interpreter.

RFE/RL -- The opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) blamed on Friday Armenia’s controversial agreements with Turkey for the difficulty with which pro-Armenian lawmakers pushed their latest genocide resolution through a U.S. congressional committee.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the non-binding measures by 23 votes to 22. The outcome of the vote, which lasted for over 90 minutes, hang in the balance until the last minute. The panel passed similar resolutions, most recently in 2007, by much wider margins in the past.

Armenian Reporter, by Emil Sanamyan -- Silva Harotonian, an Iranian-Armenian IREX employee who has been sentenced to three years in prison over what her family calls a “tragic misunderstanding.”.

In a March 10 statement her employer the U.S.-funded International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) thanked "the Government of Armenia for their engagement in securing Silva's release." Details of that engagement have not been made public.

Ms. Harotonian, an Iranian citizen, was arrested on June 26, 2008, while on a business trip to Tehran for IREX's Maternal and Child Health Education and Exchange Program (MCHEEP). A Yerevan-based administrative officer for the program, launched in 2007, she was the only IREX staff member working in Iran at the time.

Military authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh have denied violating a ceasefire following a casualties report issued by Azerbaijan on Thursday. A spokesman said Stepanakert remains committed to the agreed regime along the line of contact with Azerbaijani armed forces.

RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service quoted the country’s Defense Ministry as confirming that three Azerbaijani soldiers were killed and another soldier was wounded “after exchanging fire with Armenian armed forces near the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.” The Azerbaijani ministry did not specify where the fighting took place. Its spokesman said the Armenian side also suffered casualties.

Talking to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Friday, a Nagorno-Karabakh military spokesman advised “searching for the causes of the Azerbaijani soldiers’ deaths in the [low] morale of the Azerbaijani armed forces.” He also flatly denied casualties on the Armenian side.

RFE/RL -- Official Yerevan dismissed on Tuesday Turkish warnings that a U.S. congressional resolution describing the 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide would set back the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations.

It also emerged that a group of mostly pro-government Armenian parliamentarians is heading to Washington in an apparent effort to facilitate the passage of the resolution introduced by pro-Armenian U.S. legislators a year ago.

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to discuss and vote on the proposed legislation on Thursday. It urges President Barack Obama to “accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide.”

nationalgeographic -- Armenia has learned the hard way what it means for a country to lose its forests--and the huge backbreaking effort required to replant them. But in its struggle and determination to restore its trees, Armenia is an inspiration for the rest of the planet.

The endeavor to bring trees back to Armenia--a Massachusetts-size nation on the borders of Iran and Turkey--is thanks mostly to an initiative called the Armenia Tree Project, a program supported by the international conservation charity WWF and BMU/KfW, the German Development Bank.

The Armenia Tree Project has been raising and planting trees throughout the country for almost 16 years. Last year one million trees were planted, a record that brings the total of trees planted over the life of the project to about 3.5 million.

Civilitas Foundation -- Azerbaijan’s minister of foreign affairs has found generally acceptable the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs’ new version of the principles for the settlement of the Karabakh conflict, proposed last December in Greece. This is the first occasion since 1997 that Baku has found the mediators’ proposal acceptable.

Now, it is Armenia’s turn and it will be difficult for Armenia to say "Yes" to the version that took shape first in Krakow in July 2009, then in Athens at the end of 2009 and then in Sochi on January 25, 2010, because in contrast to the 2007 Madrid proposals, not only is the right of the people of Nagorno Karabakh to self-determination very vague, but in terms of removing the consequences of the conflict, Azerbaijan is at an advantage.

Since 1997, Azerbaijan has either rejected or withheld consent to all settlement proposals; it also rejected the Madrid document presented in 2007. And now, over the course of a mere two years, the mediators have presented proposals which are acceptable to Azerbaijan and unacceptable for Armenia.

RIA Novosti -- The European Union on Tuesday called on Armenia and Turkey to ratify protocols on bilateral relations without preliminary conditions.

Armenia and Turkey signed protocols on establishing diplomatic relations and on developing bilateral relations last October. They are yet to be approved by their parliaments.

"The European Union supports the process started between Armenia and Turkey and calls on the countries to stay true to this process. The EU urges the countries to ratify and implement the protocols without preliminary conditions," Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, whose country now holds the rotating EU presidency, told a press conference in Yerevan.

RFE/RL -- The United States has again criticized the Armenian authorities’ human rights record, saying that they have continued to stifle dissent, manipulate elections, tolerate police brutality and restrict judicial independence over the past year.

“Authorities restricted the right of citizens to freely change their government in [the May 2009] mayoral elections in Yerevan,” the U.S. State Department said late Thursday in an annual report scrutinizing human rights practices around the world.

“During the year authorities subjected citizens, particularly those considered by the government to be political opponents, to arbitrary arrest, detention, and imprisonment for their political activities; lengthy pretrial detention also continued to be a problem,” concludes the report.

“Authorities continued to use harassment and intrusive application of bureaucratic measures to intimidate and retaliate against political opponents. Authorities used force to disperse political demonstrations and constrain citizens seeking to publicize them. Police beat pretrial detainees and failed to provide due process in some cases.”

RFE/RL -- Armenia and Azerbaijan are narrowing their differences over a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict sought by international mediators, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said over the weekend.

“We are trying to help Armenians and Azerbaijanis to reach a common approach,” the DPA news agency quoted him as saying at the Munich Security Conference. “It's obviously a very difficult issue, but things are moving.”

“The understanding is growing and the number of issues that must be tackled by the top leaders is reducing and we are trying to help,” Lavrov said.

Russia, which co-chairs the OSCE Minsk Group with the United States and France, has stepped up its involvement in the Karabakh negotiating process of late, with President Dmitry Medvedev hosting this year’s first meeting of his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts near the Russian city of Sochi late last month.