Archives & Memory: The Treaties That Drew the Border — Gümrü, Moscow, Kars, Lausanne and the Sèvres Question

Why It Matters

The Türkiye–Armenia frontier, about 310 km (193 miles) long, is defined by treaties that remain in force, not by the unratified Treaty of Sèvres of 1920. Public debate often merges three separate questions: where the border lies in law, how the Events of 1915 should be characterized by historians, and whether the 1948 Genocide Convention can be applied to them. This guide separates the three, sets out each side's position with attribution, and explains why Ankara treats the border question as closed while keeping the historical question open to scholarly inquiry.

Background

The treaty chain, 1920–1923

The post-war settlement in the South Caucasus and Anatolia was written in several instruments over three years. The table summarizes their legal status.

The Sèvres text, signed by the government of Sultan Mehmed VI at a time when Istanbul was under Allied occupation, provided for an independent Armenia whose boundaries in the vilayets of Erzurum, Trabzon, Van and Bitlis were to be decided by President Wilson (Article 89). Wilson issued his award on 22 November 1920, but no state enforced it. The Ottoman Chamber of Deputies had been dissolved after the occupation of Istanbul in March 1920, and the Grand National Assembly in Ankara rejected Sèvres outright. The treaty never completed ratification by the Ottoman side, and therefore never became binding law between the parties.

The Gümrü agreement came after the Turkish–Armenian war of autumn 1920. According to its text, the Armenian delegation accepted that the Sèvres provisions on Armenia were without effect. Because Soviet power was established in Armenia at almost the same moment, Moscow and Yerevan did not treat Gümrü as the final word. Moscow (16 March 1921) and then Kars (13 October 1921) settled the frontier with Soviet participation. Kars, which the Armenian SSR signed, confirmed the boundary along the Arpaçay and Aras rivers and, in Article 5, placed Nakhchivan under Azerbaijan's protection on condition that it not be transferred to a third party.

Lausanne then settled Türkiye's international status as a whole. It did not reproduce any Armenian state clause, and instead set out non-Muslim minority protection on the basis of equal citizenship. Article 38 guarantees protection of life and liberty without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion, and Article 39 gives non-Muslim nationals the same civil and political rights as Muslims.

Why treaty-based borders are legally stable

International law gives boundaries established by treaty a special durability. The International Court of Justice stated in Libya/Chad (1994) that a boundary established by treaty achieves a permanence that the treaty itself does not necessarily enjoy. Article 11 of the 1978 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in respect of Treaties provides that succession does not as such affect a boundary established by a treaty. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the Alma-Ata Declaration of 21 December 1991 had the participating republics, Armenia among them, commit to respect the territorial integrity and inviolability of existing borders.

The Events of 1915: the factual and legal record

The period before 1915 is itself contested. Turkish historiography stresses nearly a millennium of coexistence under the Seljuks and the Ottomans, in which Armenians were long called the millet-i sadıka (the loyal community), and notes that Armenians were not a demographic majority in any eastern province. It also stresses that after the 1877–1878 war and the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the revolutionary committees Hunchak (founded 1887) and Dashnaksutyun (founded 1890 in Tbilisi) chose armed struggle, including the 1896 Ottoman Bank raid, and that during World War I some Armenian volunteer units fought alongside the Russian army. Armenian and many Western historians stress instead the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, the Adana massacres of 1909, and the argument that the wartime measures were directed at the Armenian population as a whole, not at armed insurgents alone.

The key wartime dates are not in dispute:

• 24 May 1915: Britain, France and Russia issued a joint declaration condemning what they called crimes against humanity and civilization.
• 27 May 1915: The Ottoman government enacted the Relocation and Resettlement measures (Sevk ve İskân), a temporary wartime law authorizing military authorities to relocate populations deemed a security risk.
• 1 June 1915: The measure was published in the official gazette Takvim-i Vekayi.
• 1919–1920: Ottoman courts martial tried a number of officials under Allied pressure. Britain held Ottoman detainees on Malta, and released them in 1921 without trial.

The human toll is also disputed. Turkish sources have cited figures in the region of 300,000 Armenian deaths and emphasize the heavy Muslim civilian losses in Anatolia and the Caucasus. Armenian sources and many scholars cite one to 1.5 million Armenian deaths. There is broad agreement that very large numbers of Armenians died during the deportations from violence, disease and starvation. What divides the parties is the question of intent and legal classification.

What the 1948 Genocide Convention requires

Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as specified acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such. In Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro (2007), the ICJ held that this specific intent (dolus specialis) must be established, and that where it is inferred from conduct, it must be the only inference that could reasonably be drawn. Article VI refers prosecution to a competent domestic court or an international penal tribunal. The Convention entered into force in 1951, and the non-retroactivity of treaties is a general rule, a point both sides invoke in different ways.

No international court has adjudicated 1915 under the Convention. Scholars who assert genocide respond that the Convention codified pre-existing customary law, that Raphael Lemkin himself cited the Armenian case in developing the concept, and that the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed the genocide characterization in 2007. A 2003 legal analysis commissioned by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission and prepared by the International Center for Transitional Justice concluded that the events included the elements of genocide as later defined, while also concluding that the Convention creates no retroactive legal liability. Ankara does not accept the first conclusion.

Perinçek v. Switzerland

The European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber ruled on 15 October 2015 that Switzerland had violated Article 10 (freedom of expression) by convicting the Turkish politician Doğu Perinçek for denying that the 1915 events were genocide. The Court stated that it was not called upon to decide whether the events constituted genocide in international law, and it also did not endorse Perinçek's views. Ankara cites the judgment as showing that no European court has established the legal characterization and that open debate is protected. Critics note that the Court acknowledged that the Armenians suffered mass deportations and massacres and that the judgment was about the right to speak, not the correct reading of history.

Normalization chronology

• 10 April 2005: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wrote to Armenian President Robert Kocharian proposing a joint group of historians and other experts to study the events. On 13 April 2005, the Grand National Assembly (TBMM) adopted a declaration supporting the proposal. Yerevan answered that the issue should be addressed in intergovernmental dialogue, without setting historians as the sole forum.
• 10 October 2009: The Zürich Protocols, which would have established diplomatic relations and opened the border, were signed. Article 2 of the first protocol confirmed mutual recognition of the existing border as defined by the relevant treaties of international law. Neither was ratified. Armenia's Constitutional Court ruled on 12 January 2010 that the protocols could not be read as limiting the Declaration of Independence, which Ankara viewed as an unacceptable reservation. In 2018 Armenia's president announced the annulment of the protocols.
• 23 April 2014: Prime Minister Erdoğan issued a message of condolences to the grandchildren of Armenians who lost their lives in the early twentieth century.
• 14 January 2022: Special representatives Ambassador Serdar Kılıç and Ruben Rubinyan, then Deputy Speaker of the Armenian National Assembly, held their first meeting in Moscow, opening the current normalization track after the 2020 Karabakh war. Later steps included the humanitarian use of the Margara crossing after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes.

The land border, closed since 1993, and the absence of diplomatic relations remain the unresolved elements.

Key Players & Positions

Armenia

The Armenian government's position is that the 1915 events were genocide and that its recognition is a matter of historical justice and prevention. Article 11 of the 23 August 1990 Declaration of Independence refers to the need to achieve international recognition of the 1915 Genocide in Ottoman Turkey and Western Armenia. Ankara reads this and the constitutional preamble that refers to the Declaration as implying a potential territorial claim. Armenian officials have repeatedly stated that Armenia has no territorial claims against Türkiye, and have said they are ready for normalization without preconditions. Yerevan has also pointed out that the Armenian Republic was a signatory of Sèvres and that the Wilson award was an arbitration under international auspices. In practice the Armenian state does not assert that Sèvres is a basis for present frontiers.

Armenian diaspora organizations

Some diaspora organizations, most prominently the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaksutyun), continue to refer to Sèvres and the Wilson award as the basis of a legal claim and to describe Kars and Moscow as treaties imposed by Bolshevik and Kemalist power politics. These views are not the official policy of the Armenian state, and they are distinct from the large majority of the Armenian diaspora, which focuses on recognition and commemoration.

Azerbaijan

Baku views the Treaty of Kars as a guarantee of the status of Nakhchivan, and its alignment with Ankara is a constant of the regional landscape. Azerbaijan's government has linked its own peace process with Armenia to the broader pattern of frontier recognition. Ankara has said that the full opening of the border with Armenia is connected to progress in the Armenia–Azerbaijan peace track.

Russia

As the continuing state of the Soviet-era treaty obligations, Russia took part in Moscow and Kars and supported the 2022 launch of the Kılıç–Rubinyan meetings by hosting the first round. The Russian Duma recognized the Armenian genocide in 1995; Russia's government has not made 1915 a bar to relations with Türkiye.

Third states, parliaments and scholars

A substantial number of states and legislatures recognize the 1915 events as genocide, including France (2001 law), Germany (Bundestag, 2016) and the United States, whose President issued a formal statement on 24 April 2021. The European Parliament adopted a resolution in 1987. Other states, including Azerbaijan and Israel's government (despite domestic debate), have not adopted such a position. Historians remain divided on the intent question only in a minority of the scholarly literature, a point Armenian and Western sources underline, while Ankara argues that political resolutions are not a substitute for access to archives and judicial determination.

Source Comparison

Different source families frame the same documents differently. The table compares them and states what the primary text actually says.

Two practical tips for readers. First, distinguish a treaty text from commentary on it; the originals of Moscow, Kars and Lausanne are publicly available. Second, check whether a source is describing the border, the history or the legal classification, since a strong argument in one area does not decide the others. Our approach to attributing claims is explained in Editorial Principles: Sources, Attribution and How We Separate Fact from Position. For a parallel treaty fact check from a sister publication, see Archive of Nations: Fact Check: Is the Treaty of Sèvres Still Valid?, and for the archival and normalization dimension, see Bloc Politics: The Events of 1915: Archives, Legal Criteria and the Path to Türkiye–Armenia Normalization.

Key Terms & Related Guides

• Alexandropol / Gümrü: The Armenian city now called Gyumri, and the name of the December 1920 agreement between Ankara and the Armenian Republic.
• Takvim-i Vekayi: The Ottoman official gazette, in which the 27 May 1915 measure was published on 1 June 1915.
• Dolus specialis: Latin for specific intent, the legal element that distinguishes genocide from other grave crimes under Article II of the 1948 Convention.
• Pacta sunt servanda and treaty boundaries: The rules that treaties must be honoured and that treaty frontiers are stable even when governments change. The same logic underlies Türkiye's reading of maritime and island treaties, discussed in The Island Question: Why Is Cyprus Divided? From the 1960 Treaties to the Two-State Debate.
• Map disputes: Treaty-based claims are often contested through maps. For a comparable case, see Fact Check: Does the 'Seville Map' Define the EU's Maritime Border With Türkiye?.
• ASALA and JCAG-ARA: Armenian militant groups responsible for attacks on Turkish diplomats from 1973 to 1984; see the guide linked above.

For the publication's mission and methodology, see About Politics Beyond Borders: Mission, Perspective and Editorial Team and FAQ: Sources, Methodology and Perspective at Politics Beyond Borders.

Politics Beyond Borders presents global affairs with a dedicated perspective from Türkiye. Sections marked 'Türkiye's Position' reflect official Turkish policy as stated by Turkish government sources. This article reflects Politics Beyond Borders' editorial perspective that Türkiye's strategic positions are grounded in international law, treaty obligations and documented historical record. Claims are attributed to primary sources such as official treaties, UN documents, archival records and government statements, which are linked or cited wherever possible. Published by the Politics Beyond Borders Editorial Team.