ANKARA (Agencies) – The Swiss Foreign Ministry has officially stated that the protocol on the normalization of Turkey-Armenia relations will be signed today.

The protocols will be signed at the University of Zurich, if no changes are made to the program, the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported.
According to the sources in Turkey, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandyan will sign the protocols, the History of Truth web site reported.
The Turkish ambassador to Switzerland, Oghuz Demiralp, has also left Bern for Zurich to make preparations for the process.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also flies to Zurich today to attend the ceremony, Reuters reported.
The move would bolster Turkey’s standing with the European Union, which it hopes to join, while boosting Armenia’s economy and improving security in the South Caucasus, a key transit corridor for oil and gas supplies to the West.
The ceremony will see the two neighbors, at odds over the World War I massacres of Armenians under Ottoman rule, sign two protocols, agreed under Swiss mediation, to establish diplomatic ties for the first time and open their border, which has been sealed for more than a decade.
But the signing ceremony marks only the first step in a lengthy process during which the two countries need their respective parliaments to ratify the protocols in order for them to take effect.
Although both governments have the parliamentary majority for the adoption of the protocols, they are not expected to rush ahead due to domestic opposition.
The Armenian leadership is under fire at home for allowing the creation of a commission to study the Ottoman-era massacres of Armenians under the deal with Turkey -- a point that critics say calls into question Yerevan’s genocide claims.
Armenians say that 1.5 million of their kinsmen were systematically killed by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1917.
Turkey, which says the figure is inflated and denies genocide took place, has refused to establish diplomatic ties over Yerevan’s campaign to have the killings recognized as genocide.
A dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh -- an Armenian-majority enclave which broke free from Azerbaijan after a war by Yerevan-backed Armenian separatists in the early 1990s -- also has the potential to spoil the rapprochement.
In 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia to support close ally Azerbaijan, which has strong ethnic, trade, and energy links with Ankara.
Turkish officials have said that the border will remain closed unless Yerevan and Baku make progress towards resolving the conflict.
“The lack of progress on Nagorno-Karabakh could leave the protocols in limbo as the government could submit the protocols to parliament, but not seek a vote on them,” said Mustafa Aydin, a professor of international relations from Ankara’s TOBB University.
Armenia rejects any link between Nagorno-Karabakh and the rapprochement process.