Keep advice to yourself, Turkish PM tells Sarkozy over Armenia remarks
11 October 2011, Tuesday / TODAYSZAMAN.COM,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Tuesday lashed out at French President Nicholas Sarkozy for recent remarks calling on Turkey to face its history and recognize the 1915 killings of Armenians as genocide, saying the French leader should keep his advice to himself.
“You see the French president, Sarkozy, is giving some advice to Turkey in a move to invest in the [upcoming French] elections. You should first listen to your own advice. He is different in France, different in Armenia and more different in Turkey. There cannot be a political leader with so many faces. Politics requires honesty,” Erdoğan said during a speech delivered at his party's parliamentary group meeting.
Recalling that there are nearly 600,000 Armenians in France, but there are also as much as 500,000 Turks in France, he accused the French president of disregarding his country's relations with Turkey for such “minor calculations.” “Holding the title of a statesman requires thinking about future generations, not future elections. It will be too late for those who fail to understand this now when they understand the reality,” Erdoğan added.
Sarkozy drew a strong negative reaction from Turkey when he said last Thursday on a short trip to Armenia that Turkey should recognize the 1915 incidents as genocide, threatening to pass a law in France that would make denying this a crime. “The Armenian genocide is a historical reality. Collective denial is even worse than individual denial,” Sarkozy told reporters.
“Turkey, which is a great country, would honor itself to revisit its history like other great countries in the world have done,” the French president added. On Friday, Sarkozy made further comments on the issue, calling on Turkey to “make a gesture of reconciliation” and warning that if Turkey refrained from taking any steps, France would consider amending its legislation to penalize denial, Reuters reported. Sarkozy did not give a date for such a move but noted that measures could be adopted “in a very brief time.”
Amidst tension between the two countries over Sarkozy's remarks, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe will pay an official visit to Ankara on Oct. 26 at the invitation of his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu.
France has long been urging Turkey to acknowledge that the allegations of genocide are true. Turkey, in turn, has proposed that a committee of historians, not politicians, should decide what transpired in 1915. The French Parliament recognized the so-called “Armenian genocide” in 2001, which resulted in short-lived tension between France and Turkey. In 2006 the French National Assembly adopted a bill proposing punishment for anyone who denies the “Armenian genocide.” The bill was dropped this summer before coming to the Senate.
The issue of the World War I-era killings of Armenians is a sensitive one for Turkey. Armenian groups say up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed during World War I in a systematic genocide campaign perpetrated under the Ottoman Empire. Turkey categorically rejects the charges, saying the death toll is inflated and that Turks were also killed as Armenians revolted against the Ottoman Empire in collaboration with Russian forces for an independent state in eastern Anatolia.
Opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli also targeted Sarkozy during his party's parliamentary group meeting on Tuesday. “Our advice for Sarkozy is that if he wants to see an example of genocide, he should look back at his history. He will clearly see the atrocities committed in Algeria and will notice explicit or implicit massacres in North Africa,” Bahçeli said.
Keep advice to yourself, Turkish PM tells Sarkozy over Armenia remarks
