Turkish minister puts off visit to Switzerland to protest criminal
investigation of historian

AP Worldstream
Jun 09, 2005

A Cabinet minister postponed a visit to Switzerland to protest a Swiss
investigation of a Turkish historian who denied that the mass killings
of Armenians in the early 1900s amounted to genocide, officials said
Thursday.

Trade minister Kursat Tuzmen had been scheduled to take part in a June
22-24 Turkish-Swiss business forum. But his visit and the conference
were “indefinitely postponed” because of an ongoing Swiss criminal
probe into Yusuf Halacoglu, the head of the Turkish Historical
Society, officials in Tuzmen’s office said.

The probe was launched because of suspicions that Halacoglu violated
Swiss anti-racism laws by denying that the killings of Armenians
around the time of World War I amounted to genocide in a speech last
year.

Turkey’s semiofficial Anatolia news agency said a visit by Swiss
Economics Minister Joseph Deiss to Turkey, slated for September, had
also been put off. Turkish officials could not immediately confirm
that report.

Manuel Sager, spokesman for the Swiss Economics Ministry, said that
Deiss would like to travel as scheduled to Turkey, but “the trip has
yet to be confirmed from the Turkish side.”

The postponement is the latest row between Turkey and Switzerland over
the killings.

Micheline Calmy-Rey, the Swiss foreign minister, had been scheduled to
travel to Turkey in 2003, but Turkey withdrew its invitation after the
parliament of a western Swiss canton (state) recognized the killings
of Armenians in Turkey as genocide. Calmy-Rey visited Turkey in March.

Armenians say 1.5 million of their people were killed as the Ottoman
Empire forced them from eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1923 _ and
that this was a deliberate campaign of genocide by Turkey’s rulers at
that time.

Turks say the death count is inflated and insist that Armenians were
killed or displaced as the Ottoman Empire tried to secure its border
with Russia and stop attacks by Armenian militants.