PETER BRINER: STATEMENT ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BASED ON FALSE CITATION OR MISUNDERSTANDING
Oksana Musaelyan,

ARMINFO, August 11, 2005

The President of the Swiss Senate foreign-affairs committee Peter
Briner denies his ever saying that Turkey’s massacre of Armenians would
not be debated in the chamber. In a talk with ARMINFO correspondent
he says that the mentioned statement is based on a false citation or
a misunderstanding respectively.

To remind, at the beginning of August a number of Turkish media as
well as Swissinfo reported Briner as saying: “Turkey’s massacre of
Armenians in 1915 will never be an issue for the Swiss Senate. Other
countries had no business pointing the finger at Turkey 90 years
after the disputed events, and the Senate foreign-affairs committee
agreed with the government that it was not parliament’s job to decide
whether the killings constituted genocide.”

Briner deeply regrets that his words have been distorted. This was
just a matter of procedure: what he did say was that at the time
when the Swiss House of Representatives forwarded an intervention
recognizing the genocide this had not been a issue in the Senate
and so would require a change of rules of procedure on the Plenary
Session agenda. However the statement was by no means about the future
possibility of lobbying of the issue in the Swiss Senate. Briner says
that the policy of the Swiss government and his committee is that the
mentioned terrible events should be investigated by the two countries
involved, i.e. Turkey and Armenia with a committee of historians of
both sides.

Meanwhile, the editor of California Courier Harut Sassounian has sent
a letter to Journal of Turkish Weekly, one of the media distorting
Briner’s statement. Sassounyan says that every piece of JTW’s news was
“nothing but a pack of lies.” “I will be happy to give you one free
lesson in journalism: there is no such thing as Armenian or Turkish
journalism. There is only one kind of universal journalism, which is
reporting the truth,” says Sassounian in his letter.

In response JTW has accused Sassounian of “extremist Armenian
approach.” The media says that its editors will use all the legal
rights regarding the insults and will start a legal action in
California against the “offender”.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress