CANADA’S ‘ARMENIAN GENOCIDE’ COMMENT SPARKS ROW WITH TURKEY

Agence France Presse — English
April 25, 2006 Tuesday 5:29 PM GMT

Turkey’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that a reference by Canada’s
Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the “Armenian genocide” as fact had
hurt bilateral relations.

“We are appalled by the prime minister’s comments, which give support
to Armenia’s unfounded allegations of genocide,” the ministry said
in a statement.

The statement said Harper’s reference to the “Armenian allegations” as
fact was serious, and that his position on the issue would “negatively
affect ties between Turkey and Canada”.

The ministry called in Canadian ambassador Yves Brodeur to inform
him of Turkey’s “sensitivities” regarding Harper’s declarations,
a Turkish diplomat told AFP.

“Turkey’s views were clearly transmitted to him,” said the diplomat,
who asked to remain anonymous and did not give the date of the meeting.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen were slaughtered in
an orchestrated genocide in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey categorically rejects claims of genocide, arguing that
300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife
when Armenians began fighting for independence in eastern Anatolia
and sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

The Canadian head of government had on Friday praised commemorations
of the massacres in Armenia during World War I.

He noted that the Canadian Senate had passed a resolution in 2002
recognizing the killings in Armenia as the first genocide of the 20th
century, and the House of Commons had followed suit two years later.

“My party and I have applied those resolutions and continue to do so,”
the prime minister said in a statement.

The Turkish foreign ministry said the two resolutions had led to the
“stagnation” of bilateral relations.

The statement also recalled that a Turkish military attache had been
killed by an Armenian militant group in Ottawa in 1982.

The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet on Tuesday quoted a diplomat as saying
the prime minister’s comments had led to Canadian companies being
excluded from a forthcoming bid to build Turkey’s first nuclear plant.

Armenians marked the 91st anniversary of the bloodbath on Sunday.