Daily Telegraph, Australia
May 7 2006
Envoy recalled over genocide remark
>>From correspondents in Montreal
May 07, 2006
TURKEY has recalled its ambassador to Canada following Prime Minister
Stephen Harper’s recent remarks calling the killing of Armenians in
1915 genocide, a Montreal daily reported overnight.
Ambassador Aydemir Erman has not been officially withdrawn but was
called back to Ankara to help formulate Turkey’s response to an April
19 statement by Harper marking the 91st anniversary of the killings,
The Gazette, an English-language newspaper, said.
“For us, this is a serious matter,” Yoney Tezel, an official with the
Turkish embassy, was quoted as saying. “The Armenian claims are a
direct attack on our identity, on Turkey’s history. We feel it’s
unfair.”
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen were slaughtered in
an orchestrated genocide in the final years of the Ottoman Empire,
mainly from 1915 to 1917.
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.
Mr Harper’s statement noted that both houses of Canada’s parliament
have passed resolutions acknowledging the slaughter as the first
genocide of the 20th century.