MSNBC
May 8 2006

Turkey recalls officials for talks

Turkey said on Monday it had recalled its ambassadors from France and
Canada “for consultations” in a diplomatic dispute over moves to
recognise Armenian claims of genocide during the first world war.

Ankara’s anger has been stirred by a decision of the French
parliament to debate a draft law later this month that would make
denial of the Armenian genocide claim a crime similar to denial of
the Holocaust. Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, also recently
backed Armenia’s genocide claim. Both France and Canada have
substantial Armenian communities.

Namik Tan, a spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry, said the
ambassadors had been recalled to Ankara “for a short period for
consultations regarding recent developments over the baseless
Armenian genocide claims in France and Canada”.

The withdrawal of the envoys threatens to further sour relations
between Ankara and Paris, which are already strained because of
French resistance to Turkey’s ambition to join the European Union.

Armenia claims that up to 1.5m civilians were massacred by Ottoman
troops as the empire collapsed starting in 1915, and that the
massacres amounted to genocide because they were the result of
deliberate Ottoman policy. The Armenians were citizens of the empire
at the time.

Turkey denies the genocide claim. It says hundreds of thousands of
Armenians, as well as a similar number of Turkish Muslims, died in
partisan fighting, famine and forced removal. It also insists the
mass killings cannot be blamed on the republic of Turkey, which was
created in 1923.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress