DUTCH TURKS COULD BOYCOTT ELECTIONS OVER ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ROW

Agence France Presse — English
October 5, 2006 Thursday 1:02 PM GMT

Turkish groups in the Netherlands expressed concern Thursday that
voters of Turkish origin will boycott elections after candidates
for parliament were bumped off the electoral lists after refusing to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide.

Last week the Netherlands’ two biggest political parties, the ruling
Christian Democrat CDA and the opposition PvdA labour party, scrapped
three prospective MP’s of Turkish origin from their list of candidates
for the November 22 elections because they would not recognize the
World War I massacre of Armenians as a genocide.

"We have heard from every side that voters of Turkish origin are
disappointed and do not understand, and we fear this could have
consequences for the participation of the Turkish community in Dutch
politics," said Ahmet Azdural of IOT, an umbrella group representing
some 300 local Turkish organisations in the Netherlands.

"We have called on all organisations and bodies together, with national
and local politicians of Turkish origin, to meet Sunday in Capelle
aan den IJssel (near Rotterdam) to agree on a course of action,"
Azdural told AFP.

"It is very difficult to force candidates of Turkish origin to choose
sides in what is a historic debate. This gives the impression that
there is no freedom of speech in the major political parties,"
Azdural told AFP.

There are 235,000 voters of Turkish origin in the Netherlands,
corresponding in terms of population to some three seats in the 150
seat parliament.

Statistically the Turkish community in the Netherlands votes in higher
numbers than other immigrant communities and they traditionally favour
the PvdA labour party.

Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in
orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917 and want the massacres
to be internationally recognized as genocide.

Turkey argues that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in
civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern
Anatolia and sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling Ottoman
Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey.