ROMANIAN LEADER RULES OUT ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RECOGNITION
Irina Hovannisian
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Oct 5 2006
Romania will not join France and other Western states in officially
accepting the massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as genocide,
Romanian President Traian Basescu said on Tuesday.
He explained that his country does not want to risk spoiling its
relations with Turkey, which strongly denies that the 1915-1918 mass
killings and deportations constituted a genocide.
Basescu made the comments at a meeting with Yerevan State University
students on the second day of his official visit to Armenia. Asked
by a student whether he is ready to follow French President Jacques
Chirac’s example and urge Ankara to recognize the genocide, he said,
"We will not do anything affecting our neutrality in our relations
with all the countries of the Black Sea region."
Visiting Yerevan last week, Chirac indicated that genocide recognition
should be a precondition for Turkey’s membership in the European
Union. "Each country grows by acknowledging its dramas and errors of
the past," he said.
Basescu claimed, however, that it is Armenia that complicates its
integration into European structures by raising the genocide issue on
the international stage. "Keep history on the history books and in the
memory of the peoples, and rebuild the future," he said. "If history
constantly stands in the way of the future as a bone of contention,
you won’t achieve success in European integration."
Basescu argued that Romania laid to rest its historical disputes with
neighbors for the sake of membership in NATO and the EU. "Romania
is one of the countries which at any moment can have disputes with
neighbors regarding the border, history and so on. So is Armenia and
so is Turkey," he said.
The Armenian genocide has been officially recognized by the governments
and parliaments of about two dozen nations, including France, Italy,
Canada and Russia.