ARMENIAN GROUP CRITICIZES EU DECISION ON TURKEY

International Herald Tribune, France
The Associated Press
Dec 12 2006

BRUSSELS, Belgium: An Armenian pressure group criticized the European
Union on Tuesday for basing its decision to partially suspend
membership talks with Turkey only on a dispute over Cyprus.

It complained the EU ignored human rights issues and the controversy
over the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians.

"The silence of the (EU) member countries on other Turkish violations
are a lapse that seriously endangers European integration," said
a statement from the European Armenian Federation for Justice and
Democracy.

EU foreign ministers on Monday agreed to suspend membership talks
with Turkey in a number of areas ranging from fisheries to external
relations in response to Ankara’s refusal to respect an agreement to
open its ports to ships and planes from Cyprus.

Although the decision was a blow to Turkey’s EU membership aspirations,
the Brussels-based Armenian lobby group said it did not go far
enough. It said the EU should have also punished Turkey for violations
of human rights, treatment of minorities, a blockade of Armenia’s
border and a refusal to recognize the 1915-1919 killings of Armenians
as genocide.

Today in Europe

Communists are gone but not the spies EU acts against Ankara for
failure to open ports to Cyprus British regulators to explore possible
break-up of BAA’s airports "The member states’ decision has added to
the existing confusion in relations with Turkey," said the group’s
president, Hilda Tchoboian.

Turkey acknowledges that great numbers of Armenians were killed in
fighting and mass expulsions at the end of the Ottoman Empire, but
vehemently rejects the label of genocide.

Ankara reacted angrily to a bill in the French parliament this year
that would make it a crime to deny that the killings of up to 1.5
million Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide.

The European Commission criticized the French bill as counterproductive
during a critical stage in the Muslim country’s EU entry talks.