TURKISH FM, IN US, ANGERED AT ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BILL

Agence France Presse — English
February 7, 2007 Wednesday

Turkey’s foreign minister has warned that strategic ties with the
United States would be poisoned if Congress passed a resolution
recognising the 1915 massacres of Armenians as genocide, a report
said Wednesday.

Abdullah Gul, who met US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in
Washington on Tuesday, told the Anatolia news agency that passage
of the resolution would "spoil everything" between the long-standing
allies.

"The resolution submitted to Congress is a great threat which could
poison all our relations," he was quoted in Turkish as telling
reporters in Washington.

He noted pointedly that Turkey had "worked shoulder-to-shoulder"
with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warned that the
resolution was bad "as much for Turkey as for the United States."

In a wide-ranging one-on-one meeting and working lunch, Rice and Gul
discussed renewed moves in the US Congress to pass a law recognizing
the 1915 massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman empire as genocide.

"We understand very clearly that this is a sensitive issue not only
for the Turkish people but for the Armenian people," said McCormack.

A number of legislatures around the world have recognized the killing
of up to 1.5 million Armenians in what is today Turkey as genocide.

But while US President George W. Bush commemorates the massacres each
year in a speech, his administration had stopped short of backing
the genocide bills.

Turkey rejects the genocide label and 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 during World War I.