TURKEY SLAMS SWISS VERDICT ON GENOCIDE
Gulf Times, Qatar
March 11 2007
ANKARA: Turkey has condemned the decision of a Swiss court to impose
a suspended jail sentence and a fine on a Turkish citizen for denying
that mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 amounted
to genocide.
In the first such conviction under Swiss law, the court on Friday
sentenced Dogu Perincek, head of the leftist-nationalist Turkish
Workers’ Party, to a 90-day suspended jail term and fined him 3,000
Swiss francs ($2,461).
"The court case was inappropriate, groundless and controversial in
every sense … the verdict cannot be accepted by the Turkish people,"
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement released late on Friday.
It criticised Swiss media coverage of the case, calling it biased,
and said the verdict violated free speech.
Perincek, whose party has no seats in the Ankara parliament, was
convicted under a 1995 Swiss law which bans denying, belittling
or justifying any genocide. Twelve Turks were acquitted of similar
charges in 2001.
Perincek, 65, said he would appeal against the verdict.
Turkey strongly denies claims by Armenia and its supporters that the
Ottoman Empire committed a systematic genocide against about 1.5mn
Armenians during World War I.
Ankara says that figure is greatly exaggerated. It says large
numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died because
of inter-ethnic fighting, famine and disease as the Ottoman Empire
collapsed.
But many parliaments around the world have now recognised the Armenian
killings as genocide.
