DEPUTY RAISES EYEBROWS WITH ICJ PROPOSAL

Today’s Zaman
Jan 31 2008
Turkey

Veteran Turkish diplomat Þukru Elekdað has said Ankara and Paris
could jointly take an almost decade-old French parliamentary decision
recognizing the controversial World War I-era killings of Anatolian
Armenians as genocide before the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) in order to determine whether the century-old incidents can
be accurately categorized as acts of genocide according to a related
UN convention.

The controversial decision bluntly stating that "France publicly
recognizes the Armenian genocide of 1915" was made in January 2001,
leading Ankara to launch strong protests of Paris, including the
cancellation of a number of major projects with actual or potential
French involvement.

In October 2006 the French parliament approved a bill that made it
a crime to deny that the Ottoman Turks committed "genocide" against
Anatolian Armenians during World War I, despite Ankara’s protests
and a warning that this would "poison" the deeply rooted relations
between the two countries. Later in the year, the Turkish military
announced that its ties with France had been suspended after the
French legislature’s approval of the so-called genocide bill.

Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy Elekdað’s
proposal presented in Paris following talks at the French parliament
as part of a Turkish parliamentary delegation has so far never been
voiced as an official stance by Ankara. Foreign Ministry officials
approached by Today’s Zaman briefly stated yesterday that this
should be considered a personal view of Elekdað, who was formerly an
ambassador to the United States.

"We can go to the ICJ with France and ask whether the law adopted
in France in 2001 is in compliance with the agreement in 1948 and
whether the 1915 incidents constitute genocide," Elekdað was quoted as
saying by the Anatolia news agency, in an apparent reference to the
1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide. He noted that the delegation shared this view with French
lawmakers during their talks.

Head of the Turkish delegation Yaþar Yakýþ, a former foreign minister
and chairman of Parliament’s European Union harmonization commission,
said Turkey has no official policy on taking the Armenian issue to
the ICJ. He, however, added that certain studies on the issue have
been conducted at the Foreign Ministry.

Armenians claim that up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered
in orchestrated killings during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey categorically rejects these claims, saying that 300,000
Armenians, along with at least as many Turks, died in civil strife
that emerged when the Armenians took up arms for independence in
eastern Anatolia and sided with the Russian troops who were invading
Ottoman territory.

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