TURK MINISTER: DEPORTATION COMMENTS MISUNDERSTOOD TURKISH MEDIA QUOTED GONUL ON TUESDAY AS SAYING HE HAD BEEN MISUNDERSTOOD
Javno.hr
Nov 11 2008
Croatia
Turkey’s defence minister said on Tuesday he was misunderstood when
he apparently praised the deportation of Greeks and Armenians after
the fall of the Ottoman Empire as an important step in creating
modern Turkey.
Vecdi Gonul’s statement during a ceremony to mark the death of
the republic’s revered founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on Monday may
reignite decades-old issues that have left deep scars in Turkey and
in neighbouring Greece and Armenia.
"Would Turkey be a nation state if the Greeks had stayed in the Aegean
region and Armenians had stayed in several parts of Turkey?," Gonul
was quoted by state Anatolian news agency as saying at the Turkish
embassy in Brussels on Monday.
"I do not know which words to use to explain the importance of this
population exchange but if you look at the old (population) balances,
its importance will be seen very clearly," he said, adding Ankara was
made up of Jews, Muslims, Armenians and Greeks before the republic
was founded.
Turkish media quoted Gonul on Tuesday as saying he had been
misunderstood. The defence ministry declined to comment.
Hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians were expelled from
Turkey as smaller numbers of Muslims were forced out of Greece in
the 1920s, under an agreement that established the Greek and Turkish
borders. More Greeks were forced out of Turkey during the 1950s.
Armenians were deported by Ottoman Turks during World War
One. Armenians say some 1.5 million died either in massacres or from
starvation or deprivation as they were marched through the desert.
Turkey has always insisted that the deaths of Armenians, most of them
in 1915, were part of a war in which a beleaguered Ottoman Empire
was facing Armenian rebels allied with its enemies.
After Turkey’s defeat in World War One and its subsequent war with
Greece, Ataturk founded modern Turkey in 1923 and established a
secular republic.