MORE THAN 11,000 TURKS APOLOGISE FOR ARMENIAN DEATHS

Agence France Presse
December 17, 2008 Wednesday

More than 11,000 Turks have signed an Internet petition that apologises
to Armenians for massacres that took place in 1915, in an unprecedented
move that has sparked fierce criticism.

The petition — drafted by a group of university professors and
coinciding with a time of warming relations between arch-foes
Ankara and Yerevan — relates to events nearly a century ago in the
then-Ottoman Empire.

The text of the petition states that signatories regret "that we
remain indifferent to the Great Catastrophe that Ottoman Armenians
endured… and that we deny," and offers apologies.

University professor Cengiz Aktar, a founder of the campaign for
signatures launched on the Internet Tuesday and which has been endorsed
by intellectuals and artists, hailed the effort a success.

He said he sensed that there were "many people" in Turkey who shared
his opinion of what happened. "I was right," he said.

Armenia and Turkey offer starkly different accounts of those events,
and the dispute has been a major obstacle in relations between the
two countries.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen died between 1915
and 1917 in orchestrated killings during the final years of the
Ottoman Empire.

But Turkey rejects the genocide label and argues that between 300,000
and 500,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife.

Significantly, the petition does not use the word "genocide" —
a move that in Turkey could possibly lead to legal proceedings.

It has nethertheless drawn the ire of politicians, diplomats and even
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government is trying to
normalise relations with Yerevan.

"I don’t accept this campaign, I will not support it and I will not
take part in it," Erdogan told reporters in remarks cited by Anatolia
news agency.

More than 20 countries, including Belgium, Canada, Poland and
Switzerland, have officially recognised the killings as genocide.

But many others, including Britain and the United States, refuse to
use the term to describe the events, mindful of relations with Turkey.