TURKISH DEPUTY WOULD LIKE TO THROW A SHOE AT PRESIDENT GUL THE SAME WAY AN IRAQI JOURNALIST LAST WEEK HURLED A SHOE AT VISITING US PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

ArmInfo
2008-12-22 18:56:00

Turkish President Abdullah Gul released a statement yesterday about
his family’s ethnic origins in response to a Republican People’s Party
(CHP) deputy Canan Aritman’s attempt to link the president’s attitude
toward a recently launched apology campaign for the Armenian killings
at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire in 1915 to his ethnic roots. In
his statement yesterday, Gul announced that his mother’s side, the
Satoglu family from Kayseri, and his father’s side, the Gul family
also from Kayseri, are Muslim and Turkish, according to centuries of
written genealogy records.

According to the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman, as CHP deputy Canan
Aritman who claimed that President Gul’s mother is of Armenian origin,
continued to attack the president in an interview published in the
Milliyet daily yesterday, saying that she would like to throw a shoe
at the president when she sees him in the same way an Iraqi journalist
last week hurled a shoe at visiting US President George W. Bush.

Aritman last week attacked the apology campaign initiated by a group
of intellectuals to apologize for the Armenian massacres of 1915,
which Armenians claim constituted genocide. "The false scientists
signing it should apologize to Turkey," she said.

In his statement Gul said that he respects the ethnic background,
different beliefs and stressed that all Turkish citizens are equal to
one another regardless of any differences. "No one has any superiority
whatsoever over another one. Everybody has the equal and same rights
under the guarantee of our Constitution," the statement reads.

When asked for his opinion on the campaign, Gul said the state’s stance
is to improve relations with its neighbors. "We believe dialogue to
be the solution to problems we have with our neighbors. Perpetuating
problems is not useful to anyone," he said.

"I would toss a shoe and draw attention to this issue," Aritman
said in her interview. "I wouldn’t recommend suing me. They would be
embarrassed. There is no legal basis for such a lawsuit," she said. "If
I do sue the president on charges of supporting incidents that might
lead to an ethnic conflict, that would have a legal basis." She said
she had known about Gul’s alleged Armenian background for a long time,
adding that she should be appreciated for not revealing the information
during Gul’s election campaign.

Responding to Gul’s statement, the deputy said: "I never asked the
president to announce his genealogical background. I just wanted
him to protect his nation and state, the duty assigned to him by the
Constitution." "Why doesn’t the president show the principled stance
shown by the prime minister?" Aritman asked. To recall, Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted harshly to the statement, saying he had
nothing to apologize for.