SWITZERLAND UNWILLING TO GIVE WRITTEN GUARANTEE TO TURKEY OVER RA CC RULING
PanARMENIAN.Net
28.01.2010 16:39 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey will start talks with Switzerland and the
United States to get legal clarification that the recent decision of
the Armenia’s Constitutional Court will not prevent a debate between
Ankara and Yerevan on whether or not the 1915 killings of Armenians
at the hands of Ottomans amounted to genocide, Turkish Hurriyet
newspaper reports.
"We can set up a commission of historians that can talk about
everything on the 1915 events, yet cannot discuss whether it was
genocide or not because the Armenian court ruled this is not an issue
open to discussion," an anonymous Turkish diplomat said, adding that
Turkey will continue talks with Switzerland and the U.S. and try to
find a solution on legal grounds.
The Protocols aimed at normalization of bilateral ties and opening of
the border between Armenia and Turkey were signed in Zurich by Armenian
Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian and his Turkish counterpart Ahmet
Davutoglu on October 10, 2009, after a series of diplomatic talks
held through Swiss mediation.
On January 12, 2010, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of
Armenia found the protocols conformable to the country’s Organic Law.
Following the decision, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued an official
statement concerning the deal. It runs particularly as follows:
"The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Armenia has declared
its decision of constitutional conformity on the Protocols between
Turkey and Armenia signed on 10 October 2009 with a short statement
on 12 January 2010. The Constitutional Court has recently published
its grounds of decision. It has been observed that this decision
contains preconditions and restrictive provisions which impair the
letter and spirit of the Protocols.
"The said decision undermines the very reason for negotiating these
Protocols as well as their fundamental objective. This approach
cannot be accepted on our part," says the statement posted on Turkish
MFA website.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.
The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be
April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes
and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of
food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were
indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse
commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case
of genocide after the Holocaust.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In
recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as
genocide.
To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized
the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars
and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also
recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC,
The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.