TURKEY NOT READY TO RETURN ENVOY TO WASHINGTON: PM
By Paul Handley (AFP)
Agence France Presse
March 9 2010
RIYADH — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday Turkey is
not ready to return its ambassador to Washington after a US Congress
panel branded the World War I massacre of Armenians as genocide.
"As long as the situation does not get any clearer we will not send
back our ambassador to Washington," Erdogan said about the tiff
over the Armenia resolution passed by the US House Foreign Affairs
Committee on Thursday.
"America should not let go of a strategic ally like Turkey over such
an issue," he said.
An infuriated Ankara recalled Ambassador Namik Tan on Thursday,
shortly after the panel narrowly approved the non-binding resolution.
The move, opposed by the administration of President Barack Obama,
now opens the door for a vote by the full House of Representatives.
Erdogan called the move "a comedy stunt" and blamed the vote on a
combination of "unbecoming" voting procedures in the US Congress and
a change of attitude by the "Jewish lobby" to back the action.
"The Jewish lobby in the US supported this resolution," he said.
The resolution calls on Obama to ensure that US foreign policy reflects
an understanding of the "genocide" and to label the mass killings as
such in his annual statement on the issue.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed during World
War I by their Ottoman rulers in a planned campaign of extermination
as the empire was falling apart, a stance that is supported by several
other countries.
The massacres followed a roundup in Istanbul on April 24, 1915,
the date on which Armenians each year hold rallies around the world.
Turkey categorically rejects the genocide label. It argues that between
300,000 and 500,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks were killed
in civil strife when Armenians rose up for independence and sided
with invading Russian forces.
Ankara is concerned that if the killings are officially labelled
genocide by Washington or others, this could possibly open the door
to legal claims for restitution by the descendants of those who died,
according to some analysts.
In a bid to limit the fallout of the committee’s decision, US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday the administration would "work
very hard" to stop the resolution from going before the full House.
Following US-backed bridge-building talks, Turkey and Armenia signed a
deal last October to establish diplomatic relations and open their
border.
But the process has already hit the rocks, with Ankara accusing Yerevan
of trying to tweak the terms of the deal and Yerevan charging that
Ankara is not committed to ratifying the accord.
Meanwhile Erdogan, who was in Riyadh to receive the King Faisal
International Prize for Service to Islam, rejected a new round
of sanctions on Iran to halt its alleged drive to acquire nuclear
weapons capability.
Washington has been strongly lobbying countries in the Middle East in
recent weeks to support a tighter crackdown on companies linked to
the Iranian regime and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, to pressure
Tehran to give up its nuclear drive.
"I don’t believe that any further sanctions will yield results,"
he told a group of journalists during a talk about Turkey’s role in
Middle East politics.
"The first and second rounds (of sanctions) have never yielded
results."
He also said he believe that Israel was ready to accept Turkey as a
mediator in Israeli-Syrian peace talks, frozen since December 2008
when Israel launched a 22 day assault on Gaza.
"There is an interest in revitalising these talks. Syria wants Turkey
as the mediator," he said.
"Israel has been moving on this so possibly we can restart talks,
I hope," he said.
He added that there were "only a few more sentences" to be sorted
out in a peace pact when the talks were suspended nearly 15 months ago.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
