Monsters and Critics.com
March 13 2010

Swedish-Turkish "genocide" vote row overshadows ministers’ meeting

DPA

Saariselka, Finland – The row between Turkey and Sweden over the
Swedish parliament’s decision to label the killing of Armenians in
1915 as genocide overshadowed a meeting between the two countries’
foreign ministers on Saturday.

Sweden’s Carl Bildt and Turkey’s Ahmet Davutoglu met in northern
Finland to discuss European Union foreign policy with a small,
informal group of EU ministers, but Thursday’s Swedish parliament vote
forced itself onto the agenda of their bilateral meeting.

Davutoglu said that the resolution was a ‘shocking development’ for
Turkey, calling it ‘unjust for those who do not know anything about
the history to decide what happened and to judge a nation.’

The ‘unacceptable’ parliamentary decision was ‘related to Swedish
domestic politics more than to Turkish-Swedish relations or
Turkish-Armenian relations,’ Davutoglu said. Sweden faces
parliamentary elections in September.

However, at the same time Davutoglu stressed that his government’s
relationship with the Swedish administration had been ‘excellent’ and
‘exemplary’ over the last six years, and that Sweden was still
supporting his country’s EU membership bid.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt called the vote ‘regrettable,
because the politicization of history serves no useful purpose.

‘We have to move on … We are a close strategic partner of Turkey
when it comes to European accession, and we’re a close strategic
partner of Turkey on quite a number of other issues as well,’ Bildt
said.

Turkey initially reacted to the late Thursday vote by recalling its
ambassador to Stockholm and cancelling a planned trip by Turkish
Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Sweden.

Turkey’s further policy ‘depends how the Swedish government and
parliamentarians act in the future,’ Davutoglu said.

And the country ‘hopes that this mistake will not be repeated,’ he stressed.

Turkey is currently eyeing events in the United States, where a
congressional committee a week ago voted to label the Armenian killing
‘genocide,’ but where the White House is trying to keep the motion
away from a vote in Congress.

The EU’s foreign-policy director, Catherine Ashton, who also attended
the meeting in the ski resort of Saariselka, said that ‘as countries
develop and look to their future, they also have to reflect on their
past.’