Global Post
Jan 6 2015

Turkey vows to actively counter Armenia ‘genocide allegations’

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday Ankara would “actively”
challenge a campaign pressuring Turkey to recognise as genocide the
mass killings of Armenians in World War I, on the 100th anniversary of
the tragedy this year.

“I believe that both the foreign ministry and the relevant
institutions will actively counter those allegations,” Erdogan told
Turkey’s ambassadors in a keynote speech, adding that discussions were
already under way to detail an action plan.

One of the sessions at the annual ambassadors’ conference this week in
Ankara focuses on defining a strategy to counter a campaign by Armenia
and the Armenian diaspora who want Turkey to recognise the 1915
killings at the hands of the Ottoman security forces as genocide.

Turkey has so far vehemently rejected the claims and says up to
500,000 Armenians died in fighting and of starvation after Armenians
sided with invading Russian troops. It claims a comparable number of
Turks were also killed.

Last year, Erdogan offered an unprecedented expression of condolence
for the massacres when he was prime minister but this was far from
satisfying the Armenians, who want the deaths of an estimated 1.5
million people recognised as genocide.

On Tuesday, Erdogan accused Armenia of expending its energy on
genocide claims despite Turkey’s will to normalise bilateral ties and
politicising the issue by imposing its own “biased” view point.

Turkey and Armenia in 2009 signed protocols to normalise ties, but
they have still not been ratified by the national parliaments.