TURKEY SLAMS EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT CALL FOR RECOGNITION OF ‘ARMENIAN GENOCIDE’
Breitbart.com
March 16 2015
The Turkish Foreign Ministry denounced on Saturday a recent report
adopted by theEuropean Parliament that called on European Union member
states to recognizeArmenian claims of genocide at the hands of the
late Ottoman Empire.
In a statement, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic called
the European Parliament’s annual human rights and democracy report’s
reference to the Armenian claims as “devoid of historical reality
and legal basis.”
“We find these expressions extremely problematic and regret them,”
Bilgic said in the statement.
The European Parliament adopted the Annual Report on Human Rights and
Democracy in the World 2013 on March 12. Article 77 of the report
“calls, ahead of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide,
on all the Member States legally to acknowledge it, and encourages
the Member States and the EU institutions to contribute further to
its recognition.”
Armenians say 1.5 million people were killed during the First World
War years in eastern Anatolia as part of a systematic genocide campaign
against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey disputes
that claim, saying both that the death toll is inflated and that the
Armenians were killed while the Ottoman Empire was trying to quell
unrest caused by Armenian attacks on the Turkish population while
they were trying to establish an Armenian state in eastern Anatolia.