ERDOGAN: ARMENIAN ‘GENOCIDE’ CAMPAIGN SEEKS TO ATTACK TURKEY, NOT UNCOVER TRUTH

Cihan News Agency (CNA), Turkey
March 19, 2015 Thursday

ANKARA (CÄ°HAN)- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday
slammed Armenian efforts for greater international recognition of an
alleged genocide of Armenians at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire
a century ago, urging the Armenian diaspora to prove its claims by
bringing out documents in support of them.

Erdogan said the Armenian campaign to promote the genocide claims
was meant to attack Turkey, not to uncover the truth or commemorate
the suffering of Armenians, adding that Turkey had nothing it cannot
account for regarding what happened a century ago.

Turkey categorically denies Armenian claims that 1.5 million Ottoman
Armenians were victims of a genocide campaign during the First World
War years, insisting that both Turks and Armenians were victims of
civil strife during the period of the war. The dispute has become a
heated issue as the centennial of the alleged genocide approaches.

Armenians say April 24, 1915, when a group of Armenian intellectuals
were rounded up in Ä°stanbul, is the date when the alleged genocide
campaign got under way and commemorate the date every year as a
“genocide” anniversary.

Erdogan said there “might have been tragedies at the time of war,”
but added that thousands of Turks were also killed by the Armenians
during the civil strife.

“O Armenian diaspora, O Armenian administration, our archives are
here. We have hundreds of thousands of documents, over a million
documents. How many documents do you have? Bring your documents, and
we task the historians, our historians, political scientists, even
archeologists and lawyers … let’s seek the truth here,” he said,
adding that “anti-Turkey campaigns carried out by paying money and
forming lobbies will not earn you anything.”

“The truth should be sought in archives,” Erdogan said, accusing the
Armenians of not responding to Turkey’s call to examine the archives
and uncover the truth about history.

“Our calls are not answered because the aim is not to explore the
facts. We have nothing we cannot account for,” he said. “Instead, if
we examine what our nation had to go through over the past 100-150
years, we would find far more [suffering] than what the Armenians
allegedly went through,” he said.

‘First World War not yet over’

Erdogan also slammed the post-First World War order in the Middle
East established by the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret deal between
Britain and France that defined their proposed spheres of influence
in the Middle East.

Erdogan said the Sykes-Picot agreement, which brought nothing but
“tears and oppression,” defined boundaries to deepen, not to bridge,
ethnic and religious rifts in the region. “The order based on chaos
is still in place,” he said. “Today we see clearly that the First
World War is not yet over. The long parenthesis it has opened is not
yet closed.”