The American Register
April 12 2015
Pope Francis’ Armenia “Genocide” Declaration Angers Turkey, Recalls
its Vatican Ambassador
By Jessica Smith
Turkey recalled its ambassador to the Vatican on Sunday after Pope
Francis declared the massacre of Armenians under Ottoman rule 100
years ago as genocide.
The Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement that the pope’s
comments were “null and void” to the Turkish people, and withdrew its
envoy in the Vatican back to Ankara.
It added that the Turkish people would not recognize the pope’s
statement “which is controversial in every aspect, which is based on
prejudice, which distorts history and reduces the pains suffered in
Anatolia under the conditions of the First World War to members of
just one religion.”
Earlier on Sunday, Francis described the massacre of up to 1.5 million
Armenians the “first genocide of the 20th century,” marking the
centenary of the mass killing.
Armenians have long campaigned for recognition that the killings,
which happened between 1915 and 1917 under the rule of the Ottoman
Empire, constituted genocide.
Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes with
Ottoman soldiers when Armenia was part of the empire ruled from
Istanbul. But the country denies hundreds of thousands were killed and
that this amounted to genocide.
The killings are recognized as genocide by a number of countries
around the world, but Turkey’s allies Italy and the United States have
avoided using the contentious term.
The United Nations defines genocide as acts intended to destroy a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.
Prior the recall of its ambassador, Turkey’s embassy to the Vatican
canceled a planned news conference for Sunday. Instead, the Foreign
Ministry in Ankara issued a terse statement conveying its “great
disappointment and sadness” over the pope’s statement.
It said the pope’s words signaled a loss in trust, contradicted the
pope’s message of peace and was discriminatory because Francis only
mentioned the pain of Christians, not Muslims or other religious
groups.