TURKEY’S ERDOGAN: ‘I CONDEMN THE POPE’ OVER ARMENIA GENOCIDE COMMENT
Assyrian International News Agency AINA
April 14 2015
Posted 2015-04-14 19:18 GMT
Turkey’s President Erdogan takes part in a welcoming ceremony in Kiev
(Thomson Reuters).ISTANBUL (Reuters) — Turkish President Tayyip
Erdogan said he condemned Pope Francis on Tuesday for comments that
the 1915 mass killing of Armenians was genocide and warned him not
to make such a statement again.
The pope became the first head of the Roman Catholic church to publicly
call the killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians “genocide” on
Sunday, prompting a diplomatic row with Turkey, which summoned the
Vatican’s envoy and recalled its own.
Muslim Turkey agrees Christian Armenians were killed in clashes with
Ottoman soldiers that began on April 15, 1915, when Armenians lived
in the empire ruled by Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands
were killed and that this amounted to genocide.
“We will not allow historical incidents to be taken out of their
genuine context and be used as a tool to campaign against our country,”
Erdogan said in a speech to a business group.
“I condemn the pope and would like to warn him not to make similar
mistakes again.”
While other Turkish politicians, and now Erdogan, have lashed out at
the pope, some ordinary Turks have dismissed the row as empty politics
and voiced a desire to leave history be.
Erdogan’s comments are likely to put a focus on whether the United
States, a traditional ally of NATO-member Turkey, will eventually
use the term “genocide” for the mass killings.
Unlike almost two dozen European and South American states that use
the term, Washington avoids it and has warned legislators that Ankara
could cut off military cooperation if they voted to adopt it.
Pope Francis appeared to refer to his use of the term “genocide”
on Monday, saying in a sermon that “today the Church’s message is
one of the path of frankness, the path of Christian courage”.
Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by David Dolan and Louise Ireland.