ANSA English Corporate Service, Italy
February 6, 2019 Wednesday 1:10 PM CET
Turkey against Macron for Armenian genocide commemoration: 'He is trying to distract attention from domestic problems'
(ANSAmed) – ISTANBUL, FEBRUARY 6 – Turkey ''condemns and rejects the attempts carried out by Macron, who is dealing with political problems in his country, of solving the situation by transforming historic events into political material'', said the spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday. ''Accusations on the so-called Armenian genocide are a political lie that lacks any legal grounds and is against historic facts'', the spokesman said, responding to the announcement made by the French President Emmanuel Macron that he was declaring April 24 a ''day dedicated to the commemoration of the Armenian genocide''.
Ankara has never recognized the mass killing of Armenians during World War One as a genocide, denying the death toll and admitting that a maximum of 500,000 people were killed while historians dispute that they were over one million.