Germany’s speaker of parliament has sharply criticized Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, following threats against German-Turkish MPs. Norbert Lammert said top Turkish politicians had fuelled the fire, reports.
Norbert Lammert expressed the outrage in Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, on Thursday, over comments made by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Lammert also denounced the “sometimes hate-filled threats and smears” targeting the 11 German lawmakers with Turkish heritage.
“I would not have thought it possible in the 21st century, that a democratically elected head of state would criticize members of the German Bundestag by voicing doubts on their Turkish heritage, by labeling their blood as impure,” Lammert told parliament on Thursday.
He was criticizing Erdogan’s reaction to last week’s contentious Bundestag resolution, which repeatedly referred to the killings of Armenians in Ottoman-era Turkey during World War I as genocide. Turkey disputes this definition of the massacre of Armenians.
Erdogan had said the German-Turkish parliamentarians were a “mouthpiece for the PKK,” the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party seeking an independent Kurdish state. The president also suggested that the 11 lawmakers should undergo blood tests, to see “what kind of Turks they are.”
“Also, I reject in all its forms the insinuation that members of this parliament are terrorist mouthpieces,” Lammert said.