TURKISH PM DOES NOT WANT ANY COUNTRY TO HAVE NUKES
MATTHEW BARAKAT
Associated Press Online
April 12, 2010 Monday 8:38 PM GMT
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday that his
country does not want Iran or any other nation to have nuclear weapons.
Erdogan is among dozens of world leaders in Washington for President
Barack Obama’s nuclear security summit. He spoke Monday at George Mason
University’s new Center for Global Islamic Studies, just outside the
U.S. capital.
Turkey currently holds one of the rotating seats on the U.N. Security
Council, and the United States is hoping Turkey will cooperate with
efforts to impose sanctions against Iran as punishment for its alleged
work toward creating nuclear weapons.
While the United States worries about Iran’s nuclear program, Turkey
has its own concerns about Israel’s nuclear program. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opted not to attend Obama’s summit, and
insiders said he had expected Turkey and Egypt to use the conference
as a platform to challenge him over his country’s widely assumed
nuclear arsenal, which the Jewish state never has acknowledged.
Erdogan, in his remarks, did not specifically mention Israel’s nuclear
program, but he criticized its treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza
Strip and called Gaza an "open-air prison."
While he specifically said Turkey does not want nuclear weapons in
"our region," he also said Ankara "would like to see all countries
possessing nuclear weapons work to eliminate them in a certain time
frame." His remarks in Turkish were translated by an interpreter.
As for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Erdogan noted that Tehran has
denied it is pursuing a nuclear weapon, but he also said that the
International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog,
has faulted Iran for a lack of transparency.
In his prepared remarks, Erdogan also criticized a long-running effort
in the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution declaring that Armenians
were victims of Turkish genocide nearly a century ago.
"We are against a one-sided interpretation of history," Erdogan said.
"History cannot be written in parliament and judged by parliament."
Turkey recalled its U.S. ambassador last month in protest after the
House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution declaring that
the Ottoman-era killings amounted to genocide. The full House has
not voted on the resolution.
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by
Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed
by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies
that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated
and those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.