Ethnic leader lambastes Armenian authorities for failure to issue
visas to Kurds
Arminfo
26 Apr 05
YEREVAN
“At the time when the Belgium-based Kurdish satellite channel Media TV
broadcast for three days programmes devoted to the Armenian genocide,
including unique pictures which even the Armenian side does not have,
the Armenian authorities denied visas to members of the Kurdish
intelligentsia in Europe, thus foiling an Armenian-Kurdish scientific
conference on genocide in Ottoman Turkey,” the chairman of the
Kurdistan committee in Armenia, Charkaz Mstoyan, told an Arminfo
correspondent today.
Mstoyan stressed that the Armenian authorities’ refused to grant visas
to the Kurds, while they accepted Turks. “At the moment, while we are
speaking, blood is being shed in the vicinity of the Armenian-Turkish
border, the Turkish army is carrying out large-scale military
operations against Kurdish militiamen,” he noted, adding that “20m
Turkish Kurds, who are shedding their blood, deserve a better
attitude”.
He stressed that this was not the first time the Armenian authorities
refused to receive foreign Kurds. He said that this policy of the
Armenian authorities would backlash since “any action leads to
counter-action and causes the Kurdish community to stay alert”.
An associated professor of Yerevan State University’s department of
Armenian literature, Charkaz Mstoyan, considers that “the Kurds
residing on the area stretching from Kars to the Persian Gulf must be
a priority in the Armenian foreign policy”, especially as the Kurds
now have their own state – de facto independent Iraqi Kurdistan.