TURKEY BLOCKS GDF TALKS IN GENOCIDE ROW
By Reuters
April 5, 09:19 BST
Turkey has suspended talks with Gaz de France over the Nabucco natural
gas pipeline project in reaction to a French bill on the mass killings
of Armenians during Ottoman rule, senior Turkish energy officials
told Reuters on Thursday.
Nabucco is a â~B¬4.6bn ($6.14bn) project to transport natural gas from
Turkey to Austria, passing through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. The
planned pipeline would reduce Europe’s dependency on Russian gas.
France angered Ankara last year when its national assembly passed a
bill making it a crime to deny that the mass killings of Armenians
during the fall of the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide. The
Turkish armed forces froze bilateral ties with its NATO ally France
due to the bill.
"We will suspend partnership by Gaz de France until the French
presidential elections. We will decide according to policies to be
followed after the elections," a senior energy minister official,
who declined to be named, said.
The four other countries involved in the project, Bulgaria, Romania
and Hungary, have already approved partnership with Gaz de France in
the project, which will transmit Caspian and Iranian gas to Europe.
Bulgargaz, Transgaz from Romania, MOL of Hungary and Austria’s OMV
Gas are partners in the project in addition to Turkey’s Botas.
Negotiations with France’s Total for a stake in Nabucco collapsed
earlier this year.
Turkey, seeking European Union membership, strongly denies claims
by Armenia and its supporters that the Ottoman Empire committed a
systematic genocide against about 1.5m Armenians during World War One.
Ankara says that figure is greatly exaggerated. It says large
numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died because of
inter-ethnic fighting, famine and disease.
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