TURKEY DOWNPLAYS SUSPENSION IN PIPELINE TALKS WITH FRANCE
Agence France Presse — English
April 6, 2007 Friday 2:57 PM GMT
Turkey’s suspension of talks with Gaz de France on the French firm’s
possible participation in a major gas pipeline is not a final decision,
a foreign ministry official said Friday.
The official was commenting on a press report Thursday that the
state-owned oil and gas company BOTAS had suspended talks with GDF in
reaction to a French bill calling for jail sentences for those who
deny that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians during
World War I.
"This is not a final decision. We understand that the negotiating
process has not yet come to an end," the diplomat told AFP on condition
of anonymity.
"This is a commercial issue between companies and they will make the
final decision on the basis of financial considerations," he added.
The five-company Nabucco consortium involving BOTAS plans to build
a 3,300-kilometre (2,000-mile) pipeline that will carry natural gas
from the Middle East and Central Asia to the European Union via Turkey
and the Balkans, bypassing Russia.
The other partners are Austria’s oil and gas group OMV, Hungary’s MOL,
Bulgaria’s Bulgargaz and Romania’s Transgaz.
The consortium is seeking a sixth partner in the six-billion-dollar
(4.5-billion-euro) project, expected to become operational in 2012.
The other partners reportedly approved GDF’s participation, but
BOTAS has opposed it because of the French draft law on the Armenian
massacres.
The bill was adopted by the National Assembly in Paris in October but
must still go before the upper-house Senate, then back to the lower
house before becoming law.
Turkey had at the time threatened unspecified measures against the
bill, which followed a 2001 resolution by the French parliament
recognising the killings as genocide.
In November, the Turkish army froze bilateral military ties with
France over the bill.
The foreign ministry official said "there is no problem in what has
been scheduled in the political and diplomatic field between Turkey
and France."
Senior Turkish and French diplomats will meet for consultations in
the coming weeks, he said, adding that it is up to the army to revise
its own decision on military relations.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin perished in orchestrated
killings between 1915 and 1917 in the final years of the Ottoman
Empire.
Turkey categorically rejects the genocide label and says thousands of
Turks and Armenians were killed in civil strife when Armenians took
up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian
troops invading the crumbling empire.