Erdogan Vows to Actively Counter Armenia 'Genocide Allegations'
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday Ankara would "actively" challenge a campaign pressuring Turkey to recognize as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in World War I, on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy this year.
"I believe that both the foreign ministry and the relevant institutions will actively counter those allegations," Erdogan told Turkey's ambassadors in a keynote speech, adding that discussions were already under way to detail an action plan.
One of the sessions at the annual ambassadors' conference this week in Ankara focuses on defining a strategy to counter a campaign by Armenia and the Armenian diaspora who want Turkey to recognize the 1915 killings at the hands of the Ottoman security forces as genocide.
Turkey has so far vehemently rejected the claims and says up to 500,000 Armenians died in fighting and of starvation after Armenians sided with invading Russian troops. It claims a comparable number of Turks were also killed.
Last year, Erdogan offered an unprecedented expression of condolence for the massacres when he was prime minister but this was far from satisfying the Armenians, who want the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people recognized as genocide.
On Tuesday, Erdogan accused Armenia of expending its energy on genocide claims despite Turkey's will to normalize bilateral ties and politicizing the issue by imposing its own "biased" view point.
Turkey and Armenia in 2009 signed protocols to normalize ties, but they have still not been ratified by the national parliaments.
Source: Agence France Presse
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