ISTANBUL: Turkey yesterday branded “unacceptable” parts of US President Barack Obama’s carefully worded statement on the mass killings of Armenians, saying that hundreds of thousands of Turks and Muslims also died.
Obama avoided using the word genocide on Friday in his commemoration of the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 and welcomed efforts announced by Turkey and Armenia this week to normalize relations after decades of hostility.
Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounts to genocide, as Armenia views it.
Speaking in Bulgaria, President Abdullah Gul, said of the statement: “There are points on which I disagree. Hundreds of thousands of Turks and Muslims also died in 1915. Everyone’s pain must be shared,” state-run news agency Anatolian reported.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry echoed his remarks, saying the statement’s perception of history was “unacceptable” and appealing for the impartial study of the conflict in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire.
Earlier this week, Turkey announced that it had agreed on a road map with Armenia to normalize relations in reconciliation talks mediated by Switzerland and held away from the public eye.
“Now is the time to look forward and... give diplomacy a chance,” Gul said, adding that efforts were under way to resolve problems between Turkey and Armenia, as well as between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorny-Karabakh, an Armenian-majority enclave which broke away from Baku in the early 1990s.
Although Turkey was one of the first countries to recognize Armenia when it gained independence in 1991, Ankara has refused to establish diplomatic ties with Yerevan because of its international campaign to have the killings acknowledged as genocide.
In 1993, Turkey also shut its border with Armenia in a show of solidarity with close ally Azerbaijan over its conflict with Yerevan over the Nagorny Karabakh enclave.
Azerbaijan on Thursday urged Turkey to link reconciliation efforts with Armenia to the withdrawal of Armenian forces from Nagorny Karabakh.Earlier this month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ruled out a deal with Armenia unless Yerevan resolved its conflict with Baku.
To refer to the killings as “genocide” is one of Turkey’s most sensitive taboos, and Turks including Nobel Literature Laureate Orhan Pamuk have been prosecuted in the European Union candidate country for doing just that.
Cengiz Aktar, a professor at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University and organizer of a campaign by Turkish intellectuals to apologize for the killings, said Turkey’s government had reacted too hastily to Obama’s words and poured oil on the fire.
Obama visited Turkey in early April and urged Ankara to resolve ties with Armenia.
Turkish officials have said any new attempt in the US Congress to brand the killings a genocide could damage US-Turkish ties.
