Turkish
anger as German MPs prepare to vote on Armenian genocide
Thursday’s
ballot on whether to pass a symbolic resolution on first world war
massacre is ‘ridiculous’, says Turkish prime minister
Philip Oltermann in
Berlin and Constanze Letsch in Istanbul
Thursday 2 June 2016
08.48 BST
The European Union’s
refugee deal with Turkey championed by Angela Merkel will be put
under further strain on Thursday as the German parliament votes on a
symbolic resolution on the Armenian genocide.
The five-page
resolution, co-written by parliamentarians from the Christian
Democrats, Social Democrats and Green party, calls for a
“commemoration of the genocide of Armenian and other Christian
minorities in the years 1915 and 1916”.
Turkish governments
have always rejected the use of the term genocide to describe the
massacre and expulsion of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians and
members of Christian minorities in the Ottoman empire.
The UN defines
genocide as any act “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.
Turkey’s prime
minister described the ballot as “a real test of the friendship”
between his country and Germany. “Some nations that we consider
friends, when they are experiencing trouble in domestic policy
attempt to divert attention from it,” Binali Yıldırım said at a
meeting of his Justice and Development party on Thursday. “This
resolution is an example of that.”
On Wednesday he had
gone further, saying the ballot was “ridiculous” and arguing that
the killings were an “ordinary” wartime event. Yıldırım
repeated the warning from the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, that bilateral ties would be damaged by Germany’s
decision to call the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a
genocide.
“It’s a
ridiculous vote,” Yıldırım said. “[This] was one of many
ordinary events that can happen in any country, in any society under
the conditions of world war one. We know that those who want Turkey
to pay the bill for it do not have good intentions.”
He said historians,
not politicians, should be the judges of what happened in 1915. He
also underlined that the vote would upset the large Turkish community
in Germany: “The 3.5 million Turks living in Germany are the
biggest asset to our bilateral ties. I hope that the German
parliament and decision makers will not close their ears to the
voices of 3.5 million voters.”
However, he added
that a positive vote would not necessarily influence the EU-Turkey
deal. “We are loyal to the agreements we have made. The EU should
stand by its word in the same way. We are not a tribal state, we are
the Turkish republic, a country with a deeply rooted tradition.”
On Tuesday, Erdoğan
had warned German MPs that “if Germany is to be deceived by this,
then bilateral diplomatic, economic, trade, political, and military
ties – we are both Nato countries – will be damaged”.
An agreement between
Turkey and the EU to return migrants arriving on the Greek islands to
Turkey has in recent months reduced the number of refugees arriving
in central Europe, easing pressure on Merkel, the German chancellor.
But Erdoğan has since repeatedly questioned the conditions of the
deal, with members of his party threatening to cancel the agreement
altogether.
A letter, signed by
more than 500 Turkish associations in Germany and sent to German
lawmakers, argued that “over 90% of the Turkish population rightly
rejects the accusation of genocide and considers it defamatory”,
warning that passing the resolution would be “poison for the
peaceful coexistence between Turks and Germans in this country, as
well as in Turkey”.
Some historians
argue that Germany, a close ally of the Ottoman empire during the
first world war, was aware of the massacre at the time and supported
it politically. The Bundestag’s resolution contains a passage
acknowledging “the German Reich’s complicity in the events”, as
well as six references to the Holocaust.
Twenty governments,
including those of France, Italy and Russia, have in the past
described the mass killings of Armenians as a genocide, and Pope
Francis referred to the killings as “the first genocide of the 20th
century” in 2015. The German president, Joachim Gauck, also used
the phrase in a speech in April last year.
Thursday’s vote
was originally scheduled for last year, but was put on ice due to
pressure from Germany’s governing coalition, reportedly for fear of
destabilising Turkish-German relations. A revised draft of the
resolution has been brought back to the Bundestag largely due to the
efforts of the Green party’s Turkish-German co-chair Cem Özdemir.
Merkel will not be
in the Bundestag for the vote because of other commitments, including
a meeting with the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário