Turkish PM Erdogan condemns Pope for Armenia 'genocide' comment // ‘The Armenians want an acknowledgment that the 1915 massacre was a crime’
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned Pope
Francis for calling the 1915 mass killing of Armenians genocide, and warned him
not to make such a statement again. "We will not allow historical incidents to be taken out
of their genuine context, and be used as a tool to campaign against our
country," Erdogan said in a speech to a business group on Tuesday.
"I condemn the pope and would like to warn him not to
make similar mistakes again." The pope became the first head of the Roman Catholic church
to publicly call the killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians
"genocide" on Sunday, prompting a diplomatic row with Turkey, which
summoned the Vatican's envoy and recalled its own.
Muslim Turkey agrees Christian Armenians were killed in
clashes with Ottoman soldiers that began 100 years ago on April 15, 1915, when
Armenians lived in the empire ruled by Istanbul, but denies hundreds of
thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.
While other Turkish politicians, and now Erdogan, have
lashed out at the pope, some ordinary Turks have dismissed the row as empty
politics and voiced a desire to leave history be. Pope Francis appeared to refer to his use of the term
"genocide" on Monday, saying in a sermon that "today the
Church's message is one of the path of frankness, the path of Christian
courage". Erdogan's comments are likely to put a focus on whether the
United States, a traditional ally of NATO-member Turkey, will eventually use
the term "genocide" for the mass killings.
Full, frank acknowledgement of facts: Unlike almost two dozen European and South American states
that use the term, Washington avoids it and has warned legislators that Ankara
could cut off military cooperation if they voted to adopt it. On Tuesday, the US State Department called for a "full,
frank" acknowledgement of the facts surrounding the mass killing of
Armenians in World War I, but shied away from calling it "a
genocide".
"The president and other senior administration
officials have repeatedly acknowledged as historical fact, and mourned the
fact, that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their deaths in
the final days of the Ottoman empire," State Department acting spokeswoman
Marie Harf said. Harf added that "nations are stronger and they progress
by acknowledging and reckoning with pretty painful elements of their
past".
Such moves were "essential to building a different,
more tolerant future," she said. However, she refused to term the mass killings a genocide,
even though during his 2008 campaign for the White House, then senator Barack
Obama had pledged to "recognise the Armenian genocide".
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‘The Armenians want an acknowledgment that the 1915 massacre was a crime’
‘The Armenians want an acknowledgment that the 1915 massacre was a crime’
Just before the invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler urged
his generals to show no mercy towards its people – there would be no
retribution, because “after all, who now remembers the annihilation of the
Armenians?” As the centenary of the Armenian
genocide approaches – it began on 24 April 1915, with the rounding up
and subsequent “disappearance” of intellectuals and community leaders in
Constantinople – remembrance of the destruction of more than half of the
Armenian people is more important than ever. Although, as Hitler recognised in
1939 (and it is still the case today), the crime against humanity committed by
the Ottoman Turks by killing the major part of this ancient Christian race has
never been requited, or, in the case of Turkey, been the
subject of apology or reparation..
(Many people believe higher powers masterminded the plan against a man who openly rejected Turkey’s denial of the 1915 Armenian Genocide).
