Epress.am News from Armenia
In the view of upcoming presidential elections, the Ankara government has urged French politicians not to use Turkey as a tool in their campaigns following both French President Nicholas Sarkozy and prominent Socialist candidate François Hollande “exploiting Armenian Genocide claims” last week, the Hürriyet Daily News reports.
Turkey’s Ambassador to Paris Tahsin Burcuoğlu expressed Ankara’s uneasiness with Sarkozy’s remarks in a meeting with the French President’s foreign policy advisor Jean-David Levitte on Saturday.
Burcuoğlu sent a letter to Hollande urging him to avoid making Turkey a daily domestic political issue after the prominent socialist candidate promised backing the draft of a law criminalizing denial of the Armenian Genocide, the Hürriyet Daily News learned.
“The message we have conveyed does not solely refer to Sarkozy, but to the entire French political class.
“We have underlined that this kind of rhetoric does not serve anything other than to ruin our bilateral relations. We want to improve our relations, but these statements are not helpful to this end,” the senior Turkish diplomat told the paper yesterday.