{"id":149550,"date":"2011-12-19T15:20:21","date_gmt":"2011-12-19T11:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=149550"},"modified":"2011-12-19T15:20:21","modified_gmt":"2011-12-19T11:20:21","slug":"those-who-do-not-wish-to-see-genocide-should-face-their-own-bloody-history-erdogan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/12\/19\/those-who-do-not-wish-to-see-genocide-should-face-their-own-bloody-history-erdogan.html","title":{"rendered":"Those Who Do Not Wish to See Genocide Should Face Their Own ‘Bloody History’: Erdogan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turkey has slammed France for what it calls attempts to judge Turkish history before coming to terms with its own \u201cdirty, bloody past\u201d and repeated warnings of consequences in response to a bill the French legislature is readying to vote on that would criminalize denial that the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians in 1915 was genocide, Today’s Zaman<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span> reports.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, nobody talks about the 45,000 Algerian deaths in 1945, or the role of France in the massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994,\u201d Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan said of France on Saturday with a bitter criticism as he urged the country to face its own history before judging the history of others with strictly political motives.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose who do not wish to see genocide should take another peek at their own dirty and bloody histories,\u201d Erdo\u011fan said during a joint press conference with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairperson of the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC).<\/p>\n

Accusing France of insincerity due to its \u201cattack against Turkish history based on unfounded allegations,\u201d the Turkish prime minister repeated Turkey’s official stance regarding the Armenian deaths of 1915 as an historical matter that calls for the judgment of historians and academics rather than as a matter of politics to be voted on in parliaments. Ankara has also raised doubts regarding Sarkozy’s motives in changing his stance regarding the Turkish-Armenian conflict, speculating that the French president might be seeking votes from the strong Armenian community in France to gain an advantage over his Socialist Party rival, Fran\u00e7ois Hollande. Hollande is also a known defender of the Armenian Genocide and voiced throughout his election campaign that he would support a law to make genocide denial punishable in French courts.<\/p>\n

Unmoved by Ankara’s warnings, Sarkozy’s ruling party reaffirmed its faith in the bill, expressing support for its passage. Lawmakers interviewed by Agence France-presse (AFP) said that they were \u201cdetermined at this time\u201d that the bill not return from the Senate, as it did back in 2006. France had previously brought the same bill to the agenda five years ago, but the French Senate refused to discuss it even though France recognized the Armenian deaths of 1915 as genocide in 2001.<\/p>\n

According to a Cihan news agency report on Sunday, regarding the Turkish warnings as \u201cblackmail,\u201d French Senator Philippe Kaltenbach said, \u201cFrance should not give up on its values in the face of this [Turkey’s] attitude.\u201d Kaltenbach also suggested Turkey is not sincere in its warnings, since the country issued similar statements back in 2001 when France recognized the Armenian Genocide, but none of its warnings were realized. \u201cTurkey is after the same strategy [of issuing threats],\u201d Kaltenbach said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cToday, nobody talks about the 45,000 Algerian deaths in 1945, or the role of France in the massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":144232,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[10372,36038,10790,24085,10426,10222],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}