Turkey must deal with the ghosts of the past if it wants to become one of the world\u2019s top 10 economies by 2023, Washington\u2019s envoy to Ankara said following controversy over a French bill to criminalize denial of genocides, including the Armenian Genocide.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery great country has brilliant moments of which we are proud in our pasts and moments of pain,\u201d Francis Ricciardone, the US ambassador to Turkey, told a group of Ankara bureau chiefs late on Jan. 25. \u201cWe think that historians need to grapple with this in an open and honest way so that you can come to a full and frank acknowledgement of what happened. We believe that you are beginning to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe like to see our friends get along and we hope that you will overcome this dispute,\u201d Ricciardone said without commenting on the nature of the French legislation. Instead, he reiterated Washington\u2019s objective of launching a new dialogue process between Turks and Armenians.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere needs to be a conversation. You need to get the historians together on both sides. I\u2019ve been glad to see since I\u2019ve come back to Turkey this past year that there is much more public conversation and debate. It\u2019s no longer a closed box,\u201d he said, the Hurriyet Daily News<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span> reported.<\/p>\n \u201cTurks have greater confidence now to look into the past and to a painful chapter and decide what it means. There is more contact between Turks and Armenians to wrestle with this terrible period of time. So we support that and we hope you will arrive at it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cTurks have greater confidence now to look into the past and to a painful chapter and decide what it means. There is more contact between Turks and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":156859,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[10372,18257,16861,10222],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156857"}],"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=156857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}