Turkey criticises Obama comments
Story from BBC NEWS:
europe/8018327.stm
Published: 2009/04/25 15:54:41 GMT
Barack Obama’s words on the day marking the killing of Armenians by
Turks in World War I were "unacceptable", Turkey’s foreign ministry has
said.
Though Mr Obama did not use "genocide", as he did during his election
campaign, Ankara said he failed to honour those Turks killed by
Armenians at the time.
"Everyone’s pain must be shared," President Abdullah Gul of Turkey
said.
President Obama described the deaths of the Armenians as "one of the
great atrocities of the 20th Century".
He appealed for Turks and Armenians to "address the facts of the past
as a part of their efforts to move forward".
The two countries agreed this week on a roadmap for normalising
relations.
`International recognition… is a matter of restoring historic justice’
Serzh Sarkisian Armenian president
While admitting many Armenians were killed, Turkey, a Nato member and
key American ally in the Muslim world, denies committing genocide,
saying the deaths resulted from wartime fighting.
Armenia has long campaigned for the loss of its people to be recognised
as a crime of genocide and it commemorated the event with ceremonies on
Friday.
‘My view unchanged’
"I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and
my view of that20history has not changed," Mr Obama said in a written
statement.
"My interest remains the achievement of a full, frank and just
acknowledgment of the facts."
In a January 2008 statement on his campaign website, Mr Obama wrote:
"The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a
point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an
overwhelming body of historical evidence."
"America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian
genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides," the 2008 statement
added.
On Friday, he said the Armenians killed in the final days of the
Ottoman Empire "must live on in our memories".
"I strongly support efforts by the Turkish and Armenian people to work
through this painful history in a way that is honest, open, and
constructive," he added.
That part of the Obama statement was considered positive by Turkey, a
key US ally in the region.
But "history can be construed and evaluated only on the basis of
undisputed evidence and documentation," Turkey’s foreign ministry
statement said.