TURKISH BISHOPS’ SPOKESMAN DENIES SAYING TURKEY IS INNOCENT OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Catholic Culture
Dec 18 2012
The spokesman for the Catholic bishops’ conference of Turkey has
emphatically denied that he suggested Vatican archives would show that
Turkey was innocent of genocide against the Armenian people.
Rinaldo Marmara, the bishops’ spokesman, had been quoted in a Turkish
daily, Vatan, as saying that internal “Armenian problems”-rather than
deliberate Turkish policies-were responsible for the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915. Marmara charged that the
quotations attributed to him were taken out of context by “journalists
to search for provocation.”
In fact, Marmara said, the Vatican archives contain a rich deposit of
documents regarding the history of Turkey. “There are of course also
some on the Armenian issue,” he said, but he noted that these
resources are available to all qualified scholars, and he did not
intend to comment on the lessons to be drawn from them. “I just point
out the relevance of these archives,” he said.
From: Baghdasarian