TURKISH BISHOPS DENIES SAYING TURKEY IS INNOCENT OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
13:03, December 19, 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.
CatholicCulture.org; December 18, 2012