Turkish President Gül: France should withdraw from the Minsk group in case genocide bill ratified by the Senate

The Turkish president has suggested France should withdraw from the Minsk Group in case a bill approved on Thursday by the French Assembly aiming to penalize denial of “Armenian genocide” becomes law, as he said he regarded that president’s refusal to return his calls as a sign of his “prejudice against Turkey.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, a day after the approval of the highly controversial bill in the French assembly despite strong Turkish opposition, President Abdullah Gül said France should withdraw from the Minsk Group if the bill is approved by the Senate and becomes law since that would mean that France has lost its impartial position in the settling of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

France currently co-chairs the Minsk Group, an international initiative that has been active since the 1990s with not many significant results so far.

Gül also criticized President Nicolas Sarkozy for “being prejudiced against Turkey.” Recalling that he has not responded to Gül’s phone calls for days, Gül complained that “heads of state talk to each other even during war time.” He said Sarkozy’s stance reveals his prejudices against Turkey.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s top officials continued to slam France following the French National Assembly’s approval of the denial bill, as Ankara urged Turkish diplomats overseas to speak to Armenians around the world and tell them of the foreign “instigation” that tore Turks and Armenians apart.

Following his initial announcement of Turkey’s measures against the French on Thursday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asserted that the French decision was “a clear sign of the hostility” against Muslims in France and Europe on Friday.
“The vote in France, where there are nearly 5 million Muslims, clearly showed that the extent of racism, discrimination and anti-Muslims sentiments has reached dangerous levels,” Erdoğan said at a conference on “Change in Muslim Societies and Role of Women” in İstanbul.

Accusing Sarkozy of “trying to win [April’s presidential] elections over hostility towards Turks and Muslims,” Erdoğan was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying, while he noted that Thursday’s vote was all the more meaningful in that the bill was approved with only 55 lawmakers in attendance.

The prime minister also read excerpts from a 1526 letter sent by Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent to French King Francis I in response to the French king’s request for help after being captured by Spanish King Charles V during the Battle of Pavia. The Ottoman sultan said in the letter he would help the French king, but the letter is written in a tone that looks down upon the French King, as Sultan Süleyman describes himself with multiple adjectives, hinting that Francis I is only “a king.” Erdoğan said he had earlier presented a copy of Süleyman’s letter to Sarkozy. “I think he did not read it,” he said.

Ankara urges its diplomats to speak out to Armenian diaspora

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu urged Turkish ambassadors on Friday to speak out to every single Armenian around the world and tell them about centuries of friendship and co-existence between Armenians and Turks and of the instigation by colonial forces, including France, to tear the two communities apart.

“We will go and talk to every single Armenian about the 10 centuries we lived together in peace with them; we will tell them how we were instigated against each other by colonizers, including the French, in the last quarter of the 20th century,” [sic] Davutoğlu said, blaming foreign intervention for causing the controversy between Turks and Armenians regarding the events of 1915.

Addressing Turkish ambassadors serving overseas on the first day of a week-long Foreign Ministry conference organized to conduct a comprehensive review of Turkish foreign policy and recent developments in international politics, Davutoğlu further slammed the French administration over the approval of the bill, saying that there was no difference between the bill the French Parliament passed and the Middle East dictators’ actions.

“Just as the Gaddafi regime, Bin Ali regime and the Assad regime dictated to their people what to think and what not to think, the French parliament and leaders behind it dictated to Europeans what not to debate,” Davutoglu said. Drawing harsh comparisons between the Arab Spring regimes and the French legislature, Davutoğlu repeated that the bill meant that the French were “walking all over the values France was built upon,” and lashed out at the French Parliament, saying pressure would not work on Turkey or make it yield.” We will make our voices heard in every place in the world. We will not yield to pressure,” he said.

“I am appealing to European intellectuals. Protect your values. We will keep raising our voice. We will go and say we do not recognize [the alleged genocide] wherever this is legally forbidden. We will raise our voice in the European Parliament. If Europeans do not protect these values, we will,” the Turkish minister said, adding that France was not being put to a test that would define its perception of the world, as well as its relations with Turkey.

Davutoğlu said the measures against France announced by Erdoğan are only initial measures, signaling that Ankara will introduce additional sanctions. “We have nothing in our history to shy away from. We draw our strength from our history,” he declared.
Turkey responds to the bill with “gradual measures”

On Thursday, following lower house approval of the bill, Erdoğan announced measures against France as “an initial step” following the French decision, as he warned that the measures could be increased or decreased in time, depending on the future of the denial bill at the hands of the French legislature.“As of now, we are canceling bilateral level political, economic and military activities,” he said. “We are suspending all kinds of political consultations with France” and “bilateral military co-operation and joint maneuvers are canceled as of now.” Although Erdoğan’s measures did not include dropping the level of diplomatic contact with France, Turkey’s Ambassador in Paris, Tahsin Burcuoğlu, was withdrawn immediately after the vote “for consultations for an indefinite period of time,” as Ankara warned he would be in case of a lower house approval.

Erdoğan also added that the bill was racist, discriminatory and xenophobic and said it had opened wounds with Paris that would be difficult to heal. Since the emergence of the denial bill voting early in December, top Turkish officials, led by the prime minister, have voiced their opposition to the bill that is “the product of petty political calculations at the expense of centuries of friendship with Turkey.”

France formally recognized the killings as genocide in 2001, but provided no penalty for anyone denying that. The bill sets a punishment of up to one year in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros for those who deny or “outrageously minimize” the killings by Ottoman Turks, putting such action on a par with denial of the Holocaust, the AP reported.

The volume of trade between France and Turkey from January to November this year was more than $13.5 billion, according to Turkish government statistics. France is Turkey’s fifth biggest export market and the sixth biggest source of its imports. The French government has stressed that the bill is not its own initiative and pointed out that Turkey cannot impose unilateral trade sanctions due to its membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and customs union of the EU. Turkey would not be allowed to officially discriminate against France due to its obligations born out of its international commitments, but a public boycott is expected to target French products on shelves and reduce French export levels significantly.

23.12.2011
SOURCE: TODAY’S ZAMAN