Turkey must recognize Armenian genocide; PM
YEREVAN, October 19, /ARKA/. In a last Thursday televised interview Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian said Armenia wants not only other foreign countries but Turkey as well to recognize the Armenian genocide.
“Our goal on moral-psychological and cultural levels is to achieve justice,’ he said, adding that Turkish-Armenian relations are not conditioned only on the opening of the border, because they are ‘much more complex relations.’
“In the first place I mean moral-psychological and cultural relations, a complicated domain both for Armenians and Turks,’ he said.
“It is very difficult to go beyond this level when it comes to the Armenian genocide. We all feel this burden and we carry it. Naturally, Turkey’s denialist policy creates problems in the normalization of our relations,’ he said.
The mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire was the first genocide of the last century. Turkey denies that mass killings constituted genocide. The Armenian genocide was recognized by Uruguay, Russia, France, Lithuania, Italy, the majority of U.S. states, Switzerland and many other countries. -0-
