DUSHANBE, June 3, 2016, Asia-Plus — The German parliament has passed a symbolic resolution recognizing the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces as a “genocide.”
According to
CNN
, President of the German Bundestag Norbert Lammert said that the resolution had been passed with a striking majority with only one politician voting against it and one abstaining.
The motion, backed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bloc, also accepts a German share of the guilt in the 1915 mass murder. As Ottoman Turkey’s ally in World War I, the German Reich failed to prevent the destruction of ethnic Armenians, the resolution reads.
According to some sources, between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians, and other Christian minorities, are estimated to have been killed by what was then-Ottoman Turkey during World War One.
Turkey has always rejected the term “genocide,” saying there was no systematic attempt to destroy a people.
The New York Times
reports that Ankara has noted that thousands of people, many of them Turks, died in the civil war that destroyed the Ottoman Empire, and argued that the estimates of the number of Armenian deaths have been exaggerated.
The vote in the Bundestag (Germany’s lower house of parliament) turned Berlin into a frontline for the ongoing feud between Armenia and Turkey over these events. Both Yerevan and Ankara have tried to sway the vote.
Turkey, which denies that the 1915 massacre amounted to genocide, warned Germany against supporting the resolution.
Deutsche Welle
(
DW
) reports that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly phoned Merkel on May 31 to warn that “diplomatic, economic, trade, political and military – we are both NATO members – will be damaged.”
The vote has no legal ramifications for Ankara, but antagonizing Turkey is awkward for Germany, which, according to
DW
, is home to over 1.5 million ethnic Turks. Germany also heavily relies on Turkey to control the flow of migrants from Syria into the European Union.
In response to the June 2 vote, Ankara recalled its ambassador to Germany for consultations. Weighing in on Twitter, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu advised that “The way to close dark pages in [Germany”s] own history is not to defame the history of other countries with irresponsible and baseless parliament decisions,”
Hurriyet Daily News
reported.
Armenia also weighed in on the debate in the Bundestag. President Serzh Sargsyan called on German lawmakers not to be swayed by Erdogan’s threats. Germany should not back away from the resolution “just because it makes the head of state of another country angry,” Sargsyan said.
Commenting on the German parliament”s decision, Armenian Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Eduard Sharmazanov, a member of Sargsyan”s ruling party, claimed that the vote can help “prevent the recurrence of new crimes against humanity.”
