Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart, and have long sought to win worldwide recognition of the massacres as genocide. Before the vote, proposed by lawmakers from the ruling coalition of Conservatives and Socialists together with the Green Party, Ankara said its relations with Germany would deteriorate in case the resolution was passed.
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Berlin’s lower house of parliament on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution on the 1915-16 killings – one MP voted against and another abstained – in a move touching a raw nerve in Turkish-European relations.
Turkey – which objects to the use of the word “genocide” to refer to the mass killings – responded by withdrawing its ambassador to Germany for “consultations”, The Associated Press reports. Ambassador Huseyin Avni Karslioglu is expected to return to Ankara Thursday afternoon, according to German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “Our ancestors did not persecute”.
Their Deputy Prime Minister also sent out an angry tweet.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, warned that the decision “will seriously affect Germany-Turkey relations”, adding: “We will make evaluations after returning [to Turkey] about steps to be taken”.
Armenian foreign minister Eduard Nalbandyan hailed the resolution and said it was a “valuable contribution” to the “international recognition and condemnation of the Armenian genocide”.
The motion stressed that, while Germany is aware of the “uniqueness” of the nazi Holocaust, it “regrets the inglorious role” of Germany, the Ottoman Turks’ main military ally at the time of the Armenians’ killings, which failed to stop the “crime against humanity”. But Erdogan has already threatened to tear it up in a row over visa-free travel to Europe for Turkish citizens.
Germany needs Turkey’s help in following through on a deal with the European Union to manage the refugee crisis arising from the Syrian civil war, but at the same time, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been under pressure not to be seen as caving to outside pressure.
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Germany plans to repeal a clause in the constitution prohibiting insults that target foreign leaders – the clause invoked by Turkey in the complaint.
