Ankara is readying an ‘action plan’ in response to Germany’s Armenian
genocide resolution.
BERLIN — As Angela Merkel tries to salvage the EU’s refugee deal with
Turkey, German MPs want her to stand up to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and
other Turkish officials for their angry and aggressive response to a vote on
the Armenian genocide.
The chancellor was accused of being mealy-mouthed in her response to verbal
attacks by Erdoğan and others on German MPs of Turkish origin for their role in
the Bundestag’s (lower house) approval of a resolution declaring the massacre
of hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians under Ottoman rule an act of
genocide.
“Their blood is impure and we know whose mouthpiece they are,” the Turkish
president said in Istanbul on Sunday, singling out 11 German MPs of Turkish
descent. They were “the long arm of the separatist terrorists placed in
Germany,” he said.
Furious at last week’s vote, Ankara withdrew its ambassador to Berlin, leaving
Merkel struggling to ring-fence a deal for Turkey to help Europe with its refugee crisis
in return for visa liberalization for Turks. Relations were already
strained after a German comedian read out an obscene poem about Erdoğan on TV.
Under pressure, Germany agreed to prosecute him.
Turkey opposes the term “genocide” being attached to the deportation and
murder of members of the Christian Armenian authority by Ottoman Empire
authorities during World War I, when Turkey was a German ally. While
acknowledging there were deaths and deportations, Turkey rejects as exaggerated
estimates that 800,000-1.5 million people died between 1915-16.
Last weekend, Ankara’s Mayor İbrahim Melih Gökçek tweeted a collage of
photos of 11 German-Turkish members of the Bundestag who backed the genocide
resolution, accusing them of “stabbing us in the back.”
Merkel’s response, during a news conference Tuesday, was to call the
Turkish response “incomprehensible” and defend the MPs in question as “freely
elected parliamentarians.”
This fell far short of how the opposition Greens expected the chancellor to
defend their German-Turkish co-chair Cem Özdemir, whose home
has been put under increased police protection since the vote.
“The chancellor has to take up a definite position [against Erdogan,]” his
Green colleague Claudia Roth, who is a vice-president of the Bundestag, told
DPA news agency. “We can’t let him get away with that.”
Already in the lead-up to last Thursday’s vote, Özdemir said he had
received insults calling him “a traitor, Armenian pig, son of a whore,
Armenian terrorist, or even a Nazi.”
“People – which includes, unfortunately, prominent people – are consciously
stirring up hatred,” the Green MP, who had been a driving force behind the
Armenian resolution, told journalists on Monday.
Conservative MP Michael Grosse-Brömer, a parliamentary leader of Merkel’s
conservatives, urged members of the Bundestag to “stand by one another” and
reject any attempt at undue influence, saying it was “completely unacceptable
to threaten MPs of Turkish descent based on how they vote.”
Thomas Oppermann, leader of the Social Democrat bloc — Merkel’s partners in
the ruling ‘grand coalition’ — said he hoped the chancellor would make it
very clear “that she finds this witch-hunt against German parliamentarians
intolerable.” The opposition Left party requested a special debate on the
issue, which will take place on Thursday.
So far, however, the German protests have been to no avail. Ibrahim
Kalin, a spokesman for Erdoğan, said on Wednesday that Turkey was “preparing an
action plan” against Germany over the Armenian vote, with the foreign ministry
in charge of drawing up the specific measures to take.
On Tuesday, the mayor of the Pazar district, which is home to members
of Cem Özdemir’s family, told Turkish journalists he
planned to withdraw Özdemir’s honorary citizenship of the town. Instead, the
title will be offered to the only German MP to vote against the Armenian genocide
resolution, the conservative backbencher Bettina Kudla.
Also on Tuesday, a scheduled German media visit to a Turkish air base in
Incirlik, where German fighter jets are stationed to praticipate in the
international campaign against ISIL, was cancelled at the last-minute by
Turkish authorities.
The Turkish government had hoped that its lobbying and influence among the
2.9 million German citizens of Turkish ancestry — who make up about 4 percent
of the entire population — would prevent the repeatedly postponed Armenian
vote.
“I believe many of the attacks are meant to stir up the Turkish community
in Germany, and to increasingly set them against the rest of the German
population,” Hans-Georg Fleck from the Istanbul bureau of the Friedrich
Naumann Foundation, a German Liberal think-tank, told Deutschlandfunk radio on
Wednesday, adding that a “considerable share of Turks in Germany, at least
among those who can still vote in Turkey, is particularly receptive to Mr.
Erdoğan’s arguments and propaganda.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Turkish ambassador to Germany was still out
of the country, according to an embassy spokesman. The government in Berlin was
sticking to a softer diplomatic approach: The German foreign ministry said
Tuesday it had “invited” a representative of the embassy to discuss recent
developments.
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