Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office hits back Monday at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a blistering row over a German parliamentary vote declaring the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against Armenians.
Erdogan has angrily condemned last week’s vote on the World War I massacres, charging that the 11 German MPs with Turkish roots who backed it supported “terrorism” by the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), and demanding “blood tests” to see “what kind of Turks they are.”
Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert on Monday says that while Berlin also considers the PKK a terrorist group, “to associate individual members of parliament with terrorism is utterly incomprehensible to us.”
“The resolution was a political initiative that emerged from the midst of the Bundestag, which is a democratically elected, independent organ under our constitution,” Seibert tells a regular press conference.
“The Bundestag reached a sovereign decision. That must be respected,” Seibert says, adding that this was the message Merkel had given to the Turkish president.
— AFP
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, talks through an interpreter to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, during the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul on May 23, 2016. (Ozan Kose/Pool Photo via AP)
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