Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out at historians who accuse the Turks under the guise of the Ottoman Empire of committing genocide against the Armenians. He said, in a speech to commemorate the 95th anniversary of the “Turkish military victory” in World War I that it was the Armenians who were seeking to eliminate all Turks and not the other way around. He said that Armenians within the Ottoman Empire did not “face genocide, but in fact had plotted to exterminate the Turks.” It comes as Turkish leaders are becoming ever sensitive toward critics of the government for not admitting and apologizing to the Armenians for the well-documented genocide that killed over one million Armenians, possibly more. Erdogan said that “our warriors always respected ancestral laws and did not kill innocent people even on the battlefield.” He continued to say that his country's history boasted of a clean and untarnished slate, arguing that “no country’s parliament can tarnish it.” He was referring to American and Swedish lawmakers’ latest resolutions recognizing the annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. Erdogan claimed there was no genocide in the country, saying that in fact “their civilization had enjoyed love, tolerance and brotherhood. Muslims don’t commit genocide,†he said. However it was reported that the Turkish premier did use the word “genocide†when he slammed the deaths of several dozen Turkic-speaking and Muslim Uighurs during last year's unrest in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. BM
