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Bush Backs Turkey, Opposes Resolution on Massacres of Armenians |
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Written by Bloomberg
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Saturday, 06 October 2007 03:09 |
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President George W. Bush expressed his opposition today to a congressional resolution on the World War I-era massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, during a conversation with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A U.S. House resolution would ask the president to declare the killings of as many as 1.5 million Armenians nine decades ago a genocide.
In today's phone call, ``Bush reiterated his opposition to this resolution, the passage of which would be harmful to U.S. relations with Turkey,'' National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in an e-mailed statement.
Turkey denies that a systematic slaughter of Armenians took place, saying Armenians and Turks alike were killed in ethnic clashes between 1915 and 1923 after Armenian groups sided with Russia in World War I.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington bought a full-page advertisement in today's Washington Post asking members of Congress to support a broad historical inquiry into the dispute rather than a ``one-sided interpretation of the tragedies'' in the last years of Ottoman rule.
Bush ``believes that the determination of whether or not the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation,'' Johndroe said.
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