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Government Hedges On Armenia Genocide Issue
F.A.Z. BERLIN. Government sources said on Friday that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joseph (Joschka) Fischer have yet to agree on whether the German parliament, the Bundestag, should debate and come to a resolution on the massacres committed by Turks against Armenians during World War I.
The Bundestag recently handed over a petition with about 16,000 signatures to the Foreign Ministry. The petition requests that the Bundestag and the federal government follow the example of the French parliament, which first condemned the massacres as a genocide in 1998 and demanded an official apology from the Turkish government last November as a precondition for allowing Turkey to join the European Union.
But according to Berlin sources, numerous German parliamentarians expressed
reservations about "reopening wounds" in a letter to the government that
accompanied the petition. The term "Genocide" was avoided in the letter in
favor of the more moderate "tragic events." Historians estimate that no
fewer than 600,000 Armenians living in what was then still the Ottoman Empire were
massacred during World War I, but the Turkish government denies this figure.
Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News Archives