Turkey summoned the Dutch charge d'affaires on Friday to complain about the Netherlands Parliament’s recognizing the massacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 as genocide, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.
The parliamentary motion, which the Dutch government said would not become official policy, risks further worsening relations already strained over the Netherlands’ barring Turkish ministers from campaigning for a 2017 referendum that gave President Tayyip Erdogan more power.
A second motion called for a high-level Dutch government official to attend Armenia’s genocide remembrance day on April 24. In the past, the Dutch ambassador has attended.
Turkey accepts many Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War One, but contests the figures and denies the killings were systematically orchestrated and constituted a genocide.
Turkey's Foreign Ministry said the Dutch motions were “baseless decisions.” Nearly a dozen other EU countries have passed similar resolutions.
Talks to repair relations between the two countries have broken down and the Netherlands recalled its ambassador on Feb. 5.
(Source: Reuters)
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