Erdogan Vows to Actively Counter Armenian Genocide Recognition Campaign

ANKARA — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday Ankara would “actively” challenge a campaign pressuring Turkey to recognise as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in World War I, on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy this year, AFP reports.

“I believe that both the foreign ministry and the relevant institutions will actively counter those allegations,” Erdogan told Turkey’s ambassadors in a keynote speech, adding that discussions were already under way to detail an action plan.

One of the sessions at the annual ambassadors’ conference this week in Ankara focuses on defining a strategy to counter a campaign by Armenia and the Armenian diaspora who want Turkey to recognise the 1915 killings at the hands of the Ottoman security forces as genocide.

On Tuesday, Erdogan accused Armenia of expending its energy on “genocide claims” despite Turkey’s will to normalise bilateral ties and politicising the issue by imposing its own “biased” viewpoint.