Reply #6: TURKEY SEEKS FRENCH BUSINESSES' HELP AGAINST GENOCIDE BILL

[Flagg]

Received Saturday, 7 October 2006 15:25:00 GMT

ISTANBUL, Oct 7, 2006 (AFP) - Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met here Saturday with representatives of French companies doing business in Turkey in a bid to enlist their support against a controversial French bill that has threatened to poison bilateral ties.
The draft law, to be debated in the French parliament Thursday, makes it an offense to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide under the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
"Erdogan asked French companies to lobby French legislators to try to avert the bill," Mustafa Abdullahoglu, an executive with a firm he did not name, told AFP after the meeting. "He said the bill would damage bilateral ties if adopted."
Abdullahoglu said he feared a boycott of French goods in Turkey if the bill was passed.

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France already passed in 2001 a resolution recognizing the killings as genocide, prompting Ankara to retaliate by sidelining French companies from public tenders and cancelling several projects awarded to French firms.
Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917.
Turkey rejects the genocide label, arguing that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with invading Russian troops as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.

http://www.ttc.org/200610071525.k97fpp926436.htm