Turkish newspaper, Today’s Zaman, reports that Turkish Embassy in France sent a diplomatic note to France, over the latter’s decision to include the Armenian Genocide within France’s secondary school curriculum, protesting the move and accusing France of using so called “fake documents” in the textbooks.
As reported, in the note, sent to the France’s Foreign and Education ministries, Turkey demanded French authorities to revise what they call “objective” data, provided in the textbooks. The letters also called into questions the text of telegrams sent by then Ottoman minister Talat Pasha that proves that the mass killings of Armenians were done in a systematic and deliberate way. The embassy said the telegraphs were “fake”.
The source informs that Ankara’s letters also warned that the section in the French textbook will “inflame hatred between the two nations.”
The Armenian Genocide section in the French textbook include material from a book by Aram Andonian, an Armenian from Istanbul, titled “The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians,” which is also known as the “Talat Pasha telegrams” and was originally published in 1920.
Andonian was deported during the Genocide, and wrote in his memoir that with the assistance of Naim Bey in Aleppo, he published the telegrams of Talat Pasha, which outline the systematic plan to annihilate the entire Armenian population.
Naturally, Genocide-denying Turkish Minister of EU Affairs said that Turkey doesn’t know what Genocide is, and that there wasn’t any Genocide throughout Turkish history.
Note, Turkey had canceled all economic, political and military meetings with France in December, after the France legally recognized Armenian Genocide.
