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Turkey ready
'to pay price' if found guilty of Armenian massacres: Erdogan
Turkey is ready to "pay the price" if found
guilty of the mass killings of Armenians a century ago, Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said.
In a live interview with state-run TRT channel on
Thursday, Erdogan said his country would take the necessary steps if historians
conclude that it was at fault for the World War I-era massacres that Armenians
say amounted to genocide.
"If the results actually reveal that we have
committed a crime, if we have a price to pay, then as Turkey we would assess it
and take the required steps," Erdogan said.
Turkey has vehemently rejected the genocide claim and
says up to 500,000 Armenians died in fighting and of starvation after Armenians
sided with invading Russian troops. It claims a comparable number of Turks were
also killed.
Last year, Erdogan offered an unprecedented expression
of condolence for the massacres when he was prime minister but this did little
to satisfy Armenians, who want the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people
recognized as genocide.
But Erdogan said in the interview: "It is
impossible to accept such thing. We are not obliged to recognize so-called
Armenian genocide on someone's orders."
He also reiterated that the mass killings should be
studied by historians on the basis of documents and archives, and not
politicians.
"If you are really sincere in this matter, let us
give it to the historians. Let the historians deal with the matter. We have
opened our archive and presented more than a million documents," he
said.
"If Armenia also has an archive, then they should
open it too.... Then we can sit and talk as politicians," he said.
Earlier this month Erdogan said Ankara would
"actively" challenge a campaign pressuring Turkey to recognise as
genocide the mass killings, on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy this year.
Sentences of conditional IF :
- If found
guilty of the mass killings of Armenians a century ago, Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said
- If
historians conclude that it was at fault for the World War I-era massacres that
Armenians say amounted to genocide
-
If the
results actually reveal that we have committed a crime
- If we have a
price to pay, then as Turkey we would assess it and take the required steps
-
If you are
really sincere in this matter, let us give it to the historians
-
If Armenia
also has an archive, then they should open it too
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