06 12 13 - INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

Subject: International Herald Tribune mer massin
Armenian group criticizes EU decision on Turkey
The Associated PressPublished: December 12, 2006
BRUSSELS, Belgium: An Armenian pressure group criticized the European Union on Tuesday for basing its decision to partially suspend membership talks
with Turkey only on a dispute over Cyprus.
It complained the EU ignored human rights issues and the controversy over the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians.
"The silence of the (EU) member countries on other Turkish violations are a lapse that seriously endangers European integration," said a statement from
the European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy.
EU foreign ministers on Monday agreed to suspend membership talks with Turkey in a number of areas ranging from fisheries to external relations in
response to Ankara's refusal to respect an agreement to open its ports to ships and planes from Cyprus.
Although the decision was a blow to Turkey's EU membership aspirations, the Brussels-based Armenian lobby group said it did not go far enough. It said
the EU should have also punished Turkey for violations of human rights, treatment of minorities, a blockade of Armenia's border and a refusal to recognize the 1915-1919 killings of Armenians as genocide.
The member states' decision has added to the existing confusion in relations with Turkey," said the group's president, Hilda Tchoboian.
Turkey acknowledges that great numbers of Armenians were killed in fighting and mass expulsions at the end of the Ottoman Empire, but vehemently rejects the label of genocide.
Ankara reacted angrily to a bill in the French parliament this year that would make it a crime to deny that the killings of up to 1.5 million
Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide.
The European Commission criticized the French bill as counterproductive during a critical stage in the Muslim country's EU entry talks.

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