Turkey strongly condemned the Czech Republic’s parliament on Thursday for recognizing the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
In a resolution unanimously passed on Tuesday, Czech lawmakers listed “the genocide of Armenians and other ethnic and religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire” among crimes against humanity committed during the First and Second World Wars. Armenia hailed the move.
“We condemn and reject in the strongest terms the resolution adopted by the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic on 25 April 2017,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The ministry also denounced Czech President Milos Zeman for standing by his view that the extermination of some 1.5 million Armenian subjects of Ottoman Turkey constituted genocide. Zeman made that clear in an April 24 letter to leaders of his country’s small Armenian community.
“Our reaction to these political actions that openly contradict historical facts as well as the basic tenets of law has been conveyed to the Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Ankara,” added the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
In contrast to its reactions to Armenian genocide recognitions by other foreign states, official Ankara appears to have stopped short of recalling Turkey’s ambassador in Prague.
The Turkish ambassador to Germany was recalled for consultations immediately after the German parliament passed a similar resolution in June 2016. The Turkish envoys in the Vatican, Brazil, Austria and Luxembourg, were withdrawn for the same reason in 2015.
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