The President of Turkey has strongly condemned Garo Paylan, the Armenian-origin deputy of the Peoples’ Democratic Party in parliament, for presenting a bill regarding the recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan considered this step more than an insult — an outright betrayal. He expressed the hope that “appropriate measures will be taken against the person who has trampled upon the legal and moral rules of parliament.”
Ahead of the 107th anniversary, the bill presented by Paylan for discussion in the Meclis would have entailed recognizing the Armenian Genocide, identifying those responsible, removing the names of the perpetrators of the Genocide from public places, instead naming those places after political officials who opposed the Genocide, and granting Turkish citizenship to the victims and members of their families.
The Speaker of Parliament, Mustafa Şentop, had sent the bill back, citing that it contradicts the Meclis’s rules of procedure.
