Ermenihaber.am reports that the inscription about Mount Ararat on the boxes of humanitarian aid sent from China to Armenia on 8 April had caused a stir in Turkey.
And the inscription was the following: “Let our friendship be higher than Mount Ararat and longer than the Yangtze River.”
The Turks were displeased that, with that inscription on the boxes, Mount Ararat was, in effect, “attributed to Armenia.”
In that connection, the spokesperson of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hami Aksoy, had stated that they had approached the Chinese ambassador to Ankara, Deng Li, and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the aim of obtaining clarification.
Later, Aksoy had made the following statement: “The Chinese ambassador informed us that the aid sent to Armenia was collected by a local self-government body and sent to Yerevan through a private organisation. On the boxes, by that local government leadership, there were only inscriptions in Chinese, among which there was no mention of Mount Ararat. We were informed that the inscriptions in English regarding Ararat were added later.”
However, the website of the Turkish newspaper “Takvim” has published a video in which it is seen that, at the very moment of unloading the boxes received from China from the aeroplane, the aforementioned inscriptions are present. “Therefore,” the Turkish newspaper asserts, “the inscription about Mount Ararat was not added later, as the Chinese ambassador maintains, but was there beforehand, even before being sent from China.”
Let us also add that the Chinese periodical “Global Times” has likewise confirmed that the inscription about Ararat was on the boxes from the outset, not added subsequently.
