Recep Tayyip Erdogan is mad at the pope for mentioning the Armenian genocide. The what? The Armenian genocide. I can’t quite hear you. THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE. Oh yes, the Armenian genocide.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he condemned the Pope and warned him to “not repeat this mistake”.
Turkey rejects the use of the term genocide to describe the killings, arguing it was a civil war in which both sides died.
It is calling for a joint study by historians of what happened.
As if no historians have studied it.
Turkey recalled its envoy to the Vatican after Pope Francis made the comments on Sunday at a Mass at St Peter’s Basilica, attended by the Armenian president and the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Karekin II.
The Pope said that humanity had lived through “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the last century.
“The first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the 20th Century, struck your own Armenian people,” he said, in a form of words used in a declaration by Pope John Paul II in 2001.
But Turkey says it wasn’t a genocide, it was just a misunderstanding.
Mr Erdogan said on Tuesday that when political or religious leaders played the role of historians, what resulted was “delirium, not fact”.
Except when Mr Erdogan does it. That’s entirely different.