The chairman of the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) is the latest Turkish politician to dismiss comments by the Armenian president.
"The Armenian president passed all bounds and slithered into the bog of unreason in order to hide his ignominious and murderous past," Devlet Bahceli said of remarks by Serzh Sargsyan, APA reports.
He was referring to comments made by the Armenian president to members of the Armenian community in Marseille that one day the Turkish people would "bow down" at the memorial to the victims of mass slaughter in the Ottoman Empire, slaughter which the Armenians say was genocide.
Devlet Bahceli said that Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party had to share the blame for Sargsyan's remarks.
"The indifference of the authorities to national issues, the belittling of our glorious history gives rise to the emergence of the imaginary 'genocide'," he said.
Bahceli criticized the Turkish government's "football diplomacy" (meetings with the Armenian leadership when their two countries met on the football field) and the protocols on rapprochement signed in Zurich in 2009. "All this created the conditions for the imaginary 'genocide' to be put on the agenda," he said.
"The president of Armenia said that sooner or later Turkey’s leaders would bow down before the monument to the so-called 'genocide'. He should know that no representative of the Turkish people would even consider such a base and humiliating step."
Bahceli also raised the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh by Armenia.
He urged Armenia to liberate the occupied Azerbaijani lands and said that without liberation there could be no talk of Turkish-Armenian relations. Bahceli called on Turkey’s ruling party to give a decisive response to the remarks by the Armenian president by finally removing the Armenian-Turkish protocols from the Turkish parliament's agenda.
News.Az
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