The French ambassador to Turkey Laurent Bili has made some interesting statements about the 1915 incidents and the Armenian Diaspora.
Bili who served at different posts at the French embassy in Turkey says that the French people are unaware of many of the developments in recent history.
He said that the French know nothing about the suffering of Turks and Muslim people, that while the French lost 1,6 million people in the First World War, Turks suffered a loss of 2,5 million people during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and that no one in France knew that , and added that these facts needed to be explained.
He called attention to the fact that the Armenian issue could not be understood by looking at the 1915 incidents alone and noted that a much bigger of portion of history in a wider geography needed to be examined thoroughly.
Ambassador Bili said further that Turks had started to be driven out of the Caucasus and the Balkans as of 1878 and more than 1 million people were exiled from the Balkans alone, adding that over 100 thousand people lost their lives in that period and that he had understood after reading the book of Dutch historian Zürcher that Armenians had to pay a price as a result of those mistakes they were involved in.
Bili also said that he was going to invite the Armenians in France to visit Turkey and wanted to show the change Turkey had gone through.
He also said self-critically that French ambassadors had not worked sufficiently in that regard and failed to convey the changes in Turkey.
Speaking also about the political and democratic development in Turkey, French ambassador Laurent Bili said that he had observed huge changes in Turkey when he returned 12 years later after completion of his term of office in Ankara in 1999, adding that he saw the biggest change in the political atmosphere and free thinking, qualifying them as markedly different from what he viewed in the 90s.
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