Turkish Foreign Ministry says Greek reaction to Erdogan rant ‘inconceivable’
The Turkish Foreign Ministry on Tuesday issued a statement saying that the Greek reaction to a recent rant by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was “inconceivable and odd due to its content and timing.”
“This statement disregards the historical facts such as Greece’s past attempt to occupy Anatolia and the compensation it paid to Turkey due to the destruction and damage inflicted to Anatolia by its army. As such, the statement is very unfortunate and incompatible with the good neighborly relations as well as the environment of trust that we try to develop with this country,” the Turkish ministry said in a statement posted on its website in English.
It was responding to an earlier statement from the Foreign Ministry in Athens on Sunday, which said that “Greece is not going to be swept away in the instrumentalization of foreign policy to serve domestic political expediencies, or use history with terms that are offensive to neighboring countries. Such unacceptable references undermine the trust we hope to build between our countries and are not in line with the European perspective that the Turkish leadership claims to support.”
That statement came in response to a rant by Erdogan during a campaign rally in Izmir ahead of local elections in Turkey, in which he made reference to the Asia Minor Disaster by hailing the city for “throwing the infidels into the sea.”
