President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made a phone call to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to express his concern over a draft bill calling for recognition of the 1915-16 events as “Armenian genocide" to be voted on in the Bundestag.
Earlier in May, Albert Weiler, a MP from Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the chair of the Armenian-German Forum, said that the German parliament would consider voting on such a resolution on June 2.
Erdoğan has urged the German government to show common sense over the bill, which qualifies the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey during World War I as genocide.
The mass killings during WWI are still a highly sensitive issue between Turkey and Armenia. Armenia claims up to 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed by Ottoman forces in 1915, but Turkey is adamant that the killing of Armenians at the height of the war does not amount to genocide.
