The Reuters website reports that Turkey's prime minister has threatened to expel 100,000 illegal Armenian immigrants, after U.S. and Swedish lawmakers passed votes branding World War I-era killings of as many as one and one-half million Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
Asked about the votes in an interview with the BBC Turkish service that was broadcast on March 16, 2010, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said: "There are currently 170,000 Armenians living in our country. Only 70,000 of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000."
Thousands of illegal Armenian immigrants -- mostly women from the impoverished countryside -- work as cleaning ladies and in other low-skilled jobs in Istanbul.
In the BBC interview, Erdogan said, "If necessary, I will tell them 'come on, back to your country' ... I'm not obliged to keep them in my country."
Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sarksyan said, "I agree with the assessment that when the Turkish prime minister allows himself to make such statements, the (genocide) events of 1915 immediately return to our memory."
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