Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said today (April 14, 2015) he condemns Pope Francis for comments that the 1915 mass killing of Armenians was genocide and warned him not to make such a statement again, the Reuters website reports.
Pope Francis became the first head of the Roman Catholic Church to publicly call the killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians "genocide" on April 12, infuriating Erdogan and prompting a diplomatic row with Turkey, which summoned the Vatican's envoy and recalled its own.
Muslim Turkey agrees Christian Armenians were killed in clashes with Islamic Ottoman soldiers that began on April 15, 1915, when Armenians lived in the empire ruled by Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.
In reaffirming Turkey's view that there was no Armenian genocide, Erdogan declared today, "I condemn the pope and would like to warn him not to make similar mistakes again."
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