Turkey is critical of Obama’s statement

The president of Turkey said Saturday that President Obama failed to honor Turks slain by Armenians in a message remembering the dead in massacres nearly a century ago.

Obama refrained Friday from branding the World War I-era massacre of an estimated 1.2 million Armenians in Turkey a “genocide,” and instead referred to the killings that began in 1915 as “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century.”

The phrasing of Obama’s statement attracted heightened scrutiny, as using the “genocide” label could have angered U.S. ally Turkey and disturbed reconciliation talks between Turkey and Armenia.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul said, however, that Obama should also have expressed sympathy for the “hundreds of thousands of Turks and Muslims” killed during the same period, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

“Everyone’s pain must be shared,” Gul reportedly said outside a meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria. “It is not possible for politicians, for statesmen to make decisions on historic events.”

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that though Obama tried to be “balanced,” the statement was “not satisfactory.”

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry also complained that certain points in Obama’s statement had been “unacceptable.”

Many scholars view the events in the final years of the Ottoman Empire as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, contending that the toll has been inflated and that the casualties were victims of civil war and other causes. It says Turks also suffered losses at the hands of Armenian gangs.