Πηγή: Bloomberg
By Emre Peker and Josh Bassett
Dec 19 2011
Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Turkey is warning France of economic pain if its parliament approves a bill this week that would make it a crime to deny that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians in Anatolia a century ago.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu summoned more than 20 local executives last week from companies including Credit Agricole SA and Groupama SA to lobby them against the French bill, according to two people at the Dec. 15 meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. France will incur “hard-to-fix damages,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Dec. 17. He is calling on French President Nicolas Sarkozy to block the measure.
Turkey has warned of retaliation in the past, though this time the threat may be more serious. French carmakers control a fifth of Turkey’s market and their banks have assets in the country exceeding $20 billion. The Turkish economy expanded 8.2 percent in the third quarter, a pace only exceeded by China among the Group of 20 major economies.
“Today, Turkey has the ability to follow through on its rhetoric because it believes that it has a stronger hand than it did in the past,” Soli Ozel, professor of international relations and political science at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, said in a telephone interview. “Turkey will not bow down on this matter.”
After the French parliament in 2006 approved a bill identifying the killings as genocide, Erdogan blocked Gaz de France SA’s participation in the 7.9 billion-euro ($10.3 billion) Nabucco pipeline and suspended military relations with France. Turkey last year temporarily withdrew its ambassador from the U.S. after a committee in the House of Representatives approved a resolution recognizing the World War I killings as genocide.
Protest Warnings
Following Davutoglu’s meeting with the executives, the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, or TOBB, sent a letter to French companies and Turkish firms doing business with France warning of actions that will “cause a significant economic loss” if the measure passes, according to the two people at the gathering.
“If the proposed legislation becomes law, there will be a serious protest against French products in Turkey,” said the letter drafted by the Turkish trade group and addressed to Sarkozy. A copy of the letter, which the companies were asked to sign and return to TOBB, was obtained by Bloomberg News.
Direct Investments
There are 960 French firms with direct investments in Turkey, according to the letter. An official with the group confirmed that it sent the letter to hundreds of companies and declined to give further details. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter. A Foreign Ministry official, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, confirmed that the meeting with Davutoglu took place, without detailing its participants.
Members of a Turkish delegation led by TOBB and the Turkish Industry and Business Association plan to visit Paris today and tomorrow to lobby their counterparts against the measure, according to a statement from the groups on their websites.
Turkey is France’s 11th-largest export market and ranks 16th among countries exporting goods to Europe’s second-biggest economy, according to the French Trade Ministry. French exports to Turkey were less than 2.5 percent of the annual 424 billion euros in sales abroad.
The French proposal would punish people who say that the killings in eastern Turkey aren’t genocide with a year in prison and a 45,000-euro fine.
Ottoman Empire
The Turkish government denies that genocide occurred, saying tens of thousands of ethnic Turks and Armenians died in clashes during World War I under the Ottoman Empire after Armenian groups sided with Russia. Armenians say the Ottomans, who preceded modern-day Turkey, killed 1.5 million ethnic Armenians from 1915 to 1923 as part of a planned campaign of genocide.
Turk Ekonomi Bankasi AS, part-owned by BNP Paribas SA, is among the 10 biggest banks in Turkey with 42.4 billion liras ($23 billion) in assets as of Sept. 30, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. France’s two biggest carmakers, PSA Peugeot Citroen and Renault SA, had combined sales of 158,844 vehicles in Turkey through November, or 22 percent of this year’s market share, according to the Automotive Distributors Association.
“Such an effort won’t benefit anyone,” Erdogan said, referring to the French parliament’s actions. Turkey will stand against it “in every diplomatic way possible,” he said.
--With assistance from Helene Fouquet and Vidya Root in Paris, Steve Bryant in Ankara and Josh Bassett in Istanbul. Editors: Louis Meixler, Digby Lidstone.
No comments:
Post a Comment