Forcefully deporting Armenians in 1915 was right decision: MHP leader

ANKARA

The leader of Turkey’s opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Devlet Bahçeli, has said that the forced deportation of Armenians in 1915 and 1916 by the Ottomans was the right decision, adding that the same deportation decision should be given again if the circumstances were the same.

 “The future of our people would be in danger if the deportation decision for the Armenians wasn’t given in those conditions,” said Bahçeli during a parliamentary group meeting of his party in Ankara on June 8, while adding that the decision was “absolutely correct.” 

“The deportation decision in 1915 was absolutely correct. It should be done again if the circumstances were the same,” he added. 

Bahçeli’s remarks came after Germany’s Bundestag approved a resolution recognizing the World War I-era killings of Anatolian Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” 

“Changing the places of the Armenians doesn’t aim to annihilate them, but to protect the state, which is absolutely correct and halal. The enemies of the Turks should keep in mind that Ottomans are in the last place in the line of apprehension-deportation,” Bahçeli also said, as he supported President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s comments on the co-chair of the Greens in Germany, Turkish-origin Cem Özdemir.

“He is supposed to be Turkish. What Turk! [His] blood should go through a lab test,” Erdoğan said after the vote in Germany. 

“If we said what President Erdoğan said, we would be regarded as racist. Mr. President, don’t say blood again because the blood of the ones with rotten blood won’t flow. They don’t have blood,” Bahçeli said in support of Erdoğan.