AYF of South America confronts Turkish envoy to Argentina

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Armenian Youth Federation (AYF) of South America attended this week the Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI) to hand out flyers at a presentation made by the Turkish ambassador to Argentina, Taner Karakas, on “The foreign policy of Turkey in 2015.”

“The Turkish-Azerbaijani denialist lobby continues spreading lies, and co-opting academics, politicians and journalists,” said the organization. “We choose again to face the denial of the Turkish state face to face with its ambassador, providing information about the real Turkish foreign policy.”

According to an Asbarez report, the AYF reminded that 2,500 people in Turkey suffered violence and police harassment only last year. “In the Taksim Square protests in 2013, 11 people died, 8,000 were injured and over 3,000 were arrested.”

AYF also recalled that the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that women are not equal to men because “it goes against nature.” “In 2014, 296 women were killed and 191 were victims of rape.”

In September 2014, Erdogan and the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, announced that in 2015 they would work “in a coordinated manner to dispel the myth of the Armenian Genocide. The denialist policy of the Turkish government is institutionalized in the Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, under which it can imprison those who ‘publicly denigrate Turkishness’ or the ‘Government of the Republic of Turkey.’ In 2012 and 2013, Turkey was the country with the most imprisoned journalists in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. According to Reporters Without Borders, Turkey is in the 154th position of 180 countries in its World Ranking of Press Freedom. In 2014, Erdogan blocked access to Twitter and YouTube before the municipal elections,” the AYF explained.

Finally, the AYF reported that “the Turkish government keeps borders with Armenia closed unilaterally, in order to drown Armenia financially until it ceases its claims for justice for the Armenian Genocide and the struggle for self-determination of Artsakh.”