Berlin - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he would not call the mass murder of Armenians that began 100 years ago Friday a "genocide", one day after the German president used the label.
Steinmeier said that adopting the term "genocide" to describe the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915 could play into the hands of those who sought to minimalise the Holocaust.
"I am sick of the debates in which I am expected to jump through a hoop held up for me although everyone knows -- those asking the questions and those answering -- that complex memories can seldom be reduced to a label," he told news weekly Der Spiegel in an interview to be published Saturday.
German President Joachim Gauck at a memorial ceremony on Thursday condemned the Armenian massacre a century ago as a "genocide", adding that Germany bore partial blame for the bloodletting.
It marked the first time that a German head of state used the word to describe the killings. The speaker of the German parliament, Norbert Lammert, also spoke of "genocide" Friday, during a Bundestag commemoration.
Steinmeier said German foreign policy aimed to encourage "reconciliation between the affected nations" and that "reducing the issue to the use of the word genocide" would not help overcome "the silence between Turks and Armenians".
Steinmeier said the word was particularly loaded for Germany.
AFP
