Turkish MPs of German Bundestag receive death threats over Armenian Genocide resolution
A leader of Germany's opposition Greens, Cem Oezdemir, one of the initiators of the resolution, has received death threats via Twitter, Facebook and email — some of them from Germans with Turkish roots in Germany and others from Turks in Turkey, said Julia Jorch, a spokeswoman for the Greens.
She said Oezdemir often received insults from right-wing extremists and Turkish nationalists and sometimes death threats but the number of these had surged in the run-up to and after the resolution, which parliament approved last Thursday. Police have now beefed up his personal security.
On Sunday Erdogan lashed out at the German parliament for passing the resolution and suggested that Germany was being hypocritical given its own history.
"Look Germany, I am saying this again; first you will be held accountable for the Holocaust, then you will be held accountable on how you killed and destroyed more than 100,000 Namibians in Namibia," Erdogan said at the graduation ceremony of a university in Istanbul, according to comments published by the state-run Anadolu agency.
"You are the last country who could conduct a parliamentary vote for Turkey on the so-called Armenian genocide. We have no issues, no problem in our history on this topic. Our history is not one of massacres. Our history is one of compassion and mercy and that is our difference," Erdogan said.
After MPs called for action from Angela Merkel, Steffen Seibert, spokesman to German Chancellor, said on Monday that the Bundestag - Germany's lower house of parliament - "had reached a sovereign decision."
"That must be respected," he added.
