Armenia: Yerevan Angry Over Turkish Threats to Deport Armenians

Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian believes that Ankara's threat to expel up to 100,000 illegal Armenian migrants from Turkey is tantamount to blackmail.

At a March 18 joint briefing with Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak, Nalbandian expressed the hope that Turkey will try to resolve its issues with Armenia without resorting to "blackmails [sic], preconditions, threats and provocations," the Tert news agency reported.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stoked the controversy by telling the British Broadcasting Corp.'s Turkish service that Ankara could consider deporting Armenians illegally residing in Turkey.

Armenia and Turkey are locked in a bitter row over Ottoman-era killings of ethnic Armenians; Turkey accuses Yerevan of disrupting attempts to normalize ties by pushing for international recognition of the massacre as genocide. The Swedish parliament classified the killings as genocide on March 11; a week earlier, a US House of Representatives committee approved a non-binding resolution for a vote that would similarly recognize the 1915 event as genocide.