Share :

Download PDF :

Daily Sabah (03 May 2019)

by VALERIA GIANOTTA

On April 10, the Italian Parliament approved a motion recognizing the so-called Armenian genocide to give it international resonance. Namely, the author of this move was Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini's Northern League along with the proposal submitted by its representative Paolo Formentini, who got the approval from all other parties with the exception of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia. Indeed, the signatories are members of the anti-system Five Star Movement, the far-right Brothers of Italy and surprisingly it appears that of some Democratic Party's (PD) members are marking a sort of turnaround against Turkey. However, this recent action opens, for the first time, a sort of crack in what has been considered both by Turkey and Italy as a "more than special friendship."

In the past, the Italian Parliament had never urged the commemoration of the Armenian massacre. A misunderstanding arose in 2000 when a motion including – just in the premise and not in the body of the text – a resolution of the European Parliament on the recognition.

In 2004, the former ambassador of Italy to Ankara, Carlo Marsili, solved the misunderstanding by deleting Italy from the list of countries recognizing the massacre as genocide. Later on, in a letter dated April 30, 2010, former Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, pointed out that the Italian government does not recognize the "Armenian genocide" and that the resolutions of the parliaments should not act on behalf of the rule of governments either on issues strictly concerning dated historians.

https://www.dailysabah.com/op-ed/2019/05/03/realpolitik-and-italys-move-on-the-armenian-allegations