Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier rejected Ankara’s demand that official Berlin distance itself from the Bundestag’s Armenian Genocide recognition as a precondition for German lawmakers to gain access to the Incirlik airbase to visit German soldiers stationed there.
“I don’t think this has anything to do with the matter and I have told this to my Turkish counterpart,” Steinmeier was quoted by the German Deutsche Welle (DW) TV and radio company.
Steinmeier added that if Turkey continues denying German lawmakers access to the airbase, German troops dispatched there to fight ISIS will be withdrawn.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu had said that Turkish permission for German lawmakers to visit the Incirlik airbase will depend on the German government distancing itself from a resolution recognizing the 1915 massacre of Armenians as genocide.