“No genocide took place in 1915. I will say this again and again. Such initiatives [investigations] are null and void for us. I do not know of any power that can arrest a minister of the Republic of Turkey,” he said on Tuesday at İstanbul's Atatürk International Airport where he held a press conference before leaving the country for an official visit to Brussels. “I am very confident on this issue,” he added.
News about the prosecution's move was published in the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The Zurich Chief Prosecutor's Office launched the investigation into Bağış's remarks -- which he made last month in Zurich on his way back from the World Economic Forum at Davos -- based on a complaint filed by members of Switzerland's Armenian community.
Zürich State Prosecutor Christine Braunschweig was quoted by the daily as having said: “Last week we received a petition about this issue, informing us that Mr. Bağış violated the anti-racism Article 261 of the Swiss Penal Code. Our prosecutor's office has taken this allegation seriously and launched an investigation. We will investigate whether Egemen Bağış uttered words denying the Armenian genocide as asserted in the petition. We will also see if he has diplomatic immunity. At the end of this, we will press charges against him if there indeed is a violation and if he cannot benefit from diplomatic immunity.”
Last week, in response to a question from a French journalist on what he thought of a bill criminalizing denial of the Armenian genocide adopted by the French Senate in January, Bağış said: “Our prime minister has said what needs to be said about this. This resolution is null and void for us. We believe that there are more people with common sense than those without it in France. Switzerland is another country where it is a crime to deny the so-called genocide. Here I am in Switzerland today, and I'm saying the 1915 incidents did not amount to genocide. Let them come arrest me.”
“We will go to Davos and say the same thing again,” a defiant Bağış said on Tuesday.
Armenians claim that the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians as the Ottoman Empire broke up was the 20th century's first genocide, and several European countries have recognized the massacres as such. Switzerland has convicted people of racism for denying genocide.
But Turkey asserts that there was no systematic campaign to kill Armenians and that many Turks also died during the chaotic disintegration of the empire. It also argues that the death toll is inflated.
Switzerland has a penal code article that punishes acts of racism, including public denial of genocides, established against a backdrop of right-wing attacks targeting asylum seekers in the country two decades ago.
