Turkey’s Erdogan does not want Iran or any Middle East country to have nuclear weapons

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Turkish PM does not want any country to have nukes

FAIRFAX, Va. — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday that his country does not want Iran or any other nation to have nuclear weapons.

Erdogan is among dozens of world leaders in Washington for President Barack Obama’s nuclear security summit. He spoke Monday at George Mason University’s new Center for Global Islamic Studies, just outside the U.S. capital.

Turkey currently holds one of the rotating seats on the U.N. Security Council, and the United States is hoping Turkey will cooperate with efforts to impose sanctions against Iran as punishment for its alleged work toward creating nuclear weapons.

While the United States worries about Iran’s nuclear program, Turkey has its own concerns about Israel’s nuclear program. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opted not to attend Obama’s summit, and insiders said he had expected Turkey and Egypt to use the conference as a platform to challenge him over his country’s widely assumed nuclear arsenal, which the Jewish state never has acknowledged.

Erdogan, in his remarks, did not specifically mention Israel’s nuclear program, but he criticized its treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and called Gaza an “open-air prison.”

While he specifically said Turkey does not want nuclear weapons in “our region,” he also said Ankara “would like to see all countries possessing nuclear weapons work to eliminate them in a certain time frame.” His remarks in Turkish were translated by an interpreter.

As for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Erdogan noted that Tehran has denied it is pursuing a nuclear weapon, but he also said that the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog, has faulted Iran for a lack of transparency.

In his prepared remarks, Erdogan also criticized a long-running effort in the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution declaring that Armenians were victims of Turkish genocide nearly a century ago.

“We are against a one-sided interpretation of history,” Erdogan said. “History cannot be written in parliament and judged by parliament.”

Turkey recalled its U.S. ambassador last month in protest after the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution declaring that the Ottoman-era killings amounted to genocide. The full House has not voted on the resolution.

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.