French-Turk friction clouds Syria meeting

As Turkey prepares to host the second gathering of the “Friends of Syria” group to discuss the Syrian crisis in Istanbul in March, Ankara is still deciding whether to inviteFrench Foreign Minister Alain Juppe. Political ties between the two countries have been strained over a “genocide” bill, Hurriyet Daily News reports. 

“We haven’t sent any invitation to any country yet. We will still consider inviting Juppe,” a Turkish diplomat told the Hürriyet Daily News yesterday. Turkey had not ruled out the participation of France, since it would not be a bilateral meeting, but rather a multi-party gathering, the diplomat said, implying a higher likelihood he would be invited.

Turkey will host the second “Friends of Syria” conference in late March, following the group’s first meeting in Tunis on Feb. 24.

If Turkey decides to invite France to the gathering, the invitation would be for Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, not French President Nicholas Sarkozy, as the conference would be at the ministerial level, the diplomat said.

Juppe is known to be against the law the French parliament passed in December 2011 which made denying the Ottoman empire committed genocide against its Armenian population in the World War I era a criminal offense.