NAN-F-19
Summon
Berlin, Sept. 18, 2017 (dpa/NAN) Turkey’s Foreign Ministry has summoned Germany’s ambassador to Ankara twice over the course of two days, German Foreign Office spokesman Martin Schaefer confirmed on Monday in Berlin.
Tension between the two nations have showed little signs of abating ahead of Germany’s national elections on Sunday.
Schaefer said Amb. Martin Erdmann was summoned for a second time within a week without mentioning specifically the grounds.
Erdmann’s first weekend summoning occurred Saturday in connection with a Kurdish festival held in the western German city of Cologne.
The festival’s slogan referenced Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated as a terrorist group in Turkey and in the European Union.
Turkish troops are embroiled in a long-running conflict with the PKK in the country’s south-east.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry said its condemnation of the Cologne event was expressed to the German ambassador.
German weekly Der Spiegel reported that the second summons was connected to German lawmakers’ decision in June 2016 to recognise as genocide the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.
The killings had occurred during World War I.
Erdmann has been summoned a total of 17 times during his two-year tenure as ambassador —— something he said was unusual among NATO members.
Germany’s Foreign Office has also summoned the Turkish ambassador multiple times —- most recently for Turkey’s imprisonment of human rights activist Peter Steudtner.(dpa/NAN)
OYE/OLAL
==========
(Edited by Celine Oyewole and Olawale Alabi)