Turkish president Erdogan has threatened to “leave” Europe to deal with its migrant crisis alone, saying that Germany “blackmailed” Ankara by recognizing the Armenian Genocide. He also called out the Germans over their “history” of mass killings.
Speaking before students at Sebahattin Zaim University on Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that Germany has no moral right to blame Turkey for mass killings, given the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany and a genocide in Namibia perpetrated by the German Empire.
“Germany! I am telling again: first, you have to give an account of the Holocaust. How you decimated, killed over 100 thousand Namibians in Namibia, you should give an account of that,” he said, as cited by The Daily Sabah. Erdogan added that Germany is the “last country”to make judgements on genocide, given its “history of massacres.”
The German Empire carried out racially-motivated mass killings of tens of thousands of Namibians during colonial wars waged on the territory of modern-day Namibia from 1904 to 1907. According to various estimates, between 24,000 and 100,000 ethnic Herero and 10,000 Nama tribal people died as a result of starvation, abuse, and diseases during the course of the warfare and in concentration camps.
However, in contrast to Ankara’s defiant stance on the Armenian Genocide, the German parliament admitted that the Namibian killings were a part of a “race war” that should be considered a…