Turkey has suspended talks with Gaz de France (GDF) over the proposed acquisition by the French group of a stake in a major gas pipeline project, but the decision is not final, a Foreign Ministry official said Friday.
A press report claimed Thursday the talks had been suspended because of a political row sparked by French pressure to label Turkish action against Armenians during World War I as genocide.
“This is not a final decision. We understand that the negotiating process has not yet come to an end,” the diplomat told AFP on the condition of anonymity.
“This is a commercial issue between companies and they will make the final decision on the basis of financial considerations,” he added.
The five-company Nabucco consortium, involving Turkey’s BOTAS, plans to build a 3,300-kilometer (2,000-mile) pipeline that will carry natural gas from the Middle East and Central Asia to the European Union via Turkey and the Balkans, bypassing Russia.
”Negotiations have been complicated and slowed down by the genocide issue,” confirmed another source close to the case.
The other partners in Nabucco are Austria’s oil and gas group OMV, Hungary’s MOL, Bulgaria’s Bulgargaz and Romania’s Transgaz.
The consortium is seeking a sixth partner in the 6-billion-dollar (4.5-billion-euro) project, expected to become operational in 2012.
The other partners reportedly approved GDF’s participation, but BOTAS has opposed it because of a French draft law on the Armenian massacres.
A bill was adopted by the National Assembly in Paris in October calling for jail sentences for those who deny that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians during World War I.
It must still go before the Senate, then back to the lower house before becoming law.
Turkey had at the time threatened unspecified measures against the bill, which followed a 2001 resolution by the French parliament recognizing the killings as genocide.
In November, the Turkish army froze bilateral military ties with France over the bill.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin perished in orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917 under the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey categorically rejects the genocide label and says thousands of Turks and Armenians were killed in civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling empire.
(AFP News, 06/04/2007)