International symposium on Armenian claims takes places in Baku

At an international symposium on "Armenian Claims and the Reality of Azerbayjian" held in Baku, Azerbayjian, the head of the Ataturk Culture, Language and History Foundation, Professor Sadik Tural, spoke about Armenian allegations of genocide in Turkey. According to Tural, whose speech came at the opening of the symposium, the source of Armenian "propoganda" in many European countries was a German priest by the name of Johannes Lepsuis, who toured Anatolia in 1915. Lepsuis, said Tural, wrote letters filled with lies and distrotions, which the Armenians then began to use in their own campaign against the Turks.Tural asserted in his speech that Turkey faces a systematic attack on the matter of the Armenian claims. Said Tural, "France, which gives great support to the Armenian claims, wiped 8,000 villages of the face of the earth in Algeria. They are also responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Algerian intellectuals." Tural also labeled England as being a country with genocide in its past.  Azeri President Ilham Aliyev sent a letter of support to the members of the symposium, saying in it that Turkey and Azerbayjian had for years been subjected to the relentless and unfounded claims of the Armenians. Aliyev also noted that in the last two hundred years, hundreds of thousands of Turkic peoples living in the Caucasian region had been "ethnically cleansed" from the area, and that their historical lands had been invaded. Said Aliyev further "Historical and intellectual truths have been, in a systematic and plotted out manner, been sacrificed to Armenian propoganda." Â