Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said conventional weapons have killed 150,000 people in Syria whereas chemical weapons have killed 1,500 people.
“So killing people with conventional weapons is not as important as killing them with chemical weapons?” Erdogan said in a speech in Sweden’s capital Stockholm on Thursday.
“We cannot ignore the fact that death is death,” he said, emphasizing that killing people is bad enough when it’s done without chemical weapons.
The US threatened the Syrian regime with a military intervention after the regime`s chemical attack on civilians that killed at least 1,500 people in August. Interventions have been stalled since Russia offered a plan for Syria to put their chemical arsenal under international control.
Erdogan said Turkey has no problem with the Syrian people, explaining that Turkey is a home to more than 600,000 Syrian refugees and has spent at least $2 billion on humanitarian aid.
- Advancing trade relations between Turkey and Sweden
Erdogan said a joint economic commission should be established in order to further strengthen Turkish and Swedish economic cooperation. Trade volume between Turkey and Sweden was $3.5 billion in 2012.
Emphasizing that Turkey and Sweden are two of the few countries that were less affected by the financial crisis that shook the world in 2008, businessmen should gain from the economic opportunities in the two countries.
Because Sweden is home to more than 100,000 Turks, Erdogan said he ‘’believes the Turkish population contributes strongly to communities in the countries they live in.”
- Turkey’s on-going peace process
Speaking on Turkey’s decades old terrorism problem, which has plagued the country for forty years, Erdogan explained that there is a successful on-going peace process.
A recent Turkish democratization package that was announced in September, which includes reforms on ethnic freedom, intended to contribute to the peace process, will be written into law by the end of this year, Erdogan said.
englishnews@aa.com.tr
