Turk minister says deportation comments on Greeks, Armenians misunderstood

Turkey's defence minister said on Tuesday he was misunderstood when he apparently praised the deportation of Greeks and Armenians after the fall of the Ottoman Empire as an important step in creating modern Turkey.

Vecdi Gonul's statement during a ceremony to mark the death of the republic's revered founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on Monday may reignite decades-old issues that have left deep scars in Turkey and in neighbouring Greece and Armenia.

"Would Turkey be a nation state if the Greeks had stayed in the Aegean region and Armenians had stayed in several parts of Turkey?," Gonul was quoted by state Anatolian news agency as saying at the Turkish embassy in Brussels on Monday.

"I do not know which words to use to explain the importance of this population exchange but if you look at the old (population) balances, its importance will be seen very clearly," he said, adding Ankara was made up of Jews, Muslims, Armenians and Greeks before the republic was founded.

Turkish media quoted Gonul on Tuesday as saying he had been misunderstood. The defence ministry declined to comment.

Hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians were expelled from Turkey as smaller numbers of Muslims were forced out of Greece in the 1920s, under an agreement that established the Greek and Turkish borders. More Greeks were forced out of Turkey during the 1950s.

Armenians were deported by Ottoman Turks during World War One. Armenians say some 1.5 million died either in massacres or from starvation or deprivation as they were marched through the desert.

Turkey has always insisted that the deaths of Armenians, most of them in 1915, were part of a war in which a beleaguered Ottoman Empire was facing Armenian rebels allied with its enemies.

After Turkey's defeat in World War One and its subsequent war with Greece, Ataturk founded modern Turkey in 1923 and established a secular republic.