YEREVAN (Armenpress)–Bulgaria’s parliament announced it had rejected Thursday four proposals by opposition lawmakers to officially recognize the Ottoman massacre of Armenia’s during World War I as genocide.
Legislators voted against three draft resolutions and against issuing a declaration "condemning the genocide against the Armenian people within the Ottoman Empire," the parliamentary press office said.
The proposals, tabled separately by the Ataka party, the Bulgarian People’s Union and Union of Democratic Forces were rejected by the Socialist-led ruling coalition.
The coalition also includes a Turkish minority party, Movement for Rights and Freedoms, and the centrist NMSP party of former king Simeon Saxe Coburg.
Almost a third of the lawmakers present in the 240-seat legislature abstained from the vote.
"I do not believe that there is a deputy in this hall who is not aware what the physical destruction of over one million Armenia’s means, but the historical truth is one thing, and politics completely another," Socialist deputy Alexander Radoslavov said after the vote.
A number of countries and official bodies, notably the European Parliament, France, and Canada have labeled the killings as genocide.
But Bulgaria has, on several occasions, refused to pass a genocide resolution for fear of sparking a diplomatic row with neighboring Turkey.
The Balkan state of 7.6 million people has an 800,000-strong Turkish minority population and is also home to over 10,000 descendants of Armenian refugees who fled the killings.
