ANKARA, Turkey (AP) – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday directed fresh verbal attacks at the Netherlands amid their growing diplomatic spat, holding the country responsible for Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II.
In a televised speech, Erdogan referred to the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, in 1995, and blamed a Dutch battalion of United Nations peacekeepers who failed to halt the slaughter by Bosnian Serb forces.
Erdogan said: “We know the Netherlands and the Dutch from the Srebrenica massacre. We know how rotten their character is from their massacre of 8,000 Bosnians there.”
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte condemned Erdogan’s comments, calling them a “disgusting distortion of history.”
“We will not lower ourselves to this level. It is totally unacceptable,” Rutte told Dutch broadcaster RTL Z.