Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is becoming ‘more hysterical’ in tone, prime minister Mark Rutte said on Tuesday, after Erdogan appeared to accuse the Dutch of carrying out the Srebrenica massacre.
Erdogan reportedly said during a press conference on Tuesday: ‘We know the Dutch from the Srebrenica blood bath. We know how their perverse their character has become through the mass murder of 8,000 Bosnians there.’ Rutte said in a reaction that Erdogan had hit a new low. ‘We are not going to reduce ourselves to his level,’ Rutte said. ‘Turkey continues to shout ever louder, directed now at Germany as well as the Netherlands.
But there must come a moment when we have talks.’ The war of words between the two countries has intensified after the Netherlands banned two Turkish ministers from attending rallies to support a referendum aimed at giving Erdogan greater powers at the weekend. Turkey has since frozen diplomatic relations between the two countries and has threatened that it will impose other sanctions. Also on Tuesday, the Turkish labour movement HTIB issued a statement calling on Erdogan to ‘remove his long arm from our shoulders’. ‘His politics are making our position in the Netherlands increasingly difficult,’ the statement on Facebook said. ‘The negative political developments between the Netherlands and Turkey are completely unacceptable… we would therefore repeat our earlier plea to Dutch politicians to abandon populism. With populism you end up in a political swam and sink in deeper with every movement.’
