Turkey cancelled on Thursday a major highway tender in which both bidding consortia included French companies, in its latest retaliation against a French accusation of genocide by Ottoman Turks.
Turkish Civil Works and Housing Minister Koray Aydin said in a statement that the multi-million-dollar tender had been rescinded after French President Jacques Chirac promulgated a controversial bill charging Ottoman Turks had committed genocide against Armenians during World War I.
"We have decided to annul the tender because the foreign partners of the participating consortia were French," Aydin said in the statement. The first consortium included construction giant Bouygues, while the second involved Campenon Bernard SGE and Transroute International.
The project, launched in 1993, envisaged the construction of a 44-kilometer (27-mile) highway over the Izmit Bay in northwestern Turkey.
The consortia had submitted bids ranging from $620 million (€658 million) to $1.5 billion for the project, which called for one of the biggest foreign investments in Turkey under a build-operate-transfer plan.
Aydin added that the ministry would re-evaluate participation by French companies in construction tenders as long as the Ankara government continued to impose economic sanctions against Paris over the genocide bill.
Turkey began introducing economic reprisals against France and recalled its ambassador after French legislators passed the Armenian genocide bill on January 18.
Meanwhile, Ali Haydar Veziroglu, the executive chairman of Vinsan — the Turkish partner of Bouygues — said on Thursday he had asked Aydin to cancel the tender as a "duty to my country".
"A businessman should either love his pocket or country. The adoption of this unjust law is contrary to Turco-French friendship," Veziroglu told AFP. Nonetheless, he said his firm could in the future work on projects abroad with Bouygues, which he described as a serious partner.
Last week, Turkey cancelled a preliminary contract with the French firm Alcatel for a spy satellite worth some $200 million, and warned of more economic sanctions in the defense industry.
The all-news NTV channel reported on Tuesday that Ankara had decided to cancel a contract with the French defense electronics group Thales for a project worth around $200 million to fit electronic defense systems on 80 US-built F-16 fighters in the Turkish air force.
Another blow came from Turkey's State Grain Board (TMO), which on Tuesday excluded two French firms from a tender for the sale of 315,000 tones of wheat, NTV said.
The bill provoked a wave of public outrage against France in the form of almost daily protests in front of French diplomatic missions and calls by trade unions to boycott French goods.
Ankara categorically rejects claims of genocide, saying that around 300,000 Armenians and thousands of Turks were killed in internal fighting in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians, however, maintain that 1.5 million people died in orchestrated massacres between 1915 and 1917. — (AFP, Ankara)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
