Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia asked Ankara on Saturday to stop trying to make political capital out of France's killing of thousands of Algerians, and stop using France’s crimes during the colonial period for political purposes.
Ouyahia made his call as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan continued to accuse Paris ahead of a French Senate vote on a bill that would make it a crime for anyone to deny that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks 1915-17 amounted to genocide.
Ouyahia said in a press conference "We say to our Turkish friends, stop making political capital out of Algeria's colonization,"
“Every country has the right to defend its interests, but nobody has the right to make the blood of Algerians their business," he added, pointing out that during the war in Algeria, Turkey was an ally to France and had provided material support to it.
Turkey has accused France of hypocrisy for its own hand in killings committed in its former colony, Algeria, in 1945 and during the north African nation's struggle for independence between 1954 and 1962.
"An estimated 15 per cent of the Algerian population was massacred by the French from 1945 onwards," Erdogan has said. "This is genocide."