Istanbul (CNN) -- The business deal looked fairly straightforward. Last week, American basketball star Kobe Bryant agreed to become the new celebrity face of Turkish Airlines, a growing international carrier.
Though he has admitted to never having visited Turkey, the Los Angeles Lakers guard said in a news release that "Turkey is a country rich in natural beauty and thousands of years of cultural history, and I'm proud to partner with Turkish Airlines to bring that majesty to people around the world".
Within days, however, Bryant's decision was being denounced by Armenian groups in North America and in Los Angeles, which is the hometown not only of the Lakers, but also of the largest ethnic Armenian community outside of Armenia.
"Turkish Deal Will Make Kobe the Face of Oppression and Injustice" and "Kobe Bryant's Direct Flight to Inhumanity," announced the website of the Armenian Youth Federation.
Armenian diaspora groups in North America have launched a media and Internet campaign urging Bryant to drop his Turkish Airlines deal.
In Toronto, about 30 Canadian-Armenians protested against Bryant, holding signs that said "Kobe: Do the Right Thing," outside the stadium where the Lakers played the Raptors on Sunday.
What appeared to be a standard and presumably lucrative celebrity endorsement has run headlong into a passionate dispute over a bloody chapter in history that took place in the highlands of eastern Turkey nearly a century ago.
Armenian groups and many scholars argue that starting in 1915, Turks committed genocide, when more than a million ethnic Armenians were massacred in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire.
Modern-day Turkey officially denies that a genocide took place, arguing instead that hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians and Muslim Turks died in intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War I.
The genocide debate is an annual source of tension between Turkey and the United States, two NATO military allies.
Every year, the White House beats back efforts in Congress to pass a resolution which would formally recognize the 1915 massacres of Armenians as genocide.
In March, Turkey temporarily withdrew its ambassador to Washington in protest, after the House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly voted in favor of a nonbinding resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide.
The resolution was subsequently blocked from reaching a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. CNN
