Hundreds of Turkish nationalists chanting slogans and waving flags protested yesterday against a controversial academic conference on the World War I massacre of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.

The conference had been due to open on Friday at two universities in Istanbul but a last-minute court order blocked it, causing acute embarrassment to the Turkish government just days before the start of its European Union membership talks.

Organisers circumvented the court ban by moving the conference yesterday to a third university in the city. The issue of the Armenian massacres is highly sensitive in Turkey. Armenia and its supporters around the world say some 1.5 million Armenians perished in a systematic genocide committed by Ottoman Turkish forces between 1915 and 1923.

Ankara accepts many Armenians were killed on Turkish soil during and after World War I, but says they were victims of a partisan conflict that claimed even more Turkish Muslim lives as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. It denies any genocide.

But in a bid to defuse the issue, the government has opened up Turkey's archives to scholars, saying it has nothing to hide, and has urged Armenia and other nations to do likewise.

The academic conference was originally scheduled for May but was cancelled after Justice Minister Cemil Cicek accused those backing the genocide claims of "stabbing Turkey in the back".

This time, with a nervous eye on Brussels as the clock ticks towards the start of its long-delayed EU entry talks on October 3, the government has strongly backed the conference.

The court banning order, announced on Thursday evening just before the conference was due to start, drew swift condemnation from Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan as well as from the European Commission, which spoke of a "provocation" by anti-EU elements.

Lawyers behind the original court ban condemned Bilgi University's decision yesterday to host the event regardless.