Reuters, UK
April 21 2005

Armenians’ national anguish stalks Turkey EU bid
21 Apr 2005 09:23:41 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Hasmik Mkrtchian

YEREVAN, April 21 (Reuters) – Armenians will throng through their
capital this Sunday to commemorate what they say is Turkey’s genocide
of 1.5 million of their people and which 90 years on is casting a
shadow over Ankara’s European ambitions.

Armenians say their kin were systematically exterminated by Ottoman
Turkey’s rulers during and soon after World War One and that modern
Turkey ought to recognise that as a genocide. Ankara refuses, saying
there was no plan to wipe out Armenians.

It is an old debate but the Oct. 3 date for the start of Turkey’s
talks on entry to the European Union has put the issue — and this
tiny ex-Soviet republic on Turkey’s eastern border — onto the European
political map.

“I have no doubt the question of genocide will be on the agenda for
the talks between the EU and Turkey,” said Armenian Foreign Minister
Vardan Oskanyan.

“We, of course, would like the EU to put (recognition) forward as
a condition,” said Oskanyan, who grew up in Syria after his family
fled their home in southern Turkey.

The problem for Ankara is that some European politicians — notably
in France, home to an influential, 400,000-strong Armenian emigre
community — agree with him.

NATIONAL SECURITY

A Christian nation of 3.2 million people almost encircled by hostile
neighbours, Armenia says persuading Turkey to own up to genocide is
an issue of national security.

“Without recognition of the fact of genocide and an admission (from
Turkey) that it was wrong, we cannot trust our neighbour, which has
a tangible military weight,” said Oskanyan.

Armenia nervously eyes its neighbour — home to the biggest army in
NATO after the United States — across a 355-km (220-mile) frontier
that zigzags through the snow-topped Caucasus mountains.

The two countries have no diplomatic relations and Turkey shut the
border in 1993 out of solidarity with Turkish-speaking ally Azerbaijan,
which was then fighting a territorial war with Armenia.

Meanwhile, the simmering conflict with Azerbaijan fuels suspicion
of Turkey. Ankara helps train Azeri troops, which still exchange
occasional potshots with Armenian forces across a tense cease-fire
line.

But security aside, Armenians see the events of 90 years ago as a
national tragedy that they want the world — and Turkey in particular
— to acknowledge.

Armenia, supported by many Western historians, says between 1915
and 1923 up to 1.5 million Armenians were either killed or died from
disease and starvation as an intended result of forced relocations
implemented by Turkey’s nationalist government.

Most Turkish historians say Armenian nationalists sided with Russian
troops when they invaded eastern Turkey. Many died, Turkey says,
but they were the victims of a war, not genocide.

Organisers of this Sunday’s anniversary in Yerevan say 1.5 million
people — representing the number Armenians say died — will converge
on a memorial to the victims, a granite obelisk on a hill overlooking
the city.

Marianna Yeremyants, a 50-year-old Yerevan resident, said she would
be joining the procession.

“When he was defending his plans (to exterminate the Jews) Hitler said:
‘Who remembers the Armenian victims?'” said Yeremyants.

“Maybe, if the Armenian genocide had been condemned right away,
there would not have been a Holocaust,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Gareth Jones in Ankara and Timothy Heritage
in Paris)