Armenia’s president renews call for Turkey to admit to ‘genocide’

Agence France Presse — English
April 20, 2005 Wednesday 8:57 AM GMT

YEREVAN April 20 — Armenia’s President Robert Kocharian on Wednesday
renewed calls for Turkey to face up to its past and admit that it
committed genocide against Armenians as the republic prepares to mark
the 90th anniversary of the massacres.

“It is hard for us to understand the position of the Turkish side which
is expressed not only by a denial of the past but with a continuing
blockade of Armenia,” Kocharian said in an address to a conference
on genocide prevention.

Armenian will mark on Sunday mass killings by Ottoman Turks,
a slaughter that is among the most painful episodes of Armenia’s
ages-old history and that continues to impede modern relations between
Armenia and Turkey.

Ankara recognized Armenia’s independence when it broke away from the
Soviet Union in 1991 but has refused to establish diplomatic relations
with Yerevan because of Armenian efforts to secure international
condemnation of the World War I-era massacres as genocide.

In 1993, Turkey shut its border with Armenia in a show of solidarity
with its close ally Azerbaijan, which was at war with Armenia over
the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, dealing a heavy economic blow to the
impoverished nation.

Armenia has planned a series of events, including conferences,
exhibits, film screenings and a massive march, with which it hopes to
draw international attention to its cause and put pressure on Turkey.

“Recognizing the genocide is important to prevent genocide in the
future … it would be the answer to many of the problems that exist
between our two peoples and a possibility to look into the future,”
Kocharian said.

Kocharian opened with a conciliatory remark saying, “we remember the
past with pain but without hate.”

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen perished in
orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire,
the predecessor of modern Turkey, was falling apart.

Ankara counters that 300,000 Armenians and thousands of Turks were
killed in “civil strife” during World War I when the Armenians rose
against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.