Armenia remembers 1915 killings

Sunday, 24 April, 2005, 04:02 GMT 05:02 UK

By Natalia Antelava
BBC News, Yerevan

Armenia want Turkey to admit the mass killings amounted to genocide

Armenia is marking the 90th anniversary of the mass deportations and
killings of hundreds of thousands of their people by the Ottoman
empire. Thousands of young people marched through the streets of
Yerevan on Saturday night.

They sang the national anthem as the torchlit procession moved slowly
up the hill towards a memorial to the victims.

Many said they were going to spend the night at the memorial and then
join a procession on Sunday.

Hundreds of thousands are expected to join the remembrance march.

Among them will be many Armenians from the United States and Europe,
members of the country’s huge diaspora which is at least three times
as big as Armenia’s current population of three million.

Turkey’s position

Many people said they hoped to see a million and a half Armenians come
out into the streets on Sunday – as many as are believed to have died
during the two-year period of killings and deportations by Ottoman
Turkey that began in 1915.

Ninety years later, Armenia is still haunted by this past.

Its borders with Turkey are sealed and there are no diplomatic
relations between the two countries.

The people of Armenia want Turkey and the world to recognise what
happened in 1915 was genocide.

But Ankara says the number of those killed is grossly inflated and
that Armenians were casualties of WWI and not victims of genocide.

As Ankara prepares to start EU membership talks in October, the
government in Yerevan hopes that Europe will push Turkey to change its
stance: and this will be one of the demands of those who will take to
the streets of Yerevan on Sunday.

Many here say they will come out not just to commemorate those who
died, but also to demand that the world recognise what everyone here
believes was the first genocide of the 20th century.