ONASA News Agency
April 24, 2005

ARMENIANS MARK 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF OTTOMAN MASSACRES

YEREVAN, April 24 (ONASA – AFP) – Armenians across Europe – from
their capital Yerevan to the Ukrainian city of Lviv to the southern
French port of Marseille – Sunday commemorated the 90th anniversary
of the mass killings of their forebears by Ottoman Turks. Hundreds of
thousands of Armenians live in Europe, North and South America and
the Middle East and played a major role in keeping the memory of the
massacres alive through the years of Soviet rule in Armenia when the
subject was taboo. Today they have influential communities in many
Western countries, some of which have officially acknowledged the
Armenian massacres as genocide. The issue is believed to have played
a role in the Armenians’ ability to retain their language and culture
after almost a century in exile. On April 24, 1915 the Ottoman
Turkish authorities arrested some 200 Armenian community leaders in
the start of what Armenia and many other countries contend was an
organized genocidal campaign to eliminate ethnic Armenians from the
Ottoman Empire. Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen
perished in the killings between 1915 and 1917 as the Muslim 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 Armenians rose against their
Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops. In Paris, the
Notre Dame cathedral hosted a requiem mass Sunday and many other
gatherings took place across the country. Some 350,000 ethnic
Armenians live in France. Armenian religious and community leaders
headed a procession of around 1,000 people in the western Ukrainian
city of Lviv carrying candles and red carnations. Greece recognized
the massacres as a genocide in 1997 and in Athens a crowd of 500
including diplomats and Greek officials placed a wreath at a war
memorial. In Yerevan itself Sunday tens of thousands of Armenians
including the president and top officials filed through the city’s
towering Genocide Memorial to mark the anniversary. A silent
procession headed by President Robert Kocharian laid flowers at an
eternal flame as Armenia’s chief clergymen sang an emotional
Gregorian Apostolic requiem service beneath the baking sun. Armenians
observed a minute of silence at 7:00 pm (1400 GMT) in commemoration.
It was preceded by an ecumenical liturgy in St. Gregory cathedral in
which prayers were read by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Greek and
Russian Orthodox as well as Armenian Apostolic priests. In the run-up
to the anniversary, Armenia, the world’s first Christian nation, has
pulled out all the stops in an effort to make Turkey acknowledge the
massacres as genocide and officials have estimated that 1.5 million
people — the number of the victims — will visit the memorial
through Sunday. Many members of the Armenian diaspora worldwide have
converged on Yerevan for the ceremonies. “As we live on, we must show
Turkey, which tried to annihilate us, that they were wrong,” said
Vaagn Ovnanian, an American-born millionaire who has invested heavily
in the Armenian economy. Meanwhile, Kocharian made a conciliatory
gesture towards Ankara, saying his government would not ask for
financial compensation for the killings if Turkey recognized them as
genocidal. “We are not talking about compensation, this is only about
a moral issue,” Kocharian told Russia’s Rossiya television, which is
also broadcast in Armenia. The row over whether or not to call the
killings genocide has embarrassed Turkey as it readies for the start
of European Union accession talks later this year. Armenians hope
that their mass commemoration on Sunday will increase the pressure.
On Friday, French President Jacques Chirac accompanied Kocharian to a
Paris monument for victims of the massacre, and in Germany members of
parliament from across the political spectrum appealed to Turkey to
accept the massacre of Armenians as part of its history, saying this
would help its EU aspirations. On Tuesday, Poland joined a list of 15
countries that have officially acknowledged the killings as genocide.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently proposed the
creation of a joint Armenian-Turkish commission to review the issue,
though officials expressed confidence that the study would confirm
Turkey’s current position.