Armenians refuse to let genocide be forgotten

By Nick Allen in Moscow and Amberin Zaman in Ankara

The Daily Telegraph/UK
(Filed: 25/04/2005)

Hundreds of thousands gathered in Yerevan yesterday to mark 90 years
since the murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman empire
and to add their voices to an international campaign to press Turkey
to admit genocide.

Authorities led by President Robert Kocharyan hoped for 1.5 million
people to visit a giant hilltop memorial in the capital of Armenia as
the former Soviet republic seeks international recognition of the
genocide of its people under Turkish rule.

“Recognition and condemnation is not just an issue for Armenia today
but one of international politics,” Mr Kocharyan said, as streams of
people filed to the site.

Many members of the Armenian diaspora worldwide converged on Yerevan
for remembrance ceremonies and to join the Christian republic’s 3.8
million inhabitants in a minute of silence at 7pm.

While Turkey acknowledges the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of
deaths, it denies that there was a state-sponsored extermination plan,
a stance that has complicated its hopes of joining the European
Union. Accession talks are due to start this year.

France, one of 15 countries to recognise the Armenian genocide, has
called on Turkey to make an effort to set the record straight before
it can join the union.

Faced with growing pressure from the EU, Turkey has for the first time
invited international scrutiny of its past.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, wrote to the Armenian leader
this month proposing a joint commission to investigate the claims of
genocide. He said: “Teams of historians from both sides should conduct
studies in [Turkey’s] archives.

“We do not want future generations to live under the shadow of
continued hatred and resentment.”

Western diplomats welcomed the move as a breakthrough while critics
have shrugged it off as a ploy, saying that incriminating documents
have been purged from the Ottoman archives.

Mr Kocharyan, who has not officially responded to Mr Erdogan’s letter,
told a Russian television channel that its contents did not “offer
hope that our problems will be solved any time soon”.

On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Turkish government arrested hundreds of
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, most of whom were
quickly executed. That was followed by the mass relocation of ethnic
Armenians from Anatolia through desert to Mesopotamia and what is
today Syria.

Starvation, disease, attacks by bandits and the brutality of the
escorting troops resulted in mass fatalities over the next two years.

Western sources estimate there were at least one million deaths in
what has been widely referred to as the first genocide of the 20th
century, though Armenians put the figure at 1.5 million.

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

In one key change, EU-inspired laws have enabled a small and vocal
group of Turkish academics and intellectuals to challenge the official
version of what happened in 1915.