Agence France Presse — English
April 24, 2005 Sunday 3:27 PM GMT
Thousands of diaspora Armenians return home to commemorate slayings
YEREVAN
Syrian-born Sako Kasapian is one of the many descendants of Armenians
expelled from Ottoman Turkey in 1915 who have come to the homeland of
their ancestors to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the massacres
at Yerevan’s genocide memorial.
“We have not forgotten the genocide and we don’t consider it to be
just a matter of history,” the 25-year-old, a third generation
diaspora Armenian told AFP at the monument where tens of thousands of
people have come to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Ottoman
slaughter.
The events being commemorated are the mass expulsion and killings of
Christian Armenians in what was then the Ottoman Empire during World
War I.
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.
Turkey denies this, saying 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.
Officials have estimated that 1.5 million people would visit the
memorial through Sunday, including thousands of Armenians from
abroad. The hoped-for showing is meant to represent the number of
people Armenians believe were killed between 1915 and 1917.
In the run-up to the anniversary, Armenia has pulled out all the
stops in an effort to make Turkey acknowledge the massacres as
genocide, organizing a series of seminars, film screenings and
exhibitions.
A mass was to be celebrated on Sunday in Yerevan’s Saint Gregory
cathedral, as well as in churches all over Armenia, and a minute’s
silence was to be observed throughout the country at 7:00 pm (1400
GMT).
“I am a member of the third generation of Armenians who survived the
genocide. My grandmother and grandfather would always tell of the
nightmares they went through in Turkey with tears in their eyes,”
Kasapian said.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in Europe, North and South
America and the Middle East had been key in keeping the memory of the
massacres alive through the years of communist rule in Armenia where
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.
Only 40,000 Armenians remain in Turkey down from an estimated 3
million before World War I.
“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 luxury real estate in
Yerevan.
Today many Armenians from abroad send their children to school here
and buy homes in the former Soviet republic.
“I am filled with joy when I see so many young people participating
in the commemoration,” said 66-year-old Rubina Pirumian from Los
Angeles, “It means you can’t ignore or forget the genocide issue,
that’s why I brought my sons along with me.”