Armenia Liberty – Radio Liberty, Czech Republic
June 3 2005
Dashnaks Plan Shift In Genocide Recognition Effort
By Ruzanna Stepanian
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) plans a major
shift in its decades-long campaign for international recognition
of the Armenian genocide that will aim to hold modern-day Turkey
accountable for the events of 1915-1918, it emerged on Friday.
Giro Manoyan, the spokesman for the pan-Armenian party’s governing
Bureau, said that genocide recognition alone would not restore historic
justice and that the international community should now “hold Turkey
accountable” for the extermination of some 1.5 million Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire.
“There is no longer a need to merely prove a historic fact,” Manoyan
told RFE/RL. He indicated that this will be at the heart of a planned
“adjustment” of the activities Dashnaktsutyun’s lobbying structures
in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Representatives of those structures began on Friday a two-day meeting
to discuss the shift in the nationalist party’s emphases. The meeting
took place behind the closed doors.
The policy change is in tune with one of the main tenets of
Dashnaktsutyun which has never made secret of its desire to get Turkey
to not only admit to the genocide but also pay material compensation
to Armenia and descendants of genocide victims.
Earlier this year, Dashnaktsutyun accused the United States of prodding
Turkey to recognize the genocide “without consequences.” Its leaders
also want Yerevan to keep the door open for future territorial and
financial claims to Ankara.
“We believe that Armenia is unable to make such demands today,”
Manoyan told RFE/RL in April. “But this doesn’t mean that it will be
unable to do so tomorrow.”
This stance contrasts with the official position of the Armenian
government in which Dashnaktsutyun is represented with three
ministers. “We are not talking about compensations, this is only
about a moral issue,” President Robert Kocharian said recently.
Manoyan claimed on Friday that in seeking Turkish reparations the
Armenians can count on the support of countries like France that
want Turkey to address the genocide issue before joining the European
Union. “Incidentally, these are the countries that have said ‘no’ to
the EU constitution,” he said. “According to commentators in those
countries, the ‘no’ vote was in large part due to the prospect of
Turkey’s EU membership.”
However, neither France nor other EU nations that recognized the
Armenian genocide have ever called for Turkish reparations. In a
landmark 1987 resolution, the European Parliament stressed that
“neither political nor legal or material claims against present-day
Turkey can be derived from the recognition of this historical event
as an act of genocide.”