KOCHARIAN BLAMES TURKEY AS ARMENIANS MARK GENOCIDE ANNIVERSARY
By Emil Danielyan and Astghik Bedevian
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep
April 24 2006
President Robert Kocharian said on Monday that modern-day Turkey is
responsible for the 1915 genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
as Armenia somberly marked the 91st anniversary of the start of the
mass killings and deportations.
Hundreds of thousands of people silently marched to a hilltop
memorial in Yerevan and laid flowers by its eternal fire in an annual
remembrance of some 1.5 million victims of what many historians believe
was the first genocide of the 20th century. Some of them carried
Armenian flags and banners denouncing Turkey’s long-standing claims
that the massacres occurred on a much smaller scale and therefore
did not constitute a genocide.
The day-long procession began, as usual, with a prayer service in
memory of the dead that was led by the head of the Armenian Apostolic
Church, Catholicos Garegin II, in the presence of President Robert
Kocharian, members of his government and other senior officials.
The heads of foreign diplomatic missions in Yerevan were the next to
lay wreathes at twelve bending columns that encircle the eternal fire
on Tsitsernakabert Hill overlooking the city center. Among them was
U.S. Ambassador to Armenia John Evans, the first American official
since President Ronald Reagan to publicly refer to the 1915-1918
massacres as genocide. “The Armenian Genocide was the first genocide of
the 20th century,” he declared in a February 2005 speech in California.
The U.S. government, which has so far avoided officially recognizing
the genocide for fear of antagonizing Turkey, disavowed Evans’s
remarks, saying that they reflected only his personal opinion. The
State Department reportedly plans to recall the envoy, a move which
would enrage the influential Armenian community in the United States.
Armenia’s leadership, meanwhile, reaffirmed its pledge to seek
worldwide recognition of the genocide in collaboration with Diaspora
Armenian lobbying groups in the West and to continue to raise the
issue in its dealings Turkey. “Our pain is all the more intense as we
are forced to struggle for the recognition and condemnation of that
black page of our history,” Kocharian said in a traditional April
24 written address to the nation. “As the defender of the interests
of the Armenians living in the homeland and around the world, the
Republic of Armenia will continue that struggle.”
Kocharian indicated that Ankara’s unrepentant stance on the issue
amounts to complicity in the genocide. “Ottoman Turkey and its legal
successor bear full responsibility for this crime,” he said.
Armenian leaders have refrained in the past from implicating the
existing Turkish state in the 1915 genocide. Kocharian’s statement
was welcomed as an “interesting news” by a spokesman for the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation, a nationalist governing party that favors
a firm Armenian stand on the issue. Giro Manoyan told RFE/RL that he
thinks Kocharian thus held Ankara responsible for “carrying out the
final phase of the genocide.”
Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Arman Kirakosian, for his part
was quoted on Monday by the Turkish daily “Zaman” as saying that the
authorities in Yerevan “believe the Turkish people are not responsible
for the events of 1915.” “The Turkish administration at that time is
the responsible party,” Kirakosian said, according to “Zaman.”
In a famous 1987 resolution, the European Parliament denounced the
mass killings as a genocide but said “the present Turkey cannot be
held responsible for the tragedy experienced by the Armenians of the
Ottoman Empire.”