GAREGIN INSISTS ON GENOCIDE RECOGNITION IN TURKEY

Radio Liberty, Czech Republic
June 26 2006

The head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Garegin II, said in Istanbul
Sunday that Turks committed genocide against Armenians, a statement
that is likely to increase tensions during the last two days of his
weeklong visit to Turkey.

Garegin II, whose official title is Catholicos of All Armenians, has
been facing protests since his plane landed at the Istanbul airport
on Tuesday. The protesters included prominent lawyers from the Turkish
Lawyers’ Union, who previously pushed for the prosecution of novelist
Orhan Pamuk after he said that Turks had killed 1 million Armenians.

Turkey vehemently denies that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman
Turks around the time of World War I was genocide, and several cases
have been brought against those who say otherwise. The cases have
been opened under a law making it a crime to "insult Turkishness."

Armenians say that as many as 1.5 million of their ancestors were
killing in an organized genocidal campaign by Ottoman Turks, and have
pushed for recognition of the killings as genocide around the world.

Garegin II was unreceptive Sunday to Turkey’s requests that Turkey
and Armenia, which are neighbors but have no diplomatic relations,
open their historical archives to researchers from both countries
to try to ease tensions and reach an objective conclusion about the
killings. "For our people research is not an issue. This is something
that happened and it needs to be recognized," the Dogan news agency
quoted Garegin II as saying. "The genocide issue has been researched
for 90 years by academics."

Garegin II said the protests hadn’t affected him. "They didn’t break
my spirit and they don’t reflect my visit," he said. "But if these
kinds of protests continue, it shows that we have a lot of work so
that these two societies can live together."

(Armenian Apostolic Church photo: Garegin II, right, and Patriarch
Mesrob II, the spiritual leader of the Armenian community in Turkey,
pictured outside an Armenian church in Istanbul.)