FRANCE’S CHIRAC PAYS HOMAGE TO ARMENIAN "GENOCIDE" MEMORIAL

Agence France Presse — English
September 30, 2006 Saturday 7:45 AM GMT

French president Jacques Chirac attended a solemn ceremony at
Armenia’s monument to the 1915-1917 massacres of Armenians at the
hands of Ottoman Turks in a move likely to irritate neighboring Turkey.

Accompanied by his wife Bernadette, Chirac is on the first ever visit
of a French president to the impoverished Caucasus nation, which is
at odds with its Turkic neighbors Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Chirac placed flowers at the towering Tsitsernakaberd monument where
he was greeted by an honor guard playing mournful music before being
taken on a tour of a "Genocide Museum."

France, which has 400,000 citizens of Armenian descent, officially
recognized the World War I-era events as genocide in 2001, putting a
strain on its relations with European Union aspirant and fellow NATO
member Turkey.

Visiting dignitaries traditionally plant a fir tree at the memorial
grounds and Chirac paused near a pine planted by slain Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafiq Hariri, asking to be photographed before planting his
own sapling.

France became the first Western power to officially recognize the
massacres as genocide.

Many countries, including the United States and Israel, have so far
refused to label the massacres as genocide.

Armenians throughout the world have pushed for official recognition of
the killings, in which they say 1.5 million of their brethren perished,
as genocide.

But Ankara argues that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks
died in an internal conflict sparked by attempts by Armenians to win
independence for eastern Anatolia and secure assistance for their
bid from Russia — Turkey’s age-old nemesis.

Armenia is also locked in a stalemate with Azerbaijan over the
ethnic-Armenian enclave of Nagorny Karabakh, which it gained control
of in an early 1990s war but which is still internationally recognized
as part of Azerbaijan.