PRESS RELEASE
Armenian Mission to UN
119 E 36 Street, New York, NY 10016
Contact: Lilit Toutkhalian
Tel: (212) 686 9079
e-mail:l_toutkhalian@yahoo.com

The postponed exhibition dedicated to the 13th anniversary of the
Genocide in Rwanda and entitled `Lessons from Rwanda’ finally took
place on Monday, April 30 at the UN Headquarters in New York.
Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon delivered the
opening remarks.

The exhibition is a production of the Aegis Trust, a British
organization for genocide prevention, in partnership with the UN
Department of Public Information (UNDPI).

The exhibition was suspended as a result of the involvement of the
Turkish Mission, which stridently opposed the inclusion in the text of
the exhibit of the sentence on the massacres of one million Armenians
in Turkey. This attempt to exert censorship at the United Nations met
a strong reaction from the Armenian Mission. The international mass
media also voiced its concern regarding the Turkish pressure on the
international body, and expressed its support to the Armenian cause
through the articles in such prominent newspapers as `The New York
Times’, `The International Herald Tribune’ and others, condemning the
Turkish policy of denial and attempts to revise the history.

As a result of two-week long discussions the integrity of the
exhibition was restored and the sentence about the mass killings of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which later were qualified as
`Genocide’, a term coined by the eminent scholar Prof. Raphael Lemkin,
was reinstated where it belonged.

This traveling exhibit, which will first be shown at the UN
Headquarters in NY over a period of three weeks, highlights the role
of states in preventing genocides, educates viewers on the warning
signs of genocide, examines the genocide in Rwanda, and emphasizes the
plight of victims.