ROBERT KOCHARIAN WELCOMES U.S. LAWMAKERS’ RESOLUTION ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Pravda, Russia
Oct 11 2007

Robert Kocharian, Armenian President, approved the decision of
U.S. lawmakers to recognise the extermination of hundreds of thousanfs
of Armenians during WWI as genocide.

"We hope this process will lead to a full recognition by the United
States of America of the fact of the Armenian genocide," Kocharian
told reporters after talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

Kocharian, Armenian President, appealed to Turkey to join Armenia in
talks to restore bilateral relations, but said Ankara had no right to
bully other countries into refraining from recognizing the killings
as genocide.

"All of our foreign contacts around the world demonstrate that there
is no disagreement or that there is no doubt anywhere in the world
about the events that took place in Turkey in 1915, and there is a
consensus regarding those events," Kocharian said.

"The fact that Turkey has adopted a position of denial of the genocide
doesn’t mean it can bind other states to deny historic truths as well,"
he added.

Solana urged Armenia and Turkey to "look to the future" and work to
build bilateral ties.

Kocharian said the passing of a resolution by the U.S. Congress
would have no impact on diplomatic ties between his country and its
neighbor, Turkey – which are nonexistent – but said he was open to
talks with Turkey.

"We are ready for diplomatic relations without any preconditions and
we are ready to start a very wide dialogue with our Turkish partners
on all possible issues of Armenian-Turkish relations," he said.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted Wednesday to pass a
measure calling the killings of Armenians early in the last century
a genocide, despite objections from U.S. President George W. Bush and
Turkey, a NATO ally that has provided support to Washington in Iraq.

The dispute involves the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by
Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event viewed by
genocide scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey
denies that the deaths constituted a genocide, saying the toll has
been inflated and insisting that those killed were victims of civil
war and unrest.

France voted last year to make it a crime to deny the killings were
genocide, after which the Turkish government ended its military ties
with that country.