PanARMENIAN.Net
La Stampa: `march of death’ for hundreds of thousand of Armenians in
1915-1918 was Genocide
12.10.2007 18:56 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ `Two problems painfully press on the image and
stability of present-day Turkey, born 84 years ago as result of
Kemalist revolution. These are the past, which doesn’t want to fade,
and the present, which threatens. The past returns again and again,
casting a black shadow of mass killings of Armenians during World War
I, on Ankara. The present threatens with rebellious and belligerent
Kurdish minority,’ says an article titled `Armenians – apple of
discord between Bush and Turkey’ published in La Stampa Italian
newspaper.
`The cruel past and alarming present tend to unite, forming a crisis
which can call into question Turkey’s traditional strategic ties with
the U.S. and NATO. In addition, the current dissension with Washington
and Paris can block Turkey’s thorny path toward the European Union. An
explosive and critical mass is being accumulated in Europe-aspired
Turkey. And on the top of this mass appears one word – Genocide, the
tabooed and defamatory word. This awful word has pealed in the
Democrat-dominated U.S. Congress as a final verdict that cannot be
appealed. This word has come to define the Armenian `marches of death’
that extended from the Anatolian northeast to Syrian deserts in
1915-1918. The Ottoman Empire had no mercy on children, women and old
people. This slaughter is described in historical documents,
bulletins, testimony of witnesses, novels by Franz Werfel and recently
shot films,’ the article says.
`Many historians say it was the first genocide of the 20th century,
maybe because Young Turks, redial reformators and patriots, their
powerful military heirs and secular governments controlled by them,
never recognized the fact of the Genocide. They always denied this
terrifying word and chilling statistics which stubbornly reminded of 1
million 800 thousand killed Armenians. They kept on insisting that the
casualties reached 200 thousand only as result of the chaos inherent
to war. Since those times, the Turkish authorities have followed state
historical revisionism. The incumbent Erdogan and Gul-led Islamist
government is not an exception,’ La Stampa reports