PRESS RELEASE
Date: March 25, 2008
Armenian National Committee of New York
P.O. Box 770-693, Woodside, NY 11377
Contact: Doug Geogerian
Tel: 646-468-9061

Armenian Genocide Commemoration at New York City Hall

—Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan and Dr. Henry Theriault to
Address New York Armenian Community

New York, NY-The Armenian National Committee of New York will host the
93rd Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide at City Hall Chambers on
April 25th at 5:30 P.M. The evening will feature Professor Henry
Theriault of Worcester State College as the main speaker and
Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan, who will address the community and give
the invocation.

"While causing New York’s Armenian community to reflect thoughtfully
on the horrible catastrophe that befell our people, Dr. Theriault will
also connect the Armenian Cause to the broader struggle for advancing
international human rights," said Doug Geogerian of the Armenian
National Committee of New York.

Elected official at the local, state and federal levels will attend
and pay tribute to the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians, a
genocide, which the perpetrator, the Turkish government, continues to
deny to this day. The commemoration will also include musical work
performed in memory of the crime committed against the Armenian
nation.

The evening’s main speaker will be Dr. Henry Theriault, who has
written extensively on the subject of genocide and the dispossession
of indigenous peoples. While he has dealt at length with the Armenian
case, which concerns his own ancestry, Theriault’s work is broad and
examines the impact of genocide against Africans, Native Americans and
other victim groups.

Committed under the cover of War War I, the Young Turk government
rounded up hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, artists and civic
leaders on April 24, 1915 only to have them murdered. This massacre
ushered in a state-planned campaign to eradicate the Armenian people
from their traditional homeland of 3,000 years, marking what is
commonly referred to as the first genocide of the 20th century.

The Turkish Government has since gone to extraordinary lengths to deny
this crime against humanity. Its world-wide campaign of public
misinformation has especially focused on influencing media outlets and
governmental bodies in the United States, where Ankara has spent tens
of millions of dollars to distort the historical record and cover up
the "murder of a nation."

The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) is the largest and
most influential Armenian American grassroots political
organization. Working in coordination with a network of offices,
chapters and supporters throughout the United States and affiliated
organizations around the world, the ANCA actively advances the
concerns of the Armenian American community on a broad range of
issues.
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