SWEDISH PARLIAMENT DOES NOT RECOGNIZE 1915 GENOCIDE

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STOCKHOLM, JUNE 13, ARMENIANS TODAY – NOYAN TAPAN.

On June 12, the Swedish Parliament, with the votes 245 against and 37
for, rejected a call for the recognition of the 1915 genocide in the
Ottoman Empire. On the previous day, on June 11, a long debate took
place in the Swedish Parliament in regard to the Foreign Committee
report on Human Rights, including five motions calling upon the Swedish
Government and Parliament to officially recognize the 1915 genocide. In
its answer a majority consisting of the ruling alliance parties
together with the Social Democrats proposed rejecting the motions,
whereby the Green and the Left parties announced their reservations,
forcing the Parliament to have a debate before the proposal was voted
on. The argumentation for why a recognition should be rejected was
based on four main assumptions:

1. No particular consideration regarding the Armenian situation has
ever been in form of an UN Resolution, either in 1985 or any other
occasion.

2. The Committee understands that what engulfed the Armenians,
Assyrian/Syrians and Chaldeans during the reign of the Ottoman Empire
would, according to the 1948 Convention, probably be regarded as
genocide, if it had been in power at the time.

3. There is still a disagreement among the experts regarding the
different course of events of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
The same applies to the underlying causes and how the assaults shall be
classified.

4. In regard to the development in Turkey, in the time being, it would
be venturesome to disturb an initiate and delicate national process,
which could fuel the extremists in the country.

In an open letter to MPs, Vahagn Avedian, the Chairman of the Union of
Armenian Associations in Sweden Chief Editor of Armenica.org, pointed
out some major flaws in the stated arguments, mentioning that the
Foreign Committee members are either poorly informed on the existing
data, reports, conventions and resolutions or they simply disregard the
broad information which strongly contradicts their assertions. However,
the debate on June 11 proofed that the decision had nothing to do with
the presented facts.

The more the debate went on, the more it was revealed that no MP could
explain, less defend, any of the above mentioned arguments, save for
maybe the last one.

However, during the debate, Member of Parliament Hans Linde (Left),
talking about the arguments stated in the document repeatedly asked the
members of the alliance parties to explain the argumentation in the
report and answer three simple and straight forward questions, namely

1) Who are these researchers disagreeing on the reality of the 1915
genocide?

2) If the 1915 genocide can not be recognized due to the chronology of
the 1948 UN Convention, how come then the Holocaust is recognized?

3) Why should the fear of extremists inside Turkey dictate the freedom
of speech in the Swedish Parliament?

None of the defendants could give an answer.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress