The Salem News (Beverly, Massachusetts)
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
April 24, 2009 Friday

City pauses to remember the Armenian Genocide

Matthew K. Roy, The Salem News, Beverly, Mass.

Apr. 24–PEABODY — City officials and members of Peabody’s Armenian
community yesterday paused to commemorate the 94th anniversary of the
Armenian Genocide.

The annual remembrance began with a flag-raising ceremony outside City
Hall and continued inside the building’s second-floor
auditorium. Mayor Michael Bonfanti, the Rev. Aram Stepanian and
Congressman John Tierney’s district director, Gary Barrett, spoke to
about 50 attendees.

Stepanian, who traveled here from his church outside Worcester,
relayed details of the horrific killings that took place between 1915
and 1923.

"How can you deny?" Stepanian said. "How can you forget?"

He expressed frustration at the reluctance of the country’s political
leaders, including President Obama during his recent visit to Turkey,
to publicly acknowledge the genocide.

Scholars estimate that 1.5 million people died in a Turkish campaign
to exterminate the Armenian people living in the crumbling Ottoman
empire. The campaign included death marches and concentration camps.

The Turkish government has admitted that there were killings but
disputes the numbers and recoils at calling it genocide, the
purposeful annihilation of an entire race or ethnic group.

Filmmaker Apo Torosyan yesterday shared a portion of his film "The
Morgenthau Story," about Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador in
Constantinople (today Istanbul in Turkey) who appealed to the Turkish
Ottoman leaders to stop the killings.

Former Mayor Peter Torigian, whose mother survived the genocide, began
Peabody’s ceremony in the early 1990s.

The late mayor’s granddaughter, Erin Burbridge, yesterday read aloud
the proclamation declaring it Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in the
city.