FIRST MINISTER OF WALES RECOGNIZES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ON HOLOCAUST DAY
PanARMENIAN.Net
28.01.2010 18:29 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ First Minister for Wales Carwin Jones recognized
the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, independent French
journalist Jean Eckian told PanARMENIAN.Net. The road to Genocide
recognition, which began on 24th April 2001, when Rhodri Morgan,
(then First Minister), laid flowers in memory of the 1915 Genocide
Victims, was completed in Cardiff with an explicit recognition of
the Armenian Genocide by the new First Minister.
The National Holocaust Day event was supported by the government
of Wales (Welsh Assembly Government) and Cardiff City Council, the
municipality of Wales’ capital. The Genocide was also recognized at
the event by guest speaker Rabbi Aron Hier from the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre, Los Angeles. The sharp diplomacy of Mr. John Torosyan, the
moving spirit of the Welsh Armenian community was an important factor
in this historic achievement.
Carwyn Jones belongs to the Labour Party, as does Gordon Brown, Prime
Minister of the UK who will now be under huge pressure following
this crack in the UK Labour ranks. This recognition will also send
shock waves through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London,
which has been the architect of the Labour Party policy of supporting
the Turkish denialist position at all costs
It is noticable that while parliaments throughout the World have
passed resolutions recognising the Genocide, this recognition is
of more significance as it comes from the government of Wales (in
addition to the past recognition by the National Assembly of Wales
(2002) and the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly (2007).
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.
The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to
be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some
250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes
and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of
food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were
indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse
commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case
of genocide after the Holocaust.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In
recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as
genocide.
To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized
the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars
and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also
recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC,
The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.
The Holocaust, also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to
describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during
World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination
by Nazi Germany.
Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should
also include the Nazis’ systematic murder of millions of people in
other groups, including ethnic Poles, Romani, Soviet civilians,
Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents. By
this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims would be
between 11 million and 17 million people.
The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Legislation
to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the
outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in
which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion
or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern
Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and
political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were confined
in overcrowded ghettos before being transported by freight train to
extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority
of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany’s
bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder,
turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a
genocidal state
Auschwitz was a network of concentration and extermination camps built
and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second
World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps,
consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or main camp); Auschwitz
II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz
III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp; and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz is the German name for OÅ~[wiÄ~Ycim, the town the camps
were located in and around; it was renamed by the Germans after they
invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation
of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby
that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s
Minister of the Interior, as the locus of the "final solution of the
Jewish question in Europe." From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944,
transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all
over Nazi-occupied Europe.[2] The camp’s first commandant, Rudolf
Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three
million people had died there, a figure since revised to 1.1 million,
around 90 percent of them Jews.[3] Others deported to Auschwitz
included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners
of war, and tens of thousands of other nationalities. Those not killed
in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, lack of disease
control, individual executions, and purported medical experiments.
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day
commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance
Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz
I and II, which by 1994 had seen 22 million visitorsâ~@~T700,000
annuallyâ~@~Tpass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous
motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes you free").
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
