TURKEY CRITICIZES ISRAEL WHILE DENYING ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
PanARMENIAN.Net
02.02.2010 17:03 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Hayat London-based Arabic newspaper slammed Turkey’s
police towards the Arab world.
As Shahan Kandaharian, Editor-in-Chief of Beirut-based Aztag newspaper
told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter, Ankara was criticized for using
double standards in relation to Arab world.
"Turkey criticizes Israel while denying Armenian Genocide," the
newspaper said.
At the same time, Turkey is developing a unified strategy with Syria,
Lebanon and Jordan. "Nevertheless, strategic partnership between
Turkey and Israel continues," Shahan Kandaharian emphasized.
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.
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.