ZURICH COURT OF APPEAL LEAVES UNCHANGED THE COURT DECISION ON TURKS DENYING ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

PanARMENIAN.Net
10.02.2010 16:39 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ On February 9, the Zurich Court of Appeal confirmed
the judgment in first proceedings of three partisans of the Turkish
politician Dogu Perincek for Armenian Genocide denial and violation
of the standard antiracism (art.261bis CSP).

According to an independent French journalist Jean Eckian, the
defendants, Swiss citizens of Turkish descent had been stopped on
July 2007 during a meeting organized in a hotel of Winterthur. The
principal defendant, Ali Mercan, 59, representing Workers Party, had
declared that the Armenian genocide was "an international historical
lie ". He was condemned to a fine of 4500 francs. The accomplices,
organizers of the meeting are condemned with a fine of 3600 francs. In
2008, Dogu Perincek, leader of the Workers Party, was condemned by
the Federal court for similar declarations.

Sarkis Shahinian, President of Association Switzerland-Armenia (ASA),
was pleased with the decision of the Swiss court, noting that it
breaks the line of the denial of Turkish State.

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.