RAMKAVAR PARTY: THE U.S. CONGRESS UNLIKELY TO ADOPT ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTION

PanARMENIAN.Net
03.03.2010 18:05 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ " U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign
Affairs can give a positive opinion over the on the Armenian Genocide
resolution, but I do not think that the U.S. Congress will adopt
it," Harutyun Arakelyan, charman of the Board of Ramkavar Armenian
Democratic Liberal party told a press conference in Yerevan.

According to Harutyunyan, the U.S. is unlikely to go against the huge
investment in the Turkish economy. " At the moment the U.S. uses the
issue of genocide to leverage pressure on Turkey, and nothing depends
on Armenia, " he said.

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.