HISTORICAL SUBCOMMITTEE – PLATFORM TO DISCUSS THE AFTERMATH OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
PanARMENIAN.Net
12.03.2010 15:28 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Throughout the Armenian-Turkish normalization Armenia
has never raised the question of Armenian Genocide as a precondition,
neither ignored the historical fact of the destruction of a 1.5
million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Armenian deputy foreign
minister Arman Kirakosyan said in Yerevan addressing the 73 Seminar
of NATO Parliamentary Assembly Rose Roth.
"Despite our approach, after the Armenian-Turkish Protocols signed,
Ankara once again started to speak in the language of preconditions,
saying that Turkey could ratify the Protocols within 3 days. So why
is Ankara artificially dragging out their ratification, why is again
raising the Karabakh problem as a precondition?" the deputy foreign
minister asked.
According to him, Armenia has had a progress in the process of
ratification of the Protocols. " We hope that Ankara is honest in this
process and believes in the success of the Armenian-Turkish process,
" deputy foreign minister of Armenia said.
Armenia views the historical sub-committee as a platform to discuss
the aftermath of the genocide, not to examine the very fact of the
genocide, Arman Kirakosyam stressed "The Armenian Genocide is a fact.
Over 3 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, not in Turkey.
The Ottoman Empire was the country of Armenians and other peoples
living there. The Armenian people were destroyed in the process of
Turkification of the empire and that was a genocide," deputy foreign
minister of Armenia Armen Kirakosyan 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.