BGN News, Turkey
April 4 2015
Greek Cyprus criminalises denial of 1915 Armenian `genocide’ claims
Greek Cyprus on Thursday made it a crime to deny claims that Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire were victims of a genocide campaign a century
ago, a move likely to rile Turkey as peace talks on the
ethnically-split island remain stalled.
The Greek Cypriot parliament passed a resolution penalizing denial of
genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, modifying existing
legislation, which required prior conviction by an international court
to make denial a crime.
“Today is a historic day,” speaker of parliament Yiannakis Omirou
said. “It allows parliament to restore, with unanimous decisions and
resolutions, historical truths.”
The east Mediterranean island, split into a Turkish Cypriot north and
a Greek Cypriot south after a Turkish military intervention in 1974
that followed a Greek inspired coup, was one of the first countries
worldwide in 1975 to recognize the Armenian claims of genocide,
commemorated annually on April 24.
Turkey accepts that many Armenians died during the First World War
years but says the death toll offered by the Armenians, up to 1.5
million people, is inflated and denies that the deaths resulted from
an act of genocide. Ankara says Turks were also killed when Armenians
took up arms in pursuit of an independent state in collaboration with
the Russian forces then invading the eastern Anatolia. Armenia, on the
other hand, accuses the Ottoman authorities at the time of
systematically massacring large numbers of Armenians, then deporting
many more, including women, children and the elderly and infirm in
terrible conditions on so-called death marches.
The issue has long been a source of tension between Turkey and several
Western countries, especially the United States and France, both home
to large ethnic Armenian diasporas. Greek Cyprus too has an Armenian
population.
The Greek Cypriot government has been at loggerheads with Turkey for
decades. Greek and Turkish Cypriot populations have lived estranged in
the south and north respectively since 1974, but seeds of division
were sown earlier when a power-sharing government crumbled amid
violence in 1963.
April 2, 2015 | BGNNews.com with wires | Ä°stanbul