ARMENIA KILLINGS A GENOCIDE: POPE
Illawarra Mercury (Australia)
April 14, 2015 Tuesday
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis has used the word “genocide” to describe
the mass murder of Armenians in a move likely to severely strain
diplomatic ties with Turkey.
“In the past century our human family has lived through three massive
and unprecedented tragedies,” he said on Sunday during mass in Saint
Peter’s Basilica to mark the centenary of the Ottoman Turk killings
of Armenians.
“The first, which is widely considered ‘the first genocide of the
20th century’, struck your own Armenian people,” he said, citing a
statement signed by John Paul II and the Armenian patriarch in 2001.
Though many historians describe the killings as the 20th century’s
first genocide, Turkey hotly denies it.
If the Pope did not use his own words to describe the murders as
genocide, John Paul II’s use of the term provoked a sharp reaction
from Turkey at the time, and citing the beloved former pope will do
more than ruffle feathers.
“It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honour their memory, for
whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester,”
Pope Francis added.
The 78-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church had been under
pressure to use the term publicly to describe the murders, despite
the risk of alienating an important ally in the fight against radical
Islam.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed between 1915
and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart, and have long sought
to win international recognition of the massacres as genocide.
But Turkey rejects the claims, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000
Armenians and as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose
up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.
Pope Francis said the other two genocides of the 20th century were
“perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism. And more recently there have
been other mass killings, like those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and
Bosnia. It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the
shedding of innocent blood.” AFP