GERMAN JEWISH LEADER CALLS FOR RECOGNITION OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
13:06, 17 Apr 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
The Central Council of Jews in Germany has called on the German
government to recognize the World War I mass murder of over one
million Armenians in what was then the Ottoman Empire as a genocide,
the World Jewish Congress reports.
“One hundred years ago, the government of the Ottoman Empire ordered
the deportation of one million Armenians. They were murdered directly,
or died of starvation and dehydration in the desert,” Central Council
President Josef Schuster told the newspaper ‘Der Tagesspiegel.’ He
added: “These terrible events should be called what they were:
a genocide.”
Schuster said the Armenian genocide later served Adolf Hitler and
his Nazis as a blueprint for the Holocaust.
The main German parties, CDU and SPD, have so far been reluctant to
use the term genocide because they fear a conflict with Turkey.