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    Categories: 2019

Garo Paylan calls for investigation into the Istanbul pogrom of 1955

Panorama , Armenia
Sept 6 2019

Turkish Armenian MP of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Garo Paylan has called for investigation into the pogroms of September 6/7 in 1955, Ermenihaber reported.

"The Pogrom of September 6/7, 1955 is one of the gravest incidents that took place in the Republic of Turkey and has still not been confronted. According to the official figures, in Istanbul only, 73 churches, 8 sacred springs, 2 monasteries, 5 thousand and 538 houses and shops, 3 thousand and 584 of which belonged to the Greeks from Turkey, were destroyed, vandalized and plundered,” Paylan said in a statement, adding:   "It will be an important step for the Republic of Turkey to confront its past by finding the perpetrators of the Pogrom on September 6/7, 1955, identifying the losses of life and property and compensating the material and non-material losses of the victims and/or their families.”

To note, the Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots or September events were organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The events were triggered by the false news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece—the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been born in 1881—had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press, conveying the news in Turkey, was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.


  

Emil Lazarian: “I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.” - WS