SYDNEY: The National Armenian Genocide Commemoration Evening on Monday 24th April 2023 – which will honour the 108th anniversary of the 1.5 million Armenians, as well as the 1 million Assyrians and Greeks, who were massacred by Ottoman Turkey in 1915 – will feature strong representation from Federal and New South Wales parliamentarians, reported the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC-AU).
Federal Parliamentarians, Jerome Laxale MP – Member for Bennelong and Chair of the Australia-Armenia Inter-Parliamentary Union; Paul Fletcher MP – Member for Bradfield and Vice Chair of the Australia-Armenia Inter-Parliamentary Union and Kylea Tink MP – Member for North Sydney will lead the list of Federal representatives at the commemoration.
Laxale and Tink will be attending their first National Commemoration as Federal Members of Parliament since their election to the House of Representatives in May 2022.
Steve Kamper MP – Member for Rockdale and NSW Minister for Multiculturalism – will attend his first National Armenian Genocide Commemorative event, and will be joined by NSW state parliamentary colleagues, including Hugh McDermott MP – State Member for Prospect; Tim James MP – State Member for Willoughby, Mark Coure MP – State Member for Oatley, Jordan Lane MP – State Member for Ryde, Matt Cross MP – State Member for Davidson and Michael Regan MP – State Member for Wakehurst.
There will be several elected officials from the Willoughby, Ryde, Northern Beaches and Fairfield local governments also in attendance, led by the Mayor of the City of Willoughby, Tanya Taylor and Mayor of the City of Ryde, Armenian-Australian Sarkis Yedelian OAM.
“Many of our political guests will be joining us for the first time for an in-person commemoration to honour our fallen ancestors and pay tribute to their memory. It is an honour to have them join us for such a solemn occasion marked on the calendar of all Armenian-Australians,” said Kolokossian.
Middle East studies historian Dr. Ümit Kurt, who is an ethnically Kurdish citizen of Turkey, will keynote the first in-person National Armenian Genocide Commemoration evening since the Covid pandemic.
Dr. Kurt completed his dissertation in the Department of History at Clark University in the United States in 2016. He has since held several postdoctoral positions at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and the Polonsky Academy in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Armenian Studies Program at California State University (CSU) in Fresno.
Currently, Dr. Kurt is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences (History) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has also been serving as a Vice Executive Secretary for the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) since March 2020, and is the author of several books, including "The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province" and “Antep 1915: Genocide and Perpetrators” (2018).
He is also the co-author of “The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide” (Berghahn, 2017), the co-editor of "Armenians and Kurds in the Late Ottoman Empire" (The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2020), "The Committee of Union and Progress: Founders, Ideology, and Structure" (The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2021), and "The State of the Art of the Early Turkish Republic Period: Historiography, Sources and Future Directions" (The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2022).
The event is organised by the Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee, under the auspices of His Eminence Archbishop Haigazoun Najarian, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian Catholic Church, and the Armenian Evangelical Church.
The member organisations of the Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee are the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, the Armenian Missionary Association of Australia, Hamazkaine, Nor Serount, Homenetmen, Tekeyan, Armenian Relief Society, Dkhrouni, AGBU Youth and the Armenian Youth Federation.