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Dashnaks Plan Shift In Genocide Recognition Effort

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  • Dashnaks Plan Shift In Genocide Recognition Effort

    Armenia Liberty - Radio Liberty, Czech Republic
    June 3 2005

    Dashnaks Plan Shift In Genocide Recognition Effort
    By Ruzanna Stepanian

    The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) plans a major
    shift in its decades-long campaign for international recognition
    of the Armenian genocide that will aim to hold modern-day Turkey
    accountable for the events of 1915-1918, it emerged on Friday.

    Giro Manoyan, the spokesman for the pan-Armenian party's governing
    Bureau, said that genocide recognition alone would not restore historic
    justice and that the international community should now "hold Turkey
    accountable" for the extermination of some 1.5 million Armenians in
    the Ottoman Empire.

    "There is no longer a need to merely prove a historic fact," Manoyan
    told RFE/RL. He indicated that this will be at the heart of a planned
    "adjustment" of the activities Dashnaktsutyun's lobbying structures
    in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the world.

    Representatives of those structures began on Friday a two-day meeting
    to discuss the shift in the nationalist party's emphases. The meeting
    took place behind the closed doors.

    The policy change is in tune with one of the main tenets of
    Dashnaktsutyun which has never made secret of its desire to get Turkey
    to not only admit to the genocide but also pay material compensation
    to Armenia and descendants of genocide victims.

    Earlier this year, Dashnaktsutyun accused the United States of prodding
    Turkey to recognize the genocide "without consequences." Its leaders
    also want Yerevan to keep the door open for future territorial and
    financial claims to Ankara.

    "We believe that Armenia is unable to make such demands today,"
    Manoyan told RFE/RL in April. "But this doesn't mean that it will be
    unable to do so tomorrow."

    This stance contrasts with the official position of the Armenian
    government in which Dashnaktsutyun is represented with three
    ministers. "We are not talking about compensations, this is only
    about a moral issue," President Robert Kocharian said recently.

    Manoyan claimed on Friday that in seeking Turkish reparations the
    Armenians can count on the support of countries like France that
    want Turkey to address the genocide issue before joining the European
    Union. "Incidentally, these are the countries that have said 'no' to
    the EU constitution," he said. "According to commentators in those
    countries, the 'no' vote was in large part due to the prospect of
    Turkey's EU membership."

    However, neither France nor other EU nations that recognized the
    Armenian genocide have ever called for Turkish reparations. In a
    landmark 1987 resolution, the European Parliament stressed that
    "neither political nor legal or material claims against present-day
    Turkey can be derived from the recognition of this historical event
    as an act of genocide."
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