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Armenians welcome US ruling on 'forgotten' genocide

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  • Armenians welcome US ruling on 'forgotten' genocide

    Armenians welcome US ruling on 'forgotten' genocide
    Heartening victory for one of the world's most dispersed peoples in
    the fight for their suffering to be recognised

    Ian Black, Middle East editor
    guardian.co.uk,
    Friday 5 March 2010 19.13 GMT
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/05/ar menia-welcomes-genocide-ruling

    About 1.5m Armenians were killed by the Turkish army during the first
    world war. Photograph: HO/Reuters


    As he planned the extermination of Europe's Jews before the second
    world war, Adolf Hitler is famously said to have asked: "Who speaks
    today of the annihilation of Armenians?"

    The answer is that the Armenians themselves have lobbied hard to
    ensure that their suffering in Turkey during the first world war is
    never forgotten.

    Thursday's vote by a US congressional committee, recognising the 1915
    killings of 1.5m Armenians as genocide, is a vivid example of those
    efforts - and how much the issue can stir up trouble.

    Armenians are one of the world's most dispersed peoples, with a
    diaspora of about 8 million living outside Armenia, once part of the
    Soviet Union and now home to 3 million people.

    The world's largest Armenian communities are in Russia, France, Iran,
    the US and Georgia. Smaller numbers live in Syria, Lebanon and
    Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, as well as in Cyprus, Greece,
    Argentina and Canada. Turkey still has 40,000 to 70,000 Armenians and
    there are 140,000 in disputed Nagorno-Karabakh where they form a
    majority.

    Political campaigning on the genocide issue is concentrated in Paris
    and Washington. Armenian activists in Europe have tried to block
    Turkey's EU membership application, recently warning of the threat of
    the country's "neo-Ottoman, imperial and Islamic shift".

    In 2006 France's national assembly outlawed denial of the Armenian
    genocide - mirroring penalties in several countries for denial of the
    Nazi Holocaust.

    But Turkey prefers to deal with the present rather than admit to past
    crimes. Last year it normalised relations with Armenia, hoping to use
    that to counter the influence of the Armenian-American lobby.

    "Armenia does not make normalisation conditional on Turkey's formal
    recognition as genocide of the 1915 forced relocation and massacres of
    Armenians under the Ottoman Empire," commented the International
    Crisis Group. "But it must take into account the views of Armenians
    scattered throughout the global diaspora, which ... has long had
    hardline representatives. New trends in that diaspora ... have softened
    and to some degree removed demands that Turkey surrender territory in
    its north-east, where Armenians were a substantial minority before
    1915.""

    Canadian film director Atom Egoyan, whose parents were
    Armenian-Egyptians, once said: "You can talk about Holocaust denial,
    but it's marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the
    Armenian genocide is how it has been forgotten."

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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