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Pope Francis Recognizes Armenian, Assyrian, Greek Genocide

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  • Pope Francis Recognizes Armenian, Assyrian, Greek Genocide

    Assyrian International News Agency AINA
    April 12 2015

    Pope Francis Recognizes Armenian, Assyrian, Greek Genocide

    By Jethro Mullen
    Posted 2015-04-12 17:04 GMT


    Pope Francis leads a mass for Armenian Catholics marking 100 years
    since the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire (photo:
    Andreas solaro).(CNN) -- Pope Francis risked Turkish anger on Sunday
    by using the word "genocide" to refer to the mass killings of
    Armenians a century ago under the Ottoman Empire.

    "In the past century, our human family has lived through three massive
    and unprecedented tragedies," the Pope said at a Mass at St. Peter's
    Basilica to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian
    massacres.

    "The first, which is widely considered 'the first genocide of the
    twentieth century,' struck your own Armenian people," he said,
    referencing a 2001 declaration by Pope John Paul II and the head of
    the Armenian church.

    His use of the term genocide -- even though he was quoting from the
    declaration -- upset Turkey.

    Turkey responded by summoning the Vatican ambassador for a meeting at
    the Foreign Ministry, Turkish state broadcaster TRT reported.

    In a tweet Sunday on his official account, Turkey's Foreign Minister
    Mevlut Cavusoglu called the Pope's use of the word "unacceptable" and
    "out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis."

    "Religious offices are not places through which hatred and animosity
    are fueled by unfounded allegations," the tweet reads.

    More than a million massacred Armenian groups and many scholars say
    that Turks planned and carried out genocide, starting in 1915, when
    more than a million ethnic Armenians were massacred in the final years
    of the Ottoman Empire.

    Turkey officially denies that a genocide took place, saying hundreds
    of thousands of Armenian Christians and Turkish Muslims died in
    intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War I.

    The Armenian government and influential Armenian diaspora groups have
    urged countries around the world to formally label the 1915 events as
    genocide. Turkey has responded with pressure of its own against such
    moves.

    Pope Francis said Sunday that "Catholic and Orthodox Syrians,
    Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks" were also killed in the bloodshed a
    century ago.

    He said Nazism and Stalinism were responsible for the other two
    "massive and unprecedented tragedies" of the past century.

    CNN's Gul Tuysuz in Turkey and Karen Smith in Atlanta contributed to
    this report.


    http://www.aina.org/news/20150412130443.htm




    From: A. Papazian
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