Armenia commemorated 106th anniversary of genocide with candles, flowers and moving ceremonies

Thousands of people marched through Yerevan with candles and flowers on Saturday to mark the 106th anniversary of the massacres of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during WWI. Crowds flocked from the center of the Armenian capital to the memorial to the victims, which overlooks Yerevan from above.

Military personnel, religious dignitaries, women with children and the country’s authorities, including Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, attended the memorial, as is tradition in Armenia every April 24, the day the massacres began in 1915.

Armenia qualifies the tragedy of genocide, as do some thirty countries in the world as well as the community of historians, but this term is openly rejected by Turkey. Today, Joe Biden has become the first US president to recognize the genocide. “The American people honor all Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” he said, adding, “We affirm history. We’re not doing it to blame anyone, but to make sure what happened never happens again “

Ankara rejects the term “genocide” and denies all traces of extermination, and instead refers to reciprocal massacres against a backdrop of civil war and famine that have left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides. Armenians’ anger towards Turkey has grown since Armenia’s defeat last fall in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh against Azerbaijan, supported precisely by Ankara.

The Pashinyan head of government called the conflict in Karabakh “Turkish-Azerbaijani aggression”, which erupted in September and ended six weeks later with a ceasefire signed by Russian mediation.

“Turkey’s expansionist foreign policy and its territorial aspirations towards Armenia are proof of the rebirth of its genocidal ideology,” Pashinyan said in a statement released on Saturday. “Anophobia is the very essence of Panturkism, and today we can witness its most disgusting manifestations in Azerbaijan,” he added.

Azerbaijan, armed by Turkey, inflicted a humiliating defeat on Armenia, which defeated Azerbaijani forces in a first war in the 1990s.

After the defeat last fall, Armenia had to cede important territories of Nagorno-Karabakh, which it had controlled for decades, as part of the ceasefire negotiated under the aegis of Russia, who have deployed their peacekeepers in the region.

During the war, Armenia accused Turkey of being directly involved in the fighting, which Ankara denies. Several countries, including France, denounced the sending of Proturc fighters to Syria to join the Azerbaijani forces.

“The old wound has opened again and is bleeding again,” Sonik Petrossian, 72-year-old retiree, told AFP, recalling the six-week war which left 6,000 dead on both sides. “Armenians must stand together,” the woman said, laying flowers near the memorial to the victims of the massacres.

On Friday evening, some 10,000 people have already marched in Yerevan to commemorate these victims.

Armenians estimate that a million and a half of theirs were systematically killed during World War I by troops from the Ottoman Empire, then an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Every April 24, they commemorate this genocide.

On April 24, 1915, thousands of Armenians suspected of having national sentiments hostile to the central government were arrested. On May 26, a law authorizes evictions “for reasons of internal security” and another law of September 13 orders the confiscation of their property. The Armenian population of Anatolia and Cilicia (a region integrated into Turkey in 1921) was forcibly exiled into the deserts of Mesopotamia. Many were killed on the road or in the fields, burned alive, drowned, poisoned or victims of typhus, according to reports by foreign diplomats and intelligence officials at the time.

In 2000, 126 researchers, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, said in a statement issued in New York that “the Armenian genocide during World War I is an indisputable historical fact”.

Global recognition

On April 20, 1965, Uruguay was the first country to recognize the Armenian Genocide. In France, recognition was passed by law in 2001, and a national day of commemoration was celebrated for the first time on April 24, 2019. Denial of genocide is not criminalized there, unlike Switzerland and Cyprus or in Slovakia.

In total, the parliaments of around thirty countries have passed laws, resolutions or motions explicitly recognizing the Armenian genocide. These are Germany, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, United States, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Paraguay, Holland, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Uruguay, Vatican and Venezuela. In February 2020, in the context of strong tensions between Damascus and Ankara, the Syrian parliament officially recognized her.

These votes, which sometimes emanate from only one of the chambers of Parliament and with which governments can distance themselves, have different legal implications.

The European Parliament recognized the Armenian genocide in 1987.

Countries where a resolution recognizing the genocide was recently passed include the Netherlands in 2018 and Portugal in 2019. In Germany, the Bundestag, the lower house, also passed a resolution in 2016, although Chancellor Angela Merkel l qualified as non-binding.

On April 24, 2015, in Armenia’s full commemoration of the centenary of the genocide, Pope Francis referred to it as the “first genocide of the twentieth century”.

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