RECOGNISE THE ARMENIAN AND ASSYRIAN GENOCIDE
By Peter Marshall
Assyrian International News Agency
April 24, 2006
On Saturday 22 April, around a thousand Armenians living in the UK
marched from Marble Arch to the Cenotaph in Westminster where a wreath
was laid to draw attention to their demands for the recognition of
the Turkish genocide of 1915-23 in which around 1.5 million Armenians
were killed.
Genocide has been around throughout history, but it was only in
the twentieth century that the term was invented. It was needed to
describe both the fate of the Jews under the Nazis and the earlier
Turkish crimes against the Armenians.
Ethnic groups such as the Armenians just didn’t fit in with the concept
of a new Muslim Turkey held by the Young Turks in the early years of
the twentieth century. The only solution was to kill them.
The Turks started on the job on 24 April 1915 by arresting 1000
intellectuals and other leaders and executing them.
Next they conscripted 300,000 male Armenians for army service, but
but instead of sending them to the trenches, they were alleged to be
traitors, disarmed and killed.
Finally, the remaining Armenians – women, children and the elderly –
were dealt with my mass killings and enforced marches into the desert
where they starved. Rape and other atrocities were common.
The Armenians had been living inside what became modern Turkey for
some 3000 years. At the start of 1915 there were over 1.5 million of
them. Most were killed during that year, and by 1923 there were only
around 50,000 left.
The Turkish government still refuses to accept this genocide
occurred. In 1916, a UK parliamentary report by Lord Bryce and Arnold
Toynbee, ‘Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16’
detailed these systematic politically motivated killings, and many
other reports, including some from the UN have given simiilar accounts.
Over recent years, many governments and other organisations around the
world have passed resolutions affirming that the Armenian genocide
occurred. Like the Nazi holocaust, it is a fact of 20th century
history, and like that, totally reprehensible.
Various Early Day motions in the British parliament have called upon
our government to take some action. The most recent, sponsored by
Stephen Pound MP, “calls upon the UK and Turkish governments publicly
and officially to recognise the Assyrian and Armenian genocide of
1915” and for the “UK Government to call on the European Union to
make official Turkish recognition … one of the pre-conditions for
Turkey’s membership of the EU.” So far this has only attracted 38
signatures – only one from a Conservative.
The march was one of a number of events this year organised by the
Campaign for the Recognition of the Armenian Genocide, CRAG, together
with other Armenian community groups. Among those leading the march
was Bishop Nathan Hovhannisian, Primate of the Armenian Church of
Great Britain.
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