TURKEY MUST RECOGNIZE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE; PM
ARKA
Oct 19, 2009
YEREVAN, October 19, /ARKA/. In a last Thursday televised interview
Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian said Armenia wants not only
other foreign countries but Turkey as well to recognize the Armenian
genocide.
"Our goal on moral-psychological and cultural levels is to achieve
justice,’ he said, adding that Turkish-Armenian relations are not
conditioned only on the opening of the border, because they are
‘much more complex relations.’
"In the first place I mean moral-psychological and cultural relations,
a complicated domain both for Armenians and Turks,’ he said.
"It is very difficult to go beyond this level when it comes to the
Armenian genocide. We all feel this burden and we carry it. Naturally,
Turkey’s denialist policy creates problems in the normalization of
our relations,’ he said.
The mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians in the last years of the
Ottoman Empire was the first genocide of the last century. Turkey
denies that mass killings constituted genocide. The Armenian genocide
was recognized by Uruguay, Russia, France, Lithuania, Italy, the
majority of U.S. states, Switzerland and many other countries.