Aztag, Lebanon
April 24 2008
Katia Peltekian Lectures at Haigazian University on Day of Armenian Genocide
Beirut: On April 23, 2008, the Armenian Heritage Club at Haigazian
University organized a special event to commemorate the 93rd
anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
The University Auditorium was packed with hundreds of guests, faculty
members and students most of whom wore a special T-shirt on which was
written `We Demand Retribution’
After the opening words by a member of the student club, the audience
stood one minute in silence to pay their respect to the 1.5 million
Armenians who were massacred in Ottoman Turkey. The President of
Haigazian University, Rev. Paul Haydostian delivered his sermon on the
occasion highlighting the meaning of April 24 to not only Armenians
but also to the international community.
The guest speaker of the event was Miss Katia Peltekian, who
demonstrated that many Armenians themselves have the misconception
that the Genocide started on April 24, 1915. She explained why this
was not true, and why it was wrong to say that this year was the 93rd
anniversary of the Genocide. The main point of her demonstration was
to counter the Turkish logic which claimed thousands of Armenians, as
well as Turks, were killed because of the Great War.
Through power point, she demonstrated headlines from American, British
and Canadian newspapers that depicted sporadic massacres of the
Armenian population, sometimes in thousands, in various districts in
Ottoman Turkey; sometimes whole villages were wiped out of their
Christian population. The oldest newspaper clip she showed was from
1876 which implied there were massacres even 40 years before 1915.
Headline after headline, year after year, papers like the Washington
Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Chicago Daily Tribune,
Montreal Gazette, Toronto Star, The Times of London, The Guardian,
among others, printed stories of massacres that took place in the
Armenian districts. Long before the Great War, foreign correspondents,
missionaries, diplomats and travelers ` not Armenians – reported the
on going massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Headlines
from the 1890s and 1900-1914 and even those after the Great War ended
only prove that Armenians were killed not only during wartime but also
during peace, that it was not only the Young Turks but also the Sultan
and even the Nationalist leader Mustapha Kemal, the founder of modern
day Turkey, who had committed massacres.
The lecture also included quotes from foreign diplomats, who had
witnessed the massacres, and confessions by Turkish authorities.
Rev. Haydostian led the audience out to the University grounds where
they lit candles and placed them around a replica of Dzidzernagapert
that was placed at the entrance of the main campus.