Category: News

The German Bundestag is set to vote on an Armenian Genocide bill on June 2, according to an agreement reached in April between the Greens and the government.

The ruling coalition, the Left and the Alliance90/Green Parties have reached an agreement to call the 1915 events “genocide.”

If adopted, the bill will come to replace the special resolution adopted by the Bundestag on 2008, which, failed to label the events as “‘genocide,” calling them “massacre” and “forced deportation” instead.

“The things that come on German agenda, are shown on German TV or discussed in the Bundestag are not decided by Mr. Erdogan, Mr. Putin or other authoritarian leaders. I’m glad that thanks to consistent serious work we’ve reached a joint approach with the Federal Government to raise the issue of the genocide of Armenians and other Christians in the Bundestag,” Green Party Co-Chair Cem Özdemir told .

“I’m glad that we can finally recognize the Armenian genocide with a joint resolution,” he said.

Green Party brought the motion to the parliament in February, but the voting was postponed, since coalition parties Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) demanded a common motion.

Bundestag discussed a motion on April 24, 2015 for the first time, but there was no voting. While the government avoided using the term “genocide”, President and President of Bundestag Norbert Lammert openly used the word “genocide” to describe the events of 1915.

“Friendship with Turkey does not mean we have to keep silent about the issues, especially considering that we share the responsibility as an ally of the Ottoman Empire. We want to see a strong, European Turkey. The opening of the shared border is in the interests on not only Turkey, but also Armenia and Europe,” Özdemir said.

George Clooney visited the  Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex on the hill of Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan to lay flowers in memory of the 1.5 million Armenians who perished during the first genocide of the 20th century. He also visited the  

In the evening of April 24, Armenian Genocide Memorial Day, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Co-Chair, George Clooney, will present the $100,000 grant to the inaugural Aurora Prize Laureate.

The Laureate will then invite his or her nominated organization(s) to the stage to receive the $1 million award.

On behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and in gratitude to their saviors, the Aurora Prize celebrates the strength of the human spirit that compels action is the face of adversity.

The Aurora Prize will be awarded annually on April 24 of each year in Yerevan, Armenia.

Iranian Armenians gathered at a cathedral in Tehran on Sunday to commemorate victims of the killings of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks over a century ago, reports.

Horizon Weekly – Members of the Armenian Youth Federation of Canada gathered in Ottawa on April 23 prior to the official commemoration day of the 101st Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide to raise awareness about the cause.

Earlier the day, more than 100 activists gathered at the busiest intersections of Canada’s capital, distributing over 2,000 informative fliers about the Genocide and the Turkish government’s ongoing policy of denial.

At 6:00 PM, the activists, tied to each other with rope, depicting a typical deportation march, marched down Sussex Dr. while reading historic accounts of the Genocide. The march concluded at the the CF Rideau Centre, where the participants staged a mass die-in to draw the public’s attention, who were provided with further information.

Thousands of Canadians will gather on Sunday, April 24th at the Turkish Embassy to protest against the Turkish government.

“Turkish President was yet another failed expression of denialim, an obvious attempt to lay the responsibility for the genocide on Armenians,” Armenian deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharyan told a press conference today.

“Turkey maintains efforts to put the victims of war and the victims of genocide planned and perpetrated on a state level,” he added.

“Turkey’s denialist posture further increases the gap between the Armenian and Turkish peoples, acknowledgement of history and penitence is the best way to overcome it,” th Deputy Foreign Minister said.

Photo: Kayana Szymczak

The soft sound of the duduk, the national instrument of Armenia, enveloped the Cathedral of the Holy Cross Saturday afternoon at the start of a prayer service held on the eve of the 101st anniversary of the Armenian genocide,  reports.

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley led the ecumenical service that marked the first time the Archdiocese of Boston has formally commemorated the genocide that killed 1.5 million people.

“It is so important that we do not allow the events of the genocide to slip into oblivion,” O’Malley said, addressing nearly 800 people seated in the pews. “The one and a half million lives are not forgotten. . . . One of the fruits of their martyrdom is the accumulation of love that unites us.”

O’Malley was joined by church leaders representing a number of Catholic, eastern Orthodox, Christian, and Armenian churches across the eastern United States and Canada.

Sunday marks 101 years since the beginning of the mass execution by the Ottoman Empire. In a ceremony one year ago, those killed were canonized by the Armenian Apostolic Church.

“We pray for them,” said Archbishop Oshagam Choloyan, leader of the Armenian church in the eastern part of the United States. “They will be remembered for eternity.”

Pope Francis last year declared the mass killing of Armenian Christians in Ottoman Turkey during World War I “the first genocide of the 20th century,” during a Mass in St. Peter’s Square to mark the centennial anniversary of the massacre.

The remark angered officials in Turkey, which does not recognize the wartime killings as a genocide.

O’Malley, a top American adviser to the pope, on Saturday urged people to confront the lessons of the genocide.

“We must ask ourselves if the world had responded differently to the Armenian Genocide, could the Holocaust [have been] averted?” he said.

“No civilization can afford to falsify the historical record,” he said. “To do so is perilous.”

Anthony Barsamian, the cochairman of the Armenian Assembly of America, said present-day Turkey must “account for its past so that they will not repeat the crime of genocide.”

He lauded O’Malley for holding the two-hour prayer service.

“We warmly thank Cardinal Sean O’Malley and the Massachusetts Catholic community for hosting this important event on our behalf,” said Barsamian, who also serves as president of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, an ecumenical organization.

Some Armenians said they were grateful for the chance to pray with people of other faiths.

“It was a beautiful ceremony of unity,” said Sona Topjian Frissora, 87, who lives in the North End. “I can’t tell you how touched I was.”

“It was very memorable for me,” said Lilit Karapetyan of Watertown, during a reception that followed the service. “The most amazing thing is there were people from all religions there.”

Canada is holding a number of events to commemorate the 101^st anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

On April 17 a large political gathering was held in Toronto, featuring representatives of the federal, regional and municipal authorities of Canada. The address of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was read out at the event, Armenian Ambassador to Canada Armen Yeganian told

On April 20 a book titled “Armenian Genocide and the Canadian Response” was presented at the Canadian parliament, the Ambassador informed.

Canadian Armenians from Toronto, Montreal Laval, Cambridge and other cities are gathering in capital Ottawa for a rally today. Representatives of the diplomatic corps have also been invited to attend the event.

The participants will march to the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa to demand recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

Another march is scheduled for May 8 in Montreal; a number of Canadian Ministers are expected to participate in the event.

On April 30 a cross-stone dedicated to the Armenian genocide victims will be unveiled in the city of St. Catharines, Mr. Yeganian informed.

Some 300 people gathered on Saturday in St. James Monastery in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem and held a ceremony commemorating 101 years to the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, the reports.

The ceremony was held after a mass that was led by Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem Nourhan Manougian, and was attended by the leaders of Armenian community in Jerusalem. The service honored the memory of some 1.5 million Armenian victims whom Ottoman forces killed between 1915 and 1923, mainly in Syria.

Commemorative events will be held throughout the world this year under the shadow of the ongoing violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Dozens have been killed so far in clashes that started earlier this month.

Harut Baghamian, one of the organizers of the ceremony, a member of the Homenetmen youth movement and a descendant of Armenian Genocide refugees, told The Jerusalem Post that the Armenian community is disappointed from the way Israel deals with the memory of the genocide. “It’s not that they are denying like some countries, they are just not talking about it,” he said.

However, Baghamian sees in the Jewish people a partner of the Armenians. “There were some Israeli politicians that have expressed their feelings about the genocide in the past, and we appreciate that.

But we expect from the government to honor their values before politics,” he said.

“We understand that this is a political issue. We receive a broad support from the Israeli public. There is much resemblance between the Armenians and the Jews all throughout the history, hence we expect from the Jewish state to be the first to acknowledge and to speak out about the issue. The Armenians know about the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust so we hope that the Israeli government will act the same.”

On Sunday, members of the Armenian community and social activists will protest in front of the Turkish Consulate in Jerusalem and the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Ceylan Yeginsu

The Turkish government has seized the historic Armenian Surp Giragos Church, a number of other churches and large swaths of property in the heavily damaged Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, saying it wants to restore the area but alarming residents who fear the government is secretly aiming to drive them out.

The city, in the heart of Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, has been the scene of heavy fighting for nearly a year, since the Turkish military began a counterinsurgency campaign against militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which ended a two-year cease-fire in July. Many neighborhoods have been left in ruins, and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes. Surp Giragos, one of the largest Armenian churches in the Middle East, was damaged in the fighting and forced to shut its doors.

Both the Armenians, for whom Surp Giragos is an important cultural touchstone, and the Kurds have discerned a hidden agenda in the expropriations. They say the government plans to replace the destroyed neighborhoods they shared with other minorities with luxury rentals and condominiums affordable only to a wealthier, presumably nonminority class of residents.

Some analysts agree, saying even some of the better-off Syrian refugees in Turkey could end up there.

“Solving ethnic and religious strife through demographic engineering is a policy of the Turkish government that goes back well over a century,” said Taner Akcam, a prominent Turkish historian. “The latest developments in Sur,” he added, referring to the historic heart of Diyarbakir, “need to be viewed through this framework.”

Indeed, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party has displayed a predilection for sweeping projects. It was a proposal to build a shopping mall in place of a razed central park in Istanbul that set off mass antigovernment demonstrations in 2013.

Mr. Erdogan announced the government’s urban renewal plans for Diyarbakir in 2011, saying they would “make the city into an international tourism destination.”

Shortly after that speech, the local housing administration started tearing down decrepit residential buildings in Sur, but opposition soon brought a halt to the demolition. Many of the buildings in Sur are protected, prohibiting big restoration projects. Mass construction can be carried out only if the government declares an urgent expropriation, as it has done now.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said recently that the government would rebuild Sur to look like the scenic Spanish city of Toledo. “Everyone will want to come and appreciate its architectural texture,” he said.

Yet for the Armenians and the Kurds, distrust of Turkey’s intentions runs deep. Armenians still have vivid memories of what historians now call the World War I genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks, in which 1.5 million of their countrymen died, and the Kurds have fought the Turkish government on and off for generations.

Diyarbakir is a polyglot city that is home to small Christian congregations of Assyrians, Chaldeans and Turkish converts, as well as to Armenians and Kurds.

Surp Giragos (“Surp” means saint in Armenian), which stands in Sur, closed in the 1960s for lack of parishioners but was renovated and reopened in 2011, part of a reconciliation process begun by the Erdogan government that has returned dozens of properties that the Ottoman Turks confiscated during World War I.

To many Armenians in the area, who lost touch with their family histories after the genocide and were often raised as Muslims by Kurdish families, the church has served as an anchor as they rediscovered their identities.

These “hidden Armenians” emerged as Turkey relaxed its restrictions on minorities, but now they say they again feel threatened.

That helps explain why the government’s seizure of the church struck a particularly raw nerve with the Armenian diaspora and rights groups, who say the expropriation of religious properties and 6,300 plots of land in Diyarbakir is a blatant violation of international law.

“This is reminiscent of the events leading up to the start of the Armenian genocide on April 24, 1915, when properties were illegally confiscated and the population was displaced under the false guise of temporary relocation for its own protection,” said Nora Hovsepian, the chairwoman of the Western Region of the Armenian National Committee of America.

“That temporary relocation,” she added, “turned out to be death marches and a permanent disenfranchisement of two million from their ancestral homeland.”

The Turkish government denies that those killings amounted to genocide, saying thousands of people — many of them Turks — died as a result of civil war.

The local governor’s office defended the decision to expropriate the property in Diyarbakir, saying in a written statement that the main aim was to bring Sur’s potential as a historic quarter to light by restoring registered buildings and replacing irregular structures with new ones that fit the city’s historical fabric. Local officials have said the properties will be returned once they are restored.

But many communities in the area have lost trust in the government, and official statements have been dismissed as insincere.

“The government wants to seize the heart of Diyarbakir and singularize it, ridding it of its rich multifaith and multicultural structure,” Abdullah Demirbas, a former mayor of Diyarbakir, said in a telephone interview.

A video distributed by the prime minister’s office to illustrate the government’s vision for the project has also been criticized for its focus on mosques and residential areas over other prominent religious establishments in the area.

One line of narration in particular drew the attention of religious minorities: “The call to prayer that rises from Diyarbakir’s minarets will not be quieted down.”

The Diyarbakir Bar Association has sued the government, claiming that the project is a work of “military and security reconstruction” and that it will not benefit Sur. The Surp Giragos Church is also preparing to take legal action against the order.

The developments in Sur have marred the steps taken by the Turkish government in recent years toward reconciliation with the nation’s Armenian population.

Last year, a historic Armenian orphanage, built by dozens of descendants of people who survived the genocide, was returned by the government to the Gedikpasa Armenian Protestant Church Foundation, after months of campaigning and the intervention of Mr. Davutoglu.

At the time, Armenians worldwide hailed the decision as an example of how activism by Turkish Armenians could bear fruit.

But critics argued that the restitution of the land just before important elections was politically motivated, and said they doubted that other confiscated properties would be returned in a timely fashion.

“How can we have any trust left when the government backtracks on every positive step taken?” asked Anita Acun, a leader in the Armenian community in Istanbul. “But even so, the situation in Sur came as a surprise. We never imagined history would repeat itself.”

That history, and the traumas associated with those bloody events, have been passed down through generations, and continue to reverberate among Armenians.

“We haven’t been able to go to the church for months, and it’s devastating to hear that it has been damaged in the fighting,” said Onur Kayikci, a Kurdish resident of Sur, who recently became aware of his Armenian ancestry. “For us, it’s not just a building or a place of worship. It’s where we would come to put together the pieces of our history and identity together.”