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Armenian genocide resolution presented to German parliament
Berlin -- A resolution declaring the 1915-17 Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey to be genocide was Thursday presented to the German parliament and government by an opposition member of the lower chamber.
"There was an Armenian genocide," said Uwe Hiksch, a deputy for the former East German communists - now called the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) - who sponsored the resolution.
The two-page declaration calls on Germany to formally recognize the killing of Armenians during the First World War by Ottoman Turks as genocide and says Berlin has to apologise for the role played by Germany's armed forces in the slayings.
Estimates of the number of Armenians who were killed or died during Ottoman deportations from 1915 to 1917 range widely. Turkish sources say 300,000 died while Armenians and some historians say the death toll was 1.5 million.
Turkey has argued the deaths took place as part of the conflict, but Armenians and others say they were a planned and systematic genocide. Armenians were a Christian minority in mainly Islamic Turkey.
Hiksch said German troops - which were allied with Turkey during the war - helped with Armenian deportations and used their artillery to attack Armenians.
He stressed the resolution was not intended to be anti-Turkish but was rather aimed at helping Ankara come to terms with acts carried out during a previous government in its colonial past.
A senior German government official declined to comment on the resolution when presented with the text by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
France has paid a heavy price after approving a similar resolution last January. A furious Turkish government slapped a virtual trade embargo on business with Paris. A United States Armenian genocide resolution bill was withdrawn last year after former president Bill Clinton gave in to strong Turkish lobbying.
Observers say Germany has an even deeper fear of approving such a resolution.
There are some 2.1 million Turks living in Germany - the biggest single foreign community. It remains totally unclear how this minority would react to such a resolution. In contrast the Armenian community in Germany is far smaller and numbers between 30,000 and 35,000, according to Armenian historian Tessa Hofmann.
This helps explain why the only German political party backing the
resolution is the tiny PDS. Unless support for the declaration can be built
across party lines it will have no chance of winning approval in the German
parliament's lower house, the Bundestag.
Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News Archives