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Recognize our genocide, Armenians urge Ottawa
Hundreds of Montreal Armenians marched through downtown yesterday to commemorate the 86th anniversary of Armenian genocide and demand its recognition by the Canadian government.
About 400 students of Montreal's two Armenian high schools were joined by about 100 Armenian professionals, jewellers and shopkeepers as they marched on Ste. Catherine St. from Place du Canada to Phillips Square.
The protesters, who carried portraits of Armenian intellectuals rounded up and killed in Istanbul by the Turkish secret police on the night of April 24, 1915
- the day Armenians the world over mark as the beginning of the genocide - chanted the names of countries that have already recognized the Armenian genocide. They want Canada to follow suit.
Premeditated Campaign
A majority of genocide scholars and historians agree that Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey between 1915 and 1923 were part of a premeditated campaign to exterminate Armenians and thus constitute an act of genocide, the first one of the 20th century.
At its international conference held in Montreal in June 1997, the Association of Genocide Scholars, the foremost authority on the subject, unanimously adopted a resolution reaffirming that the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey was genocide.
According to the Encyclopedia of Genocide, published in 1999 by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, about 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or died during forced marches, deportations and internment in the Syrian desert.
Turkey has steadfastly refused to recognize the genocide. It argues that there was no premeditated plan to exterminate Armenians; that Armenians are exaggerating the number of casualties; that Turkish authorities were forced to deport Armenians fearing they would collaborate with the advancing Russian army; and that those Armenians who were killed died in intercommunal violence, which claimed as many Turkish victims as Armenians.
Most genocide scholars, however, have condemned Turkish denials.
"We denounce as morally and intellectually corrupt the Turkish government's denial of the Armenian genocide," said a statement signed by 150 scholars, writers and Nobel laureates in 1998.
"We urge our government officials, scholars and the media to refrain from using evasive or euphemistic terminology to appease the Turkish government; we ask them to refer to the 1915 annihilation of the Armenians as genocide."
Many of the protesters said yesterday that the tide has started turning against Turkey.
Argentina, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Russia and Uruguay have all recognized the genocide.
And on Jan. 18, in a landmark victory for the Armenian diaspora, France passed a law recognizing the genocide.
Now Canadian Armenians say it's Canada's turn.
"Canada has a moral obligation to recognize the genocide," said Mher Karakashian, a teacher and Montreal film-maker. "It has to re-instate the truth, because until it does so, it is a co-conspirator in the denial, and denial is another form of genocide."
Martin Poeti, a Universite de Montreal student of Italian descent, had no doubts about what the Canadian government must do.
"We all have a moral obligation to recognize it," Poeti said. "Because genocide is a crime against mankind, it's not something Canadian or Quebecois. As human beings we should recognize the genocide, any genocide."
Refusal An Affront
For Dikran Arouchian, whose parents survived the massacres in the Turkish city of Urfa, Canada's refusal to recognize the genocide was an affront to its democratic and human-rights credentials.
Rouben Kuyumdjian, a Turkish-born Armenian and a retired university professor who now devotes all his time to the fight for genocide recognition, said the day Canada will recognize the genocide is not far away.
Quebec and Ontario legislatures recognized the Armenian genocide in 1980 and have been voting every year to confirm that motion, Kuyumdjian said.
"A federal government spokesman admitted on June 10, 1999, that the event in
question was an act 'committed with intent to destroy a national group,' "
he said. "That description conforms, word for word, to the (United Nations)
definition of genocide."
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