Pope Francis uses 'genocide' to refer to mass killings of Armenians by Turks by Jethro Mullen, CNN, April 12, 2015. CNN's Gul Tuysuz in Turkey, Nimet Kirac and Karen Smith in Atlanta contributed to this report.
(CNN) Pope Francis risked Turkish anger on Sunday by using the word "genocide" to refer to the mass killings of Armenians a century ago under the Ottoman Empire.
"In the past century, our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies," the Pope said at a Mass at St. Peter's Basilica to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian massacres.
"The first, which is widely considered 'the first genocide of the 20th century,' struck your own Armenian people," he said, referencing a 2001 declaration by Pope John Paul II and the head of the Armenian church.
His use of the term genocide -- even though he was quoting from the declaration -- upset Turkey.
The nation summoned its ambassador to the Vatican for "consultations" just hours after Francis' comments, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said. Earlier, Turkey summoned the ambassador from the Vatican for a meeting, Turkish state broadcaster TRT reported.
Turkey's former ambassador to the Vatican, Kenan Gursoy, told CNN in a telephone interview that while it is the first time Turkey has summoned its ambassador home from the Vatican, "This does not mean that our diplomatic ties with the Vatican are over."
"Since this is a situation that we do not approve of, as a first reaction, (the ambassador) is summoned to get consultation," Gursoy said, adding that the Pope's use of the word "genocide" was "a one-sided evaluation."
In a tweet Sunday on his official account, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu called the Pope's use of the word "unacceptable" and "out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis."
"Religious offices are not places through which hatred and animosity are fueled by unfounded allegations," the tweet reads.
More than a million massacred
Armenian groups and many scholars say that Turks planned and carried out genocide, starting in 1915, when more than a million ethnic Armenians were massacred in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey officially denies that a genocide took place, saying hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians and Turkish Muslims died in intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War I.
The Armenian government and influential Armenian diaspora groups have urged countries around the world to formally label the 1915 events as genocide. Turkey has responded with pressure of its own against such moves.
Pope Francis said Sunday that "Catholic and Orthodox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks" were also killed in the bloodshed a century ago.
He said Nazism and Stalinism were responsible for the other two "massive and unprecedented tragedies" of the past century.
استدعت تركيا الاحد مبعوث الفاتيكان الى انقرة لطلب تفسير حول استعمال البابا فرنسيس كلمة "ابادة" لوصف المجازر التي الحقها العثمانيون بالارمن خلال الحرب العالمية الاولى، بحسب تقارير تلفزيونية.
وقالت قنوات ان تي في وسي ان ان تورك انه تم استدعاد مبعوث الفاتيكان الى وزارة الخارجية في انقرة من دون ذكر مزيد من التفاصيل.
وبحسب وسائل اعلام تركية فان بيانا رسميا سيصدر لاحقا عن الوزارة.
وكان البابا فرنسيس وصف الاحد مجازر 1915 بانها "اول ابادة في القرن العشرين" وذلك اثناء قداس في روما بحضور بطريرك كيليكيا للارمن الكاثوليك نرسيس بدروس التاسع عشر تارموني ورئيس ارمينيا سيرج سركيسيان.
ويقول الارمن ان 1,5 مليون ارمني قتلوا بشكل منهجي في نهاية عهد الامبراطورية العثمانية. ويقر مؤرخون من اكثر من عشرين بلدا بينها فرنسا وروسيا بحدوث ابادة.
Assyria
\ã-'sir-é-ä\ n (1998)
1: an ancient empire of Ashur
2: a democratic state in Bet-Nahren, Assyria (northern
Iraq, northwestern Iran, southeastern Turkey and eastern Syria.)
3:
a democratic state that fosters the social and political rights to all of
its inhabitants irrespective of their religion, race, or gender
4: a democratic state that believes in the freedom of
religion, conscience, language, education and culture in faithfulness to the
principles of the United Nations Charter —
Atour synonym
Ethnicity, Religion, Language
»
Israeli, Jewish, Hebrew
»
Assyrian, Christian, Aramaic
»
Saudi Arabian, Muslim, Arabic
Assyrian
\ã-'sir-é-an\ adj or n (1998)
1: descendants of the ancient empire of Ashur
2: the Assyrians, although representing but one single
nation as the direct heirs of the ancient Assyrian Empire, are now
doctrinally divided, inter sese, into five principle
ecclesiastically designated religious sects with their corresponding
hierarchies and distinct church governments, namely, Church of the
East, Chaldean, Maronite, Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic.
These formal divisions had their origin in the 5th century of the
Christian Era. No one can coherently understand the Assyrians
as a whole until he can distinguish that which is religion or church
from that which is nation -- a matter which is particularly
difficult for the people from the western world to understand; for
in the East, by force of circumstances beyond their control,
religion has been made, from time immemorial, virtually into a
criterion of nationality.
3:
the Assyrians have been referred to as Aramaean, Aramaye, Ashuraya,
Ashureen, Ashuri, Ashuroyo, Assyrio-Chaldean, Aturaya, Chaldean,
Chaldo, ChaldoAssyrian, ChaldoAssyrio, Jacobite, Kaldany, Kaldu,
Kasdu, Malabar, Maronite, Maronaya, Nestorian, Nestornaye, Oromoye,
Suraya, Syriac, Syrian, Syriani, Suryoye, Suryoyo and Telkeffee. —
Assyrianism verb
Aramaic
\ar-é-'máik\
n (1998)
1: a Semitic language which became the lingua franca of
the Middle East during the ancient Assyrian empire.
2: has been referred to as Neo-Aramaic, Neo-Syriac, Classical
Syriac, Syriac, Suryoyo, Swadaya and Turoyo.
