The crime of the Armenian genocide has no limitation period. President’s meeting with Al Ahram
June 27, 2020 – Origine source – armenpress.am:
EREVAN, JUNE 27, ARMENPRESS. In its June 25 issue, the newspaper Al-Ahram (Egypt), the most authoritative newspaper in the Arab world, published an exclusive interview with the President of the Republic of Armenia Armen Sargsyan: “The crime of the Armenian genocide does not has no limitation period. The Ottomans committed the most horrible genocide in history. ”
Al-Ahram was founded in 1875.: It publishes 1 million copies a day.
An official of the public relations department of the office of the President of the Republic of Armenia told Armenpress that in the preface to the interview, the newspaper writes:
The official relations between Egypt and Armenia are characterized by good and strong characteristics, which began in 1991. After the recognition of the independence of Armenia by Egypt. Then, in 1992. An agreement on the establishment of diplomatic relations was signed between the two countries. 1992 The Embassy of the Republic of Armenia in Cairo began operating in September 1993. The Embassy of Egypt opened in Yerevan in May 2010.
The political relations between the two countries are based on mutual respect. Armenia appreciates the neutral position of Egypt on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, as well as its recognition for the historic position of Egypt on the acceptance of the Armenians who escaped the massacres and integrated them into Egyptian society. In 2013, when he assumed the post of President of Egypt, N. G. The Egyptian-Armenian relations of President al-Sissi gained momentum. The Intergovernmental Commission works to develop cooperation between the two countries in various economic fields, as well as to organize cultural exchanges.
Below, we present an exclusive interview with NG With the President of the Republic of Armenia, Dr. Armen Sargsyan, where he refers to 1915. The historical problems linked to the massacres of the Armenian people and to the policy pursued by the Republic of Armenia in this sense. Last year, at the Munich Security Summit, he and President Sissi addressed the issue, noting that 100 years ago Egypt hosted massacred Armenians “where they found security, peace and stability. ”
Yerevan, exclusive to Al Ahram.
QUESTION. Mr. President, on April 24 of each year, the Armenian people celebrate the 1915 genocide worldwide. The memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian genocide who were victims of the First World War in the Ottoman Empire through the deportations of the Armenian population, massacres, violence, hunger and diseases organized by the government young turks. What can you say about it?
ANSWER: More than a century has passed since 1915-1923. The crimes committed against humanity and civilization, but the consequences of this crime are still being felt and hamper the normal development of Armenia.
In fact, the massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey began in 1894-1896. During the reign of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, 300,000 people were killed. Armenian. The great powers of the time, the world press and celebrities, including the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom William Gladstone, the French politician Jean Jaurès, the writer Anatole France, the German missionary Johannes Lepsius and others, who raised their voices to protest this act, demanded it. In Western Armenia, which was supposed to guarantee respect for the basic civil rights of Armenians, the inviolability of life and property, but they could not arrest Sultan Abdul-Hamid.
The Entente countries, the Vatican and diplomats accredited to Turkey, including the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau, did not dissuade the Young Turks either, who improved the mechanism of extermination of the Armenians by bringing it state-planned and genocidal genocide.
Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the First World War, the government of the Young Turks in 1915-16. He launched a plan to completely eliminate the Armenians in Turkey by undertaking unprecedented deportations, atrocities and murders.
(Russia, France and the United Kingdom issued a joint declaration on May 24, 1915, describing them as a “crime against humanity and civilization”.
Later, in 1944, Raphael Lemkin laid the groundwork for the destruction of the Armenians in 1915, when he introduced the term “genocide” into international law.
After the end of the First World War, the new chief of Turkey Mustafa Kemal continued the work of his predecessors, eliminating the last remains of the Armenians in Cilicia and in western Armenia and starting a war against the young Republic of Armenia.
QUESTION. Why and how did it happen? After all, the Ottoman Armenians have served this country legally for centuries and contribute to its development. How did they hinder the Turks?
ANSWER: That’s the question. How? ‘Or’ What. Witnesses – diplomats, soldiers, military doctors, missionaries, politicians, international press, etc. – left undeniable evidence of the genocide and the mechanisms by which it was perpetrated. Later, academic circles, historians and genocide specialists, on the basis of archival documents, described it in detail and confirmed it. The world is well aware of this.
I would like to focus on the causes and consequences of the genocide. Let me cite some of the reasons.
The first was political. 1878 The “Armenian question” raised at the conferences of San Stefano and Berlin was to have a logical end with the establishment of Armenian autonomy in the territories of historic Armenia, laying the foundations for the future independence of the Armenia, which, in the case of other Ottoman nations, took place in the European and Middle Eastern parts of the empire after the First World War after the Balkan wars.
It is against this that the sultan was, afterwards, republican Turkey, because in the event of independence of Armenia, the strategic part of the empire, which blocked the way of the Turks towards the Caucasus and the countries of Asia central, was torn from the body of the empire.
By the way, the superpowers of the time lost their interest in the prospect of creating an independent state by an active and entrepreneurial nation like the Armenians on these territories, otherwise, in 1923, they would not have given up the section of the Peace Treaty of August 10, 1920 in Lausanne concerning Armenia, which established Armenian sovereignty over the Armenian provinces of Ottoman Turkey with access to the black seas.
The interests of Armenia and the Armenian people were ignored in 1921 by the Moscow-Kars agreements, which gave the Armenians a small territory.
Armenia was divided, the provinces of Kars and Ardahan were ceded to the Kemalists.
On the other hand, Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan arbitrarily surrendered to the administrative administration of Soviet Azerbaijan, which created a source of internal unrest and conflict in our region, which we are witnessing today ‘hui.
The other reason for the genocide was ideological.
Newborn Turkish nationalism wanted to transform a huge multinational and multicultural empire into a monolithic and monolithic Turkish state, with its political progress towards the Caucasus and Central Asia.
spacious and rich areas.
The main obstacles on this path were still the Armenians living between the two territories, as well as the Greeks and other Christians living in Asia Minor.
Therefore, the ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Armenians from the two most active elements of the empire had no alternative for Turkish nationalists.
The two peoples who created and inherited Byzantine civilization, who devoted their talent and energy to the development and prosperity of the Ottoman Empire.
QUESTION. However, it is said that the Armenians did not have enough resources to create an independent state, like the other peoples of the empire who gained independence.
ANSWER: Not at all, and the Turks knew it best, and not just them.
From the 17th to the 18th century, the Armenians had a program and a constitution for the establishment of autonomy, even the restoration of the state. Since then, political groups have been active, transforming into political parties in the second half of the 19th century. Since the beginning of the 16th century, printing and publishing houses were created and, in the 18th century, the national press was widely debated on the political fate and the future of Armenia and the Armenian people. Training personnel from various fields have been trained in Russia and Europe.
In the economic field, the Armenians were very active and influential not only in the territories of the Ottoman and Russian empires, where their historic homeland was located, but also in the West, the vast territories from North to South, where they became an insurmountable factor due to their entrepreneurial spirit. and development of economic and economic relations.
The founders of the banking system in Southeast Asia were the Sargis family, the Lazarian dynasty in Russia, the Middle East and Europe, the oil magnate Gulbenkian and the Yesayan, Alexander Mantashov in the Caucasus and others. Huge capital has been accumulated in their hands. This capital was financed by a large network of Armenian educational establishments, psycho-cultural centers, hospitals, youth and sports institutions.
The Armenians, as an ancient people with traditions of state, had effective organs of autonomy, not only in these two empires, but also from the East in the country of their residence. Many of them held high-level military, diplomatic and administrative positions in various countries.
In order to maintain the internal and external peace of the future country, the Armenians also had qualified officers, commanders, generals, private soldiers and regiments of volunteers trained in the Balkan and Caucasian wars, who then demonstrated their skills soldiers during the First and Second World Wars.
He had enough human resources. Demographically, Armenians made up a significant number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus, and were comparable to other peoples, some of whom even exceeded them.
In other words, before the First World War, the Armenians had all the conditions to form an independent state, as evidenced by that of 1915-1923.
After the genocide, the Armenians were able to stand up and build a modern developed country on a piece of the historic homeland. During World War II, Armenian soldiers, generals and marshals made a name for themselves on all fronts in the fight against fascism. In our time, their grandchildren selflessly defend the right to live freely and independently in Artsakh.
Today, Armenia is united with Artsakh and the organized and influential diaspora of Armenia, the descendants of the Armenians who were on the brink of extinction 100 years ago.
QUESTION. Mr. Speaker, more than a century has passed since the genocide, and no matter how serious the losses, some say it is a thing of the past and that we must look to the future.
ANSWER: Our vision is for the future, we dream of the future, we plan this future, we work every day to build the future. But let us remember that the future is the continuation of yesterday and today.
We often speak of huge human and material losses. And that’s true. The loss of 1.5 million people has significantly affected the continued reproduction of the Armenian people. Under normal circumstances, we should not be 10 to 12 million today, but at least twice as much.
Another major loss sought by successive Turkish governments has been the complete elimination of the Armenian element from historic Armenian territories. Today, no other Armenian lives in these territories. And if there are no people, then there is no language, customs, way of life, culture, cuisine, house and place where the national environment is formed, the society and people are formed.
In other words, the Armenians were deprived of the right to live on their ancestral land and to control their life and their future during the genocide.
And keep in mind that the Armenians were not a newly formed ethnic group, but a nation with an old state and a civilization.
In the decades following the genocide, traces of Armenian and Armenian civilization were systematically destroyed in Turkey.
And if today we rightly condemn the destruction of individual historic monuments by extremists around the world, to what extent should we condemn and condemn in time the destruction of the material and cultural monuments of an entire nation with a history of at least millennia?
Now imagine the plight of surviving Armenians around the world, many of whom remained stateless for decades, until the 1940s and 1950s.
By the way, during the First World War, the Armenians and the allied armies fought with honor and abnegation on all fronts, from Verdun to Palestine, from Brest to Trabzon and the Caucasus, and did not receive the homeland they dreamed of after the war.
Today, almost three quarters of Armenians live in different countries, under the most diverse customs, social norms and religions. Armenians everywhere are making great efforts to preserve their identity and talk about their rights, which they were deprived of by the genocide.
QUESTION. What do you think are the lessons of genocide and what should humanity do?
ANSWER: It is unfortunate to realize that humanity has not learned a lesson from the Armenian genocide, it has been forgotten, it has long been unrecognized and unpunished, which could have prevented such atrocities in the history of the ‘humanity. And humanity has witnessed other genocides since then.
I have the deep conviction that the recognition of the Armenian genocide is not only for our Armenians, but first, it is a question of approaching universal values, of preventing this evil. It is in this spirit that Armenia is guided by one of the priorities of its policy, defining the prevention of genocide and taking active measures in this direction at national and international levels. On the initiative of Armenia, the United Nations Human Rights Council traditionally adopts resolutions on the prevention of genocide, and in 2015, the United Nations General Assembly again adopted a resolution on proclamation December 9 International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide and International Day for the Prevention of Genocide.
Consequently, the question of the recognition of the Armenian genocide by the international community “before Turkey” is very topical. It has several components. Debt relief, prevention of such crimes նման Exclusion of repetition, elimination of repercussions.
After half a century of silence, in the 1960s and 1970s, the world started talking about the Armenian genocide again. 1965 Uruguay was the first to recognize it. Today, many countries and international organizations recognize the Armenian genocide, including France, Russia, the United States, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Vatican, and in the Arab world, Lebanon and Syria. Their number is increasing.
Today, the international community has absolutely no doubts about the genocide. At the same time, it is unacceptable when the question of recognition of the Armenian genocide is viewed from the point of view of current economic or political interests with Ankara.
In this case, we cannot, on the one hand, declare our effective fight against xenophobia, discrimination, intolerance, anti-Semitism, denial of the Armenian genocide and other universal ills, and on the other hand “diplomacy” on these issues.
I am convinced that it is mainly these principles which have guided the countries which have recognized the Armenian genocide and the international organizations for which we are grateful. We are grateful to the countries that opened their doors and provided shelter to those who survived the tragedy after the genocide. We are grateful to the missionaries, military doctors and nurses, diplomats, orphans, our brothers in difficulty, the Greeks, the Assyrians, the Jews and the Yezidis, as well as to the Turkish, Kurdish and Arab families and individuals who have often put their lives and their safety in danger during these brutal massacres. They have helped and saved many people.
Another problem is the position of successive Turkish governments: avoid acknowledging the genocide and pursue a policy of denial at the state level.
Today, the international community, political and public figures, including many Turkish intellectuals and figures, raise questions about the recognition of the Armenian genocide, hoping that the Turkish authorities will face and turn the tragic pages of their own history. The crime of genocide has no limitation period. The recognition of the Armenian genocide by Turkey and the elimination of its consequences are a guarantee of security for Armenia and the Armenian people, as well as for the region.
We cannot forget the Armenian genocide and we cannot be reconciled with it. We cannot ignore the suffering of victims and survivors, and we must ensure a secure and dignified future for their generations.
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English translation – LOUSAVOR AVEDIS
