YEREVAN, (Reuters) – Armenia marked the centenary yesterday of a mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks with a simple flower-laying ceremony attended by foreign leaders as Germany became the latest country to respond to its calls for recognition that it was genocide.
Turkey denies the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in what is now Turkey in 1915, at the height of World War One, constitutes genocide and relations with Armenia are still blighted by the dispute.
Parliament in Germany, Turkey’s biggest trade partner in the European Union, risked a diplomatic rupture with Ankara and upsetting its own many ethnic Turkish residents by joining the many Western scholars and two dozen countries to use the word.
Its resolution, approved overwhelmingly, marks a significant change of stance in a country which has worked hard to come to terms with its responsibility for the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday he “shared the pain” of Armenians, but as recently as Thursday he again rejected the description of the killings as genocide and has shown no sign of changing his mind.
The French and Russian presidents, Francois Hollande and Vladimir Putin, were among guests who each placed a yellow rose in a wreath of forget-me-nots at a hilltop memorial near the Armenian capital Yerevan and led calls for reconciliation. “Recognition of the genocide is a triumph of human conscience and justice over intolerance and hatred,” Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan said in speech under grey skies, with many guests wrapped in coats or blankets.
In a speech at the ceremony that was met by warm applause, Hollande said a law adopted by France in 2001 on recognition of the killings as genocide was “an act of truth”.
“France fights against revisionism and destruction of evidence, because denial amounts to repeat of massacres,” he said, describing his own attendance as “a contribution to reconciliation”.
