As Armenia marks massacre, Berlin recognizes it as genocide
YEREVAN, Armenia — Armenia marked the centenary on Friday 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.
“Recognition of the genocide is a triumph of human conscience and justice over intolerance and hatred,” Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan said in speech under gray skies, with many guests wrapped in coats or blankets.
Turkey denies the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in what is now Turkey in 1915, at the height of First World War, 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 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
The European Parliament, which represents the 28-nation European Union, also refers to the killing in 1915 as genocide, as did Pope Francis this month, prompting Turkey to summon the Vatican's envoy and recall its own.
Other countries, including the United States, have refrained from doing so. Turkey hosts a U.S. air base at Incirlik and is a key ally in the Middle East.
In a statement on Friday, President Barack Obama called the killings of Armenians “the first mass atrocity of the 20th century,” adding that “the Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire were deported, massacred and marched to their deaths.”
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday 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 at the commemorations in the Armenian capital. Each man placed a yellow rose in a wreath of forget-menots at a hilltop memorial near the Armenian capital Yerevan and led calls for reconciliation.
Mr. Putin said Russia believed mass killings could not be excused under any circumstances since it was the initiator of or party to a number of core international laws, including the convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide.
His words provoked an angry response from Turkey.
“Considering the mass killings, exiles ... that Russia has carried out in the Caucasus, Central Asia and in eastern Europe over the past century ... we think it should be the one that knows best what genocide is and what its legal dimensions are,” a Turkish foreign ministry statement said.
Late in the evening tens of thousands of Armenians marched through central Yerevan in a torch-lit procession commemorating the victims of the 1915 killings. The march began in Republic square, where participants burnt a large Turkish flag.
The marchers walked with torches, candles and huge Armenian flags up to the hilltop memorial, shouting “Long live Armenia!”