(azatutyun.am) April 24 2016 - President Serzh Sarkisian accused Turkey of maintaining hostile attitudes towards the Armenians as tens of thousands of people marched on Sunday to a hilltop memorial in Yerevan to mark the 101st anniversary of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
The annual day-long procession followed a prayer service led by Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, by the eternal fire of the Tsitsernakabert memorial to some 1.5 million Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. Sarkisian and other senior Armenian officials also attended the ceremony.
Genocide remembrance ceremonies were also held by Armenian Diaspora communities around the world.
“More than a century has passed since the genocide,” Sarkisian said in a written address to the nation. “What has changed? First of all, we have changed. We have been reborn as a nation and as a state. We have proved to ourselves and the world that the Turkish genocidal plans failed.”
“What has not changed is Turkey’s denialist stance and hostile attitude towards everything Armenian” he went on. “This is a direct continuation of the crime going on nowadays.”
Sarkisian stressed at the same time that unlike Turkey’s government and policy-makers, “the Turkish society has partly changed” with regard to the genocide issue. “Today it knows more about Turkish history than it did yesterday,” he said. “Tomorrow it will know even more than it does today, unless, of course, they strangle free speech and media, shoot and arrest parliamentarians, public figures and editors.”
The mass killings and deportations of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian subjects began on April 24, 1915 with the arrest and subsequent execution of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. More than two dozen nations, including France, Russia, Italy and Canada, as well as the European Parliament have officially recognized the massacres as genocide.
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