Expert: today only 60,000 Armenians are left in Turkey

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Head of the Modus Vivendi Centre, historian Ara Papian said that the Armenian Genocide during the World War I and after went down the history as a crystal-clear example of unpunished crime that reinvented itself in Nazi extermination of the Jews, the Gypsies and the Slavic peoples.

In his address in Los Angeles during the 96th commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, Papian noted: “The Armenian Genocide during the World War I and after went down the history as a crystal-clear example of unpunished crime that reinvented itself in Nazi extermination of the Jews, the Gypsies and the Slavic peoples. The annihilation of an entire civilization that occurred under the apathetic eye of the world at the turn of the 20th century ricocheted right into our lifetime with the destruction of innocent people in Ruanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The principle of an ignored crime backfired again.

All Genocides have a common denominator – it is brutal and premeditated killing of hundreds of thousands and millions of people, huge loses of cultural values and property. Unfortunately the Armenian Genocide has something in particular that makes it deferent and it stands separately from all other Genocides.

In addition to human loses and destruction of our heritage we lost the most valuable thing that a nation can possess – we lost our Homeland. The Armenian massacres and deportations uprooted men, women and children who were living on their ancestral homeland for several millennia, reducing a once vibrant region into open graves and ghost towns throughout Anatolia and Western Armenia. It is a sad fact that today there are less than 60,000 Armenians left in Turkey. After 1.5 million Armenians were killed, the remaining survivors and their descendants are now dispersed throughout the world.”