TURKEY DENIAL OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE CYNICISM

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkey has to call the Armenian Genocide a «genocide,» Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian stated at the closing of Ultimate Crime, Ultimate Challenges: Genocide and Human Rights conference in Yerevan. In his words, within the two-day conference the phrase that genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity was pronounced. In his words, the Turkish people should put up with the reality. At that he noted that Armenians and Turks should address the past and jointly solve the problems available. Maybe there are states today that have never experienced problems with their neighbors and did not have a tragic past. As noted by V. Oskanian, if Armenia and Turkey were far from each other, the developments would have been different. However, we are neighbor countries, the Mount Ararat that can well be seen from Armenia reminds us we are neighbors with Turkey. But we can only do so if the demons of the past have been rejected by our neighbor, too. You notice, I didn't say 'by the perpetrator.' Armenians are able to distinguish between the perpetrators and today's government of Turkey. Two-thirds of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire were massacred or deported between 1915 and 1918. Today's Republic of Turkey must be able to condemn these acts for what they are. The evidence is overwhelming, clear, unavoidable. Armenians were one of the largest minorities of the Ottoman Empire. Where did they go? Is it possible that all our grandmothers and grandfathers colluded and created stories? Where are the descendants of the Armenians who built the hundreds of churches and monasteries whose ruins still stand in Turkey? Is US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's account of the atrocities that he witnessed a lie? Why was a military tribunal convened at the end of World War I, and why did it find Ottoman Turkish leaders guilty of ordering the mass murder of Armenians? How does one explain the thousands and thousands of pages in the official records of a dozen countries documenting the plans to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire? If it wasn't genocide and they were simply 'war time deportations' of so-called rebellious Armenian populations near the eastern border with the Russian Empire, as Turkish apologists sometimes claim, why were the homes of Armenians in the western cities looted and burned? Why were the Armenians of the seacoast towns of Smyrna and Constantinople deported? Boatloads of people were dumped in the sea - is that what deportation is all about? Could rounding up scores of intellectuals on a single night and killing them be anything but premeditation?