April 10, 2013 - 13:05 AMT
Canadian Museum for Human Rights to open exhibit on Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide will not be left behind when the Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens, the museum's head of stakeholder relations said, according to Winnipeg Free Press.

"Human rights lessons from the Armenian genocide will be explored in a number of ways in the CMHR, including in an exhibit exploring Raphael Lemkim's work (he coined the term genocide), an exhibit examining the 1948 Genocide Convention, and in a gallery that will explore a cross-section of global mass atrocities, including the five atrocities that the Canadian Parliament has recognized as genocides," Clint Curle said.

Calling the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a genocide may hurt lucrative trade between Canada and Turkey but the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is not about to call the slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people anything other than genocide, Curle stressed.

Curle said genocide is a timely human rights issue. "Ongoing denial of this historic atrocity, waged in the name of ethnic homogeneity, makes it a contemporary human rights concern." He recently visited Yerevan in Armenia to see the Genocide Museum there and will be working to develop links between it and the human rights museum in Winnipeg.