Armenia should to take clear stance on Protocols before April 24

PanARMENIAN.Net - Having signed and publicized the so-called "road map" on April 22, the Armenian side simply allowed U.S. President to avoid legal responsibility, by using the term "Metz Yeghern", says Edward Abrahamyan, leader of Neo-Conservative Movement.



"If Armenia quits the Turkish-initiated games before April 24, the U.S. President will not avoid using the term 'genocide' in his annual address," he told PanARMENIAN.Net in an interview.



At that, he noted that Armenian authorities' deeds will enable the world's countries to further their towards international recognition of Armenian Genocide, a process that was disrupted following the signature of ill-fated Protocols.



The Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Empire (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.



The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.



The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide.



To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.



The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.



The Protocols aimed at normalization of bilateral ties and opening of the border between Armenia and Turkey were signed in Zurich by Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian and his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu on October 10, 2009, after a series of diplomatic talks held through Swiss mediation.

On January 12, 2010, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Armenia found the protocols conformable to the country's Organic Law.