British-Armenian Parliamentary Group calls on official London to recognize Armenian Genocide

PanARMENIAN.Net - The British-Armenian All-Party Parliamentary Group, which organized a conference under the auspices of the Armenian Embassy on May 7, 2009 sent a statement to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs David Miliband MP and newly-elected Speaker of the British Parliament John Bercow.



The statement says:



"On the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the UK



Despite the overwhelming evidence and ever-growing international recognition of the Armenian Genocide the British Government consistently refuses to unequivocally recognize it as such.



1 We call on the British Government to consider the following facts and to publicly recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.



* The atrocities committed against the Armenian people in the Western Armenia and other parts of the Ottoman Empire during 1915-1923 constitute a Genocide. It was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire and was carried out under the cover of World War I. The Armenian people were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation. It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923.



* The Allied Powers during World War I : Great Britain, France and Russia in their May 24, 1915 joint declaration, had accused the Young Turk regime of crimes against humanity and civilization. In 1915, thirty-three years before the UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity. Winston Churchill wrote in his book The World Crises that: "In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor. There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons."



* The word "genocide" was coined by famous Polish-Jewish lawyer and humanist Rafael Lemkin, who said that he "became interested in genocide because it happened to the Armenians" and because the Turkish "criminals were guilty of genocide and were not punished." He believed that being not punished was one of the objective reasons for the elimination of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany in 1939-1945.This emboldened Hitler who justified his campaign of mass murder by asking his generals, "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?" In 1997, the world's foremost organization of genocide experts, The International Association of Genocide Scholars, unanimously passed a formal resolution that affirmed the Armenian Genocide.



In June 2000, 126 leading scholars of Holocaust including Nobel Prize laureate Eliе Wiesel placed a statement in the New York Times declaring the "incontestable fact of thе Armenian Genocide" and urging western democracies to acknowledge it. The editorial board of New York Times has also issued a statement to its editors by qualifying the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.



* In June 2005 the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) addressed an open letter to Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan unequivocally reconfirming the genocidal nature of the Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey. It particularly states that "...It is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participants in international and democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust".



* Despite the affirmation of the Armenian Genocide by the overwhelming majority of historians, academic institutions on Genocide Studies, parliaments and governments around the world, the Turkish government still actively denies the fact of the Armenian Genocide. It does not only spend millions of dollars on publishing false and defamatory literature and sponsoring "academic" studies to deny the Genocide, but also openly blackmails the countries whose legislatures dare to discuss and formally recognize the Armenian Genocide.



* One of the early accounts of the Armenian Genocide (the term genocide was not known at the time) was published in 1916 in Britain. The British Government at the time commissioned James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee to compile evidence on the events in Armenia. The subsequent report was printed in the British Parliamentary Blue Book series entitled "The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916".



It is long overdue for Britain to address its own historical record and to heed to the calls of the prominent academicians, human rights advocates and the relevant resolutions of the European Parliament by acknowledging and condemning the first genocide of the 20th century."