First Minister of Wales recognizes Armenian Genocide on Holocaust Day

PanARMENIAN.Net -
First Minister for Wales Carwin Jones recognized the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, independent French journalist Jean Eckian told PanARMENIAN.Net The road to Genocide recognition, which began on 24th April 2001, when Rhodri Morgan, (then First Minister), laid flowers in memory of the 1915 Genocide Victims, was completed in Cardiff with an explicit recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the new First Minister.



The National Holocaust Day event was supported by the government of Wales (Welsh Assembly Government) and Cardiff City Council, the municipality of Wales' capital. The Genocide was also recognized at the event by guest speaker Rabbi Aron Hier from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Los Angeles. The sharp diplomacy of Mr. John Torosyan, the moving spirit of the Welsh Armenian community was an important factor in this historic achievement.



Carwyn Jones belongs to the Labour Party, as does Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the UK who will now be under huge pressure following this crack in the UK Labour ranks. This recognition will also send shock waves through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, which has been the architect of the Labour Party policy of supporting the Turkish denialist position at all costs



It is noticable that while parliamnents throughout the World have passed resolutions recognising the Genocide, this recognition is of more signifigance as it comes from the government of Wales (in addition to the past recognition by the National Assembly of Wales (2002) and the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly (2007).



The Armenian Genocide (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 Holocaust, also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany.



Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis' systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, including ethnic Poles, Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents. By this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims would be between 11 million and 17 million people.



The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were confined in overcrowded ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state



Auschwitz was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or main camp); Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp; and 45 satellite camps.



Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, the town the camps were located in and around; it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.



Auschwitz II-Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the locus of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe." From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe.[2] The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there, a figure since revised to 1.1 million, around 90 percent of them Jews.[3] Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and tens of thousands of other nationalities. Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported medical experiments.



On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 1994 had seen 22 million visitors—700,000 annually—pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes you free").