Armenia, on Day of Rain and Sorrow, Observes 100th Anniversary of Genocide

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/world/europe/armenian-genocide-100th-anniversary.html

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YEREVAN, Armenia — Thousands of Armenians laid flowers around an eternal flame here on Friday in memory of the 1.5 million people killed in Ottoman Turkey a century ago. The ceremony was one of many around the world marking the 100th anniversary of what historians call a genocide.

The legacy of those mass killings and forced deportations, which Turkey still insists were not genocide, remains a source of bitter enmity and continues to roil politics in Asia Minor and beyond.

On an ashen gray day here in the Armenian capital, President Serzh Sargsyan was joined by international delegations that included Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and François Hollande of France at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex, the main monument to the Armenian genocide, on a hilltop overlooking the city.

Mr. Sargsyan, in his opening remarks, described the killing of Armenians as “unprecedented in terms of volume and ramifications” at that point in history.

“The western part of the Armenian people, who for millenniums had lived in their homeland, in the cradle of their civilization, were displaced and annihilated under a state-devised plan,” Mr. Sargsyan said, “with direct participation of the army, police, other state institutions, and gangs comprising criminals released from the prisons specifically for this purpose.”

“Around 1.5 million human beings were slaughtered merely for being Armenian,” he said.

The forced exiles that accompanied the killings in Ottoman Turkey transformed the Armenians into one of the world’s largest diaspora peoples — estimated at up to 10 million people, more than three times Armenia’s population.

Many of the mourners in Yerevan on Friday had traveled from Russia, Iran, the United States and other countries with large Armenian communities.

Charles A. Hajinian, 61, a dentist from Delafield, Wis., carried an aging black-and-white photograph of his great-grandmother. “I came to remember my great-grandmother, my great-uncles, both my great-grandparents died, my great-cousins,” Dr. Hajinian said, fighting back tears. “I came to say thank you to the Armenians for surviving, fighting and putting this monument up.”

Gevorg Tonoyan, 60, an elevator technician, who was waiting with his 2 ½-year-old granddaughter to enter the memorial complex, said: “Whatever happens, we will not forget. We will come, we will honor our victims, our martyrs.”

In some cases, mourners expressed seething anger at the Turks. Sona Ghazaryan, 63, a religion teacher, said, “Only at a time when our neighbor apologizes, washes their bloody hands and gives us back our treasures” could there be reconciliation.

“How can you be neighbor with someone if they have a dagger and wants to stab you in your back?” she said.

An increasing number of world leaders have endorsed Armenia’s position that the mass killings in 1915 constitute a genocide; Turkey says it was a tragic outcome of a bloody war, but not a planned genocide.

“We sincerely sympathize with the Armenian people who suffered one of the most awful tragedies in the history of mankind,” said Mr. Putin, who decided to attend the ceremony in Yerevan and eschew a ceremony in Turkey, brought forward by one day, commemorating the Turkish victory in the Battle of Gallipoli.

The American delegation to Yerevan was led by Jacob J. Lew, the secretary of the Treasury, and the White House referred to the ceremony Friday as the “Centennial Commemoration of the Events of 1915” — euphemistic enough perhaps to satisfy President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, but a disappointment to Armenians who had hoped Mr. Obama would make good on his promise as a presidential candidate to recognize the killings as genocide.

In a new statement on Friday, Mr. Obama called the killings of Armenians “the first mass atrocity of the 20th century.”

He also suggested that the absence of the word genocide in his statement was an official position, but not a reflection of his personal beliefs. “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view has not changed,” Mr. Obama said.

By now, with the facts well established, it is largely a semantic debate that Turkey seems to be losing. And even some people in Turkey have called for recognition and reconciliation given the increasingly settled world opinion.

Beyond the fight over the term genocide, the enmity between Turkey and Armenia still weighs heavily in both countries and is a major factor in regional politics.

The border between the two nations is sealed, in what amounts to an economic barrier for the entire region, and Armenia remains officially at war with its other Turkic Muslim neighbor, Azerbaijan, over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

At the memorial complex in Yerevan, many Armenians said they wanted Turkey to acknowledge the genocide, as a matter of historical justice. But none seemed to be holding their breath.

“If you have a scab, a sore, and you keep picking at it, it will never heal, and that’s the sad part of Turkey, they are hurting themselves by not acknowledging,” said Dr. Hajinian, the dentist from Wisconsin. “But for the rest of the world and for us, we know in our hearts what happened. We don’t need the acknowledgment of Turkey for our healing.”