Tens of thousands of people marched to the Tsitsernakabert memorial in Yerevan on Friday to pay their respects to some 1.5 million Armenians who were massacred by the Ottoman Turks 100 years ago in the first genocide of the 20th century.
In what has been an annual ritual in Armenia for almost 50 years, they laid flowers by the hilltop memorial’s eternal fire surrounded by 12 inward-bending columns symbolizing Armenian-populated provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
The daylong procession began amid heavy rain after an official ceremony during which Armenia’s political and spiritual leaders as well as dozens of foreign dignitaries marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide.
“The western part of the Armenian people, who had for millenniums lived in their homeland, in the cradle of their civilization, were displaced and annihilated under a state-devised plan with direct participation of the army, police, other state institutions, and gangs comprising criminals released from the prisons specifically for this purpose,” President Serzh Sarkisian said in a speech at Tsitsernakabert.
“Human language is powerless to describe what an entire people endured,” he said. “Around 1.5 million human beings were slaughtered merely for being Armenian.”
The 3-hour ceremony also involved speeches by the visiting presidents of Cyprus, France, Russia and Serbia and a prayer service led by Catholicos Garegin, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. It ended with an address by Esther Mujawayo, a prominent survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
“It is very important that we stand by our Armenian sisters and brothers sharing their pain, their struggle, and of course their rebirth,” Mujawayo told the participants of the event.
“As one of the participants of the Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide, held in Yerevan over the last two days, I would like to extend our gratitude to the government and people of Armenia for furthering prevention agenda and raising public awareness to combat the crime of genocide and reach the noble goal of its complete exclusion,” she added.
Mujawayo also read out the forum’s concluding declaration that calls on the outside world to ensure a greater international recognition of the Armenia genocide and condemns its denial by Turkey. The declaration also calls for a worldwide “strengthening of genocide prevention mechanisms.”
In his speech, Sarkisian similarly denounced Turkey’s continuing claims that Ottoman Armenians died in smaller numbers and not as a result of a premeditated government policy. “As Pope Francis rightly pointed out [on April 12,] ‘Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,’” he said.
Sarkisian went on to thank foreign nations and various international bodies that have officially recognized the Armenian massacres as genocide. “Recognition of the genocide is a victory of human conscience and justice over intolerance and hatred,” he said.
The Armenian leader further praised scores of Turks who were due to gather in Istanbul later in the day to commemorate the genocide victims. “They are strong people who are doing the right thing for their homeland,” he said.