Armenian Community In Edmonton

Motion to be Introduced in Canadian parliament to declare April Genocide Remembrance Month -

Motion to be Introduced in House of Commons to declare April Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month

Ottawa – The Armenian National Committee of Canada (ANCC) is proud to have worked closely with Mr. Brad Butt, Member of Parliament for Mississauga – Streetsville (Conservative) on a motion to declare April as

Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month and, among other things, to mark April 24 of each year as Armenian Genocide Memorial Day.

 The ANCC urges all Canadians dedicated to the cause of preventing future genocides and properly recognizing past genocides to make their voices heard by writing or calling their Members of Parliament and asking them to vote for this motion.

ANCC President Dr. Girair Basmajian said “This motion reaffirms Canada’s commitment to the important cause of genocide prevention and recognizes that the first step to prevention is to ensure that we remember and condemn past genocides.” Dr. Basmajian further stated “We are very grateful that this motion designates April 24 as Armenian Genocide Memorial Day so that all Canadians can join with the Armenian community to work to prevent future genocides, which is especially important in light of the religiously and ethnically motivated violence against minorities currently taking place in Iraq and Syria.”

 The Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month motion was published on the Notice Paper today, which is the first step that must be taken before the motion can be introduced in the House of Commons and then brought to a vote. It is expected that the motion will be formally introduced in the House of Commons next week by Mr. Butt. It is also expected that other Members of Parliament will speak in favour of the motion at that time. It is not yet clear when the motion would be approved.

 The Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month motion recalls that Canada has officially recognized four genocides (the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and the Armenian Genocide) and that three of these genocides have a memorial day in April, so it is appropriate to designate April of each year as Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month. The ANCC notes that the designation of April 24 of each year as Armenian Genocide Memorial Day in this motion is the first time that any Canadian federal government body has formally recognized April 24 as Armenian Genocide Memorial Day.

Motion 587

March 26, 2015- Brad Butt, Member of Parliament for Mississauga-Streetsville, gave notice for a motion today. Motion 587 reads:

That this House re-affirm its support for

(a) the Holocaust Memorial Day Act, which received Royal Assent on November 7, 2003;

(b) the Armenian genocide recognition resolution, adopted on April 21, 2004;

(c) the Rwandan genocide resolution, adopted on April 7, 2008; and

(d) the Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day Act, which received Royal Assent on May 29, 2008;

That this House call upon the Government of Canada to honour the victims of all genocides by recognizing the month of April as Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month; and

That this House acknowledge the associated commemorative days of

(a) Yom ha-Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, as determined by the Jewish Lunar calendar;

(b) Armenian Genocide Memorial Day, April 24;

(c) Rwandan Genocide Memorial Day, April 7; and

(d) Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day, fourth Saturday in November.

***

  The ANCC is the largest and the most influential Armenian-Canadian grassroots human rights organization. Working in coordination with a network of offices, chapters, and supporters throughout Canada and affiliated organizations around the world, the ANCC actively advances the concerns of the Armenian-Canadian community on a broad range of issues and works to eliminate abuses of human rights throughout Canada and the world.

Web Site Assesses Armenian Genocide Losses -

Yerevan – Armenian Genocide Losses 1915, http://armeniangenocidelosses.am/, is a new web site created by an independent research group in Armenia. “The goal is to provide a framework for informed discussion on the extent of the harm resulting from this genocide.”

 It presents a formula based on international norms and precedents, which call for reversible harm to be reversed and irreversible harm to be compensated. Reversible harm includes land, property and rights that can be restored. Irreversible harm includes lost lives, destroyed property, and other intangible harm caused and benefit gained by delay and denial of the Armenian Genocide. The total harm caused and benefit gained from the Armenian Genocide is estimated to be in excess of $3 trillion.

 The site takes as a starting point the 1919 Armenian Claim at the Paris Peace conference, which had both monetary and land/property restoration components. It also adds delay damages for the 100 years of denial and delay in resolving the Armenian Genocide.

 As show in bar charts, the mix of reversible and irreversible harm is subject to adjustment, depending on political will. The more land, property and rights that are restored, the less monetary compensation that is due for irreversible harm, and vice versa. The site considers four scenarios for land restoration ranging from current-day Armenia and Artsakh to the 1919 Armenian Homeland claim from the Black to Mediterranean Seas made at the Paris Peace Conference.

 Somewhat unique in its approach, the site recognizes that in addition to direct perpetrators there were other complicit parties and beneficiaries before, during and after the Armenian Genocide. A pie chart allocates the harm caused and benefits gained to various countries and peoples. These include the Turkey, its WWI Allies Germany, and Austro-Hungary, the Kurds, and the Great Powers, whose policies and actions factored into the Armenian Genocide and the obstruction of its timely resolution, such as, England, Russia, France, Italy, the US and later Israel.

Delay damages were calculated using present value and the time value of money and property. Delay damages also includes deprivation of access to the Armenian ancestral homeland for 100 years, interference with maintenance of cultural heritage, and the emotional distress associated with denial of the crime, delay in justice, and witnessing the depredation of one’s nation and homeland.

Irreversible harm includes post-1919 destruction of life, real and immovable property, injuries and refugee maintenance costs, destroyed and desecrated cultural heritage, lost revenues from natural resources and transit rights, stolen property, costs of continued discrimination, oppression and persecution of Armenians in Turkey, as well as projected revenues from national patrimony, including natural resources (minerals, hydrocarbons) and continued costs to Armenia of blockade and lack of access to the sea.

The site makes the case that assessment of the harm is essential to recognition and rectification of the crime. Although justifying the need for compensation, the site comes to the sobering conclusion that “although compensation cannot make the victims whole, it can help the perpetrators and beneficiaries find the redemption they need:  if not for themselves, for humanity’s sake; if not for this generation, for future generations.”  

Download the PDF version here

http://armeniangenocidelosses.am/pdf/Armenian_Genocide_Losses_Eng.pdf

100 years ago this day, Azg published Catholicos of All Armenians’ address heads of dioceses.

The full text of the encyclical is available here: http://armeniangenocide100.org/en/100-years-ago-en/1915/03/16/

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2015/03/06/the-armenian-genocide-in-modern-turkeys-official-denialism-a-hundred-shades-of-denial/#.VPojSaGaw-d.facebook

Picture showing Armenians killed during the Armenian Genocide. Image taken from Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, written by Henry Morgenthau, Sr. and published in 1918. Original description: “THOSE WHO FELL BY THE WAYSIDE. Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation” (Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)

The will to truth is cowed by pressure of numerous kinds, reasons of state on the one hand, economic necessities on the other, and, not least, the pure careerism of intellectuals who put their expertise in the service of power as a matter of course. When governments and professional elites find reward in the sophistries of might makes right, truth is bound to suffer.”

–Terrence Des Pres

Repentant or emboldened through a hundred long years of denial, the Turkish statehood stands at a critical juncture of its historical past, present, and future. The Armenian Genocide and the Great National Dispossession of the Armenian people from their homeland will ultimately determine its decent place in the family of civilized nations. Recognition and repentance, along with elimination of dire consequences, is the right way forward for the Turkish government.

Only a month ahead of the April 24 Centennial of the Armenian Genocide, the Republic of Armenia, together with Diaspora Armenians from many far-flung corners of the world, brings together the vestiges of enduring historical memory and remembrance on human suffering, extermination and resurgence to denounce past inhumanities and prevent future ones. Unbroken in spirit against this unprecedented crime, the message they bring to the fore of international agenda stretches far beyond the tragedy of a single nation to embrace the whole humanity.

Against the backdrop of Turkish official denialism, distortion, and propaganda stunt – as the commemoration of Gallipoli landings staged by the Turkish government on April 24 demonstrate – looms the larger decay of a state rooted in organized forgetting and long-enforced oblivion. Not only does the strenuous denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government constitute a form of renewed aggression that should be condemned and outlawed in its own right, but it also forecloses the mere opportunity for many decent men and women in Turkey to come to grips with their own history.

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers. Kharpert, Armenia, Ottoman Empire, April, 1915 (Public Domain/Wikimedia Common

Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to centrally planned and systematically orchestrated genocide against the Armenian people – the testimony of survivors, documentary evidence, official archives, and the reports of diplomats – the denial of Armenian genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has proceeded from 1915 to the present. Among the scores of articles available in the archives of the New York Times, one featured on February 23, 1916 presents the reflections of Lord Bryce, the head of British delegation to the Anglo-French Parliamentary conference, on Turkish atrocities committed against Armenians. It reads in part: “The cause of Armenians is especially dear to me. There is no people in the world which has suffered more. It has been a victim not of religious fanaticism, but of cold-blooded, premeditated hatred on the part of the brigands who term themselves the Turkish Government and who do not intend to permit the existence of any national vitality except in their own element.”

In an attempt to assassinate the entire civilization and culture, the Ottoman Turkish government unleashed the deportation of Armenian people to the arid deserts of Syria that would come to be known as death marches of men, women and children, with many dying along the way of exhaustion and starvation. The American ambassador Henry Morgenthau would later write inhis memoirs: “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”

The Armenian Genocide commemorative memorial at the Goddard Chapel, Tufts University. The plaque reads, “To the glory of God and the memory of one and one half million Armenians – many of them related to Tufts Alumni – who perished in the 1915 Genocide in what is now modern Turkey.” (Photo: Grigor Boyakhchyan)

Various perspectives on denial can be brought to bear on the form and content of Turkish attempts to transplant a benign political image around the world; what unites them together, however, is the state-sponsored struggle to diminish, disguise and consign to oblivion the memory of race extermination behind their actions in whatever way possible – a struggle of forgetting against memory.

Regardless of the state of play on the ground in the Middle East or elsewhere and the ensuing geopolitical significance allegedly attributed to Turkey in world affairs, it is crystal clear that the only enduring strength, authority and leadership that a country seeks to obtain in international arena proceeds along the principles of morality and justice. Unwillingness to embrace this route is an attribute of politicians who think in short timelines.

There are no “smart denials” on the face of justice, irrespective of the strategies and techniques the Turkish authorities choose to concoct behind the sealed borders and closed doors. Denials are either short-or long-lived; but they never mature into reality. Nor does the known fade into the unknown – no matter how intensely the hundred shades of distortion and denial envelop the truth – and those who have attempted it have themselves ended up in the dustbin of history. To bind the country to the same path of government-backed denial is an expression of no strategy, no goals, and no vision for its future. It is a sign of moral decay.

Edmonton Fellow Armenians,

The members of Red Deer Armenian Community arranged a memorial service for one and half million Christian Armenians who were killed during the first Genocide of the twentieth century in Turkey. We have planned a memorial service of about one and half hours on Friday , April 24, at 6 PM, in Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
The Church Address: Red Deer, 5508 - 48 A Avenue, Red Deer
The memorial will start with prayer by father Jozef, the Church pastor, for the children, women and men who were massacred during the mass killing and deportation of Christian Armenians, from their ancestral holy land by the Turks.

https://www.facebook.com/armeniangenocide100/photos/a.1608089689413640.1073741830.1589928921229717/1621383504750925/?type=1&theater

“The Turkish crisis.” The engraving depicts a scene from the Armenian massacres in the Kasim pasha quarter of Constantinople.

The Illustrated London News, October 10, 1896.

http://www.horizonweekly.ca/news/details/62206

Armin Wegner, Writer, Poet and Eyewitness to the Armenian Genocide

Armin Wegner, Writer, Poet and Eyewitness to the Armenian Genocide - 

Intellectual, Doctor in Law, Photographer, Writer, Poet, Civil Rights Defender, Eyewitness to the Armenian Genocide

Armin Theophil Wegner (1886-1978)

Armin T. Wegner, whose photographic collection documents conditions in Armenian deportation camps in 1915-1916, was born in Germany in 1886. At the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled as a volunteer nurse in Poland during the winter of 1914-1915, and was decorated with the Iron Cross for assisting the wounded under fire. In April 1915, following the military alliance of Germany and Turkey, he was sent to the Middle East as a member of the German Sanitary Corps. Between July and August, he used his leave to investigate the rumors about the Armenian massacres that had reached him from several sources. In the autumn of the same year, with the rank of second-lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal Von der Goltz, commander of the 6th Ottoman army in Turkey, he traveled through Asia Minor.

 Eluding the strict orders of the Turkish and German authorities (intended to prevent the spread of news, information, correspondence, visual evidence), Wegner collected notes, annotations, documents, letters and took hundreds of photographs in the Armenian deportation camps. With the help of foreign consulates and embassies of other countries, he was able to send some of this material to Germany and the United States. His clandestine mail routes were discovered and Wegner was arrested by the Germans at the request of the Turkish Command-and was put to serve in the cholera wards. Having fallen seriously ill, he left Baghdad for Constantinople in November 1916. Hidden in his belt were his photographic plates and those of other German officers with images of the Armenian Genocide to which he had been a witness. In December of the same year he was recalled to Germany.

 Wegner was deeply moved by the tragedy of the Armenian people to which he had been eyewitness in Ottoman Turkey. Between 1918 and 1921, he became an active member of pacifist and anti-military movements while dedicating his literary and poetic output to the search for the truth about himself and his fellow man. On February 23, 1919, Wegner's "Open Letter to President Wilson" appealing for the creation of an independent Armenian state was published in Berliner Tageblatt.

 A man of conscience who protested his country's responsibilities in the Armenian Genocide, Wegner was also one of the earliest voices to protest Hitler's treatment of the Jews in Germany. He dedicated a great part of his life to the fight for Armenian and Jewish human rights.

 In 1968 he received an invitation to Armenia from the Catholicos of All Armenians and was awarded with the Order of Saint Gregory the Illuminator.

Armin Wegner died in Rome at the age of 92 on May 17, 1978.

 Wegner served as a witness during the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who had assassinated the Ottoman leader, Talaat Pasha, in Berlin in 1921.

Memory can't be erased, Charles Aznavour

http://armeniangenocide100.org/stories/

http://armeniangenocide100.org/cultural-genocide/