Montreal-A group among the world’s foremost scholars and academics of genocide studies urged the U.S. Congress to recognize the Armenian Genocide through a petition signed and prepared at McGill University during the Global Conference on Genocide Prevention this past week-end.
"The 20th century has been described as the Century of Genocide. It opened in 1915 with the mass killing of almost 1.5 million Armenia’s by the Ottoman Empire," Payam Akhavan, S.J.D., chair of the symposium, noted in his opening remarks.
The petition, which asks members of the U.S. Congress to approve a vote for H. Res. 106, calling on the White House administration to recognize the genocide, was signed by Dr. Akhavan, Faculty of Law at McGill University, Professor Frank Chalk, Director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Senator Rom?o Dallaire, former commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, Professor Yehuda Bauer, Holocaust historian and scholar at Yad Vashem and Hebrew University, Dr. Irwin Cotler M.P., Former Minister of Justice and Former Attorney-General of Canada, Dr. Gregory Stanton the President of Genocide Watch, and many others.
"The scholars’ reaffirmation of the Armenian Genocide’s historical reality and their commitment to justice once more show how Turkey’s claims that ‘history should be left to the historians’ is a cheap political ruse," remarked Dr. Girair Basmadjian, president of the Armenian National Committee of Canada. "Everybody on that petition, as well as Turkey, knows that the true historians have already passed their verdict. We hope the U.S. Congress will now do the same, and thank the symposium’s organizers and participants for their hard work," he concluded. "I cannot help but feel pride as a Canadian for the moral stance that the Canadian Senate, Parliament and especially the Government have taken in affirming and reaffirming the historical fact of the genocide."
Funded by the Penny and Gordon Echenberg Family Foundation, The Global Conference on Genocide Prevention at McGill University took place between October 11 and 13.
The ANCC is the largest and the most influential Canadian-Armenian grassroots political 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 Canadian-Armenian community on a broad range of issues.
