French President Emmanuel Macron with Prof. Taner Akçam

PARIS (Armenpress) — President of France Emmanuel Macron on January 30 attended the annual gala dinner of the Coordination Council of Armenian Organizations of France (CCAF) in France and delivered remarks.

Macron spoke about the recognition process of the Armenian Genocide internationally, and emphasized that France has been engaged in the process for 19 years. Macron said he was pleased to note that it has already been a year that his promise on declaring April 24 as the National Commemoration Day of the Armenian Genocide in France has been fulfilled.

French President Emmanuel Macron

“The struggle that the Armenians are carrying out for the recognition of the genocide is also a struggle against silence, against forgetting. As for the issue of truth, there is brotherhood between the Armenian and French peoples,” Macron said.

Macron underscored that Turkey has based its policy on revisionism. “No great history is shaped on lies, denial and revisionism,” Macron said.

At the beginning of the event, those in attendance observed a minute of silence in honor of former French President Jacques Chirac’s memory, who died in September 2019.

Turkish historian Prof. Taner Akçam, a renowned advocate for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, participated in the event a guest of honor.

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Macron congratulated Akçam for his continued efforts.

Guests surround French President Emmanuel Macron at the Coordination Council of Armenian Organizations of France program.

“You denounced the denial,” Macron told Akçam, author of the book Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and Armenian Genocide. He said the book constitutes “the scientific establishment of clear intentionality of an organized crime.”

“You brought out what some wanted to plunge into oblivion, Genocide denial,” said Macron. “It is an essential stone in this deeply political debate with the Turkish leaders.”

“We don’t build any great story on a lie, on the policy on a revisionism or a negationism,” he insisted in allusion to Turkey, denouncing “the shadow cast by a strategy which aims at a new expansionism in the Middle East, deny the crimes and strive to regain the strength of the past, a fantasized past, very largely.”

The French translation of the book was published in late January. This book provides a major clarification of the often blurred lines between facts and truth in regard to these events. The authenticity of the killing orders signed by Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha and the memoirs of the Ottoman bureaucrat Naim Efendi have been two of the most contested topics in this regard. The denialist school long argued that these documents and memoirs were all forgeries. The book once and for all put a stop to that fallacy.

French President Emmanuel Macron, right, speaks with Nicolas Aznavour.

Settling Karabakh Conflict

France has been one of the main guarantors for the continuation of peaceful negotiations on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Macron added.

“In the settlement process of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict France plays its role within the frames of the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship and is one of the main guarantors for the continuation of peaceful negotiations,” President Macron said.

He noted that he is in contact with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan as well as Azeri President Ilham Aliyev.

“France stands with Armenia, taking into account the democracy created by the efforts of a very young state of a millennia-old nation, as well as the achievements that are now being recorded thanks to the recent revolution,” the French President said.

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