YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan again did not explicitly condemn the masterminds and perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey as Armenia marked its 110th anniversary on Thursday, April 24.
Tens of thousands of people marched to the Tsitsernakaberd memorial in Yerevan to commemorate the genocide victims. The daylong procession followed an official wreath-laying ceremony at the hilltop memorial led by Pashinyan, parliament speaker Alen Simonyan and President Vahagn Khachaturyan.
Catholicos Karekin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church increasingly at odds with Pashinyan’s government, was again excluded from the annual ceremony. Karekin and other top clergymen held a prayer service at Tsitsernakaberd later in the morning.
The genocide began with mass arrests on April 24, 1915 of Armenian intellectuals and activists in Constantinople. An estimated 1.5 million Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were massacred or starved to death in the following months and years. About three dozen nations, including Russia, France, Germany and the United States, have recognized the genocide.
“Today we remember the innocent victims of the Armenian Genocide, who fell victim to the massacres and mass deportations that raged since 1915,” Pashinyan said in a statement issued on the occasion.
In contrast with his past statements, Pashinyan did not mention the regime of the so-called Young Turks that ruled the crumbling empire during that time. He also continued to put the emphasis on the Armenian phrase “Meds Yeghern” (Great Crime), rather than the term “genocide,” in reference to the events of 1915.
