Recognition of Armenian Genocide by Kurds
Kurdish Parliament In Exile Recognizes Genocide
BRUSSELS-The Kurdish Parliament in Exile, passed a resolution recognizing and marking the Armenian Genocide Thursday. Below is the entire text of that resolution, which is being reprinted in its entirety and without any editorial posturing. To The Public Opinion
In Kurdistan, together with the Kurdish people, live Assyrian-Syrians as well as Armenians.
Invasion, occupation and division of Kurdistan, has not only affected the Kurds but also the Assyrian-Syrians as well as the Armenian peoples. Imposed colonialist policies have set these people against the Kurdish people and against each other, have created clashes and forced deportations and exiles. In our country, by setting the peoples against each other, the bloodiest imposed period of colonialist policies is 1915 and the few years following that.
On April 24, 1915, the decision of mass genocide and annihilation of the Assyrian-Syrian and the Armenian peoples was taken by the Ottoman Empire.
The blueprints of and the logistics for this genocide being prepared ahead of time, they employed Hamidiye Alaylari from Kurdish tribes (Similar to the present day Village Guards system who kill our people) to commit history’s, until then unknown, Genocide. In this Genocide, millions of Armenians and Assyrian-Syrians were killed, and millions others were deported from their homes and land and scattered to the four corners of the world.
The Turkish State which practices policies of setting peoples and people of diverse opinions against each other, still pursues the same repulsive policies at the end of the 20th century. Similar to setting-up Alevis and Sunnis against each other, they set-up the Kurdish people against each other through their creation, the Village Guards, which consist of Kurdish Jahshs. Separately, through their diverse assaults to annihilate the Kurdish people, they are registering new pages in the annals of genocides.
The Turkish State regime, from history to our days, has worked against the peoples, as if a guilty party, and with her committed genocides has changed the demographics of Anatolia causing the demise of many cultures-civilizations. The same policies are being applied in Kurdistan today. I call upon the world public opinion to become aware of this Turkish State policies and vehemently oppose it.
Today is the 82nd anniversary of the genocide committed against the Assyrian-Syrian and Armenian peoples. Sharing the agony caused by this process, I find the Ottoman State and their collaborators the Hamidiye Alaylari, formed by some Kurdish tribes, responsible for this crime before history and I condemn them with abhorrence. Zubeyir Aydar Chairman of the Executive Committee
Source: Asbarez On-Line 97/4/29
PKK Chairman's letter to Kocharian
Abdullah Ocalan President Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
10 April 1998
The President-elect of Armenia Robert Kocharian
Dear Mr President
I am writing to congratulate you on your election as President of Armenia and to wish you every success in forming your new government. I want particularly to wish you well in implementing democratic reforms and a political solution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.
I also welcome and endorse the passage of a resolution in the Belgian Senate calling on the Turkish government in Ankara to recognise the reality of the Armenian holocaust perpetrated by the last Ottoman regime in 1915-19.
This resolution of 26 March, I believe, can not be treated as a transient episode but is of paramount significance in the protracted campaign to end the political amnesia about 1915, deliberately contrived by Turkish and foreign governments in the past in order to perpetrate the carve-up of Asis Minor and the Mid-East by the imperial powers at the Lausanne Conference of 1923.
The massacres during the First World War which shocked the civilised world then became a precedent for an even more appalling and destructive demonstration of genocide of the Jewish people by the German Nazis in the Second World War. Let us recall Hitler’s response to a critic of the "final solution" of the Jewish problem: "Who complained about the Armenians?"
Now, when the spectre of ethnic cleansing is once again stalking the Balkans the courageous stand of the Belgian Senate, we feel, must concentrate the minds of Turks, Armenians, Greeks and Kurds alike the necessity for a wide- ranging discussion and fresh analysis of the causes of the 1915 events as a precondition for a genuine reconcilliation of ethnic groups and nations and the settling of territorial disputes through negotiation. Such a process, we are firmly convinced, will help Turkish-Armenian and Greek relations.
Our movement will continue to support all efforts to set in train a genuine dialogue between all contending parties with the self-evident proviso that the Kurdish claim to self- determination and freedom will not be predujiced - as it was in Lausanne.
We urge the new governments of Armenia and Turkey to seize the historic opportunity.
We look forward to future co-operation with your government and the Armenian people and wish you all the success needed to move the peace process forward.
In the name of peace, freedom and reconcilliation, we remain
Yours respectfully,
Abdullah Ocalan
Kurdish newspaper apologizes to Armenian people
13.05.2005 14:31
YEREVAN (YERKIR) - On its website, the Kurdish newspaper Ozgur Gundem, on behalf of the Kurdish people has offered its apologies to the Armenian people for the years of silence and complicity in the Armenian Genocide, Armenpress reported, citing Marmara, an Armenian-language newspaper published in Istanbul, Turkey.
The paper has described the great suffering of the Armenian people in stunning words, Marmara wrote. It has also apologized for its reluctance to widely discuss the issue.