The ongoing controversy about the Armenian Genocide
When on June 2nd, 2016, the German Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 a genocide, the Turkish government angrily denounced the vote as “null and void,”. And Prime Minister Erdogan called his ambassador in Germany back to Ankara for consultations. Fear spread among German political leaders that Erdogan might retaliate and unleash tens of thousands of refugees that Turkey currently hosts.
Robert Fisk is the award-winning Middle East correspondent of the London Independent. He has reported from the Middle East since 1976, speaks arabic and lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
Fisk wrote on June 2, 2016 in the Independent that Germany now joined France and Russia and at least 18 other nations who accept the Armenian genocide as a fact of history, along with Pope Francis – with the US remaining the sole major exception.
Fisk was the only journalist who pointed out that the refugees and migrants, who Europe tried to keep out of come, in many cases, from the very towns and deserts in which the Turks committed their acts of horror against the Armenians 101 years ago.
Fisk writes that “The skulls and bones of Armenians still lie in the sands south of the Turkish border which Isis now controls; and when al-Nusrah captured parts of Deir ez-Zor, they blew up the Armenian cathedral of the Syrian city, took the bones of genocide victims from the vaults and scattered them in the streets.” end quote.
In the context of these events here is a talk that Robert Fisk gave to Armenian Americans in San Francisco in 2001 on the 85th anniversary of the Armenian Holocaust – as he chooses to define it. He had just been attacked in the media for using that word.
Robert Fisk, author and Middle East correspondent of the London Independent, spoke before the Armenian National Committee in San Francisco in March 2001.
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