On April 24th we commemorate the genocide of the Armenians and other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. On that day 106 years ago, the gruesome crime began with the arrest and deportation of Armenian politicians, intellectuals and artists in Istanbul on the orders of the Ottoman Interior Minister Mehmet Talat. It was the prelude to a state extermination campaign in which a total of 1.5 million people were killed in 1915/1916. DIE LINKE bows to the victims in silent mourning.
It has only been five years since the German Bundestag passed a joint resolution to recognize the crimes of the Ottoman Empire as a German war allied as genocide without any ifs or buts. The vote on June 2, 2016 was a victory for justice and a victory for the Enlightenment – and at the same time it was a break with the German raison d’être of concealing the imperial complicity in these terrible crimes.
Today we remember the deportees, whose names hardly anyone knows, the writer Rupen Zartarian from Diyarbakir, the poet Yeruhan from Istanbul and the novelist Dikran Chökürian from Gümüşhane, for example, who were shamefully murdered. With them, part of the culture of the Ottoman Empire, part of the culture of the world, was wiped out.
Crimes of the autocrats Erdogan and Aliyev today
This April 24th is also a day of protest against the continued denial of the genocide by President Erdogan and his Islamist-fascist AKP-MHP government in NATO member Turkey. DIE LINKE condemns the expulsion and murder of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in the course of the campaign of the Azerbaijani autocrat family Aliyev last autumn – with the active help of the Turkish army and killer drones supplied by Erdogan, which he was able to develop with German know-how.
It is an unbearable mockery of the youngest Armenian war dead, like the victims of the genocide 106 years ago, when Erdogan celebrates a “glorious victory” at the military parade in Baku and raves about Enver Pasha, one of the main people responsible for the Armenian genocide in 1915/1916 , while his despot partner Aliyev marches in the war museum in military uniform along an avenue made of the helmets of dead Armenian soldiers and corrupt lobbyists gloss over the Azerbaijani regime, including the new expulsion of the Armenians.
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