HUNDREDS of Turks and Armenians held a vigil at Istanbul’s main Taksim square on Friday (April 24), for Armenians killed 100 years ago in what they say was a ‘genocide’, a chargeTurkey vehemently dismisses.
Under tight security hundreds of people, including artists and human rights activists, gathered around a special memorial, holding red flowers and lighting up candles.
The WWI killings is a defining element of Armenian national identity and is recognised as genocide by a number of foreign states and Western historians.
Muslim Turkey accepts many Christian Armenians died in partisan fighting beginning in 1915 but denies that up to 1.5 million were killed and that it amounted to genocide.
The two countries signed accords in October 2009 to establish diplomatic relations and open their land border, trying to overcome the legacy of the World War One mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.
The process had been deadlocked by nationalists on both sides, and Ankara and Yerevan have accused the other of trying to rewrite the texts and setting new conditions.
Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan withdrew the landmark peace accords with Turkey from parliament on February, setting further back U.S.-backed efforts to bury a century of hostility between the neighbours.
One Turkish protester in Taksim square, Osman Kavali, said the people of the two nations have managed to build a friendship in recent years despite a political setback.
“It is very important to be with the Armenians who came from abroad and to hold this vigil with them. This experience has strengthened relations between us. Maybe there has been no big changes in terms of state policy in the short term, but Armenians in Turkey and Armenians living abroad have formed a significant friendship,” he said.
Many Armenians want Turkey to recognize the 1915 mass killings as genocide and pay reparations, proposals Ankara balks at.
Turkey still rejects that the massacres amounted to genocide but, on the centennial of the killings, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu expressed his sadness over the loss of life, a major shift in tone after decades of acrimony with Armenians.
Grassroots efforts are also growing among Turks to atone for what they say are the crimes of their Ottoman ancestors.
Across Istanbul and in a handful of cities in the country’s south-east, where most of a pre-war population of some 2 million Armenians lived, makeshift memorials and rallies marked April 24, the date in 1915 that Armenians commemorate as the anniversary of the start of the genocide.
Reuters
