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YEREVAN, April 24 (AFP) - 4h02 - Over one and a
half million Armenians from Armenia and abroad are
expected to commemorate the 90th anniversary of mass
killings by Ottoman Turks in Armenia's capital
Yerevan Sunday.
The gathering is likely to be on an unprecedented
scale and occurs as pressure is mounting on Turkey
to recognize the slayings as genocide.
The events being commemorated are the mass expulsion
and mass deaths of Christian Armenians in what was
then the Ottoman Empire at the time of World War I.
It was on April 24, 1915 that the Ottoman Turkish
authorities arrested some 200 Armenian community
leaders in the start of what Armenia and many other
countries say was an organized genocidal campaign to
eliminate ethnic Armenians from the Ottoman Empire.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen
perished in orchestrated killings between 1915 and
1917 as the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of
modern Turkey, was falling apart.
Ankara counters that 300,000 Armenians and thousands
of Turks were killed in "civil strife" during World
War I when the Armenians rose against their Ottoman
rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.
Ceremonies begin Sunday with the laying of a wreath
at the genocide memorial, which will be attended by
Armenian President Robert Kocharian.
A mass will be celebrated later that day in
Yerevan's Saint Gregory cathedral, as well as in
churches all over Armenia, and a minute's silence
will be observed throughout the country at 7:00 pm
(1400 GMT).
Many members of the Armenian diaspora worldwide have
converged on Yerevan to take part in the ceremonies,
at which organizers say 1.5 million participants are
expected.
The number of participants is to symbolize the
number of Armenians which Yerevan says were killed
during the massacres 90 years ago.
Over 10,000 people holding torches late Saturday
marched through the streets of Yerevan, demanding
that Turkey recognize the killings as genocide.
Meanwhile, Kocharian made a conciliatory gesture
towards Ankara, saying Yerevan would not ask for
financial compensation for the killings if Turkey
recognized them as genocidal.
"We are not talking about compensations, this is
only about a moral issue," Kocharian told Russia's
Rossiya television, which is also broadcast in
Armenia.
The row over whether or not to call the killings
genocide has embarrassed Turkey as it readies for
the start of European Union accession talks later
this year.
Armenians hopes that their mass march on Sunday will
increase the pressure, which seems to be bearing
fruit.
On Saturday, the Conference of European Churches
called on Turkey to recognize the genocide claim.
The previous day, French President Jacques Chirac
accompanied Kocharian to a Paris monument for
victims of the massacre.
And in Germany, members of parliament from across
the political spectrum appealed to Turkey to accept
the massacre of Armenians as part of its history,
saying this would help its EU aspirations.
Polish Nobel laureate and former president Lech
Walesa went further, saying Armenians had the right
to demand that the European Union bar Turkey from
joining the bloc unless it admitted to genocide.
On Tuesday Poland joined a list of 15 countries that
have officially acknowledged the killings as
genocide when its parliament passed a resolution
condemning the Armenian massacres.
The decision has drawn protest from Ankara where
officials called it "irresponsible," and said it
would hurt relations.
However, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
recently proposed the creation of a joint
Armenian-Turkish commission to review the issue,
though officials expressed confidence that the study
would confirm Turkey's current position.
AFP
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