The Diplomat
The Euskal Herria Bildu Parliamentary Group has called on the Government to “publicly recognize” as “a crime against humanity” the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against more than 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.
In a Non-Law Proposition (NLP) presented last March 24 by Deputy Jon Iñarritu for debate in the Foreign Affairs Committee of Congress, Bildu recalls that the Armenian genocide was “the first extermination, scientifically planned, organized and executed in the history of mankind”, despite which “some sectors, such as the Turkish authorities, continue to deny and relativize the existence of this fact”.
The text recalls that, between 1915 and 1923, “the so-called Young Turks committed a crime against humanity, deporting and executing more than one and a half million Armenians, because of their ethnic origin”, a massacre that has become known as “the Armenian Genocide”. After World War I, the NLP continues, Turkey’s own post-war courts sentenced several Young Turks to death for the extermination on the basis of evidence collected by the Turkish military itself and other evidence collected by countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom or Germany. Also, “the sources of the time leave no doubt about the barbarism committed especially against the Armenian minority, as well as against the Assyrian and Pontic Greek, among others.”
“Despite all the evidence, Turkey has always denied the existence of such an event, arguing that the deaths did not respond to an extermination plan, but were the product of interethnic strife, disease and hunger, produced during the confusing period of the First World War,” denounces the motion. The Turkish State not only incurs in “denial and relativization” of the facts, but “punishes criminally the affirmation of the existence of this Genocide” and even “exerts intolerable pressures on all those States that have deigned to recognize and condemn it,” it continues.
“This Genocide has been recognized by several States, such as France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Lebanon, the United States and Argentina among others”, the text continues. “Similarly, organizations such as the UN and the European Union have recognized this extermination” and the European Parliament established in 1987 – and reaffirmed in 2002, 2004 and 2015 – that “the events then suffered by the Armenian population constitute a genuine extermination, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in December 1948.”
“In short, in order for this malicious crime not to be forgotten and to heal the wounds that, even today, persist and cause a tense relationship between states such as Turkey and Armenia, it is necessary and fair to make a declaration by the Spanish State of recognition of the Armenian Genocide,” adds Bildu.
For all these reasons, and by virtue of the Proposition not of Law, “the Spanish Congress of Deputies publicly recognizes the Armenian Genocide as a crime against humanity that produced the extermination of more than 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923″ and urges the Government to “take the appropriate measures in relation to the commemoration of this tragedy so that its memory helps to honor the memory of the victims and to prevent crimes against humanity”.
