La Stampa: “march of death” for hundreds of thousand of Armenians in 1915-1918 was Genocide

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ “Two problems painfully press on the image and stability of present-day Turkey, born 84 years ago as result of Kemalist revolution. These are the past, which doesn’t want to fade, and the present, which threatens. The past returns again and again, casting a black shadow of mass killings of Armenians during World War I, on Ankara. The present threatens with rebellious and belligerent Kurdish minority,” says an article titled “Armenians – apple of discord between Bush and Turkey” published in La Stampa Italian newspaper.“The cruel past and alarming present tend to unite, forming a crisis which can call into question Turkey’s traditional strategic ties with the U.S. and NATO. In addition, the current dissension with Washington and Paris can block Turkey’s thorny path toward the European Union. An explosive and critical mass is being accumulated in Europe-aspired Turkey. And on the top of this mass appears one word – Genocide, the tabooed and defamatory word. This awful word has pealed in the Democrat-dominated U.S. Congress as a final verdict that cannot be appealed. This word has come to define the Armenian “marches of death” that extended from the Anatolian northeast to Syrian deserts in 1915-1918. The Ottoman Empire had no mercy on children, women and old people. This slaughter is described in historical documents, bulletins, testimony of witnesses, novels by Franz Werfel and recently shot films,” the article says. “Many historians say it was the first genocide of the 20th century, maybe because Young Turks, redial reformators and patriots, their powerful military heirs and secular governments controlled by them, never recognized the fact of the Genocide. They always denied this terrifying word and chilling statistics which stubbornly reminded of 1 million 800 thousand killed Armenians. They kept on insisting that the casualties reached 200 thousand only as result of the chaos inherent to war. Since those times, the Turkish authorities have followed state historical revisionism. The incumbent Erdogan and Gul-led Islamist government is not an exception,” La Stampa reports.