Armenians launch large campaign against Turkey

ANKARA

REUTERS Photo.

U.S. Armenians have launched one of their largest donation campaigns to “help bring down Ankara’s last firewalls against the justice Turkey owes the Armenian nation,” the biggest and most influential U.S. Armenian group said on the weekend.

Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) chairman Ken Hachikian urged Armenians to donate funds to strengthen Armenia and pass the “Armenian genocide” bill pending in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

ANCA executive director Aram Hamparian also said there was a quite good linkage between such campaigns and “the ability of reformers to implement meaningful remedies to punish the guilty and restore the rights of those victimized by these crimes.”

 “American condemnation in the 1980s of apartheid in South Africa, a major U.S. Cold War ally, was the first step toward a U.S. policy of actively seeking to reverse this hateful policy,” Hamparian said as an example.

“The public’s understanding of the truth and the perpetrator’s eventual acceptance of its wrongs represented a powerful step toward the justice required to remedy great offenses against humanity,” he said.
 “These examples, while not perfect analogies, shed some light as to how recognition of the Armenian genocide by the U.S. government and the acceptance by the Turkish government of its responsibilities for this crime can, very meaningfully, help pave the way for a truthful and just resolution of the Armenian genocide,” Hamparian said.

 “The Turkish government understands this reality. Its leaders, intelligence officers and diplomats are well aware of the stakes. Denial is their last firewall against justice. That’s why Ankara devotes millions of dollars and a growing share of its political capital to preventing U.S. and international recognition of the Armenian genocide,” he said.

 “And that’s why we need your help in generating the Armenian American political power to both end U.S. complicity in Ankara’s denial of the Armenian genocide, and to finally break the back of the Turkish state and society’s obstruction of the truth and justice owed to the Armenian nation,” Hamparian said.