James Debono
The government intends to institute a day of remembrance in which parliament will rise to commemorate the victims of genocide and crimes against humanity.
But the government has no intention of tabling a motion to condemn the Armenian genocide, as proposed by Labour’s development aid spokesperson Noel Farrugia in a parliamentary question last week.
Foreign Minister Tonio Borg insists that Malta is under no obligation to condemn the Armenian genocide, but would be abiding by a 21-year-old resolution approved by the European Parliament calling on all EU member states “to dedicate a day to the memory of the genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated in the 20th century, specifically against the Armenians and Jews.”

Farrugia asked Tonio Borg whether the government intends to present a motion to condemn the Armenian genocide, committed by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917.
According to most historians, up to a million and a quarter Armenians were massacred after 1915, as they were forced out of Turkey towards Syria by a government that feared they sympathised with Russia, which was at that time at war with Turkey.
A substantial part of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was expropriated.
Turkey strongly denies that the Armenians were the victim of genocide and has reacted harshly when resolutions condemning the Armenian genocide were approved by parliaments in 21 different countries.
According to Turkey “only” 300,000 people died in the conflict between Turks and Armenian and that many of these had died from starvation, disease or clashes between Armenian groups and the Turks.
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide describes genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Russia, Canada, and Turkey’s regional rival Greece, have deemed the Armenian slaughter a genocide.
France, which has a very large Armenian community, became the first major western European nation to condemn the Armenian genocide in 1998.
In 2006 the French parliament even approved a resolution making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered “genocide” at the hands of the Turks.

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