European Parliament votes to call Armenian deaths genocide

The European Parliament backed a motion yesterday calling the massacre a century ago of up to 1.5 million Armenians a genocide, days after Pope Francis used the same term.

Although the resolution repeated language previously adopted by the parliament in 1987, it could raise tensions with Turkey, whose president, Tayyip Erdogan, said even before the vote took place that he would ignore the result.

After the vote, the Turkish foreign ministry accused the parliament of attempting to rewrite history.

Muslim Turkey agrees Christian Armenians were killed in clashes with Ottoman soldiers that began on April 15th, 1915, when Armenians lived in the empire ruled by Istanbul, but denies that this amounted to genocide.

Some western historians and foreign parliaments also refer to the mass killings as genocide.

Voting by a show of hands, MEPs overwhelmingly backed the motion stating that the “tragic events that took place in 1915-1917 against the Armenians in the territory of the Ottoman Empire represent a genocide”.

Pope Francis sparked a diplomatic row last Sunday by calling the killings “the first genocide of the 20th century”. His remarks prompted Turkey to summon the Vatican’s ambassador to the Holy See and to recall its own.

The European Parliament sprang to the Pope’s defence, commending the message the pontiff delivered at the weekend.

Reuters