The Executive Council of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) released a statement on the occasion of the 108th year of the Armenian genocide.

The KNK statement released on Monday includes the following:

“Beginning on the 24th April,1915, the Ottoman Empire and their allies began a major genocide against the local Christians, together with a large number of Yezidi Kurds, living in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. This genocide was led by Ittihad and Terakki Society (The Committee of Union and Progress), the gangs of the Special Organization called Teşkîlât-ı Mahsûsa (a paramilitary organisation), the The Hamidiye Regiments/Cavalries and the officers of the Ottoman Army.

Genocide is a Crime Against Humanity by the United Nations. Article 2 (1948) of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.  In their systematic attacks directed at civilians, including murder, extermination, deportation, torture, rape (and other gender-based crimes) and enforced disappearance, the officers of the Ottoman Army committed Crimes Against Humanity (Article 7, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court).

The Armenian as well as the Assyrian-Syriac-Chaldean people were massacred with the aim of erasing their history and culture.  This genocide, and other crimes against humanity, cannot be denied. There is clear evidence of the deaths of more than one and a half million people. Indeed, the population records of the Ottoman Empire confirm this fact.

More than half a million Assyrian-Syriac-Chaldean people, and over a million Armenian people were barbarically killed in different places and hundreds of thousands of people were exiled from their places of living by the Expulsion Law, an act of Ethic Cleaning.  Tens of thousands, mostly girls and women, were forcibly converted to Islam and forced into unwanted marriages. Thousands of settlements, churches and monasteries, schools and libraries, factories were destroyed. An unknown amount of property and wealth was seized and looted. The killing and kidnapping of the Assyrian-Syriac-Chaldean and Armenian people and the destruction of their settlements and cultural and historical traces were allowed; ethnic and religious persecution was carried out.

The trauma of these people has gone unacknowledged by the Republic of Turkey for the past one hundred and eight years. The bitter memories of this trauma have become a tragedy for new generations of people.

Since the Republic of Turkey, the heir of the Ottoman Empire, has refused to accept this genocide, it is implicated as the inheritor and partner of this crime against humanity.

On the occasion of the 108th year of the genocide, we, as the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), once again strongly condemn the genocide of 1915 and call on the Republic of Turkey to recognize this genocide and fulfill all obligations to the people who were the victims of this crime against humanity.”