Nearly 10,000 people marched on Friday, April 23, in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, to commemorate the massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
The crowd, carrying torches, marched from the city center to the memorial dedicated to the victims. Some demonstrators chanted patriotic songs, others drummed, noted a journalist from Agence France-Presse (AFP). Activists from the nationalist and opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), who led the procession, also burned Turkish and Azerbaijani flags.
This march, organized every year on the eve of April 24, the day the massacres began in 1915, comes after Armenia’s defeat this fall in the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, against Azerbaijan supported by Turkey.
An expected Biden ‘announcement’
It also comes as the President of the United States, Joe Biden, could recognize the massacres of Armenians during the First World War as a genocide, according to the American dailies New York Times and Wall Street Journal. A State Department spokeswoman said on Friday that a “Announcement” was expected Saturday.
The Armenian genocide is already recognized by some thirty countries and the community of historians. It is estimated that between 1.2 million and 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire at that time. But Turkey refuses the use of the term “genocide” and rejects any desire for extermination, evoking reciprocal massacres against a backdrop of civil war and famine which has left hundreds of thousands of deaths in both camps.
Recognition by Washington risks further straining current tensions with NATO member Ankara. Armenia has for years demanded financial compensation from Turkey and the restoration of the property rights of the descendants of the victims of the massacres, which is called, in Armenian, Meds Yeghern (“The great crime”).