The Russian and French presidents and representatives of about 60 other states will arrive in Yerevan this week to participate in official events marking the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey, it was announced on Monday.
A top aide to President Serzh Sarkisian coordinating the planned ceremonies said that Vladimir Putin and Francois Hollande will be joined by their counterparts from Serbia and Cyprus.
“They are coming as representatives of their states and presidents,” the official, Vigen Sargsian, said of the other foreign delegations due in Yerevan.
Sargsian could not say who will represent the United States at the commemorations. He cited only a statement by the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Richard Mills, saying that President Barack Obama will personally appoint the official U.S. delegation. The White House has made no announcements to that effect yet.
The visiting delegations will join President Sarkisian and other Armenian leaders on Friday in laying wreathes at the genocide memorial on the Tsitsernakabert hill overlooking the city center. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Armenians will walk to the memorial in the following hours. The adjacent Museum-Institute of the Armenian Genocide, which has been expanded in the last several months, will reopen its doors to visitors in time for that ceremony.
The ceremony will take place the day after a collective canonization by the Armenian Apostolic Church of some 1.5 million Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. Later on Thursday the U.S.-Armenian rock band System of A Down will give a concert in Yerevan’s central Republic Square dedicated to the genocide centennial.
Sarkisian has invited dozens of foreign leaders, including Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to the ceremonies. Erdogan, whose government strongly denies the genocide, has not replied to a corresponding letter from Sarkisian which Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian handed to him in Ankara in October.
Instead, Erdogan invited his Armenian counterpart in January to the annual commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli that began on April 25, 1915, one day after hundreds of Armenian intellectuals were rounded up Constantinople in what was the start of the genocide. The Turkish government scheduled this year’s Gallipoli event for April 24 in an apparent effort to deflect international attention from the ceremonies in Yerevan.
Pointing to the timing of the event, Sarkisian swiftly rejected the “indecent” invitation. He said that Ankara is thus sticking to its “traditional policy” of genocide denial.