Garo Paylan, an ethnic Armenian member of Turkey’s parliament, on Tuesday pledged to continue fighting for an official Turkish recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
Paylan is among 1,800 Armenians from around the world who converged on Yerevan to take part in the latest government-organized conference on Armenia’s relations with its worldwide Diaspora. The conference got underway on Monday in the presence of President Serzh Sarkisian and other senior Armenian officials.
“Turkey is again in a dark period,” Paylan declared in his speech at the forum. “And we know very well that such tendencies lead to crimes. A great crime, a genocide, was perpetrated 102 years ago and that crime is continuing because a crime that goes unpunished causes new crimes.”
“I do believe that one day we will achieve justice leading to the recognition of the genocide and I will continue to fight for it,” he added, sparking rapturous applause.
Paylan, 44, is one of the three Istanbul Armenians who were elected to the Turkish parliament from different political parties in 2015. He is affiliated with the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which is in opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The HDP is the only major Turkish party to have recognized the World War One-era mass killings of some 1.5 million Armenians as genocide. Successive Turkish governments have for decades claimed that Ottoman Armenians died in smaller numbers and not as a result of a government policy of extermination.
“The HDP knows that without facing up to the genocide Turkey can neither solve the Kurdish problem nor establish democracy,” said Paylan.
Paylan, who has previously run an Armenian school in Istanbul, pledged to challenge Ankara’s genocide denial shortly after being elected to the Turkish parliament. In April 2016, he read out on the parliament floor the names of Armenian intellectuals who were rounded up in 1915 and subsequently executed by the Ottoman authorities at the start of the genocide.
He was suspended from the legislature for three days in January after referring the “genocides” of Armenians and other Ottoman minorities. In July, the Turkish parliament passed a law that banned its members from mentioning the Armenian genocide in the chamber.
Armenia’s Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian praised Paylan’s activities when the two men met in Yerevan on Monday. Nalbandian’s press office said they discussed, among other things, the “resolution of regional problems.”
Paylan said in his speech that only “a democratic Turkey” would agree to normalize relations with Armenia. “Unless Turkey becomes a democracy we could wait [for that] for decades,” he said.