ANKARA (Armenian Weekly)—A founding member of Turkey’s ruling AK Party called the Armenian genocide a “geno-deportation” and “personally” apologized in an interview with the Turkish daily newspaper Radikal.
İsmet Uçma, a member of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly, added: “Their pain is our pain.”
The parliament member noted that although the Committee of Union and Progress was responsible for what happened, he personally apologized for the suffering of the Armenians during what he called the “geno-deportations.”
Uçma said that although violence was indeed employed against the Armenian deportees, what happened to the Armenians was not genocide, but a “geno-deportation,” the violent deportation of an entire ethnic group, because if the perpetrators wanted to commit genocide, “annihilation methods employed by the Spanish and Portuguese in South America, or those employed by the Americans against Native-Americans, or the Germans against the Jews would have been used.”
The very annihilation methods that Uçma was referring to were indeed employed against the Armenians.
Asked about reparations, Uçma said that he finds land demands absurd, although he noted that no one should live is someone else’s house. In this context, he said, the government’s initiative to return some confiscated property to non-Muslims was a positive step.
The Turkish government has promised to return less than 10 percent of properties confiscated since the 30′s from non-Muslim minorities. No properties confiscated during the Armenian genocide have been returned.
Kurdish Parliamentarian to Push for Commemoration Day
In a more meaningful gesture, and according to reports, Kurdish Parliamentarian Sırrı Süreyya Önder is working on bringing a motion declaring April 24 a “Day of Mourning and Sharing the Pain of the Armenian victims of 1915.”
Önder is a member of the pro-Kurdish BDP in Istanbul. He is a filmmaker and columnist who was elected into parliament in 2011.
Adding insult to injury won’t help.
Returning our stolen assets with compensation and sincerely apologizing for the GENOCIDE will get the ball rolling.
we do not accept your nopology.
Can turcks be this ignorent.
mr. founder of another ignorent turkish party. no matter how and what you call it. your grandparents wiped out the hole Armenian population living unther their rule. killing them or as you put it deporting them to the deset, with only one objective in their mind. to empty the land from its endegenous poeple. if thats not GENOCIDE what is?
if you and your seljuk poeple don’t know the meaning of GENOCIDE. GOOGLE IT.
and all the land you aquired as a resalt of your ‘GENO-DEPORTATION’according toUN resolution on GRNOCIDE you have to give it back. and we wont stop demanding untill you do.
take this to your party mr. founder.
thank you mr.ismet ucma we need more brave turks like you so you don’t deny what happened to the armenians it’s about time 97 years of suffering is too long
“geno-deportation,” what’s that? never heard of it, NEW invention? how Uçma finds land demands absurd, he must be out of his mind if he thinks recognition of Genocide comes for Free.
Gamts gamts guh hasneenk mer nbadageen. Arants Hai Tahdeen asghadankeen vsdah em ays marte koneh ice chapeh cher eser.
thats not good enough! in fact thats an insult to the memory of the victims. during abdul hamids reign armenians were killed in their homes and villages. the europeans and americans made a huge fuss to save armenians then. so when the young turks killed the armenians again in 1915, they took them out of their villages and homes and killed them in the mountainsides, canyons, fields or deserts to try to avoid international scrutiny.
in some of these instances the turkish civilians were allowed to take part, in almost all instances the turks eagerly bought the armenians belongings for next to nothing because they knew armenians were being sent to their deaths. turkish civilians cut open the stomaches of corpses looking for gold or jewels that might have been swallowed. after taking whatever they could they moved into our homes.
WHAT IM TRYING TO SAY IS NEVER FORGET – THE TURKISH CIVILAIN POPULATION IS JUST AS GUILTY AS THE GOVT
the lies used by the turkish govt today are the same lies used in 1915 because in 1915 they were under international pressure.
armenians were raped, abducted, slashed, burned alive, hung, drowned (to the point that corpses dammed the euphrates river and the river altered its course), sexual depravities that i couldnt explain,
How stupid do these stupid Turks think we Armenians are? They are finding themselves in a situation where they can no longer fabricate fallacies about the Armenian Genocide and slowly but surely are feeling the pinch and now they want to soften things up by making up words to describe the Armenian Genocide to avoid prosecution.
As they say, a leopard never changes its spots. These mild-mannered and soft-spoken Turks are trying to trick Armenians into believing that being shot in the head or dying from exhaustion and starvation is more humane than being stabbed to death. The ultimate goal of this pre-planned and system-sponsored deportation of the Armenian natives from their Western Armenian homeland, in today’s Eastern Anatolia, by the Turks was to cleanse the occupied Armenian homeland from the Armenians and establish the region as a Turkish homeland for Turks only after their numerous defeats in the Balkans.
Armenians should never fall into such traps because the Armenian Genocide of 1915 did not occur in a vacuum. It was the continuation of the Hamidian massacres of 1890s, in which the Turks cunningly also employed the Kurds in their murderous plans, with the ultimate goal of driving Armenians out of their homeland. The only difference being that in the 1890s, during the reign of Sultan Abduhamit II, some 300,000 Armenians fell victim to Pan-Turkism and in 1915 and under the cover of WWI and under direct orders from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), also known as the Young Turks, 1.5 million Armenians were butchered, their ancient civilization destroyed and their homeland confiscated.
True justice for the Armenians means the acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide, reparation and compensation in billions to the Armenian nation and the return of all Armenian provinces to the Armenian people. Accept nothing less!
It is laudable that the ruling Islamist party speaks thus. Turkey is moving in the right direction. I feel I can sit down and have a friendly conversation with this man without a trace of antagonism bothering us. Eventually our perceptions would merge. It’s inevitable.
you poor armenians keep demanding and keep saying your lies.. it seems like you succeeded to trick one of the deputy in 97 years,, we have 548 more.
you will understand that it was not a genocide one day…