April 24, 2026
Lydia Margossian – Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Western Armenia
We are here to commemorate the victims of a genocide that claimed 2 million lives in Western Armenia, that is, in the territory of an indigenous people with more than 10,000 years of history.
The genocide of the Armenian nation, carried out through the barbarity of three successive Turkish governments within a phased program, has, in reality, never ceased to this day.
An indigenous people living peacefully on their ancestral land was massacred and fragmented by the Turkish yataghan from 1894 to 1923, turning into an orphaned nation.
The uprooting and exile of Armenians of Western Armenia as a result of the genocide are extremely cruel, leading to forced assimilation and the loss of the living memory of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
Genocidal programs continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in many cities and provinces of Western Armenia, subjecting our population to massacres, and recently reached Artsakh, where the indigenous population was subjected to ethnic cleansing corresponding to the legal definition of genocide.
However, the Turkish-Azerbaijani methods have changed: the yataghan used a century ago has been replaced by drones and cluster munitions—the same types of weapons used today against the Palestinian population.
The flood of fire and iron unleashed on 150,000 inhabitants of Artsakh claimed 5,000 lives and left 10,000 people disabled, marking one of the first real tests of this new technological warfare directed against indigenous populations.
As a result of these successive genocidal phases, our nation has been destroyed for several generations, its population subjected to the yoke of invaders from Central Asia, its heritage destroyed or illegally appropriated, and its forests burned under phosphorus bombs.
To the “crime of crimes” over more than a century has been added the crime of the illegal appropriation of state sovereignty of Western Armenia, as the Turkish state has illegally occupied it from the perspective of international law since 1920. This means that the genocide against Armenians took place within the territory of the recognized state of Armenia of 1920, whose legal successor is Western Armenia.
The restless and meaningless actions of certain leaders of the Yerevan regime, ready to concede parts of a reduced territory by recognizing Western Armenia as Turkish and Artsakh as Azerbaijani, cannot silence the voices rising from the graves of our ancestors calling on new generations to apply international law.
What is this international law, if not the necessary implementation of the arbitral award of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, which defines the full sovereignty of Western Armenia within its borders?
What is international law, if not the application of the Armenian provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres, which remain in force?
I would like to once again thank the representatives of the states present here and all elected officials of the French Republic.
You are the continuation of distinguished French figures such as Anatole France and Jean Jaurès, who stood by the Armenian people at the first moments of their tragic fate.
Ladies and gentlemen, Armenian national history will forever remember your names.
By your presence, you affirm the right of peoples to self-determination, restoring the dignity of the United Nations Charter.
By standing alongside indigenous peoples, including ours, you affirm their right to self-determination and contribute to human dignity.
I thank all the states, including France, that voted in favor of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as those that officially recognized the Armenia of 1920, that is, Western Armenia.
Here in France, occupation has been a phase of history, and I would like to commend the representatives of the resistance movement, as well as the decision of the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, to recognize the sons of Western Armenia—survivors of the genocide or their descendants—who sacrificed their lives for the liberation of France and the world, by transferring Missak and Mélinée Manouchian to the Panthéon.
The occupation of Western Armenia will also be only a phase in the long history of the Armenian people, so that happy days may finally come for the Armenian nation, with the return of the descendants of genocide survivors to their ancestral lands.
Long live France,
And long live free, sovereign, and independent Western Armenia.
Thank you.