April 23, 2023, Apostolic Church of Geneva, the Armenian community of Geneva were present to commemorate the victims of the genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people.

Speech of Arménag APRAHAMIAN  

President of the National Council of Western Armenia

“Father Gusan Aljanyan, Mrs. Lydia Margossian Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Western Armenia, His Excellency Vartan Sirmakesh, Consul General of the Republic of Armenia, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Parliament of Western Armenia, Ladies and Gentlemen, dear compatriots and friends.

And to all of you, for your loyalty and solidarity on this day of commemoration of the victims of the genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people from 1894 to the present.

We are together to recall that it took 30 years of execution from 1894 to 1923 by successive Turkish occupation governments to implement an extermination plan against the indigenous Western Armenians with a civilization dating back thousands of years on their ancestral territory,

And yet, today, we are also together to condemn the barbaric acts that are taking place before us in Artsakh by the gradual, gradual suffocation of 120,000 Armenians as a result of the blockade since December 12, 2022 perpetrated by Azerbaijan, from which we present excerpts:

Cases of two-way movement of people along the Stepanakert-Goris highway (Berdzor road) have decreased by about 183 times.

About 12 times less vital goods were imported than they should have been (4,089 tons instead of 48,800 tons).

A total of 3,900 people, including 570 children, were unable to return home because of the blockade.

1060 citizens were deprived of the opportunity to solve their health problems through surgery.

Azerbaijan totally or partially cut off gas supply from Armenia to Artsakh for 56 days.

Electricity supply from Armenia to Artsakh was completely interrupted for 93 days.

According to preliminary estimates, approximately 10,300 people lost their jobs and source of income, representing more than 50 percent of private sector workers.

The disruption of gas and electricity supplies has led to unplanned deforestation, cutting down an additional 7,400 trees, which in turn will create problems in ensuring a healthy environment.

The country’s economy has suffered a loss of US$230 million.

A number of rights violations are most acute among representatives of vulnerable groups, namely: 30,000 children, 9,000 people with disabilities, 20,000 elderly people, 60,000 women (women and girls) and 15,000 displaced people. 

This year, I wanted to give you figures to illustrate the terrorist acts of the Baku authorities against the indigenous Armenian population.

But I would also like to read you a video message spread on social networks of an Azeri terrorist infiltrated on the territory of Armenia: 

“We have shed the blood of Armenians, we have beheaded Armenians. We are still fine, we are not dead. If we die, let them judge us, we are not traitors to the fatherland. The “we” expresses that there are many of them in these operations.

I myself was present in Artsakh on April 10, 1992 when Azeri terrorists exterminated women, old people and children of the village of Maragha, a massacre of 40 civilians, just like that! For nothing. 

And after all this, the administrative court in France in 2019, one year before the war started by Azerbaijan, would come to explain to us that the charters of friendship between French cities and cities of Artsakh have no reason to exist. We do not understand anymore. Who is preparing the ground for whom?  

Also, a fine pedagogue, President Macron comes to explain to us that we must accept the dismantling of the integral Armenia of 1920 by accepting the Turkish and Soviet occupation of 1921 which allowed in 1991 the formation of a new Armenian republic on the basis of the declaration of Alma Ata.

All of this was relayed by a part of the media in France which did not hesitate to present the Armenians as separatists. The indigenous Armenians, descendants of the genocide survivors, would therefore be separatists within their own liberated homeland?

It is as if we were to declare that Paris, the capital of France, occupied by Germany from June 1940 to August 1944, should be returned to Germany, and that the victims and resisters of the Nazi regime should be separatists or terrorists! 

Europe, by abandoning the Armenians, Western Armenia and Artsakh, has created a new jurisprudence, the jurisprudence of an unpunished crime of genocide. Is this what we are going to pass on to our younger generations?

So yes, “genocide against territory”, the bonus of massacres continues before you. The genocide of the Armenians has never been a memorial or historical issue, as some people would have us believe, it is a current issue, the gas pipelines that cross the territory of occupied Western Armenia supply Europe and France.

An unremedied genocide continues over time, therefore one will remember Hitler’s statement before invading Poland in 1939, “Who remembers today the annihilation of the Armenians!”.

It is particularly against these attempts at annihilation that Western Armenia, which I preside over, works in its daily struggle.

Indeed, without values, without memory, without justice and without reparations, then unquestionably some states will bend before barbarism and others before conflicts of interest, to the detriment of any right and any justice.

An indigenous nation that does not want to die, will not die!

Thank you”

I thank you for this 

For 24.04.2023

Armenag APRAHAMIAN, President of the National Council of Western Armenia