‘Where is Our Nuremberg?’ Asks Serzh Sargsyan in Deir ez-Zor

Armenian President Serzh Sargysan, while on a three-day official visit to Syria, issued an address while in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor.

The statement, translated and released by the RA presidential office, reads, in part, as follows:

“Your Eminencies,
“Ladies and Gentlemen,

“I am here today since I could not but be here. It is the greatest grief of my nation that has brought me here, the grief of the first genocide of the 20th century and the greatest disgrace of the civilized humanity. Up to this moment, in the 21st century, the stigma of that disgrace still remains on the foreheads of all those who have turned the denial of the evident facts into their policy, turned it into their bargaining chip and into their lifestyle and norm of behavior.

“In the desert of Deir ez-Zor the most monstrous acts of the tragedy had taken place, and it is neither possible to articulate the particulars of that tragedy in the language of human beings, nor am I going do that since these particulars are well-known even to those who publicly deny the veracity of the Genocide. Bereft of home and property, bereft of children and parents, bereft of health and the last hope, and finally bereft of the most important — their homeland, these people were doomed to lose the last thing they had — their life in accordance with the state orchestrated and meticulously developed plan of extermination.

“Quite often historians and journalists soundly compare Deir ez-Zor with Auschwitz saying that ‘Deir ez Zor is the Auschwitz of the Armenians.’ I think that the chronology forces us to formulate the facts in a reverse way: ‘Auschwitz is the Deir ez-Zor of the Jews.’ Only a generation later the humanity witnessed the Deir ez-Zor of the Jews. Today, as the President of the Republic of Armenia, the homeland of all Armenians, I am here to ask: ‘Where and when will be held our Nuremberg?’”