On Saturday night, thousands gathered at Glendale City Hall to call for an official recognition of the killings as a genocide, which the United States has not done.
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The actor serves as a co-chair on the selection committee for the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, which grants an annual cash prize to an individual who has demonstrated exceptional work for humanitarian causes “on behalf of the survivors…and in gratitude to their saviors”. (AFP)Among the mourners at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial was Samvel Balayan, a 63-year-old retired biology teacher, who said that “101 years on, Turkey had not renounced its plans to exterminate Armenians”.
This year, commemorations of the Armenian genocide in Turkey will be more muted than last year.
Christians in Syria, including Armenians who are descendants of those killed in the genocide a century ago, also are facing genocide today at the hands of “a terrorist scourge in Syria”, Schiff said.
“This is why we are protesting against them, to recognize the genocide”.
In addition to Armenians, a contingent of some 200 Assyrians waved their white national flags in a sea of Armenian flags at the rally.
President Barack Obama declined on Friday to refer to the 1915 massacre as a genocide, instead calling the massacre the first mass atrocity of the 20th century.
Clooney attended a service at a hilltop memorial in the capital Yerevan led by Armenian church leader Catholicos Karekin II to commemorate the victims of the massacre. Armenia’s foreign ministry denounced Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a message he issued on April 24 “to commemorate Armenians who died in 1915”, without making any reference to the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians.
In Greece, hundreds of ethnic Armenians and sympathizers marched through Athens to denounce Turkey and slam Azerbaijan for allegedly escalating the conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Both sides on Sunday reported attacks on their positions.
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The fragile ceasefire is largely observed but yesterday, Azerbaijan claimed it had destroyed an Armenian tank and its crew and accused Yerevan of shelling Azerbaijani villages using heavy artillery.
