Around a year ago, Mr Berzan Boti, a permanent resident of Turkey, began to write to SEYFO CENTER, the main organisation that undertakes investigative research on the Assyrian Genocide. He expressed that he genuinely wishes to make an apology towards the Assyrian people for the Genocide and is willing to return all the estates (house, land, etc.) he inherited, to their actual owners from which they were originally confiscated.
We have been corresponding with each other for two years. Finally he passed onto us the deed he had made on the 6th October 2008, through the Notary Public’s Office which was the complete transfer of house/land title.
We are planning to announce this new step to the international public, sometime in April this year through a press conference in the Swedish Parliament, with the presence of Mr Berzan Boti himself.
Unfortunately, due to the discussions and debates surrounding the matter within and outside Turkey, it is necessary for us to make a preliminary statement prior to our planned press conference.
Let this be known, the 1915 Genocide did not simply target people of Armenian nationality. The Assyrian people (also known as Chaldean and Syriac) were also massacred and exterminated along side the Armenian people. However this has not been widely discussed. This is similar to the accounts of crimes against Rumanians during World War II being passed over in history. Forgetting the atrocities committed against the Assyrian people during the 1915 Genocide is not understandable nor is it acceptable.
Yet, more than half of the Assyrian Nation, alongside with the Armenians were exterminated with the same mentality which proposed that ‘an onion is an onion; therefore it must be chopped off’. Thus the Ottomans did not differentiate amongst the Christians. In this the case, then, why there is no mention of the Assyrians, at all?
Nowadays in Turkey, you will find a new generation of individuals who are trained in naming the main streets and public squares in the main cities of Ankara and Istanbul after Talat Pasha, who to the Assyrians and Armenians is considered the Turkish counterpart of Adolf Hitler; and that questions about the statues of Kemal Bey (Lord Kemal) and crippled Osman (Othman) which are erected in other cities like Giresun and Bo
