Pope Francis Quotes
When I had to say something that I didn't like to Turkey, but of which I was sure, I said it, with the consequences that you all know [Editor's note: a reference to his comments on the Armenian Genocide]. I said these words ... I was sure
Francis, Pope. "In-Flight Press Conference of His Holiness Pope Francis from Armenia to Rome." Vatican.va, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 26 June 2016.
At the time Dulles was the Assistant Secretary & Near East Division chief of the State Department. The Turks were killing, starving and displacing Armenians—Mostly Christians—in Turkey. Like modern ethnic cleansing and genocides such as Kosovo, Rwanda, and Sudan, the magnitude of the atrocities was denied by the perpetrators and their apologists and other countries did not want to publicly admit the genocide lest they be forced to intervene by public opinion. Previously, the Armenians had slaughtered many Turks, especially the Armenians allied with Russia, and the two groups to this day have a continued distrust of each other—see {51838}, {638251}, {620602}, {620603}, {620604}, {620605}, {620600}, and {620606}
Many Turks deny that there was a genocide and claim that the Armenians were conspiring with the Turkish Russian enemies. In order to stop the public discussion of the subject, they went to a local court and got a judge to rule that they could not use a public university for such a controversial subject. The Prime Minister and other Turkish leaders were outraged. Quickly a private university offered to provide the facility for the event with the original participants still involved. However Erdogan has had two political faces in his career—one as a moderate reformer where freedom of speech was values, and the other as the head of an Islamic political party where Islamic law makes some kinds of speech a capital crime (Heresy and blasphemy).
This speech was given on the Armenian murders, (the word genocide had not yet been coined), in Turkey
A letter to Armenian Cleric and leader Ohannes Chatschumian
He was one of the national leaders who adopted the policy of extermination of the Armenians.
The United States did very little to stop the Armenian genocide that had been carried out by Turkey. We also did little to stop the Nazi genocide of the Jews and Gypsies, the extermination of the Cambodian urban and intellectual population and the Ruanda genocide of the Tutsies. The argument that we could not stop it tended to mean that we did little or nothing to diminish the murder. President Clinton stated that this failure was his greatest mistake in office.
Mehmet Talaat Pasha was one of the national leaders who adopted the policy of extermination of the Armenians. The Christian Armenians, a minority in Turkey and its lands, were discriminated against like other non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire. But during the Turkish War with Russia, some Armenians defected and served on the Russian side. Many Turkish citizens took revenge on Armenians by means of murder and torture. Soon, the extermination of the Armenians became the official “Young Turk” government policy.
Pope Francis is the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State. Francis is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope from outside Europe since Gregory III, a Syrian who reigned in the 8th century.
