YEREVAN, APRIL 25, ARMENPRESS. Lawmaker Varuzhan Pambukchyan of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies (lower house of parliament) issued a statement on the 107th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, calling for its official recognition by Romania. 

“All those guilty must be held to account in order for it never to happen again. It must be condemned in order for the denialism and the attempts to falsify history to never happen again. The international community must be the guarantor and witness of any process of reconciliation so that it never happens again,” Pambukchyan said in the statement.

Speaking about the recognition of the Holocaust and other genocides during the WWII, he said : “It was proven how those who committed such atrocities can find the dignity and power to accept it, to apologize and move forward. A process like this leads to normalization and allows peoples to live with the crimes that their ancestors committed, but not be haunted by the ghosts of the past. In the eyes of the international community a nation like that is again perceived as one enjoying trust. Any genocide is the issue of all humanity, and we must begin with the genocide against the Armenians perpetrated during World War I, the first genocide of the 20th century, meaning of the modern world. We must start from the beginning, we’ve spoken so much about the genocide that today, on yet another anniversary of the genocide, I prefer only to say “Never Again”, believing that mankind will find the strength to overcome any interest and reach its unanimous recognition and support the reconciliation process of future generations,” he said.

The legislator added that Romania, which embraced the large number of survivors of the Armenian Genocide who arrived to Romania, still has an unfulfilled debt towards Armenians in terms of not having officially recognized the Armenian Genocide yet.

“Any nation that hasn’t yet made this step has such debt towards the international community. Because it’s not just the issue of Armenians and Turks, like the Holocaust isn’t just the issue of the Jews and Germans, it is the issue of all mankind because a world built upon hatred and haunted by ghosts of the past is not functional now or in any other case,” Pambukchyan said.