Bashar al-Assad mentions Armenian Genocide in his Martyrs Day address

YEREVAN, MAY 7, ARMENPRESS. The President of Syria Bashar al-Assad delivered an address on the Martyrs Day on May 6 and spoke about the Armenian Genocide. As Reports “Armenpress” citing the Syrian SANA agency, President al-Assad stressed that Martyrs Day has many values associated with it, some of them symbolic, and some very tangible linked to the history of Syria, as around 100 years ago, the Ottomans carried out a campaign of arrests and executions of Syrian patriots and nationalists which culminated in 1916 when a large group of nationalists were executed by the Ottomans for defending the Syrian people from oppression.

Among other things, Bashar al-Assad noted that the Ottomans’ crimes at that time weren’t restricted to nationalists; they also committed heinous crimes against millions of Armenians, Syriacs, and other groups under their rule at a time, and now these same massacres are being repeated in the same way but with different tools and names, as back then it was the Othman Jammal Basha “the Butcher” who had ordered the executions, and today history repeats itself as his ancestor Erdogan “the Butcher” is the one committing these crimes.

President al-Assad said that martyrdom is the most noble value to be championed by human beings anywhere in the world when they are defending their homeland, and the nobility of martyrdom isn’t restricted to the martyrs themselves; rather it extends to all those who continue to champion this value, and none can champion it better than the families of the martyrs.