Ms. Barankitse said she planned to donate the $1 million to three organizations that help child refugees and orphans and work to eradicate poverty: the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess Foundation of Luxembourg, the Jean-François Peterbroeck Foundation, and the Bridderlech Deelen Foundation of Luxembourg.
On April 24, 2016, the Armenian community of Canada came together in Ottawa to commemorate the 101 st year of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The commemoration started with speeches at Ottawa’s Parliament Hill near the building of the Canadian Parliament, and continued to the Turkish Embassy, where speakers addressed the Embassy with their demand for recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Marguerite Barankitse from Maison Shalom and REMA Hospital in Burundi was named as the inaugural Laureate of the $1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. At a ceremony held in Yerevan, Armenia, Barankitse was recognized for the extraordinary impact she has had in saving thousands of lives and caring for orphans and refugees during the years of civil war in Burundi.
Actor George Clooney brands the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces a century ago as “genocide” and says it is ridiculous to deny it. Rough Cut – Subtitled video is available here.
When I met them, it had been nearly a century since the survivors had seen their home. I wanted in some way to reunite them with their homeland. Based on the childhood memories they shared with me, I traveled to Turkey, took an image of what remained and brought it back to them.
Speaking at an international forum on genocide prevention and the refugee crisis held in Armenia, the actor said he had decided to use his fame to focus attention on those “who can’t get any cameras on them at all” after reading about atrocities being committed in the Darfur region in the early 2000s.
Well, I’ve been involved for a period of time and interested in Armenia for a number of reasons, obviously there is the question of identifying things like the Armenian Genocide and I thinks that’s something that has a lot of emotion in the US as well. But when I met Ruben [Vardanyan], he wanted to talk about finding a version of Armenian history where we can talk about the great things that have happened and looking forward. And I thought – what a great idea to be able to find people who risked their lives at times, certainly give up virtually everything in their life in the service and help of others, and to find a way to celebrate that in the name of Aurora, in the name of looking back in the way.
Turkish denialism (and its international helpers) will not let her or us come to rest. (Just take a look at the Turkish Foreign Ministry’s website on the topic). Turkish denialism says, “She probably did not die. Well, perhaps she did but it was really her own fault because the Armenians were in open rebellion against the state.”
As a second lieutenant in the German army stationed in the Ottoman Empire in April 1915, Wegner took the initiative to investigate reports of Armenian massacres. Disobeying orders intended to stifle news of the massacres, he collected information on the Genocide and took hundreds of photographs of Armenian deportation camps, primarily in the Syrian desert. Wegner was eventually arrested, but not before he had succeeded in channeling a portion of his research material to Germany and the United States through clandestine mail routes. When he was transferred to Constantinople in November 1916, he secretly took with him photographic plates of images he and other German officers recorded.
The killing of more than 200 Armenian intellectuals on April 24, 1915 is regarded as the start of the massacre that is widely viewed by historians as genocide. But modern Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, vehemently rejects the charge.
