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It would be recalled that in this daily bulletin’s article entitled “Will Armenians Ever Learn to Try the Needle First On Themselves” concerning the return and releasing of an Azeri officer who killed an Armenian officer in Hungary for political reasons, before reaching a decision on the reaction which could be considered to be justifiable for Armenia, it was indicated that it was necessary to first make an assessment of Armenia’s approach of principle towards the issue based on the example of V. Garabedian who was returned to Armenia from France where he was arrested for terrorism and was welcomed as a hero in Armenia.

Two commemorative programs organized within two weeks recently by Armenian nationalists have unfortunately presented fresh examples for a one-sided approach that eulogizes a bloody past. One of these is a member of a terrorist organization, a criminal whose hands have been smeared with the blood of Turkish diplomats. He was a person who returned to Armenia after being held under arrest for some time in France, whose monuments were erected there in exclusive places, who commanded Armenian military forces in 1991 during the massacres carried out against the Azeri people of Nagorno Karabakh and who was killed there in 1993, the circumstances of his death still kept in the dark.

The other is another terrorist who, for political reasons, murdered Azerbaijan’s Minister of Interior Javanshir on 18 July 1921 in front of the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul and was released by the English court martial in which he stood trial. This villain’s past, who was an Ottoman citizen born in Trabzon, is not confined to only one murder. He participated in the Russian forces that occupied east Anatolia during the First World War and together with other similar Armenians, “secured” the hinterland while the Russian troops were withdrawing from the region.

These two commemorative ceremonies form a new example of how false and misleading a one-sided historical memory could be and not only does it not serve mutual understanding and forgiveness, but also deliberately erects hurdles to and undermines Turkey-Armenia reconciliation.