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10 April 1998
The President-elect of Armenia
Robert Kocharian
Dear Mr President
I am writing to congratulate you on your election as President of Armenia and to wish you every success in forming your new government. I want particularly to wish you well in implementing democratic reforms and a political solution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.
I also welcome and endorse the passage of a resolution in the Belgian Senate calling on the Turkish government in Ankara to recognise the reality of the Armenian holocaust perpetrated by the last Ottoman regime in 1915-19.
This resolution of 26 March, I believe, cannot be treated as a transient episode but is of paramount significance in the protracted campaign to end the political amnesia about 1915, deliberately contrived by Turkish and foreign governments in the past in order to perpetrate the carve-up of Minor Asia and the Middle East by the imperial powers at the Lausanne Conference of 1923.
The massacres during the First World War which shocked the civilised world then became a precedent for an even more appalling and destructive demonstration of genocide of the Jewish people by the German Nazis in the Second World War. Let us recall Hitler’s response to a critic of the "final solution" of the Jewish problem: "Who complained about the Armenians?"
Now, when the spectre of ethnic cleansing is once again stalking the Balkans the courageous stand of the Belgian Senate, we feel, must concentrate the minds of Turks, Armenians, Greeks and Kurds alike the necessity for a wide- ranging discussion and fresh analysis of the causes of the 1915 events as a precondition for a genuine reconciliation of ethnic groups and nations and the settling of territorial disputes through negotiation. Such a process, we are firmly convinced, will help Turkish-Armenian and Greek relations.
Our movement will continue to support all efforts to set in train a genuine dialogue between all contending parties with the self-evident proviso that the Kurdish claim to self- determination and freedom will not be prejudiced - as it was in Lausanne.
We urge the new governments of Armenia and Turkey to seize the historic opportunity.
We look forward to future co-operation with your government and the Armenian people and wish you all the success needed to move the peace process forward.
In the name of peace, freedom and reconciliation.
Yours respectfully,
Abdullah Ocalan
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
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