100 Years of Impunity: Amnesty International UK to hold panel discussion on Armenian Genocide
On April 22 the Amnesty International UK will hold a panel discussion titled “Who Remembers the Armenians? 100 Years of Impunity. The event in London will be chaired by Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK. The speakers at the event will include Carla Garapedian, Armenian film Foundation and Project Leader, Armenian Genocides Testimonies Collection, and Dr James Smith CBE, CEO of the Aegis Trust and co-founder of the UK National Holocaust Centre.
It’s estimated that between 1 and 1.5 million people died through the attempted extermination of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire in 1915. April 24 marks 100 years since the start of that awful period in Armenian history.
The 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide will be remembered through an exclusive film screening. For the last three years, the Armenian Film Foundation has been working with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and has collected 400 testimonies of Armenian genocide survivors and eyewitnesses, filmed over the last four decades. This rare collection includes Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Assyrians and Yezidis. The Yezidis were eyewitnesses to the Armenian genocide – and now, sadly, are seeing history repeat itself.
After the screening, the panel will look at how impunity and failures to bring to justice the perpetrators of atrocities leads to future atrocities. The panel will focus on the Armenian genocide, and then look wider to subsequent crimes against humanity and genocides committed in the century since – right up to the emergence of ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
