Deeply interwoven with the enduring history of its people, growing from the living ascent of their humanism and strengthening the vitality of that ascent,
revealing and unequivocally affirming, while also exploring anew, its kinship with the great culture of its own nation, drawing directly from that culture, whose corrective brushstroke, whose luminous melody, whose love and smile have left their mark upon all the world’s cultures and perhaps upon every human being,
affirming its people’s historically won right to take part in shaping the world of today and tomorrow, and separating and expelling violence from the common avenue along which peoples advance,
the French National Assembly called our Armenian genocide a genocide.
This cannot but give satisfaction to all of us Armenians. A wave of warm gratitude cannot but pass through the Armenian people, scattered across the world and here in Armenia, our homeland. Just as indignation cannot but cloud all our minds and hearts if the parliamentary decision, rebounding from the unhearing wall of shared interests between France and Turkey, Turkey and the world, the world and France, returns to the parliamentary chamber and remains merely a two-hour press conference about that country’s greatness, our Armenian suffering, civilisation in general, and entering the third millennium having shaken off old sins.
In any event, those two hours, those two pages in Parliament’s annals, are significant for us. The contemporary chronicle of our Armenian life declares that we are called to affirm our identity. That means we stand before our history and our future in an entirely different position: as participants, rather than spectators.