YEREVAN, Armenia — American actor George Clooney on Sunday joined Armenians marking 101 years since a massacre by Ottoman Turks of some 1.5 million ethnic Armenians.
Clooney attended a service at a hilltop memorial in the capital Yerevan led by Armenian church leader Catholicos Karekin II to commemorate the victims of the massacre.
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 the first genocide of the 20th century.
Modern Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, vehemently rejects that the deaths constitute genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
Clooney has been a prominent voice in favor of countries recognizing the killings as genocide, which the United States has not done. Later Sunday, he will present the first Aurora Prize, an award recognizing an individual’s work to advance humanitarian causes.
Memorial events in Armenia kicked off late Saturday with a torchlight march to the memorial complex.
President Barack Obama declined on Friday to call the 1915 massacre genocide, breaking a key campaign promise as his presidency nears an end. Obama, marking Armenian Remembrance Day, called the massacre the first mass atrocity of the 20th century and a tragedy that must not be repeated.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a message commemorating Armenians who died in 1915, without making any reference to the massacre.
In a statement that was read during a ceremony at an Armenian church in Istanbul, Erdogan said he welcomed the commemoration “to share the grief endured by the Ottoman Armenians, as well as to honor their memories.”
Erdogan criticized efforts “to politicize history through a bitter rhetoric of hate and enmity and strive to alienate the two neighboring nations.”
“We will never give up working for amity and peace against those who try to politicize history through a bitter rhetoric of hate and enmity and strive to alienate the two neighboring nations,” he said.
In a commemorative speech, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan on Sunday mentioned a recent flare-up of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is officially a part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a separatist war ended in 1994.
He lashed out at Azerbaijan for what he described as plans to drive all Armenians away from the region and pledged to protect Armenians living there.
