Armenian Consulate General screens documentary on Mustafa Pasha Yamulki
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – On the occasion of the 108th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the Consulate General of Armenia in Erbil on Monday organized a premiere of a documentary film focused on the life of Kurdish military officer Mustafa Pasha Yamulki during the Ottoman empire.
The event was held in the Armenian Orthodox Holy Cross Church.
Yamulki, born in Slemani, presided the Military Court of the Ottoman Empire in 1920 and condemned a number of organizers of the Armenian Genocide to death. Although most of them fled in exile, and were able to escape their sentence.
Yamulki himself was later sentenced to jail, until he was pardoned by Sultan Mehmed VI and left for Slemani.
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On Yamulki, Armenia’s Consul General Arshak Manoukian said in his opening speech that he was the “brave son of the Kurdish nation, a person who was not afraid to throw down the gauntlet to the state machine, tried to restore justice and tell the whole world about what happened to the biblical people in their own homeland.”
“His life, his activities were the proof of human dignity. Only the small part of the history of his life was enough to show the fakeness of the Turkish denial policy,” he stated.
Manoukian also added that the atrocities of the 20th century that followed the Armenian genocide were not prevented.
“The reason for that and the main lesson to be learned is that the international genocide prevention efforts did not exert the necessary determination, consistence and solidarity, and the relevant political and legal conclusions were not made.”
“Unfortunately, April left a black trace in the history of not only the Armenian people, but humankind as whole.”
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“April is also the month in which the perpetration of the Holocaust, and genocidal crimes in Rwanda, Cambodia and in Iraqi Kurdistan commenced,” he concluded.
Following the Armenian Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were compelled to flee their homes, with some of them finding sanctuary in the Kurdistan Region.
The US in 2021 officially recognized the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman government in 1915 as a genocide, leading to protests by Turkey.
In December last year, a delegation from Kurdistan Parliament’s Martyrs, Genocide and Political Prisoners Committee participated in the 4th Global Forum on Genocide in Armenia.