Let Us Always Keep The Torch Of Our National Struggles Burning
Once again, it is April 24, a date etched into our collective soul. This year marks the 110th anniversary of our national grief and a century-old remembrance, an opportunity to reignite the torch that has burned for over sixty years through our national movement for justice. The grief we commemorate stems from the 1915 extermination of Western Armenia and the martyrdom of over one and a half million innocent Armenian lives at the hands of Ottoman Turkey, a wound that remains the darkest chapter of our nation’s modern history. Here we are, for 110 years, this tragic date has bled into the memory of our people and homeland, slammed time and again against the wall of denial by the successors of the criminal state of Ottoman Turkey. A date nailed by our people to the pillar of historical injustice.
April 24, 1915.
A date that, for generations, has not only been a time of mourning for our martyred ancestors, but one that has transformed our sorrow into a renewed spirit of justice and collective unity. Every year, on this day, groups of Western Armenians march through the capital cities and central highways of various countries around the world, telling through the language of time, the struggles and faith of their ancestors, their survival, their trauma, and their truth. The stories of those who escaped the massacres and became witnesses of the inhumane crime, knowns as the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey during the First World War, and carried out until 1923.
Since 1965, the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the government of Armenia has led annual public procession to the Dzidzernagapert memorial, in addition, requiem services, and floral arrangements are laid not only at the graves of heroes at the Yerablur National Military Cemetery and martyrs of recent wars, but also at countless monuments dedicated to the victims of 1915. Over the decades, similar monuments have been erected around the globe, standing as stone witnesses to the memory of countless Western Armenians of all ages who were brutally massacred on their ancestral lands by Turkish regular forces and mass-murdering criminals.
Among all witnesses of the Armenian Genocide, the greatest and most enduring is the Catholicosate of the Holy See of Cilicia, the spiritual representative of Western Armenians. After the Genocide, the Catholicosate was re-established in Antelias, Lebanon, and continues to this day to not only shepherd Armenian communities across the Middle East and Armenian parishes throughout the diaspora, but also safeguards and preserves the history, identity, and cause of a devastated yet surviving Western Armenians. Carried forth through generations, the Catholicosate of the Holy See of Cilicia remains unwavering in its commitment to the cause and legal claim of the Armenian nation.
Moreover, within the sacred grounds of the Catholicosate of the Holy See of Cilicia stands the Armenia Genocide Memorial Chapel, which to this day preserves the remains and relics of millions massacred 110 years ago, protecting them from the wear of time and the threat of decay. These are not mere remains; they are the screaming witnesses of the bloody crime committed against the Western Armenian population by the predecessors of today’s Turkish state. A crime that is still, shamelessly, denied by both the Turkish government and academic circles. Their denial ignores the undeniable and irrefutable evidence lying in plain sight before the eyes of the world’s great powers, the historic, blood-soaked desert of Der Zor, where for years the bones of tens of thousands of martyred Armenian’s have surfaced, and they were later gathered inside the Church of the Holy Martyrs in Der Zor. In that desolate and solemn dessert, overwhelming silence still reigns to this day. Yet even in that silence, our martyrs whisper into our ears the powerful call for national justice, a call that, through the poet’s word, delivers a message to us, the living:
“If our children forget this much evil,
Let the whole world cast shame upon the Armenian People…”
On this 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, millions of Armenians across the globe once again vow to keep the torch of our nation’s pursuit of justice burning, remaining faithful to the path forged by the generations before us. A path that transforms each of us into devoted soldiers of the great vision of a Free, Independent, and United Armenia. We too will carry the torch of justice, as we did yesterday, as we do today, and as we shall tomorrow, across every continent and every crossroads of the world. Let us light this torch with unshakable faith, until there is a just resolution to the Armenian Cause, until the annihilated population of Western Armenia receives rightful reparation for its spiritual, cultural, and economic losses.
ARCH. KEGHAM KHACHERIAN, PRELATE
WESTERN UNITED STATES
April 24, 2025
Los Angeles
