After the Armenian Genocide our people regarded it as not only an attempt to annihilate them but also a campaign to deprive them of their homeland. The more time passed, the less painful the scars of the survivors grew, Director of the History Institute Ashot Melkonyan told ArmInfo on Wednesday.
"But they have not forgotten the loss of their homeland and have passed this memory to their descendants. As a result, we see that their grand grandsons are still aware that they have lost their homeland. Before 1965 we were moving in the right way as we regarded the Armenian Genocide as the loss of homeland. But today, some 50 years later, we are beginning to realize that we have got into a trap skillfully made by the Turks. In order to deviate the world's attention from the gist of the problem, the Turks began denying the very fact of the Armenian Genocide and even more claiming that Armenians also killed them. As a result, the problem of the loss of homeland has gone to the background and we are now struggling only for the recognition of the fact of the Armenian Genocide," Melkonyan said.