Armenian genocide commemoration event and flag raising held at Fresno City Hall

Victims of the Armenian genocide were remembered Friday in an annual commemoration and flag raising event at Fresno City Hall.

Speakers included many members of Fresno’s large Armenian American community and politicians, including Congressmen Jim Costa and David Valadao.

“Although Turkey continues to deny the genocide and tries to rewrite history, history cannot be rewritten,” Honorary Consul Berj Apkarian of the Armenian Consulate of Fresno said during the ceremony.

“We gave innocent lives but we are here and we are destined to thrive regardless of all the odds against us or against our nation in Armenia as well as in diaspora.”

Another commemoration event is planned at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Armenian Genocide Monument at Fresno State, located next to the university’s Satellite Student Union.

Last year, President Joe Biden recognized the killings as genocide.

“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination,” Biden said in a 2021 statement for Armenian Remembrance Day, which is April 24.