Armenians and Greeks lived side by side in Asia Minor for more than 2,400 years, and they saw the horrors of genocide. That atrocity divided us, although we were residents of the same cities and villages, and in some sense it also united us. Angelos Syrigos, Deputy Minister of Education and Religious Affairs of Greece and Associate Professor of International Law and Foreign Policy at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, announced this Monday at the 4th Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide being held in the Armenian capital, Yerevan.

"We have to be very careful when using the word ‘genocide’ because today it is customary to call the sufferings of people all over the world ‘genocide,’ whereas ‘genocide’ cannot be seen only in terms of destroying people. Genocide is a collective, organized crime committed against specific ethnic groups for a specific purpose," he said.

Syrigos argued that at the beginning of 1914, there was not a separate genocide of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in Asia Minor, but one genocide.

"When we separate these different stages, make them different genocides, we give the perpetrators the ability to find some reasons why, from their point of view, the genocide of Armenians or Greeks or Assyrians was justified," he said.

“Today, it is even impossible to imagine that Germany would sell weapons to Iran or Syria against Israel. But two years ago, Turkey offered weapons to Azerbaijan so that they war against Armenians," the Greek official emphasized.