e-4929 (Foreign affairs)

Petition to the House of Commons

• Many Canadians of Hellenic descent are the direct descendants of the ethnic Greeks who lived in the Ottoman Empire, much of which is in modern Turkey;
• The systematic killing and deliberate extermination of the Christian Greek population in the Ottoman Empire, including Eastern Thrace, Asia Minor (also known as “Anatolia”) and Pontos, carried out by the Ottoman and Kemalist forces, before, during and after World War I, on the basis of their religion and ethnicity, is – by historical evidence – defined as Genocide;
• The Canadian Hellenic Congress has compiled and presented historical documents from international sources which unequivocally confirm and corroborate that the deliberate and systematic extermination of the Greek population, which took place in the Ottoman Empire between 1908 and 1924, is Genocide;
• The Genocide of the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire falls within the meaning of Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; and,
• The 2007 International Association of Genocide Scholars Resolution affirmed that the extermination campaign against the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide.