Andrea Casu, a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, representing the Democratic Party, referred to the Armenian Genocide.
"Arrests began on the night of April 24, 1915: within a month, many Armenians including journalists, writers, poets and parliament delegates were deported and massacred along the way to Ankara.
In the spring, after the disarmament and massacre of the military, the Ottoman authorities began mass deportation of the Armenian people, followed by a systematic murder campaign.
The majority were exterminated in the course of true death; the few survivors, however, once they arrived in the Syrian desert concentration camps, died struggling.
In the end, one and a half million people were killed including Armenian women, men and children, but also Assyrians and Greeks, who disappeared from the land inhabited for over two thousand years.
In the Day of Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide and every single day we keep alive the memory of the victims in Italy "so that from the suffering of the past a future of peace and understanding is born between peoples and states" as the message reads next to the tree planted on the occasion of the President Mattarella's visit to the memorial in Yerevan."
