10:00, 19 November, 2012
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Toward the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide the National Archive of Armenia continues publishing important 
and unique documents and introducing them to the public. The book “the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: the Testimonies of the Survivors. Archival Documents” is already finished. The testimonies of the survivors dated to 1916 are enclosed in the book.
In a conversation with “Armenpress” the head of the National Archive of Armenia Amatuni Virabyan stated that there was a program organized by the Russian Army and held in 1916-1917, which was aimed to the discovery of the events in the Western Armenia in 1915. Amatuni Virabyan stated: “During the liberation of the Armenian territories by the Armenian voluntary units and the Russian Army they have seen that almost no Armenian was left in that territories or a very small number of people remained there. And a row of intellectuals developed a questionnaire to discover the number of the population, income and residents of a row of villages before the aforementioned events: the number of the servicemen, their future fate, the date of the beginning of the massacre and deportation, the identities of the participants of those events, the survivors and the state of a village by 1916.”
As the Head of the National Archive of Armenia stated these are authentic testimonies, as they have been taken only a year after the tragic events, when the memory f the people was fresh and they could recall the names of those criminals. The testimonies spread light on those events and it becomes clear that among the executors there have been Turkish officials, policemen, heads of provinces and states, Hamidian units, the Kurdish mobs, the Circassians.
The head of the National Archive of Armenia Amatuni Virabyan emphasized the legal significance of those documents, as at the time of their record there had not been any conversation about the Armenian Genocide.