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Damascus, SANA Armenians around the world commemorate the 100th anniversary of the genocide in which one and a half million Armenians were killed at the hands of the butchers of the Ottoman Empire on April 24, 1915, in a most repulsive carnage in human history.
The mass killing of the Armenian people was committed during World War I when the Ottomans annihilated hundreds of Armenian villages in the eastern empire in an attempt to change the demography of those areas within the Ottoman policy of Turkification that works on uprooting all other ethnicities and
nationalities.
However, the mass murders peaked on April 24, 1915 when the Turkish government brought together hundreds of prominent Armenian figures in Istanbul and executed them in the city’s squares. There followed slaughters and genocides against millions of Armenian families who were deported through the desert. The
families who escaped the killings managed to take refuge in Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.
In its issue on December 15, 1915, the American New York Times newspaper said nearly one million Armenians were killed or deported by the Ottoman Turks.
The last chapter of the genocide, however, took place between 1918 and 1920 when the Turkish army, ordered by Kamal Ataturk, conducted a wide-scale cleansing operations in eastern Anatolia and attacked Armenian villages and cities there, before the Armenian State was established on October 29, 1920 and joined the Soviet Union.
The Armenian wound, which is still bleeding, lingers till today under the failure of international laws to force the Turkish government, the successor of the Ottoman butchers, to admit to the crimes and offer an official apology to the Armenian people.
With the perpetrators allowed-by the negligence of the influential parties of the international community, to get away with their
crimes, the genocide is breeding more massacres, with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan given a free hand trying to realize his Ottoman obsessions.
Five years now into the crisis in Syria, Erdogan goes ahead with shedding more Syrian blood, providing unlimited support to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist organizations and others that have been following in the footsteps of Ottomans carrying our ethnic and religious cleansing and causing chaos and destruction wherever they take hold.
100 years after the brutal genocide against the Armenians, the Turkish denial continues, with Turkey claiming that only around
300,000 Armenians were killed during WWI and disavowing any connection to the systematically committed crimes in challenge of the many documented facts that have been consecutively revealed by survivors or by media men who lived the experience firsthand.
Acknowledgment of the Ottoman massacres has been growing worldwide, with Pope Francis of the Vatican using the term “genocide” for the first time to describe the mass killings during a mass in Rome on April 12.
Though angered by the Pope’s statements, the Turkish government goes on with its efforts to try to obliterate the historical facts
through carrying out suppression campaign against Turkish intellectuals and journalists who dare to talk about the massacres.
Despite these attempts, the Armenians around the world are adherent to their right and have been annually marking the genocide by staging activities and events and launching campaigns seeking an acknowledgement of the slaughter.
This year’s commemoration takes place as a series of events under the motto”I Remember, I demand”.
H. Zain/ H. Said
