IN MY VIEW: APRIL 24, 2007, MARKS THE 92ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Armen Vartanian, The Journal

THE JOURNAL (Newcastle, UK)
April 11, 2007 Wednesday
Edition 1

Armenians worldwide will be commemorating the first genocide of the
20th Century with solemn religious and civil ceremonies. Along with
the Armenian people, prominent celebrities and statesmen will be
participating in this day of remembrance.

Since April of 2003, GenocideEvents.com has undertaken the task of
informing the general public, as a community service, of the events
commemorating the Armenian Genocide. The public is encouraged to
reflect upon the horrors which fell upon the Armenian nation and
Armenian people in the beginning of the last century.

During the First World War, The Young Turk political faction of the
Ottoman Empire sought the creation of a new Turkish state extending
into Central Asia. Those promoting the ideology called "pan Turkism"
(creating a homogenous Turkish state) now saw its Armenian minority
population as an obstacle to the realisation of that goal.

On April 24, 1915, several hundred Armenian community leaders and
intellectuals in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) were arrested,
sent east, and put to death. In May, after mass deportations had
already begun, Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha ordered their
deportation into the Syrian Desert.

The adult and teenage males were separated from the deportation
caravans and killed under the direction of Young Turk functionaries.

Women and children were driven for months over mountains and desert,
often raped, tortured, and mutilated.

Deprived of food and water and often stripped of clothing, they fell
by the hundreds and thousands along the routes to the desert.

Ultimately, more than half the Armenian population, 1,500,000 people
were annihilated. In this manner the Armenian people were eliminated
from their homeland of several millennia.

On April 29, 1915, Henry Morgenthau, Senior, United States Ambassador
to the Ottoman Empire, had stated that "I am confident that the whole
history of human race contains no such terrible episode as this. The
great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant
when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."

In 1915, 33 years before the United Nations Genocide Convention was
adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international
community as a crime against humanity.

Armen Vartanian works for GenocideEvents.com in California, USA. Its
email address is contact@genocideevents.com while its website is
located at