YEREVAN TO HOST FORUM OF YOUTH ORGANIZATION REPRESENTATIVES
PanARMENIAN.Net
26.01.2010 17:41 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ By the initiative of WAC Association of Youth
Organizations, the National Academy of Sciences will host Wednesday
a forum of youth unions, according to Vladimir Aghayan, Vice Chair
of the Association.
"Discussion will focus on youth organization problems, particularly
those relating to the organization of events dedicated to the 95th
anniversary of Armenian Genocide," he told a news conference in
Yerevan.
The forum be attended by representatives from RA Ministries, youth
organizations, creative unions, art critics etc.
The World Armenian Congress (WAC) was founded in October 2003 as
a union for Armenian NGOs, and has since reached an international
status. The WAC objective is to strengthen relations between Armenia
and the Armenian Diaspora, contribute to Armenia’s economic development
and the peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict, as well as
international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.
The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be
April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes
and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of
food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were
indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse
commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case
of genocide after the Holocaust.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In
recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as
genocide.
To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized
the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars
and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also
recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC,
The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.