There are genocides that we always remember, such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, however, on April 24, a genocide that many of us have never heard of is honored: the Armenian Genocide.
The Armenian Genocide began in 1945, when the then Ottoman empire, now the modern state of Turkey, began rounding up Armenians from Istanbul and deporting them elsewhere. Following the initial arrest, the Ottomans began to gather able-bodied men and either massacred them or forced them into the military for hard labor until they died. As for the women, children, elderly, and disabled, they were forced into long death marches through the Syrian Desert with little to no resources and were often robbed of what little they brought with them. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 didn’t end the senseless murder however, as the new countries of Turkey and Armenia fought a war in the early 1920’s, and the Turkish army murdered over 100,000 Armenian civilians. By 1923, an estimated 1.5 million innocent men, women, and children had been killed.
Even today, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the occurrence of the genocide, as do most governments around the world. This should not stop us from remembering the deaths of these people however. All genocides are equal in barbarity and immorality and all genocides deserve to remember. The victims of the Armenian Genocide deserve to be remember.
