Today, on April 24, Armenians around the world are commemorating the memory of 1.5 million holy martyrs of the Armenian Genocide.
109 years ago on this day, on April 24, 1915, the annihilation of the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire began with the arrests of Armenian intellectuals—writers and poets, musicians and doctors, architects and parliamentarians—which began in Constantinople, the capital of empire. The ringleaders of the Young Turk party, who deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1908, but continued his bloody plan in 1909 with the massacre of 30 thousand Armenians in Adana, had planned the elimination of the Armenian element in the territory of the empire as early as 1911 in a secret meeting in Thessaloniki.
In order to make the deportation of Armenians look "legal" on the eve of the massacres, the government passed in the parliament the bill to transfer Armenians from the frontline zones of the First World War, which began in 1914, to supposedly safer places. But at the government level, the formation of special gangs (Teskilat-i Mahsusa,) which were supposed to attack the exiles, the instructions to the local authorities to support and not hinder the latter, the lack of accommodation for the Armenians on the way, the failure to take any steps to place them in some shelter, testify to the undeniable nature of the planned destruction of an entire nation.
Exactly one month after the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, the Allies (Russia, France, England) fighting against the Ottoman Empire demanded—in a joint statement—an end to the mass murders of innocent Armenians, for the first time including the term "crime against humanity" in the international terminology. The Allies warned the Turkish government that after the war they would follow through on their commitment to bring to justice and punish all those responsible for the Armenian massacres. Decades later, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” into international circulation after studying the characteristics of the mass slaughter of Armenians.
1.5 million Armenians were displaced, starved, and tortured to death. Avoiding accountability, the Young Turk ringleaders fled to Germany in the fall of 1918. None of the main actors, however, escaped justice. Historians justifying the continuity of the anti-Armenian policy of the Turkish state point out that three different and mutually hostile administrations (Sultan Abdul Hamid, Young Turks, Mustafa Kemal) were united in one thing: the general extermination of Armenians. The governments that followed them have consistently denied and not atoned for the Armenian Genocide.
According to clause 11 of the Declaration of Independence of Armenia adopted on August 23, 1990, Armenia supports the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey and Western Armenia.
