06 04 09 - GENOCIDEEVENTS.COM : WORLDWIDE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE COMMEMORATION EVENTS

VISIT Website: http://www.GenocideEvents.com Sunday, April 09, 2006
April 24, 2006 marks the 91st Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. 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 attend the functions in their area of residence, watch Armenian Genocide video clips/flash presentation and reflect upon the horrors which fell upon the Armenian Nation and Armenian people in the beginning of the last century.

During WWI, 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 realization 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 & 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, Sr. 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, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity.

E-mail Address: Contact@GenocideEvents.com Website: http://www.GenocideEvents.com

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