Today is the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day

Today is the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

Its first phase began on April 24, 1915, as the Ottoman government arrested and murdered hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. The killing expanded into brutal massacres of the male Armenian population across Ottoman lands and the deportation of Armenian women, children, and the elderly into the Syrian Desert. More than one million Armenians were killed—roughly 70 percent of the total Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. The wide-scale extermination and subsequent lack of accountability inspired Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to conceptualize the concept of genocide—a word he coined in 1944—and campaign for its criminalization, The Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities (AIPG) reported.

On this occasion, the executive body of the Republican Party of Armenia has issued a statement on the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which reads:

"On April 24, the Armenian people and the civilized world commemorate the victims of the Armenian Genocide. The outset of the twentieth century was stained by the Medz Yeghern, one of the most appalling crimes perpetrated against mankind with unprecedented atrocity at a state level in Ottoman Turkey, due to which part of the Armenian nation was exterminated and deprived of homeland.

We are paying tribute, incensing and bowing before the memory of 1.5 million sanctified martyrs of the 1915 Armenian Genocide."

"We must continue our nationwide struggle for historical justice with exceptional unity. The issue of international recognition and condemnation of the Armenian Genocide should be part of Armenia's foreign policy agenda until we achieve the final...