April 24th

92 years ago, on April 24th, 1915, by the orders of the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire, 250 Armenians from the intelligentsia were arrested in Istanbul. They were taken out of the city to a prison in the desert; most of them were never seen again. With this act of ridding the Armenian minority of their leaders, the Young Turk campaign to rid Anatolia from their native Armenian population, the Armenian Genocide began. Before 1915, 2 million Armenian lived in Anatolia, after WWI was over the population of Armenians left living in Turkey was only 10,000. Somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Turks, the rest become refugees as they escaped to France, US, and to a strip of Armenia that was Under Russian rule. But aggression against Armenian didn’t stop there. When the Bolsheviks won the revolution, Russia lost control of their small Armenia, which became independent as Democratic Republic of Armenia. Shortly after declaring their independence from Russia, the new Armenia was invaded by the new republic of Turkey and further massacres continued, one of which involved my family, my great-grandfather was a survivor and became a refugee as he made his way to Baku, which at the time was safe since it was under British control. The Democratic Republic did not last, as it lost half of its territory to Turkey, and the rest was occupied by the Red Army, and become annexed to the rest of the USSR as the Soviet Republic of Armenia. It would not be independent again until 1991 when it became the modern Republic of Armenia.

For more info, there is an excellent article about the Armenian Genocide on the United Human Rights Council website, the address is: http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/armenian_genocide.htm