Thursday Marks Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day

Thursday is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorating the reputed one and a half million Armenians murdered by the Turks in 1915 during World War I.

The Turkish assault began with hundreds of Armenian intellectuals forcibly deported from the Turkish capital of Constantinople. The Muslim Young Turks intended to get rid of the Christian Armenians in Turkey. Massive atrocities, from forced death marches to placing women and children aboard ships and then deliberately sinking them, were carried out by Turkish government-backed forces.

CNN reported:

While the death toll is in dispute, photographs from the era document some mass killings. Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt. The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.

The U.S. Congress has passed resolutions acknowledging the genocide, but no U.S. administration has, likely because of concerns about relations with Turkey. Instead, the murders have been referred to as “massacres” or “crimes against humanity.”

In April 1981, soon after he was elected president, Ronald Reagan delivered a Proclamation on Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust. Speaking of the Holocaust in which the Nazis murdered six million Jews, he stated:

When America and its allies liberated those haunting places of terror and sick destructiveness, the world came to a vivid and tragic understanding of the evil it faced in those years of the Second World War. Each of those names — Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka and so many others — became synonymous with horror.

The millions of deaths, the gas chambers, the inhuman crematoria, and the thousands of people who somehow survived with lifetime scars are all now part of the conscience of history. Forever must we remember just how precious is civilization, how important is liberty, and how heroic is the human spirit. 

He then mentioned the “genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it.”