Today, on April 24, Armenians around the world commemorate the 1.5 million holy martyrs of the Armenian Genocide. Today, since early in the morning, many people are visiting the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan to pay their respects to the victims of the Genocide. But since early morning, the police have closed off the entrance to the memorial and are not allowing people to enter it. And last night, the traditional torchlight procession toward the Armenian Genocide Memorial took place.

The arrests of Armenian intellectuals, writers and poets, musicians and doctors, architects and MPs began on April 24, 1915 in Constantinople, the capital of Ottoman Empire, and later it continued with their massacres, marked the beginning of the extermination of the Armenian subjects of the empire. The leaders of the Young Turk Party, which overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1908 but continued his bloody plan with the massacre of 30,000 Armenians in Adana in 1909, had planned the elimination of the Armenian element in the empire at a secret meeting in Salonika as early as 1911.

On the eve of the massacres, in order to give the deportation of Armenians a “legal” appearance, the Ottoman government passed a bill in parliament to supposedly relocate Armenians from the front lines of World War I, which had begun in 1914, to safer places. However, the formation of special gangs (Teskilat-i Mahsusa) at the government level, which were to attack the deportees, the instructions to local authorities to support and not hinder them, the lack of shelters for Armenians along the way, and the failure to take any steps to accommodate them in any shelters, testify to the undeniable nature of the planned extermination of an entire nation.

Exactly one month after the start of the Armenian Genocide, the Allies (Russia, France, England) fighting against the Ottoman Empire issued a joint statement demanding an end to the mass murders of innocent Armenians, for the first time including the term “crime against humanity” in international terminology. The Allies warned the Ottoman Turkish government that after the war they would follow through on their commitment to bring all perpetrators of the Armenian massacres to justice and punish them. Decades later, it was precisely after studying the specifics of these mass killings of Armenians that lawyer Raphael Lemkin introduced the term “genocide” into international circulation. A total of 1.5 million Armenians were deported, starved, and tortured to death.

Escaping accountability, the Young Turk leaders fled to Germany in the fall of 1918. None of the main actors escaped justice. Historians who substantiate the continuity of the anti-Armenian policy of the Turkish state point out that three different and mutually hostile administrations (Sultan Abdul Hamid, the Young Turks, Mustafa Kemal) were united in one cause: the total extermination of Armenians. Their successor governments have consistently denied and have not repented for the Armenian Genocide. According to Article 11 of Armenia’s Declaration of Independence, adopted on August 23, 1990, Armenia supports the cause of international recognition of the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey and Western Armenia in 1915.