Today, on April 24, Armenians around the world commemorate the 1.5 million holy martyrs of the Armenian Genocide (PHOTOS).

Since early this morning, many people are visiting the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan to pay their respects to the victims of the Genocide. And last night, the traditional torchlight procession was held.

On April 24, 1915, the extermination of the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire began with the arrests of Armenian intellectuals—writers and poets, musicians and doctors, architects, and MPs—in the empire’s capital, Constantinople, and later—with the massacre. The ringleaders of the Young Turk Party, which overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1908 but continued his bloody plan in 1909 with the massacre of 30,000 Armenians in Adana, had already planned the elimination of the Armenian element in the empire in a secret meeting in Salonika in 1911.

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

Exactly one month after the beginning of the Genocide, the Allies (Russia, France, England) fighting against the Ottoman Empire issued a joint statement demanding an end to the mass killings of innocent Armenians, for the first time including the term “crime against humanity” in international terminology. The Allies warned the Turkish government that after the war they would follow through on their commitment to bring all perpetrators of the massacres of Armenians to justice and punish them. Decades later, it was the lawyer Raphael Lemkin who, after studying the specifics of the mass killings of Armenians, coined the term “Genocide” into international circulation.

A total of 1.5 million Armenians were deported, starved to death, and tortured to death. Escaping responsibility, the Young Turk ringleaders fled to Germany in the fall of 1918. But none of the main players escaped justice. Historians who substantiate the continuity of the anti-Armenian policy of the Turkish state point out that three different and mutually hostile Turkish administrations (Sultan Abdul Hamid, Young Turks, Mustafa Kemal) were united in one matter: the total extermination of Armenians. And the governments that followed them have consistently denied and have not repented for the Armenian Genocide.

According to Article 11 of the Declaration of Independence of Armenia, adopted on August 23, 1990, Armenia supports the task of international recognition of the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Empire and Western Armenia in 1915.