Armenians commemorate 97th anniversary of Genocide today.

April 24 symbolizes one of the tragic pages of the Armenian nation’s history – the Armenian Genocide - which claimed the lives of about 1.5 million Armenians in the years of World War I.

Every year on this day hundreds and thousands of Armenians from different parts of the country, as well as the Diaspora, visit Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan’s Tsitsernakaberd Park to pay respect the innocent martyrs of the big tragedy.
This year marks the 97th anniversary of the heinous massacres.

The Armenian Genocide was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with many forced to march under conditions designed to lead to their death. Other ethnic groups, including Assyrians and Greeks, were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.

The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day when Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria.

Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. Most of those who took a narrow escape from the Genocide settled in different countries across the world, forming the Armenian Diaspora.

Several countries across the globe have so far recognized the Genocide, while The Republic of Turkey, which is the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, has so denied the word term is an accurate description of those events. Consecutive Turkish government have claimed for decades that those massacred were the victims of a wider conflict.

In March 2009, US Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs adopted a resolution (H.Rep.#252) calling on President Barack Obama name those massacres Genocide.

Ever since being elected President Obama has used a carefully-chosen but an improper term – Mets Yeghern (Great Calamity) in his annual April 24 address to the Armenian nation.

The move is seen as the US leader’s attempt to keep his campaign pledge, in the meantime avoiding to insult the Turkish nation.