Remembering the Armenian Genocide, Looking Ahead

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The Armenian genocide's start is rather arbitrarily set as April 24, 1915. That's when Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, and eventually got around to killing them.

Armenians had been rounded up and butchered in odd lots before that, though.

The Ottoman Empire 's 1915 ethnic cleansing wasn't limited to Armenians. The Ottoman government exterminated Assyrians and Greeks whose crime was living in Ottoman territory and having the 'wrong' ancestry or faith.

It wasn't called a genocide at the time. That word first showed up in Raphael Lemkin's book, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress" (1944). He defined it as "the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group." (Wikipedia)

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