As Genocide Prevention month comes to an end, remembrance events are ongoing throughout the country today to remember the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire, which began in 1915. President Obama is asking the country to take today to “examine the past so that it can be better understood.”

The Armenian genocide of 1915 took the lives of an estimated 1.5 million of the 2 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire (which became the modern country of Turkey). Thriving Armenian communities vanished from the face of the earth and even today, the Turkish government disputes that a genocide took place.

Background of the Armenian Genocide

Life for Armenians under the Ottoman Empire was always difficult; as Christians they were treated as second-class citizens. In 1914, the Young Turk party in power in the Ottoman Empire began a drive to depict Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to security.

In early April 1915 tens of thousands of Armenians men were rounded up and killed and women, old men and children were deported south across the mountains to Cilicia and Syria. Over the next few months, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered by systematic state-ordered starvation, death marches, and execution.

On this day in 1915, April 24th, 300 Armenian “notables, leaders, writers and thinkers, were rounded up and killed while another 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and at their houses. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion or disease in the approximately 25 concentration camps run by the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire.

Thousands of people who survived were forcibly converted to Islam with the goal of giving Turkey a new identity and historians still describe the depraved and public killing of Armenians as some of the most gruesome in history.

Armenia and America today

During his campaign, Obama promised that as president, he would officially recognize the genocide, and as a senator he often pushed Turkey to officially recognize the events as genocide. Many hoped that he would make good on this promise today but it has just been reported that Obama will not use the word “genocide” today in his statement to memorialize the slaughter.

Two days ago, Armenia and Turkey announced that they would begin talk to move towards a better relationship – relations have been extremely strained for decades.

Obama officials say he will not acknowledge the genocide because it might upset the delicate state of these talks, but an Obama official added “he has his views and his views are known.”

Does recognition matter?

It’s important to American-Armenians and Armenians alike to have this recognition because over one million of their relatives were lost, a majority of Armenian citizens at the time. Most Armenians living in the U.S. are the children or grandchildren of victims of the genocide. It’s also an important move in the fight for universal human rights to recognize mass atrocities like this and like the ongoing tragedy in Darfur for what they are – genocides.

If you want to push the U.S. to recognize the events as a genocide, you can write your elected official about it.

Or if you want to honor the past by making sure these things don’t happen again, see what you can do to end the genocide in Darfur.