Armenia commemorates Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Empire 

ArmInfo.On the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, Armenia  and the Diaspora remember the innocent victims of this crime against humanity.

From early morning, citizens have been bringing flowers to the  Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex of the Armenian Genocide Victims.  And in the evening, despite the bad weather conditions, thousands of  citizens took to the streets to take part in the traditional  torchlight procession organized by the youth wing of the ARF  Dashnaktsutyun.

110 years ago, Ottoman Turkey exterminated 1.5 million Armenians  living in the country at that time, and the same number of people  scattered around the world fleeing the genocide. Thousands of  Armenian manuscripts, hundreds of historical and architectural  monuments were destroyed, more than 60 Armenian cities and 2.5  thousand villages were burned.

On April 24, 1965, demonstrations were organized in Soviet Armenia  demanding recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Thus, the wall of  silence that had been created around this issue was broken. In 2015,  the Armenian Apostolic Church canonized the victims of the Genocide.

The Armenian Genocide has been recognized and condemned by many  countries and influential international organizations. The first to  officially condemn the mass killings of Armenians was the Uruguayan  parliament (1965). The extermination of Armenians has been officially  recognized as genocide (under international law[177]) and condemned  by France (1998, 2000, 2001, 2006, 2012, Belgium, the Netherlands,  Switzerland - National Council (lower house of parliament), Sweden,  Russia (1995), Poland, Lebanon (2000), Italy, Lithuania, Greece,  Slovakia, Cyprus, Argentina (2 laws, 5 resolutions), Venezuela,  Chile, Canada (1996, 2002, 2004), Vatican, Bolivia (2014), Austria  (2015), Luxembourg (2015), Brazil (2015), Paraguay (2015), Germany  (2016), Czech Republic (2017), Portugal (2019), USA (2019), Latvia.

Armenian Genocide recognized by the European Parliament (1987, 2000,  2002, 2005, 2015), the parliamentary coalition of South American  countries (Mercosur), the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of  Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, the Parliament of Latin  America (2015). Recognition of the Armenian Genocide is not  officially a prerequisite for Turkey's accession to the EU, but some  authors believe that Turkey will have to do so on its way to EU  membership.

The Turkish Republic spends considerable resources on public  relations campaigns to deny the genocide and donates to universities  that provide credibility to the Turkish position. Whenever the  recognition of the genocide is discussed by parliaments or  governments of different countries, Turkey threatens them with  diplomatic and trade sanctions and reprisals against its own  minorities. In order to erase traces of the physical presence of  Armenians in Turkey, Armenian architectural monuments are  systematically destroyed.

The arguments of the deniers are usually modifications of one of the  following statements: there were never any massacres of Armenians in  the Ottoman Empire; the deaths of Armenians occurred through  carelessness from hunger and disease during expulsion from the war  zone; there was no deliberate policy on the part of the Young Turks  to exterminate Armenians; the deaths of Armenians were a consequence  of the civil war in the Ottoman Empire, as a result of which many  Turks also died.