The Armenian Genocide

Turkey is threatening serious consequences in its relations with the United States to protest a vote by the House Foreign Relations Committee declaring the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians to be an act of genocide.

Armenian-Americans have been lobbying for years to have what happened to their ancestors during World War I officially declared a case of genocide. It has been a perennial issue — noticed mostly by Armenian-Americans and by Turkey — in Congress and even in presidential campaigns.

Turkey denies that a genocide occurs, asserting that not so many Armenians died and that the deaths were an unintended consequence of a program to relocate troublesome Armenian nationalists out of a war zone.

Decide for yourself whether the cost, in damaged U.S.-Turkish relations, is worth the declaration that a genocide occurred. But make no mistake, it occurred.

In 2000, I interviewed historian Vahakn Dadrian, who has made it his life’s work to keep alive the history of the Armenian  genocide. The full piece — but I warn you, the details of how the genocide was accomplished are grisly and disturbing — is here.