Amidst the memorials to other genocides in this chilly and rainy month, we pause on April 24 to remember the 1915 genocide of a million and half Armenians. We are also historical witnesses to the hundreds of thousands of other ethnic and religious minorities killed in the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, we remember the Greek, Assyrian and other victims. The state-sponsored Young Turk mass deportations and killings were part of a long historical pattern of inequality, injustice, prejudice, discrimination, repression and massacres by an authoritarian regime. It should be noted that the Turkish leadership’s ethnic and religious persecution predated and postdated 1915.
