Mr. Speaker. between the years 1915 and 1923 in the Ottoman Turkish Empire. there were 1.5 million Armenians slaughtered and another 500.000 forced to leave from their homelands. What happened was not a series of random atrocities but a systematic policy of deportation. separation of family members. slave labor. torture. and murder. Although the killings finally ended in 1923. efforts to erase all traces of the Armenian presence in what is now eastern Turkey continued. such as the changing of geographical names and the destruction of Armenian religious and cultural monuments. This was the first genocide of the 20th century. a precursor to the Nazi Holocaust and the other cases of ethnic cleansing and mass extermination of peoples in our own time.
Keywords matched
deportation