It’s high time for Turkey to apologize for the 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks during World War I.
Thousands of people participated in a 6-mile “March for Justice,” closing the streets of Los Angeles on April 24 to remember those who died during the Armenian Genocide.
According to the Armenian National Institute Inc., 26 countries and 43 states in the U.S. recognize the massacre as genocide, but Turkey still denies the claim.
Friday marked the 100-year anniversary of the genocide.
During the march, approximately 30 Turkish demonstrators arrived with Turkish flags. The crowd of 50,000 marchers threw eggs and water bottles at the group of Turks. The LAPD had to ask the Turkish demonstrators to leave for their own safety.
According to a recent poll, 91 percent of Turks believe the genocide never happened. During World War I, when Armenians sided with the Russians, Turkey forcefully relocated the Armenians as a defense tactic. The Turkish government says that many Turks died during that time, with only 300,000 Armenian casualties instead of the 1.5 million documented by the United Nations.
The Turks have even forbidden Turkish schools from using the term genocide, according to CNN.
“Turkey is still too young and too insecure to rewrite its history and question the events unfolding at the establishment of the republic,” Burcu Gultekin Punsmann, a senior analyst at Ankara Policy Center stated in an article. Punsmann has studied Turkish-Armenian relations for a decade.
Although Turkey claims it was only attempting to relocate the Armenians, its soldiers managed to wipe out nearly the entire Armenian population. This atrocity was a genocide, or a “deliberate killing [of a] particular race,” as defined in the Webster dictionary.
According to the Business Insider, the Armenian community was ambushed and looted by the Kurdish gangs who exterminated them by the hundreds. Victims and survivors who spoke out about the incident decades later have made it a national issue today.
Even the Pope has officially recognized the Armenian Genocide as the first of the 20th century.
Though the Turkish government denies that the massacre is a genocide, they sent condolences to those who lost their ancestors during the relocation of the Armenians, according to CNN.
Still, condolences are not enough. It is time to atone.