Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Los Angeles on Friday, marching through the city and onto the Turkish consulate. They were demanding that the killing of around 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in
American Committee for Relief in the Near EastArmenian woman kneeling beside a dead child during the genocide. The plot was hatched by leaders of the diaspora gathered in a ballroom in Boston on the evening of July 8,
Armenian was her first language. Her father, Haroutoun Sanossian, lost most of his family in the massacre, and she told me she hated hearing him talk about it. He would get so angry. My mother and grandmother raised me, but I'm only half-Armenian.
These are just two of the individual testimonies sent to the Guardian to mark the centenary of what Pope Francis has called “the first genocide of the 20th century”. Widely accepted historical accounts say that between 1 million and 1.5 million
“Armenians all around the world, they have to remember the day, because this is the only way they can remember their ancestors, their great-grandparents who died during the genocide,” said co-organizer Anna Ketikyan, whose grandfather was a victim.