Good morning. It’s Tuesday, April 24, a date marked in history by the official beginning of the Turkish genocide of Armenians living within the borders of the old Ottoman Empire.

On the night of April 24, 1915, another date “which will live in infamy,” some 200 of the most prominent Armenian civic leaders were rounded up in Constantinople on orders of a cabal of army officers known as the “Young Turks.” The Armenians arrested that night were taken to prison camps in the interior of the country to be shot.

Although the word “genocide” was not yet in use, the first of the 20th century’s three most horrifying episodes of racially motivated mass murder was underway. At the hands of firing squads, contrived deprivations of food and medicine, and long forced marches into the desert, more than a million Armenians – most of the population – were slaughtered.

There was little armed resistance because, in a grim irony, most of the able-bodied male population of the ethnic group accused of disloyalty had enlisted in the Ottoman Empire’s armed forces. There, Armenian soldiers were pulled out of the ranks and either killed or forced into slave labor details. Meanwhile, their women, children, and elderly parents on death marches were attacked by armed and organized vigilante groups that raped women, kidnapped children, and randomly put people to the sword.

 From RealClearPolitics