United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I was not genocide, but rather “atrocity crimes.” The categorization was in response to a statement made earlier by the Pope, who called it “the first genocide of the 20th century.”
April 24, 2015, marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Armenian genocide. On that date, the Ottoman Empire rounded up 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals whom they accused of supporting the Russian enemy in World War I. The Ottomans then executed Armenian men of military age and sent the elderly, women and children on death marches into the Syrian desert. Scholars estimate that 1-1.5 million Armenians died.
The term “genocide” was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee from Poland, specifically to describe the experience of the Armenians.