Genocide is the deliberate extermination of a people or a nation. The twentieth century will always be remembered for the genocide that Adolf Hitler perpetrated against the Jews of Europe. But there was a lesser-known genocide during the First World War which may not have matched Hitler's in scale but certainly matched it in atrocity. This was the Armenian genocide masterminded by the Young Turk government of Turkey in 1915.
             Historically, the Armenian people have always been subjected to oppressive regimes. Armenia was the first nation to accept Christianity as a state religion. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turk movement sought to restore Turkey's shattered national pride. Their idea was to go about it through the persecution of its minorities. In 1915 the Young Turk government resolved to deport the whole Armenian population of about 1,750,000 to Syria and Mesopotamia. It regarded the Turkish Armenians-despite pledges of loyalty by many-as a dangerous foreign element bent on conspiring with the pro-Christian tsarist enemy to upset the Ottoman campaign in the east.
             Following is an excerpt from a speech presented to the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress, February 1915:
             "It is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so that there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished."1
             In what would later be known as the first genocide of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were driven from their homes, massacred, or marched until they died. There are varying death tolls of Armenians in Turkey because few outside observers could gain access to the region during that time. However, it is estimated to have been between 600,000 and 1,500,000 in the years from 1915 to 1923. Tens of thousands emigrated to Russia, Lebanon, Syria, France, and the United States, and the western part of the historical homeland of...