the Armenian people was emptied of Armenians.
             Every year, on April 24 Armenians all over the world commemorate the murder of their nation, the murder of 1.5 million innocent and defenseless children, women, elderly and men. This is also the date on which in 1915 the Turkish government arrested over 200 Armenian poets, intellectuals, religious and community leaders in Istanbul and imprisoned them in the interior of Anatolia, where most were summarily executed.
             This incident was not isolated, but rather as part of a pattern of persecutions that began in the latter years of the reign of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Under the Sultan's order, 300,000 Armenians were massacred between 1894 and 1896. Sultan Hamid's brutal reign ended in 1908, when a coalition known as the Young Turks came to power and established a new constitution. Initially there was tremendous support for the new rulers, who promised many reforms and appeared to favor fraternity among various nationalities within the empire. However, by 1914, the triumvirate of Young Turk dictators had adopted pan-Turkism as a nationalist ideology and set out to Turkify the countries minorities, beginning with the Armenians.
             Taking advantage of the outbreak of the First World War, the Turkish authorities set out to implement the long- planned program of extermination of the Armenian population of Turkey. Documentary evidence irrefutably attests that the plans for the extermination of the Western Armenian population had been in preparation even before the beginning of the World War.
             The tragic fate of the Armenian people would be sealed by the political maneuvering of foreign powers eager to capitalize on the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The West, principally France and Great Britain, was eager to look the other way. Following a pattern that the engineers of modern genocide would repeat time and time again, the Turks systematically gathered Armenian me...