Armenian Commemoration Set For City Hall

The Armenian National Committee of New York will host the 93rd Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide at City Hall Chambers on April 25 at 5:30 p.m. The evening will feature Professor Henry Theriault of Worcester State College as the main speaker and Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan, who will address the community and give the invocation. Armenia's Ambassador to the United Nations, Armen Martirossian, will speak as well.

Elected officials at the local, state and federal levels will attend and pay tribute to the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians, a genocide which the perpetrator, the Turkish government, continues to deny to this day. The commemoration will also include musical works performed in memory of the crime committed against the Armenian nation.

The evening's main speaker will be Dr. Henry Theriault, who has written extensively on the subject of genocide and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. While he has dealt at length with the Armenian cause, which concerns his own ancestry, Theriault's work is broad and examines the impact of genocide against Africans, Native Americans and other victim groups.

"While causing New York's Armenian community to reflect thoughtfully on the horrible catastrophe that befell our people, Dr. Theriault will also connect the Armenian cause to the broader struggle for advancing international human rights," Doug Geogerian of the Armenian National Committee of New York said.

Under the cover of World War I, the Young Turk government rounded up hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, artists and civic leaders on Apr. 24, 1915 and had them murdered. This massacre ushered in a state-planned campaign to eradicate the Armenian people from their traditional homeland of 3,000 years, marking what is commonly referred to as the first genocide of the 20th century.

The Turkish government has since gone to extraordinary lengths to deny this crime against humanity. Its worldwide campaign of public misinformation has especially focused on influencing media outlets and governmental bodies in the United States, where the Turkish government in the capital of Ankara has spent tens of millions of dollars to distort the historical record and cover up the event known as the "murder of a nation".