By the initiative of WAC Association of Youth Organizations, the National Academy of Sciences will host Wednesday a forum of youth unions, according to Vladimir Aghayan, Vice Chair of the Association.
“Discussion will focus on youth organization problems, particularly those relating to the organization of events dedicated to the 95th anniversary of Armenian Genocide,” he told a news conference in Yerevan.
The forum be attended by representatives from RA Ministries, youth organizations, creative unions, art critics etc.
The World Armenian Congress (WAC) was founded in October 2003 as a union for Armenian NGOs, and has since reached an international status. The WAC objective is to strengthen relations between Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora, contribute to Armenia's economic development and the peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict, as well as international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.
The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide.
To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.
