By Sahag Kavlakian

April rolls around, the flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, and what seemed like endless piles of snow are starting to dissipate. It is hard to believe that a month that brings so much life and happiness could have once been a month of unimaginable death and mourning.

April 24 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, a piece of history that is too often ignored and brushed aside.

Starting as early as 1902, the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire began systematically slaughtering the minority Christian Armenians living within their empire. With the outbreak of World War I, the collapsing Ottoman Empire saw its opportunity to set operations into full gear. On April 24, 1915, hundreds of Armenian lawyers, doctors, government officials, and intellectuals were taken from their homes in Constantinople and marched to their deaths.

At the same time, thousands of the poorest Armenians were killed in the streets of the capital by “butcher battalions.” These merciless murderers rounded up Armenians like sheep, drowned them in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them, and burned them alive, littering the Turkish countryside with Armenian corpses and permanently staining their hands with innocent blood.

Sadly, this was only the beginning and the onslaught continued and worsened until 1923.

Of the nearly two million Armenians living under Ottoman control at the time, 1.5 million men, women, and children were sent on death marches through the desert where they were beaten, raped and brutally murdered in a barbaric attempt to exterminate and “ethnically cleanse” all Christian Armenians from the Ottoman Empire.

Those who survived were either forced to convert to Islam or exiled from their homeland. Many fled to Syria, Russia and the U.S., forming diasporas in major cities such as Aleppo, Moscow, Los Angeles, and Boston. They left with nothing, some fortunate enough to have the clothes on their backs. All property, personal belongings, and family heirlooms were left behind and confiscated by the Turks.

April 24 is now a day of mourning for Armenians across the world as they take time to commemorate and remember the victims of the genocide. Turkey has made its number one priority to deny the genocide at all costs. They have tried for a century to wash their hands of the blood. But the more they deny and lobby against the genocide, the more Armenians across the world fight back for justice.

If you stand for justice, stand with us on April 24 as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.