100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

Guest: Richard Hovannisian, leading expert on the Armenian Genocide and founder of the Armenian Studies program at UCLA. He’s also an advisor to the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation on its Armenian Genocide testimony collection This last week marked the 100th anniversary of the start of systematic killing by Ottoman forces in modern-day Turkey that took the lives of over 1 million Armenians. It’s sometimes called the Armenian Holocaust and it bears similarities to the better-known Jewish Holocaust. Here too, people were chased from their homes, forced on death marches, herded onto trains and torn from their families because their religion and ethnicity were seen as a threat.  While many historians and world leaders agree the actions amounted to a campaign to exterminate the Armenian people, the Turkish government does not call it a genocide or acknowledge the scope of the events. Listen to stories from the Armenian Genocide survivors