Armenian Genocide Denial

Although it was possible for Armenians to achieve status and wealth in the Ottoman Empire, as a community they were never accorded more than "second-class citizen" status and were regarded as fundamentally alien to the Muslim character of Ottoman society. In 1895, revolts among the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire led to Sultan Abdül Hamid's decision to massacre tens of thousands of Armenians in the Hamidian massacres.

During World War I, the Ottoman government massacred between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians in the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish government has aggressively denied the Armenian Genocide. This position has been criticized in a letter from the International Association of Genocide Scholars to – then Turkish Prime Minister, now President – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The Armenian Genocide is almost unanimously acknowledged as a historical fact by historians and genocide scholars alike. It is also widely considered to have been the first modern genocide. Deniers argue that claims of genocide are anti-Turkish propaganda or a conspiracy spread by Armenians; they may claim that the events of the genocide either did not occur or that they were justified at the time.

Denial of the Armenian Genocide is officially outlawed in Greece, Cyprus, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovakia.

Currently, only the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan deny that there was an Armenian genocide. Many other countries, most controversially the United States until October 2019 (pressured by the Turkish lobby, and, in the past, the Anti-Defamation League), had deliberately avoided officially recognizing it as a genocide in order not to disturb Turkey–United States relations. On October 29, 2019, the United States Congress passed the United States resolution on Armenian Genocide officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide as a genocide. The Turkish government has spent millions of dollars on Washington lobbying over the past decade, much of it focused on the Armenian genocide issue, and has in the past threatened politicians from other countries with strong retaliation to prevent them from using the word genocide. The Turkish Republic has also been accused of attempting to intimidate and silence foreign investigative journalists and genocide scholars.

---

Source: www.wikipedia.com