SW News: Commemorating the hundreds of thousands of Christians who perished in the Armenian Genocide, hundreds of people marched through the Armenia's capital Yerevan. Participants gathered in a central square, held torches, lit the Turkish and Azerbaijani flags, and took part in a march while being accompanied by an orchestra.

The Ottoman Empire killed 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923, and Monday was the 108th anniversary of that genocide. According to the Armenians, they were purposefully targeted for extinction and were subjected to starvation, forced labor, expulsion, death marches, and massacres.

Turkey acknowledges that many people perished at that time, but Ankara rejects the term "genocide," claiming that the death toll is exaggerated and that the killings were caused by civil unrest in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Every year, people bring torches to the Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex to conclude the remembrance.

President of the United States Joe Biden recognized the Ottoman Empire's mass murder of Armenians as genocide two years ago. Biden's statement incensed Turkish authorities.

Many Armenian diaspora activists have pushed for official acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide, which has become a major issue for the diaspora in response to the Turkish state's ongoing denial. To maintain good relations with Turkey, many nations avoided recognition beginning in the 1970s. As of 2022, 31 nations, as well as Pope Francis and the European Parliament, had acknowledged the massacre.

Despite Turkey's methodical destruction of evidence-contradictory records, the genocide is well-documented in the archives of Germany, Austria, the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom, as well as the Ottoman archives. Thousands of eyewitness reports from Armenian survivors and Western missionaries are also available.

Nikos Dendias, the foreign minister of Greece, said in a message commemorating the anniversary that it is everyone's moral obligation to do everything to preserve the memory of the Armenian Genocide victims.

"Our thoughts are with the Armenians of our homeland and the entire world today," the statement reads.