Portal:World War I/Selected event/7
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The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանութիւն, Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı) — also known as the Armenian Holocaust, "Great Calamity" (Մեծ Եղեռն) or the Armenian Massacre — refers to the forced mass evacuation and related deaths of hundreds of thousands to over a million Armenians, during the government of the Young Turks from 1915 to 1917 in the Ottoman Empire.
Today, the Republic of Turkey rejects the notion that the event constituted a genocide and instead claims that the deaths among the Armenians were a result of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War I. However, most Armenian, Russian, Western, and an increasing number of Turkish scholars believe that it was indeed a genocide, or campaign of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing and mass extermination. For example, some Western sources point to the sheer scale of the death toll as evidence for a systematic, organized plan to eliminate the Armenians. The event is also said to be the second-most studied case of genocide, and often draws comparison with the Holocaust. To date 21 countries have here officially recognised it as genocide.
