1915 Armenian Genocide remembered across L.A.

Thousands are gathering across Greater Los Angeles to remember the 1915 Armenian Genocide.

Armenian-Americans gather every year on April 24 to remember the 1.5 million Armenians who were killed at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. KNX News’ Nataly Tavidian spoke to Krikor Moloyan, who’s with the Armenian Council of America and the Armenian Genocide Committee, about why this day of remembrance is important.

“It's important for us to continue to fight and condemn the atrocities from the past and to ensure that they don't happen in the future,” he said. “The last four years have been very difficult for the Armenian nation. We've been persecuted by Azerbaijan, who had significant help by the Republic of Turkey in ethnically cleansing their neighbors of Armenians.”

Moloyan said that in the face of adversity, the people remain resilient, continue to speak their language and honor their culture.

Professor Irene Victoria Massimino, law professor and the co-founder of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, said that in crimes against Armenians, there is a particular component of hatred towards their identity.

“President Aliyev tends to be quite vocal about this,” she said. “I mean, if one visits the website of the presidency of Azerbaijan of this autocratic regime, one can see that he clearly has mentioned several times without any shame that he will expel the Armenians as dogs if they don't live on their own.”

Massimino said that this intent is seen within the narrative of officials in Azerbaijan and within the crimes seen from the war in 2020, in the September 2022 attack, and in the nine-month blockade in 2023.

“That created one of the biggest humanitarian crises. More than 120,000 people were absolutely isolated and from any contact to the outside world, you know, except in the region of Artsakh and in the region that was not occupied, of course, by Azerbaijan after the 2020 war,” she said.

Massimino said that the international community has been indifferent to the genocide and the way the news of what’s happening is portrayed is biased.

“They had these two sides of portraying the Republic of Artsakh and Azerbaijan as equal and the whole situation was very poorly done in the international media and the international community, knowing and referring to Europe and the U.S. did not do sufficient to prevent the forced expulsion of the Armenians of Artsakh, who are ancestral, indigenous to the land,” she said.

Want to get caught up on what's happening in SoCal every weekday afternoon? Click to follow The L.A. Local wherever you get podcasts.

She said there’s still work that can be done to support Armenians.

“We have a different system today than the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire had. The world is very different, we have new tools,” she said.

Those tools can be used to try to defend the rights of Armenians in Artsakh, Massimino said. She believes that Armenians and people who support Armenians need to talk about the right that the Armenians in Artsakh have to return to their ancestral land.

“There are no Armenians left in Artsakh, but the Armenians of Artsakh exist,” Massimino said.

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors has declared April 24 as the official Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Gov. Gavin Newsom made the same declaration in 2023 and President Joe Biden formally recognized the day in 2021.

Follow KNX News 97.1 FM
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok