• NYC Services Planned To Remember One and a Half Million Who Were Massacred
  

Apr 21, 2005 7:22 pm US/Eastern

NEW YORK (WCBS) This weekend marks the anniversary of the saddest time for Armenians around the world.

Sunday, April 24th is the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide, in which some one and a half million Armenians were massacred by Ottoman Turks. It is considered the first genocide of the 20th century.

Turkey continues to deny a genocide occurred. But the Armenians want recognition.

WCBS880’s John Metaxas spoke with an Armenian survivor who now lives in New Jersey – 94-year-old Rahan Kachian.

She still remembers what happened to her family in 1915 when she was only four years old.

“They start killing everybody and burn the houses, and my father run to the forest,” she recalled. “And the Turks shoot him. But he didn't die. So they cut his neck. I remember very well. Me and my sister we took the head and we buried in our property. And then my sister took me and my brother and we run away to the mountain."

Ms. Kachian describes her father's death ... (0:27)

...And how she escaped to the United States (8:03)

• Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau also says it is  important to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire when the killings occurred. The elder Morgenthau, in dispatches back to Washington, tried to get the U.S. government to take action on the genocide.

• Morgenthau says his grandfather reacted as a public official and as a human being. (0:15)

• He says the Turkish government is ill-advised to keep denying the genocide. (0:19)    

• Metaxas also spoke with the Armenian archbishop in New York about the meaning of the genocide. Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan says every Armenian family has its own story of the genocide. His own is chillingly brief:
  

 “My grandfather was a priest. They nailed him to the church door. He died there,”

His family was wiped out, except for his father who miraculously survived. In all more than a million and a half Armenians were massacred.

“Recognition is important for the world because when you don't punish a genocide, you give way to another,” Choloyan said. He cited the Holocaust, Biafra, Rwanda and Darfur, which all came after the Armenian genocide as proof that failure to stop genocides makes subsequent ones inevitable.

Archbishop Choloyan recalls his family's pain. (0:36)

...Explains why it is important to establish the truth about the genocide. (0:25)