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Originally posted by Luvian:
Were Armenians living only in Turkey back then? Were the Turks only trying to exterminate those living within their borders, or those through the world?
I fon't know anything about this subject, but it's not a genocide if they only wanted to wipe some of them, it's just mass killing.
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Armenia was in the Ottoman Empire, which was a multinational empire ruled by Turks. At the time, the thing was totally unstable, and at the end of a 100 year long decline. The Ottoman Empire, in a last desperate gambit, sided with the Central Powers (Germany & Austria-Hungary) in the First World War.
The Armenians wanted their independence, and the Ottomans feared that the Armenians would help the Russians, who were fighting the Ottomans, to try and curry Russian favor for an independant Armenia. So they death marched them, killing a massive amount of them. That's my understanding of the situation at least - as you can tell from the fact that there is even a debate about this, some of the facts are fuzzy (the Ottomans weren't big on keeping records about this stuff.)
Call it what you want, but it was mass killing targeted at a specific ethnic group only. In my books, that's genocide.