Los Angeles--Edward Papikian, a high school student at the Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School in Los Angeles, says he thinks every day about his forefathers who were slain by Ottoman forces in 1915.
He says he and his classmates -- who are preparing for the 100th anniversary of what Armenians say was a systematic campaign of ethnic slaughter -- had been taught about it since childhood, "so that another genocide doesn't happen."
His classmate Nancy Bosnian added: "I hope everyone knows what happened. There were 1.5 million Armenians massacred.
"My great-grandparents were deported. We want Turkey to recognize this genocide, and ask for forgiveness," Bosnian added.
On April 24, many of the 170,000 members of the Armenian diaspora in Los Angeles -- one of the world's largest -- will rally to mark the start of what Armenians say was an effort by Ottoman forces to eradicating them from Anatolia, in what is now eastern Turkey.
Turkey however has long rejected the notion that any genocide took place , countering that hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christians were killed in a shared wartime tragedy.
"The things our ancestors have experienced, we feel this pain in our own skin even though we were not here 100 years ago," said Patil Derhovaginian, 34, a teacher at the school.
She will take her two-year-old daughter with her to the centennial remembrance event.
"She has this lavish life but she needs to understand once a year that this is important," Derhovaginian said.
Vardanyan Tigran, 22, a dance teacher at a cultural center across from the school, was preparing for a performance that will be called "100 Years of Unhealed Wounds."
"To me, there's no better way to express the impact this massacre has had on me and my people than through dance," he said.
AFP
