The President of the Republic attended a ceremony held at the Legislative Palace on the 24th, organized by the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies and the Uruguayan Armenian Cause Council, which recalled the genocide in which around 1,500,000 Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire, between 1915 and 1923.
The activity commemorated that April 24, 1915, when the government of the Young Turks executed a plan to exterminate the Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire. That night, hundreds of leaders, intellectuals, writers, clergymen, and musicians were arrested and assassinated.
Men of military age were conscripted, disarmed, put into forced labor, and killed. Women, children and the elderly were forcibly deported in “caravans of death” to the deserts, where they also died. It is estimated that around 1,500,000 Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923.
Uruguay was the first country to officially recognize the genocide, through Law No. 13,326, approved and promulgated in April 1965. That law declared April 24 as the Day of Remembrance of the Armenian Martyrs.
