On april 24th millions of Armenians around the world will commemorate the centenary of the mass killing of their forebears by Ottoman forces. A growing number of historians say it was genocide. "The central facts of the story are straightforward," says Thomas de Waal, a Russophile scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think-tank, in the introduction to his objective and meticulously researched account of the Armenian tragedy and how it has played out in modern times. "The Armenians were an ancient people, whose homeland was centred in what is now eastern Turkey." In 1913, there were up to 2m of them in the Ottoman empire. At the start of the first world war, the Ottoman government ordered their mass deportation. A few years later, Mr de Waal writes, there was barely one-tenth of that number in Turkey. The rest had been exiled or killed.
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机译：4月24日，全世界成千上万的亚美尼亚人将纪念奥斯曼帝国军队大规模杀害其前辈的百年纪念。越来越多的历史学家说这是种族灭绝。美国智囊机构卡内基国际和平基金会的一位俄国人学者托马斯·德瓦尔（Thomas de Waal）在介绍他对亚美尼亚悲剧及其应对方法的客观和认真研究的介绍时说：“这个故事的中心事实很简单。”在现代发挥了作用。 “亚美尼亚人是一个古老的民族，他们的家园集中在现在的土耳其东部。”在1913年，奥斯曼帝国有多达200万名难民。第一次世界大战开始时，奥斯曼政府下令将他们大规模驱逐出境。德瓦尔先生写道，几年后，土耳其的这一数字仅占十分之一。其余的人已被流放或杀害。
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