111th Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide: “Truth Demands Justice. Justice Demands Reparations.”

This April 24, the Armenian National Committee of America-Western Region (ANCA-WR) rises to honor the 1.5 million Armenians systematically exterminated by the Ottoman Turkish government from 1915 to 1923 – and to demand, with unwavering resolve, that the world finally move from acknowledgement to accountability.

This April 24, we do not simply remember – we recommit. We recommit to pursuing justice, demanding accountability, and building the political power to see it through.

111 years have not dulled the clarity of what happened. The Armenian genocide was not an isolated atrocity, it was the opening chapter of a pan-Turkic campaign of erasure that continues to this day. The same ideology that drove the deportations, the death marches, and the mass executions of 1915 drove Azerbaijan’s military assault on Artsakh in 2020 and its final ethnic cleansing of over 150,000 Armenians in September 2023. And Baku operates as a unified strategic axis – coordinating militarily, diplomatically, and rhetorically – to eliminate the Armenian presence from the South Caucasus and to erase Armenian history from the land itself. This is not a coincidence. This is policy. It must be named, confronted, and stopped.

The ANCA-WR calls upon the United States government to choose the righteous path – the path that this nation has always claimed as its own – and to act with the urgency these crimes demand.

We demand reparations from Turkey for the Armenian genocide – the return of confiscated lands, properties, and assets, financial restitution for the victims, the survivors and their descendants and full legal accountability through international mechanisms.

We demand reparations from Azerbaijan for the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, restitution for the forcibly displaced, restoration of stolen property, and justice for the war crimes committed against Indigenous Armenian civilians.

We demand the right of return for all Armenians displaced from Artsakh – not as a diplomatic abstraction, but as a concrete, internationally guaranteed right.

We demand the immediate release of every Armenian prisoner of war and civilian hostage unlawfully held in Baku – and we call on Washington to make their freedom a non-negotiable condition of any engagement with Azerbaijan.

We demand the protection of Armenian cultural heritage across historic Armenia and Artsakh – churches, khachkars, monasteries, and monuments that Azerbaijan is actively destroying in a deliberate campaign to erase the Armenian past from the region’s future.

It has the power, the leverage, and – we insist – the moral obligation to act. Reinstate Section 907 restrictions on military aid to Azerbaijan. Impose Magnitsky sanctions on Azerbaijani officials responsible for atrocities and the unlawful detention of prisoners. Champion genocide education in American schools so that the lessons of 1915 are never relegated to footnotes.Stand with Armenia’s sovereignty, security, and right to exist as a free nation on its ancestral land.

This is not a moment for diplomatic hedging. The arc of the moral universe does not bend on its own. It bends when people of conscience demand it, legislate it, and enforce it.

The Armenian-American community of the Western Region, from Los Angeles to the Central Valley, from the Bay Area to the Pacific Northwest, does not gather on April 24 merely to mourn. We gather to mobilize. We gather to hold perpetrators accountable. We gather to build the political power that turns recognition into reparations, mourning into movement, and memory into justice.

The United States has recognized the Armenian Genocide, now that recognition must be translated into action, making clear to Ankara that normalization of relations and continued partnership carry with them an expectation of historical accountability.