Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide began April 24, 1915 when the Turkish government arrested an estimated 250 Armenian people in Constantinople, and inprisoned them in two holding centers outside of Ankara. This began the deportation, expropriation, torture, starvation, abduction, and massacre of the entire Armenian population. Deportation was the forced march of the Armenian population out of Armenia and into the desert of Syria, where it was intended that a majority would die of starvation and dehydration. Others were massacred throughout the regions of the Ottoman Empire, regardless of their age or gender.  The purpose of this genocide was ethnic cleansing.  Prior to the genocide itself the authorities of the Ottoman Empire had used different forms of propaganda to show the Armenian population as a threat to the empire. The Turks believed that by wiping out the Armenian population, they could then create a new empire made entirely of a Turkic population. 
This event was truely horrifying, to think that these people were massacred and tortured merely because they were not of the Turkic population.  In many ways this genocide is similar to the more widely know Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were forced on death marchs and killed using an means neccessary.  However, unlike the Holocaust which is widely studied and acknowledged, the Armenian genocide is still denied by many countries, who feel that it is wrongly named.  It's almost unfathomable that a country could kill millions of their own people and then step back and deny what they did.