Services of commemoration to mark the end of World War I

Today marks the 91 anniversary of signed Armistice that ended the First World War.

The First World War involved 38 of 59 existing that times independent states, for about 73.5 million people were mobilized. The First World War left for about 20 million people dead and 20 million wounded and 3.5 million injured.

The German Empire lost its colonial possessions and was saddled with accepting blame for the war. Austria–Hungary was also partitioned, largely along ethnic lines, into several successor states including Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as adding Transylvania to the Greater Romania who was allied with the victors. The Russian Empire, which had withdrawn from the war in 1917 after the October Revolution, lost much of its western frontier as the newly independent nations of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were carved from it. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated and was to be partitioned by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. However, Treaty of Sèvres still isn’t ratified.

This brought big crash for Armenians since Turkey took advantage of war and started killing Armenians. The Armenian Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918. The Armenian people were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation. It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923. There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of W.W.I. Well over a million were deported in 1915. Hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps. Among the Armenians living along the periphery of the Ottoman Empire many at first escaped the fate of their countrymen in the central provinces of Turkey. Tens of thousands in the east fled to the Russian border to lead a precarious existence as refugees. The majority of the Armenians in Constantinople, the capital city, were spared deportation. By 1923 the entire landmass of Asia Minor and historic West Armenia had been expunged of its Armenian population. The destruction of the Armenian communities in this part of the world was total.

As Big Ben chimes 11 a.m. in London marking eleven o’clock on eleventh day of eleventh month people remember that war which left 20 million dead is over.