By Bryan Schwartzman
Nearly 700 people gathered at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows Corona Park Sunday to mark the 85th anniversary of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.
Young grade school students sat in the same room as their parents, grandparents, and even a few great grandparents who survived the killing and exile of Armenians during and after World War I.
Armenia is a 3,000-year-old civilization which has developed and maintained a unique identity despite being conquered numerous times in the past two millennia. Armenia is generally understood to include northeast Turkey, parts of Iranian Azerbajian, and the present Republic of Armenia, which is formerly a Soviet republic.
But organizers said that civilization was changed forever when three-quarters of Christian Armenians were either killed or forced into exile by the Muslim Ottomans.
Speaker after speaker stressed, both in English and in Armenian, that the world
