Kim Kardashian to remember victims of Armenian genocide on trip to Yerevan
 Kim Kardashian will pay tribute to the victims of the Armenian genocide on a trip to the country beginning on Wednesday. The Armenian-American reality TV star will be joined by her husband Kanye West and her sister Khloé as she makes the journey to mark the 100th anniversary of the slaughter of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. They will be followed by camera crews from the broadcaster E! to film several episodes of the reality series Keeping Up With The Kardashians, but no official meetings or press conferences are planned. Kardashian, West, their daughter North and several other members of her family arrived at Los Angeles airport to begin the pilgrimage to Armenia, where she will visit the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial in the capital, Yerevan. Her late father Robert was a third-generation Armenian American, and on several occasions she has publicly supported international recognition of the Armenians’ systematic extermination at the hands of the Ottoman government. The US government, apparently wary of spoiling relations with Turkey, is yet to join the 22 countries that have formally recognised the event as genocide, although 43 American states have accepted its status as such. The word genocide was coined and defined by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1943 to describe the extermination of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman authorities in Turkey. As many as 1.5 million people are thought to have been killed in the slaughter, which Armenians say began on 24 April 1915, when Ottoman security forces rounded up and arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, and continued throughout the first world war. Turkey still denies that genocide is an appropriate term for the killings. In 2011, Kardashian broke from her usual frivolous image to write a blog postcalling on Americans to recognise Armenian genocide. “Until this crime is resolved truthfully and fairly, the Armenian people will live with the pain of what happened to their families and the fear of what might happen again to their homeland,” she wrote. |
