Almost a hundred years ago, a genocide was overshadowed by World War I. Around a million (Armenian claims add half a million and Turkish sources subtract half a million from the 1 million mark) ethnic Armenians were deliberately killed, many more fled, as forces of the teetering Ottoman Empire deported and killed an ethnicity they saw as a treasonous threat in the face of Ottoman participation of a multi-fronted war.
The United Nations defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The killings of ethnic Armenians during WWI by the Ottoman military as fitting the definition of genocide is not in serious dispute. An article from the Emirati-funded news website Ahval that exclusively covers Turkish news, the closest I can find to a pro-Turkish English source, acknowledges that “an overwhelming majority of non-Turkish historians agree that April 24, 1915 was the beginning of a systematic mass murder and expulsion of civilian Armenians by the Ottoman Empire government, which meets the definition of genocide.”
Of course, the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presents the killings as worse than consensus, offering a broader definition of genocide and higher death tolls and displacement figures, but nowhere near as egregious as what the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs frames it as. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs structured the entire English webpage on the subject almost as a defense in a US court. The website stated “fundamental freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution protect those who choose to challenge the Armenian view.” The American rule of law has zero relevance to the morality of Turkish actions almost a century ago. They, the official page representing the national government, continue to embarrass themselves speaking like an American highschooler in a civics class, saying “simply put, in America every person has the opportunity to tell his or her story.” The Turkish government apparently chose to use this opportunity to portray themselves as the victim of Armenian censorship, arguing that Armenians silenced any critical perspective by accusing them of holocaust denial. The Turkish Ministry’s page then goes on to argue that Muslims died in far greater numbers. This muddies the issue. Armenians are an ethnicity, Muslims are a religion. There are much more Muslims than Christians, and Armenians were only a group of Christians. They then acknowledges themself that the death toll they cited are all deaths and not broken down by cause of death, which is again confusing the issue, and compares Armenian deaths from killings to all Ottoman Muslims (a far larger demographic) deaths during WWI. Last not least, they argue the bias of sources for the Armenian perspective, but does not acknowledge whether sources for the Turkish source had biases too.
No Turkish government since has acknowledged the genocide. This is because multiple founders of the new ethnocentric Turkish republic that emerged from the Ottoman Empire were involved in the genocide. Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian of the genocide, said in a New York Times article that “It’s not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and thieves.”