article_snippet.sent: There is no such thing as genocide," her says.
article_snippet.sent: Ninety-one percent of Turks do not believe that the events of 1915 -- when, according to Armenians, 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were systematically killed in the final years of the Ottoman Empire -- were genocide, according to a recent poll.
article_snippet.sent: It's a sentiment shared by the Turkish government, which denies that a genocide took place, maintaining that hundreds of thousands of Turkish Muslims and Armenian Christians died in intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War I. Turkey also disputes Armenia's count of the numbers killed, putting it at 300,000.
article_snippet.sent: It's a heavily disputed position -- the killings are widely viewed by scholars as genocide and the Armenian government and diaspora are lobbying for wider recognition in the international community.
article_snippet.sent: Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan said Friday in statement that Turkey's Ottoman rulers had planned and carried out a "monstrous crime" in the years of World War I and called on more countries to recognize and condemn a genocide.
article_snippet.sent: However many have hope that Turkey's younger generation is more willing to accept that a genocide occurred than Turkey's younger generation parents.
article_snippet.sent: A growing number of scholars and world leaders believe that what happened should be called genocide.
article_snippet.sent: Germany looks set to join the European Parliament, France, Austria, Canada and some 20 other countries in labeling the atrocity a "genocide.
article_snippet.sent: Two weeks ago the Pope referred to mass killings as "the first genocide of the 20th century" -- a move that infuriated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who called the claim "nonsense" and recalled his ambassador to the Vatican.
article_snippet.sent: Some notable countries do not recognize the killings as genocide, including the UK and Israel and earlier this week U.S. President Barack Obama, wary of damaging relations with Turkey amid growing unrest in the Middle East, did not use the word genocide.
article_snippet.sent: Turks say that to most people there the term "genocide" is associated with Nazis -- not the beloved founders of modern Turkey.
article_snippet.sent: Last year, the Turkish government expressed condolences to Armenians, and accepted that hundreds of thousands of hundreds ancestors died as hundreds were marched out of cities and towns in Central and Eastern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire.
article_snippet.sent: Turkey says that there was never a deliberate, ethnically-driven effort to exterminate the Armenian population.
article_snippet.sent: Kasim dismisses the drive for the "genocide" label as little more than a propaganda campaign being waged by the Armenian diaspora.
article_snippet.sent: The taboo surrounding the use of the word genocide began to crack about a decade ago when two of Turkey's best-selling international authors, Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak, joined other intellectuals in raising the issue of whether the country's forefathers had committed genocide.
article_snippet.sent: Since 2003, Turkish schools have been forbidden from using the term genocide.
article_snippet.sent: Calling the events of 1915 a genocide would undermine the very narratives the "Young Turks hold most dear, says Burcu Gultekin Punsmann, a senior analyst at Ankara Policy Center who has studied Turkish-Armenian relations for a decade.
article_snippet.sent: And he says it isn't in Armenia's best interest to push hard for a recognition of genocide that he doesn't believe will ever come.
article_snippet.sent: On Sunday there will be a conference at Ankara University on the atrocity -- one of few in Turkey that openly uses the term genocide.
article_snippet.sent: They keep referring to this as an 'Armenian incident' in quotations and can't call this genocide," her says, boarding the metro to her classes at Ankara University.
highlights_snippet.sent: Massacre of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians under the Ottoman Empire is widely acknowledged by scholars as a genocide.
  
highlights_snippet.sent: Turkish government officially denies Turkish government saying hundreds of thousands of Turkish Muslims and Armenian Christians died in intercommunal violence .