Not genocide

The majority of scholars and historians agree with Ronald Suny. But Guenter Lewy from the University of Massachusetts does not.

"There is the initial definition by the United Nations when they adopted the genocide convention, which is considered generally authoritative. And that involves the intentional destruction of a group in whole or in part for religious, ethnic or racial reasons. Applying that definition, I do not think one can consider what happened here a case of genocide. I don't think there was any intent to exterminate the Armenian community. There was an intent to remove them and neutralize them as a fifth column," he said.

Lewy says rejecting the genocide label is not a popular view. "It takes some courage these days to do so because there is a lot of pressure and some rather vicious attacks. I can speak here from personal experience. If you look me up on Guenter Lewy, Armenian genocide and you look at some of the blogs, you will find a lot of vituperation: you are called a genocide denier on a par with holocaust deniers," he said.

Experts also disagree on the number of Armenians killed by the Ottoman Turks. Guenter Lewy says close to 700,000 perished.

But most scholars - such as Roger Smith with the College of William and Mary - say the figure is higher. "Out of about two million Armenians that were thought to exist in 1915, probably about a million and a half - at least over a million - perished and others were dispersed. So that if you say in 1915 there were two million Armenians in what we call Turkey, but the Ottoman Empire - there are now about 60,000 Armenians in Turkey. So a huge, vast population change," he said.