Ottoman authorities, supported by auxiliary troops and at times by civilians, perpetrated most of the persecution and mass killing. Lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the coiner of the word and later its champion at the United Nations, repeatedly stated that early exposure to newspaper stories about Ottoman crimes against Armenians was key to his beliefs about the need for legal protection of groups (a core element in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948). The origin of the term genocide and its codification in international law have their roots in the mass murder of Armenians in 1915–16. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation. There were approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire in 1915. Sometimes called the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916.
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