Genocide In Armenia
Known also as the “Armenian Holocaust,” the “Great Calamity,” and the “Armenian Massacres,” the Armenian Genocide refers to the forced deportation and massacre of between 500,000 to 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War, in the Anatolian region of the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey).
The Ottoman Empire existed in the Balkan region of the Middle East from 1300-1923. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman conquest of Armenia and Cilicia brought the vast majority of the Armenian population under Ottoman rule. During the time of the genocide, the Ottoman Empire bordered Bulgaria and Greece in the west, the Mediterranean Sea in the south and southwest, the Black Sea in the North, Iraq and Syria in the Southwest, and the Russian empire in the East and Northeast. The topography of the region features a high central plateau (Anatolia), a narrow coastal plain, and several mountain ranges. The climate is hot and dry, with mild, wet winters.
Concurrent with the Muslim dhimmi system, Armenians, as Christians, had always been treated as second-class citizens in the Ottoman Empire. Armenians were allowed the freedom to practice their faith; however, mass persecution of Armenian citizens was a regular occurrence. Moreover, the Armenians were often blamed for misfortunes which befell the Ottoman Empire. Many times, this resulted in rioting, burning of Armenian property, rape, and mass killing. Despite the history of Armenian demise in Anatolia, April 24, 1915, is commemorated as the official date for the unfolding of the “Armenian Genocide.” The bulk of the killing was carried during World War I, between the years of 1915 and 1918. The end of World War I in 1918 brought about a brief lull in the massacres- they could no longer be carried out under war-time concealment, and the world had been made aware to the Ottoman atrocities. However, after little more than a year of calm, the killings were renewed between 1920 and 1923 when the fledgling Armenian Republic was destroyed by a reinvigorated Turkish nationalist movement. The killings ended in 1923 when the newly founded Republic of Turkey was virtually free of all Armenians, and laws were enacted to prevent displaced Armenians from returning to their former homes.
The “Young Turks” were a reformist and nationalist party, founded in the latter part of the 19th century, which became the dominant political party in Turkey during the period from 1908 to 1918. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution deposed the previously ruling Ottoman monarchy of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and as a result, brought about the gradual creation of a new governing elite, which had established its control over the Ottoman civil and military administration by 1913. It was also during this time that the Young Turks began to base their nationalist ideology on the new, pseudo-scientific race theories of Europe; the term “Ottoman” was to be replaced with “Turk.” What this meant for the Armenians, among other ethnic minorities in the Anatolian region, was that they were ethnically inferior to the superior Turkish race – much like the “inferior” Jews and gypsies in Nazi Germany. “The Three Pashas”, also known as the “dictatorial triumvirate,” were the dominant political figures of Ottoman Turkey during World War I. Following the war, the Pashas were held responsible for involving Turkey in the War, and the Armenian massacres were rendered as a consequence of their corruption. All three were tried in the Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20 and sentenced to death. However, the revival of Armenian killing in 1920 due to Greek insurgencies, suggests that the Armenian genocide was more reliant on widespread pan-Turkic ethnic and religious nationalism, rather than the responsibility of just a few individuals.
The Armenians are an ancient people that have lived on the Armenian Plateau for more than 4,000 years. The Armenian homeland is located on the Armenian plateau, central and eastern Anatolia and southwestern Caucasia-in the highlands above Greater Syria and Mesopotamia to the south. Their continual presence in the Ottoman Empire came to an abrupt end when the Young Turk regime targeted the Armenians for their non-Turkic ethnicity, their Christian faith, and their alleged affiliation with Russia, the sworn enemy of the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the majority of the Armenian people were either killed outright or “ethnically cleansed” (removed by force) from their ancestral homeland; others escaped to neighboring countries, or remained in the newly established Soviet Republic of Armenia. According to the same pan-Turkic, nationalist ideology, ethnic Greeks and Assyrians were also targeted and massacred in the genocide.
By 1914, Ottoman authorities had created an empire-wide propaganda piece in which Armenians were presented as backstabbers of Ottoman Nationalism, in league with the Russians, and a threat to state security. On the night of April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals at Constantinople. The Armenian people had no leadership, no governmental representation, and were left without defense to the Ottoman Turks. From May to September, 1915, legislations were enacted to discharge all Armenians from military service, to deport Armenian citizens out of the Anatolian region, and to sanction government confiscation of all Armenian land and property. The Ottoman military removed Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, without food or water, to the desert of modern-day Syria. Hundreds of thousands of people died on these forced marches. People were massacred indiscriminately: men and women, old and young. Mass shootings occurred at random. Pillaging, persecution, torture, rape and other sexual abuses were commonplace. Winston Churchill tactfully defined the massacres as an “administrative holocaust” when he said,
“…the clearance of (The Armenian) race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be… There is no reason to doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions.”
Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including government representatives of the United States, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented the state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials spoke out for the sake of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, whose claims were rejected and denied by the Ottoman administration. The massacres continued under the cover of World War I, until the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed on October 30, 1918. Despite international awareness, an armed intervention to stop the genocide never occurred.
Contemporary scholars estimate that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the genocide. There were also thousands of displaced Armenians, along with approximately 500,000 Assyrian deaths, and 350,000 Anatolian Greek deaths. The displaced survivors were largely unable to return to their former homes, as their land and property now belonged to the new Turkish government, or the Soviet state of Armenia. The “Armenian Diaspora” is the most visible, contemporary effect of this disaster; of the estimated 9 million Armenians worldwide, almost 8 million live outside of the Armenian homeland in Anatolia. As the first genocide of the 20th Century, the Armenian Genocide served as a measuring stick for other instances of mass atrocity to come. Less than a decade later, The Armenian Genocide influenced Adolf Hitler- he often made references to the Ottoman onslaught. In a speech given prior to his invasion of Poland in 1939, Hitler said the following:
I have issued the command — and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
Polish- Jewish professor Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1943, has claimed that he did so with the massacre of the Armenians in mind. Based on the actions of the Young Turks, Lemkin’s definition of genocide is still widely used in contemporary scholarship and Human Rights. To this day, The Republic of Turkey’s official stance is that the deaths of Armenians during their “relocation” cannot accurately be deemed as “genocide,” essentially denying the intentional nature of the atrocities. This denial has dramatically hindered Turkish foreign relations, and is currently a leading factor in Turkey’s restriction from the European Union. Most scholars around the world acknowledge that the tragedy was, indeed, genocide.
