Armenian genocide

Armenian civilians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers. Kharpert, Ottoman Empire, April 1915.

The Armenian Genocide (Template:Lang-hy, translit.: [Hayoc’ C’eġaspanowt’yown] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help); Template:Lang-tr) – also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Calamity (Մեծ Եղեռն, [Meç Eġeṙn] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), Armenian pronunciation: [mɛts jɛˈʁɛrn]) – refers to the claim of deliberate and systematic destruction (genocide) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between one and one a half million. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Greeks, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.

It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, as scholars point to the systematic, organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust. The word genocide was coined in order to describe these events.

The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace.

The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events (see, Denial of the Armenian Genocide). In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

Prelude

Main articles: Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Armenian population

Life under Ottoman rule

File:Armenians.jpg

Armenian-populated regions in Anatolia, Western Armenia, and the Transcaucasus before the genocide.

The majority of the Armenian population was concentrated in the east of the Ottoman Empire.

Armenia had largely come under Ottoman rule during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Muslim dhimmi system, Armenians, as all Christians, were guaranteed limited freedoms (such as the right to worship), but were in essence treated as second-class citizens. Christians and Jews were not considered equals to Muslims: testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses, their houses could not overlook those of Muslims, and their religious practices (such as the pealing of church bells) would have to defer to those of Muslims, in addition to various other legal limitations. Violation of these statutes could result in punishments ranging from the levying of fines to execution.

Beginning from the mid-nineteenth century, the three major European powers, Great Britain, France and Russia (known as the Great Powers), took issue with the Empire's treatment of its Christian minorities and increasingly pressured the Ottoman government (addressed as the Sublime Porte) to extend equal rights to all its citizens. Beginning in 1839 and ending with the declaration of a constitution in 1876, the Ottoman government implemented a series of reforms, known as the Tanzimat, to improve the situation of minorities, although these would all prove largely ineffective. By the late 1870s, the Greeks, along with several countries of the Balkans, frustrated with their conditions, had, often with the help of the Powers, broken free of Ottoman rule. Armenians, for the most part, remained passive during these years, earning them the title of millet-i sadıka or the "loyal millet."

Reform implementation, 1860s–1880s

Main article: Armenian Question

In the mid-1860s and early 1870s, Armenians, inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of universal equality and civic rights, began to ask for better treatment from the Ottoman government. After amassing the signatures of peasants from Western Armenia (where the bulk of the Armenian population in the empire was concentrated), the Armenian Communal Council had petitioned to the Ottoman government to redress the issues that the peasants complained about: "the looting and murder in Armenian towns by [Muslim] Kurds and Circassians, improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as witnesses in trial." The Ottoman government considered these grievances and promised to punish those responsible. However, in the eastern provinces, the rural Armenian peasantry, which made up the vast majority of the Armenian community in the empire, was often subjected to the whims of their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors, who would regularly overtax them and otherwise exploit them without any interference from central authorities.

Following the violent suppression of Christians in the uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Serbia in 1875, the Great Powers invoked the 1856 Treaty of Paris by claiming that it gave them the right to intervene and protect the Ottoman Empire's Christian minorities. Under growing pressure, the government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II declared itself a constitutional monarchy (which was almost immediately prorogued) and entered into negotiations with the powers. At the same time, the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople headed by Nerses II, forwarded Armenian complaints of widespread "forced land seizure ... forced conversion of women and children, arson, protection extortion, rape, and murder" to the Powers.

After the conclusion of the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War, Armenians began to look more towards the Russian Empire as the ultimate guarantors of their security. Nerses approached the Russian leadership during its negotiations with the Ottomans in San Stefano and in the eponymous treaty, convinced them to insert a clause, Article 16, that stipulated that Russian forces occupying the Armenian provinces would only withdraw with the full implementation of Ottoman reforms. Great Britain was troubled with Russia holding on to so much Ottoman territory and forced it to enter into new negotiations with the convening of the Congress of Berlin on June 13, 1878. Armenians also entered into these negotiations and emphasized that they sought autonomy, not independence from the Ottoman Empire. They partially succeeded as Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin contained the same text as Article 16 but removed any mention that Russian forces would remain in the provinces; instead, the Ottoman government was to periodically inform the Great Powers of the progress of the reforms.

Hamidian Massacres, 1894–1896

Main article: Hamidian Massacres

Hamidian massacres

In 1876, the Ottoman government was led by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. From the beginning of the reform period after the signing of the Berlin treaty, Hamid II attempted to stall their implementation and asserted that Armenians did not make up a majority in the provinces and that Armenian reports of abuses were largely exaggerated or false. In 1890, Hamid II created a paramilitary outfit known as the Hamidiye which was made up of Kurdish irregulars who were tasked to "deal with the Armenians as they wished." As Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions (often as a result of over-taxation) in Armenian populated towns, such as in Sasun in 1894 and Zeitun in 1895-1896, these regiments were increasingly used to deal with the Armenians by way of oppression and massacre. In some instances, Armenians successfully fought off the regiments and brought the excesses to the attention of the Great Powers in 1895 who subsequently condemned the Porte.

The Powers forced Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to curtail the powers of the Hamidiye in October 1895 which, like the Berlin treaty, was never implemented. On October 1, 1895, 2,000 Armenians assembled in Constantinople to petition for the implementation of the reforms but Ottoman police units converged towards the rally and violently broke it up. Soon, massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian-populated provinces of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzerum, Harput, Sivas, Trabzon and Van. Estimates differ on how many Armenians were killed but European documentation of the violence, which became known as the Hamidian massacres, placed the figures from anywhere between 100,000–300,000 Armenians.

Although Hamid was never directly implicated for ordering the massacres, he was suspected for their tacit approval and for not acting to end them. Frustrated with European indifference to the massacres, Armenians from the Dashnaktsutiun political party seized the European-managed Ottoman Bank on August 26, 1896. This incident brought further sympathy for Armenians in Europe and was lauded by the European and American press, which vilified Hamid and painted him as the "great assassin" and "bloody Sultan." While the Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms, these never came into fruition due to conflicting political and economic interests.

Dissolution of the Empire

See also: Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

Young Turk Revolution, 1908

Main article: Young Turk Revolution

Two of the three leaders of the Young Turk triumvirate, Enver Pasha, middle, accompanied by Djemal Pasha, right, in a visit to Jerusalem in 1915, then a part of Ottoman Syria.

On July 24, 1908, Armenians' hopes for equality in the empire brightened once more when a coup d'état staged by officers in the Turkish Third Army based in Salonika removed Abdul Hamid from power and restored the country back to a constitutional monarchy. The officers were part of the Young Turk movement that wanted to reform administration of the decadent state of the Ottoman Empire and modernize it to European standards. The movement was an anti-Hamidian coalition made up of two distinct groups: the secular liberal constitutionalists and the nationalists; the former was more democratic and accepted Armenians into their wing whereas the latter was more intolerant in regard to Armenian-related issues and their frequent requests for European assistance. In 1902, during a congress of the Young Turks held in Paris, the heads of the liberal wing, Sabahheddin Bey and Ahmed Riza, partially persuaded the nationalists to include in their objectives to ensure some rights to all the minorities of the empire.

Among the numerous factions of the Young Turks also included the political organization Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Originally a secret society made up of army officers based in Salonika, the CUP proliferated amongst military circles as more army mutinies took place throughout the empire. In 1908, elements of the Third Army and the Second Army Corps declared their opposition to the Sultan and threatened to march on the capital to depose him. Hamid, shaken by the wave of resentment, stepped down from power as Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Bulgarians and Turks alike rejoiced in his dethronement.

Adana Massacre, 1909

Main article: Adana Massacre

An Armenian town left pillaged and destroyed after the massacres in Adana in 1909.

A countercoup took place on April 13, 1909. Some Ottoman military elements, joined by Islamic theological students, aimed to return control of the country to the Sultan and the rule of Islamic law. Riots and fighting broke out between the reactionary forces and CUP forces, until the CUP was able to put down the uprising and court-martial the opposition leaders.

While the movement initially targeted the nascent Young Turk government, it spilled over into pogroms against Armenians who were perceived as having supported the restoration of the constitution. When Ottoman Army troops were called in, many accounts record that instead of trying to quell the violence they actually took part in pillaging Armenian enclaves in Adana province. 15,000–30,000 Armenians were killed in the course of the "Adana Massacre".

Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 period

See also: Middle Eastern theatre of World War I

In November 2, 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. The Middle Eastern theatre of World War I became the scene of action. The combatants were the Ottoman Empire, with some assistance from the other Central Powers, and primarily the British and the Russians among the Allies of World War I. The conflicts at the Caucasus Campaign, the Persian Campaign and the Gallipoli Campaign affected where the Armenian people lived in significant amounts. Before the declaration of war at the Armenian congress at Erzurum the Ottoman government requested from Ottoman Armenians to facilitate the conquest of Transcaucasia by inciting a rebellion with the Russian Armenians against the tsarist army in the event of an Caucasian Front.

Battle of Sarıkamış

See also: Caucasus Campaign

On December 24, 1914 Minister of War Enver Pasha developed a plan to encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus Army at Sarıkamış, to regain territories lost to Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Enver Pasha's forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and almost completely destroyed.

In the summer of 1914, Armenian volunteer units were established under the Russian Armed forces. As the Russian Armenian conscripts were already send to the European Front, this force was uniquely established from Armenians that were not Russian Armenian or the ones that were not obligated to serve. An Ottoman representative Karekin Bastermadjian (Armen Karo) was also united to this force. Initially they had 20,000 men, but throughout the conflicts it was reported that their number increased. Returning to Constantinople, Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians living in the region actively siding with the Russians.

Labor battalions, February 25

Further information: [[:Labour battalions]]

On February 25, 1915, The War minister Enver Pasha sent an order to all military units that Armenians in the active Ottoman forces be demobilized and assigned to the unarmed Labour battalion (Turkish: amele taburlari). Enver Pasha explained this decision as "out of fear that they would collaborate with the Russians". As a tradition, the Ottoman Army drafted non-Muslim males only between the ages of 20 and 45 into the regular army. The younger (15–20) and older (45–60) non-Muslim soldiers had always been used as logistical support through the labor battalions. Before February, some of the Armenian recruits were utilized as laborers (hamals), though they would ultimately be executed.

Transferring Armenian conscripts from active field (armed) to passive, unarmed logistic section was an important aspect of the subsequent genocide. As reported in "The Memoirs of Naim Bey", the extermination of the Armenians in these battalions was part of a premeditated strategy on behalf of the Committee of Union and Progress. Many of these Armenian recruits were executed by local Turkish gangs.

Events at Van, April 1915

Further information: [[:Van Resistance]]

Armed Armenian civilians and self-defense units holding a line against Turkish forces in the walled Van Resistance in May 1915.

On April 19, 1915, Jevdet Bey demanded that the city of Van immediately furnish him 4,000 soldiers under the pretext of conscription. However, it was clear to the Armenian population that his goal was to massacre the able-bodied men of Van so that there would be no defenders. Jevdet Bey had already used his official writ in nearby villages, ostensibly to search for arms, which had turned into wholesale massacres. The Armenians offered five hundred soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest in order to buy time, however, Djevdet accused Armenians of "rebellion," and spoke of his determination to "crush" it at any cost. "If the rebels fire a single shot," he declared, "I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and" (pointing to his knee) "every child, up to here."

On April 20, 1915, the armed conflict of the Van Resistance began when an Armenian woman was harassed, and the two Armenian men that came to her aid were killed by Turkish soldiers. The Armenian defenders protected 30,000 residents and 15,000 refugees in an area of roughly one square kilometer of the Armenian Quarter and suburb of Aigestan with 1,500 able bodied riflemen who were supplied with 300 rifles and 1,000 pistols and antique weapons. The conflict lasted until General Yudenich came to rescue them.

Similar reports reached Morgenthau from Aleppo and Van, prompting him to raise the issue in person with Talaat and Enver. As he quoted to them the testimonies of his consulate officials, they justified the deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had taken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians.

Arrest and deportation of Armenian notables, April 1915

Further information: [[:Armenian notables deported from the Ottoman capital in 1915]]

Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed en masse by Ottoman authorities on the night of April 24, 1915.

On April 24, 1915, the Red Sunday (Template:Lang-hy), was the night which the leaders of Armenians of the Ottoman capital, Constantinopole, and later extending to other Ottoman centers were arrested and moved to two holding centers near Ankara by then minister of interior Mehmed Talat Bey with his order on April 24, 1915. These Armenians later deported with the passage of Tehcir Law on 29 May 1915. The date 24 April, Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorates the Armenian notables deported from the Ottoman capital in 1915, as the precursor to the ensuing events.

Interior Minister Talat Pasha, who ordered the arrests.

In his order, order on April 24, 1915, Talat claimed "have long been pursuing to gain an administrative autonomy and this desire is displayed once more, in no uncertain terms, with the inclusion of the Russian Armenians who have assumed a position against us together with the Daschnak Committee in no time in the regions of Zeytûn (Zeitun Resistance (1915)), Bitlis, Sivas, and Van (Van Resistance) in accordance with the decisions they have previously taken (Armenian congress at Erzurum)." By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the empire's security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Constantinople. [It included such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Committee of Union and Progress leaders and will succeed in opening the straits (of the Dardanelles)."

On the night of April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government rounded-up and imprisoned an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. This date coincided with Allied troop landings at Gallipoli after unsuccessful Allied naval attempts to break through the Dardanelles to Constantinople in February and March 1915.

Triple Entente's reaction, May 24

On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres."

Massacres

Mass Burnings

Eitan Belkind was a Nili member, who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Camal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the burning of 5,000 Armenians.

Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, describes how a population of a village were taken all together, and then burned. The Commander of the Third Army Vehib's 12-page affidavit, which was dated 5 December 1918, was presented in the Trabzon trial series (March 29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment, reporting such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Mush. that in Bitlis, Mus and Sassoun, "The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in the various camps was to burn them." And also that, "Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at the remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after."

Suffocation

Trabzon was the main city in Trabzon province; Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trabzon, reports: "This plan did not suit Nail Bey.... Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard." The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: "I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea." The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drowned in the Black Sea.

Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé d'affaires, writes: "Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing."

Use of poison/overdose

The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton writes in a parenthesis when introducing the crimes of Nazi doctors, "Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest."

Morphine overdose; During the Trabzon trial series of the Martial court, from the sittings between March 26 and May 17, 1919, the Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib caused the death of children with the injection of morphine. The information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib's colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed.

Toxic gas; Dr. Ziya Fuad and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits reporting cases in which two school buildings were used to organize children and send them to the mezzanine to kill them with toxic gas equipment.

Typhoid inoculation; The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote "on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the IIIrd Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzican were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood ‘inactive’." Jeremy Hugh Baron writes: "Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim's brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938."

Deportations

Further information: [[:Tehcir Law]]

See also: Armenian casualties of deportations

Map of massacre locations and deportation and extermination centers

The remains of Armenians massacred at Erzinjan.

Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote [1], "Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."

In May 1915, Mehmed Talat Pasha requested that the cabinet and Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha legalize a measure for relocation and settlement of Armenians to other places due to what Talat Pasha called "the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the country." However, Talat Pasha was referring specifically to events in Van and extending the implementation to the regions in which alleged "riots and massacres" would affect the security of the war zone of the Caucasus Campaign. Later, the scope of the immigration was widened in order to include the Armenians in the other provinces.

On 29 May 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation ("Tehjir Law"), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security. The "Tehjir Law" brought some measures regarding the property of the deportees, but during September a new law was proposed. By means of the "Abandoned Properties" Law (Law Concerning Property, Dept's and Assets Left Behind Deported Persons, also referred as the "Temporary Law on Expropriation and Confiscation"), the Ottoman government took possession of all "abandoned" Armenian goods and properties. Ottoman parliamentary representative Ahmed Riza protested this legislation:

It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as “abandoned goods” for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its efforts is selling their goods...If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can’t do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it.

On 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament passed the "Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation", stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities.

With the implementation of Tehcir law, the confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter of Armenians that ensued upon the law's enactment outraged much of the western world. While the Ottoman Empire's wartime allies offered little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has since come to attest to the witnesses' horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians. In the United States, The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as "systematic", "authorized" and "organized by the government." Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as "the greatest crime of the war."

Death Marches

An Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field "within sight of help and safety at Aleppo."

The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. A good deal of evidence suggests that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to sustain the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived. By August 1915, The New York Times repeated an unattributed report that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people."

Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves. Deprived of their belongings and marched into the desert, hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished.

Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of slave drivers. With few exceptions no shelter of any kind is provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.

Similarly, Major General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein noted that "The Turkish policy of causing starvation is an all too obvious proof... for the Turkish resolve to destroy the Armenians."

German engineers and laborers involved in building the railway also witnessed Armenians being crammed into cattle cars and shipped along the railroad line. Franz Gunther, a representative for Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad Railway, forwarded photographs to his directors and expressed his frustration at having to remain silent amid such "bestial cruelty". Major General Otto von Lossow, acting military attaché and head of the German Military Plenipotentiary in the Ottoman Empire, spoke to Ottoman intentions in a conference held in Batum in 1918:

The Turks have embarked upon the "total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia... The aim of Turkish policy is, as I have reiterated, the taking of possession of Armenian districts and the extermination of the Armenians. Talaat's government wants to destroy all Armenians, not just in Turkey but also outside Turkey. On the basis of all the reports and news coming to me here in Tiflis there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they left alive until now.

Extermination Camps

The Armenians were driven south toward the deserts of Syria, with only what they could carry.

It is believed that 25 major concentration camps existed, under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hand-men of Talat Pasha. The majority of the camps were situated near Turkey's modern Iraqi and Syrian borders, and some were only temporary transit camps. Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for mass graves; these sites were vacated by autumn 1915. Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.

On the Middle Eastern front, the British military engaged Ottoman forces in southern Syria and Mesopotamia. British diplomat Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account of a captured Ottoman soldier:

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours... some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardianship of some hundred Kurds... These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women... One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100 Armenian men himself... the empty desert cisterns and caves were also filled with corpses...

Relief

Fundraising poster for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East - the United States contributed a significant amount of aid to help Armenians during the Armenian Genocide.

See also: American Committee for Relief in the Near East

American Committee for Relief in the Near East is a relief organization established in 1915, just after the deportations, primary aim was to alleviate the suffering of the Armenian people. Henry Morgenthau played a key role in rallying support for the organization. Between 1915 and 1930, distributed humanitarian relief across a wide range of geographical locations. ACRNE eventually spent over ten times of initial estimate, see original estimate, that amount and helped an estimated close to 2,000,000 refugees

In its first year, ACRNE cared for 132,000 Armenian orphans from Tiflis and Yerevan Constantinople, Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem, Sivas. A relief organization for refugees in the Middle East helped donate over $102 million (budget $117,000,000) [1930 value of dollar] to Armenians both during and after the war.

Teşkilat-i Mahsusa

Main article: Teşkilat-i Mahsusa

The Committee of Union and Progress founded a "special organization" (Template:Lang-tr) that participated in the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit, and it has been compared by some scholars to the Nazi Einsatzgruppen. Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization. According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees. Vehib Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human species.”

Trials

Turkish courts-martial

Main article: Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20

In 1919, Sultan Mehmed VI ordered domestic courts-martial to try members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (Turkish: "Ittihat Terakki") for their role in taking the Ottoman Empire into World War I. The courts-martial blamed the members of CUP for pursuing a war that did not fit into the notion of Millet. The Armenian issue was used as a tool to punish the leaders of the CUP. Most of the documents generated in these courts were later moved to international trials. By January 1919, a report to Sultan Mehmed VI accused over 130 suspects, most of whom were high officials. The military court found that it was the will of the CUP to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its special organization. The 1919 pronouncement reads as follows:

The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principal factors of these crimes the fugitives Talat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party;... the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.

The term Three Pashas, which include Mehmed Talat Pasha and Ismail Enver, refers to the triumvirate who had fled the Empire at the end of World War I. At the trials in Constantinople in 1919 they were sentenced to death in absentia. The courts-martial officially disbanded the CUP and confiscated its assets, and the assets of those found guilty. At least two of the three were later assassinated by Armenian vigilantes.

International trials

Main articles: Malta exiles and Malta Tribunals

Following the Mudros Armistice, the preliminary Peace Conference in Paris established "The Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions" in January 1919, which was chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Lansing. Based on the commission's work, several articles were added to the Treaty of Sèvres, and the acting government of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Mehmed VI and Damat Adil Ferit Pasha, were summoned to trial. The Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) planned a trial to determine those responsible for the "barbarous and illegitimate methods of warfare... [including] offenses against the laws and customs of war and the principles of humanity". Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire "hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914."

Various Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were transferred to Malta, where they were held for some three years while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris and Washington to investigate their actions. However, the Inter-allied tribunal attempt demanded by the Treaty of Sèvres never solidified and the detainees were eventually returned to Turkey in exchange for British citizens held by Kemalist Turkey.

Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian

See also: Operation Nemesis

On March 15, 1921, former Grand Vizier Talat Pasha was assassinated in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin, Germany, in broad daylight and in the presence of many witnesses. Talat's death was part of "Operation Nemesis", the Armenian Revolutionary Federation's codename for their covert operation in the 1920s to kill the planners of the Armenian Genocide.

The subsequent trial of the assassin, Soghomon Tehlirian, had an important influence on Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who campaigned in the League of Nations to ban what he called "barbarity" and "vandalism", and, in 1943, coined the word genocide.

Armenian population, deaths, survivors, 1914 to 1918

Main articles: Ottoman Armenian population, Ottoman Armenian casualties, and Armenian Genocide survivors

While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western scholars that over 500,000 Armenians died between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 600,000 (per the modern Turkish state) to 1,500,000 (per modern Armenia, Argentina, and other states). Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office, who estimated that 600,000 Armenians "died or were massacred during deportation" in the years 1915–1916.

Armenian population, deaths, survivors
1890s	1910s	1920s

Contemporaneous reports and reactions

Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire's own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government officials who claimed they were retaliating against a pro-Russian insurrection. On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres."

The American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE, or "Near East Relief") was a charitable organization established to relieve the suffering of the peoples of the Near East. The organization was championed by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau's dispatches on the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized much support for ACRNE.

U.S. mission in the Ottoman Empire

Workers of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East in Sivas.

The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire, including locations in Edirne, Kharput, Samsun, Smyrna, Trebizond, Van, Constantinople, and Aleppo. The United States was officially a neutral party until it joined with the Allies in 1917. In addition to the consulates, there were also numerous Protestant missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions, including Van and Kharput. The events were reported regularly in newspapers and literary journals around the world.

Many Americans spoke out against the Genocide, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, rabbi Stephen Wise, William Jennings Bryan, and Alice Stone Blackwell. In the United States and the United Kingdom, children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and to "remember the starving Armenians."

A telegram sent by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. to the State Department on 16 July 1915 describes the massacres as a "campaign of race extermination."

See also: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story

As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many consular officials reported to the ambassador what they were witnessing. In his memoirs which he completed writing in 1918, Morgenthau wrote, "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact..." In memoirs and reports, their staff vividly described the brutal methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority. On his return to the United States having served for thirty years as United States Consul and Consul General in the Near East, George Horton wrote his own account of "the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers; with the True Story of the Burning of Smyrna". Horton's account quotes numerous contemporary communications and eyewitness reports including eyewitness accounts of the massacre of Phocea in 1914 by a Frenchman and the Armenian massacres of 1914/15 by an American citizen and a German missionary.

Allied forces in the Middle East

Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts, British politician Viscount Bryce and historian Arnold J. Toynbee compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested to the systematized massacring of innocent Armenians by Ottoman government forces. In 1916, they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916. Although the book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers, Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification before its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated of the tome, "...the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question." Other professors, including Herbert Fisher of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, affirmed the same conclusion.

Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative holocaust" and noted that "the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be. [...] There is no reasonable 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, cherishing national ambitions that could only be satisfied at the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems."

Joint Austrian and German mission

As allies during the war, the Imperial German mission in the Ottoman Empire included both military and civilian components. Germany had brokered a deal with the Sublime Porte to commission the building of a railroad stretching from Berlin to the Middle East, called the Baghdad Railway. The Germans also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to the Israeli historian, Bat Ye’or, who writes: "The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, ...saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes,..." German officers stationed in eastern Turkey disputed the government's assertion that Armenian revolts had broken out, suggesting that the areas were "quiet until the deportations began."

Among the most famous persons to document the massacres was German military medic Armin T. Wegner. Wegner defied state censorship in taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians being deported and subsequently starving in northern Syrian camps.

Germany's diplomatic mission was led by Ambassador Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (and later Count Paul Wolff Metternich). Like Morgenthau, von Wangenheim received many disturbing messages from consul officials around the Ottoman Empire. From the province of Adana, Consul Eugene Buge reported that the CUP chief had sworn to kill and massacre any Armenians who survived the deportation marches. In June 1915, von Wangenheim sent a cable to Berlin reporting that Talat had admitted the deportations were not "being carried out because of 'military considerations alone.'" One month later, he came to the conclusion that there "no longer was doubt that the Porte was trying to exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire."

When Wolff-Metternich succeeded von Wangenheim, he continued to dispatch similar cables: "The Committee [CUP] demands the extirpation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the government must yield.... A Committee representative is assigned to each of the provincial administrations.... Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything that is not Turkish."

Another notable figure in the German military camp was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who documented various massacres of Armenians. He sent fifteen reports regarding "deportations and mass killings" to Germany's chancellor in Berlin. His final report noted that fewer than 100,000 Armenians were left alive in the Ottoman Empire; the rest had been exterminated (Template:Lang-de). Scheubner-Richter also detailed the methods of the Ottoman government, noting its use of the Special Organization and other bureaucratized instruments of genocide.

Some Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians. As Hans Humann, the German naval attaché in Constantinople said to U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau:

I have lived in Turkey the larger part of my life ... and I know the Armenians. I also know that both Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country. One of these races has got to go. And I don't blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians. I think that they are entirely justified. The weaker nation must succumb. The Armenians desire to dismember Turkey; they are against the Turks and the Germans in this war, and they therefore have no right to exist here.

In a genocide conference in 2001, professor Wolfgang Wipperman of the Free University of Berlin introduced documents evidencing that the German High Command was aware of the mass killings at the time but chose not to interfere or speak out.

Russian military

The Russian Empire's response to the bombardment of its Black Sea naval ports was primarily a land campaign through the Caucasus. Early victories against the Ottoman Empire from the winter of 1914 to the spring 1915 saw significant gains of territory, including relieving the Armenian bastion resisting in the city of Van in May 1915. The Russians also reported encountering the bodies of unarmed civilian Armenians as they advanced. In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of Erzerum led the Russians to retaliate against the Ottoman III Army whom they held responsible for the massacres, destroying it in its entirety.

Swedish Embassy and Military Attaché

Sweden, as a neutral state during the entire World War I, had permanent representatives in the Ottoman Empire, able to continuously report on the ongoing events in the country. The Swedish Embassy in Constantinople, represented by Ambassador Per Gustaf August Cosswa Anckarsvärd, along with Envoy M. Ahlgren, and the Swedish Military Attaché, Captain Einar af Wirsén, closely followed the development throughout the empire, reporting, among others, on the Armenian massacres. On July 7, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched a two-page report to Stockholm, beginning with the following information:

The persecutions of the Armenians have reached hair-raising proportions and all points to the fact that the Young Turks want to seize the opportunity, since due to different reasons there are no effective external pressure to be feared, to once and for all put an end to the Armenian question. The means for this are quite simple and consist of the extermination (utrotandet) of the Armenian nation.

During the remainder of 1915 alone, Anckarsvärd dispatched six other reports entitled "The Persecutions of the Armenians". In his report on July 22, Anckarsvärd noted that the persecutions of the Armenians were being extended to encompass all Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Quoting the statement of the Greek chargé d'affaires:

[The deportations] can not be any other issue than an annihilation war against the Greek nation in Turkey and as measures hereof they have been implementing forced conversions to Islam, in obvious aim to, that if after the end of the war there again would be a question of European intervention for the protection of the Christians, there will be as few of them left as possible.

On August 9, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched yet another report, confirming his suspicions regarding the plans of the Turkish government, "It is obvious that the Turks are taking the opportunity to, now during the war, annihilate [utplåna] the Armenian nation so that when the peace comes no Armenian question longer exists."

When reflecting upon the situation in Turkey during the final stages of the war, Envoy Alhgren presented an analysis of the prevailing situation in Turkey and the hard times which had befallen the population. In explaining the increased living costs he identified a number of reasons: "obstacles for domestic trade, the almost total paralysing of the foreign trade and finally the strong decreasing of labour power, caused partly by the mobilisation but partly also by the extermination of the Armenian race [utrotandet af den armeniska rasen]."

Wirsén, when writing his memoirs from his mission to the Balkans and Turkey, Minnen från fred och krig (“Memories from Peace and War”), dedicated an entire chapter to the Armenian genocide, entitled Mordet på en nation (“The Murder of a Nation”). Commenting the deportations as a result of accusing the Armenians for collaboration with the Russians, Wirsén concludes that the subsequent deportations were nothing but a cover for the extermination: "Officially, these had the goal to move the entire Armenian population to the steppe regions of Northern Mesopotamia and Syria, but in reality they aimed to exterminate [utrota] the Armenians, whereby the pure Turkish element in Asia Minor would achieve a dominating position."

In conclusion, Wirsén made the following note: "The annihilation of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor must revolt all human feelings...The way the Armenian problem was solved was hair-raising. I can still see in front of me Talaat’s cynical expression, when he emphasized that the Armenian question was solved."

Study of the Armenian Genocide

Historical work on the genocide has been almost entirely pro-Armenian or pro-Turkish and therefore implicated in a political conflict still unresolved today. Armenian historians seek to exorcise the trauma experienced by earlier generations, to pass on the memory of this trauma, and to present the genocide of the Armenians as the founding element of contemporary Armenian identity.

British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose 1917 report remains a critical primary source, changed his evaluation later in life, concluding, "These…Armenian political aspirations had not been legitimate....Their aspirations did not merely threaten to break up the Turkish Empire; they could not be fulfilled without doing grave injustice to the Turkish people itself."

For Turkish historians, supporting the national republican myth is essential to preserving Turkish national unity. The usual Turkish argument is that the deportations were necessary because the Armenians had allied themselves with the Russian army in wartime, and argue that around 600,000 Armenians perished during the marches, largely due to isolated massacres, disease, or malnourishment. "There was no genocide committed against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before or during World War I." Dissident historians in Turkey are trying to reclaim the Armenians as part of Ottoman and Turkish history and acknowledge the wrongs done to the Armenians as a condition for reconciliation with them on the basis of confidence in Turkish national unity.

Defining genocide

Hebrew University scholar Yehuda Bauer suggests of the Armenian Genocide, "This is the closest parallel to the Holocaust." He nonetheless distinguishes several key differences between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, particularly in regard to motivation:

[T]he Nazis saw the Jews as the central problem of world history. Upon its solution depended the future of mankind. Unless International Jewry was defeated, human civilization would not survive. The attitude towards the Jews had in it important elements of pseudo-religion. There was no such motivation present in the Armenian case; Armenians were to be annihilated for power-political reasons, and in Turkey only... The differences between the holocaust and the Armenian massacres are less important than the similarities—and even if the Armenian case is not seen as a holocaust in the extreme form which it took towards Jews, it is certainly the nearest thing to it.

Bauer has also suggested that the Armenian Genocide is best understood, not as having begun in 1915, but rather as "an ongoing genocide, from 1896, through 1908/9, through World War I and right up to 1923." Lucy Dawidowicz also alludes to these earlier massacres as at least as significant as WWI era events:

In 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was tearing France apart, Bernard Lazare, a French Jew active in Dreyfus's defense, addressed a group of Jewish students in Paris on the subject of anti-Semitism. "For the Christian peoples," he remarked, "an Armenian solution" to their Jew-hatred was available. He was referring to the Turkish massacres of Armenians, which in their extent and horror most closely approximated the murder of European Jews. But, Lazare went on, "their sensibilities cannot allow them to envisage that." The once unthinkable "Armenian solution" became, in our time, the achievable "Final Solution," the Nazi code name for the annihilation of the European Jews.

Law professor Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" in 1943, has stated that he did so with the fate of the Armenians in mind, explaining that "it happened so many times... First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action." Several international organizations have conducted studies of the events, each in turn determining that the term "genocide" aptly describes "the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915–1916." Among the organizations affirming this conclusion are the International Center for Transitional Justice, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the United Nations' Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.

In 2002, the International Center for Transitional Justice was asked by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission to provide a report on the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the controversy. The ICTJ report ruled that it was a genocide, and further that the Republic of Turkey was not liable for the event.

In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed that scholarly evidence revealed the "Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches" and condemned Turkish attempts to deny its factual and moral reality. In 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity produced a letter signed by 53 Nobel Laureates re-affirming the Genocide Scholars' conclusion that the 1915 killings of Armenians constituted genocide.

While some consider denial to be a form of hate speech or politically-minded historical revisionism, several western academics have expressed doubts as to the genocidal character of the events. The most important counterpoint may be that of British scholar Bernard Lewis. While he had once written of "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished", he later came to believe that the term "genocide" was distinctly inaccurate, because the "tremendous massacres" were not "a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government." This opinion has been joined by Guenter Lewy.

Academic views within the Republic of Turkey are often at odds with international consensus: this may partly stem from the fact that to acknowledge the Armenian genocide in Turkey carries with it a risk of criminal prosecution. Many Turkish intellectuals have been prosecuted for characterizing the massacres as genocide, including Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who was prosecuted three times for "denigrating Turkishness" for his having criticized the Turkish state's denial of the Armenian Genocide. In 2007, Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist. Later, photographs of the assassin being honored as a hero while in police custody, posing in front of the Turkish flag with grinning policemen, gave the academic community still more pause in regard to engaging the Armenian issue.

Bat Ye'or has suggested that "the genocide of the Armenians was a jihad." Ye'or holds jihad and what she calls "dhimmitude" to be among the "principles and values" that led to the Armenian Genocide. This perspective is challenged by Fà'iz el-Ghusein, a Bedouin Arab witness of the Armenian persecution, whose 1918 treatise aimed "to refute beforehand inventions and slanders against the Faith of Islam and against Moslems generally... [W]hat the Armenians have suffered is to be attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress... [I]t has been due to their nationalist fanaticism and their jealousy of the Armenians, and to these alone; the Faith of Islam is guiltless of their deeds." Arnold Toynbee writes that "the Young Turks made Pan-Islamism and Turkish Nationalism work together for their ends, but the development of their policy shows the Islamic element receding and the Nationalist gaining ground." Toynbee, and various other sources, report that many Armenians were spared death by marrying into Turkish families or converting to Islam. El-Ghusein points out that many converts were put to death, concerned that Westerners would come to regard the "extermination of the Armenians" as "a black stain on the history of Islam, which ages will not efface." In one instance, when an Islamic leader appealed to spare Armenian converts to Islam, El-Ghusein quotes a government functionary as responding that "politics have no religion", before sending the converts to their deaths.

Noam Chomsky has suggested that, rather than the Armenian Genocide having been relegated to the periphery of public awareness, "more people are aware of the Armenian genocide during the First World War than are aware of the Indonesian genocide in 1965". Taner Akçam's A Shameful Act has contextualized the Armenian Genocide with the desperate Ottoman struggle at Gallipoli, suggesting that panic of imminent destruction caused Ottoman authorities to opt for deportation and extermination.

On October 10, 2009 in Zurich, despite overwhelming opposition by Armenians in Armenia and in the Diaspora, the Armenian government signed the Armenia-Turkey Protocols, one of the provisions of which stipulates the establishment of a research commission "to study the two country's historical grievances." The agreement must still be ratified by the parliaments of both countries in order to take effect.

Just a day before, on 9 October 2009 in London, Geoffrey Robertson QC, eminent jurist, barrister and judge, published a detailed legal opinion, entitled "Was there an Armenian Genocide?" which comprehensively and methodically demolished the British Government's reasons for not formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide.

Republic of Turkey and the Genocide

Main article: Denial of the Armenian Genocide

The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of Armenians during the "relocation" or "deportation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide," a position that has been supported with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs." Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943). Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.

Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically-demonstrated "tolerance of Turkish people" itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military document leverages eleventh century history to cast doubt on the Armenian Genocide: "It was the Seljuk Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the Turkish domination in 1071 from the Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man should." A Der Spiegel article addressed this modern Turkish conception of history thus:

Would you admit to the crimes of your grandfathers, if these crimes didn't really happen?" asked ambassador Öymen. But the problem lies precisely in this question, says Hrant Dink, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos. Turkey's bureaucratic elite have never really shed themselves of the Ottoman tradition — in the perpetrators, they see their fathers, whose honor they seek to defend. This tradition instills a sense of identity in Turkish nationalists — both from the left and the right, and it is passed on from generation to generation through the school system. This tradition also requires an antipole against which it could define itself. Since the times of the Ottoman Empire, religious minorities have been pushed into this role.

In 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan invited Turkish, Armenian and international historians to form a commission to re-evaluate the "events of 1915" by using archives in Turkey, Armenia and other countries. Armenian president Robert Kocharian rejected this offer by saying, "It is the responsibility of governments to develop bilateral relations and we do not have the right to delegate that responsibility to historians. That is why we have proposed and propose again that, without pre-conditions, we establish normal relations between our two countries."}}

Additionally, Turkish foreign minister of the time, Abdullah Gül, invited the United States and other countries to contribute to such a commission by appointing scholars to "investigate this tragedy and open ways for Turks and Armenians to come together". The Turkish government continues to protest against the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries and to dispute that there ever was a genocide.

Controversies

Efforts by the Turkish government and its agents to quash mention of the genocide have resulted in numerous scholarly, diplomatic, political and legal controversies. Prosecutors acting on their own initiative have utilized Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting "insulting Turkishness" to silence a number of prominent Turkish intellectuals who spoke of atrocities suffered by Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire (as of yet, most of these cases have been dismissed). These prosecutions have often been accompanied by hate campaigns and threats, as was the case for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian intellectual murdered in 2007. The leading lawyer behind the prosecutions, Kemal Kerincsiz, is under investigation for complicity in the underground Ergenekon network.

In 1982, the Israeli Foreign Ministry attempted to prevent an international conference on genocide, held in Tel Aviv, from including any mention of the Armenian Genocide. Several reports suggested that Turkey had warned that Turkish Jews might face "reprisals", if the conference permitted Armenian participation. This charge was "categorically denied" by Turkey; the Israeli Foreign Ministry supported Turkey in this protestation that there had been no threats against Jews, suggesting that its misgivings as to the genocide conference were based on considerations "vital to the Jewish nation."

A 1989 U.S. Senate proposal to recognize the Armenian Genocide stoked the ire of Turkey. The proposal occurred in the context of the publication of internal U.S. documents which laid out a State Department official's eyewitness report that "thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered", in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey responded by blocking United States Navy visits to Turkey and suspending some U.S. military training facilities on Turkish territory. The American scholar who assembled the U.S. archive documents for publication went into hiding after a series of anonymous threats.

In 1990, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States, questioning his inclusion of references to the Armenian Genocide in one of his books. The ambassador inadvertently included a draft of the letter, presented by scholar Heath W. Lowry, advising the ambassador on how to prevent mention of the Armenian Genocide in scholarly works. In 1996, Lowry was named to a chair at Princeton University that had been financed by the Turkish government, sparking a debate on ethics in scholarship.

According to some newly discovered documents that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, over 970,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916. These documents have been published in a recent book titled The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha written by the Turkish historian Murat Bardakçı (aka "Talat Pasha's Black Book"). The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations. The documents were given to Mr. Bardakçi by Mr. Talat’s widow, Hayriye, in 1983. According to the documents, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later in 1917.

Armenia and the Genocide

See also: Nagorno-Karabakh War and Sumgait pogrom

Armenia has been involved in a protracted ethnic-territorial conflict with Azerbaijan, a Turkic state, since Azerbaijan became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. The conflict has featured several pogroms, massacres, and waves of ethnic cleansing, by both sides. Some foreign policy observers and historians have suggested that Armenia and the Armenian diaspora have sought to portray the modern conflict as a continuation of the Armenian Genocide, in order to influence modern policy-making in the region. According to Thomas Ambrosio, the Armenian Genocide furnishes "a reserve of public sympathy and moral legitimacy that translates into significant political influence... to elicit congressional support for anti-Azerbaijan policies."

The rhetoric leading up to the onset of the conflict, which unfolded in the context of several pogroms of Armenians, was dominated by references to the Armenian Genocide, including fears that it would be, or was in the course of being, repeated. During the conflict, the Azeri and Armenian governments regularly accused each other of genocidal intent, although these claims have been treated skeptically by outside observers.

Recognition of the Genocide

Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Resolution, April 24, 1998

"Today we commemorate the anniversary of what has been called the first genocide of the 20th century, and we salute the memory of the Armenian victims of this crime against humanity".

Main article: Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

As a response to the continuing denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish State, many activists among Armenian Diaspora communities have pushed for formal recognition of the Armenian genocide from various governments around the world. 20 countries and 42 U.S. states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event. On March 4, 2010, a US congressional panel narrowly voted that the incident was indeed genocide; within minutes the Turkish government issued a statement critical of "this resolution which accuses the Turkish nation of a crime it has not committed."

Cultural loss

The premeditated destruction of objects of Armenian cultural, religious, historical and communal heritage was yet another key purpose of both the genocide itself and the post-genocidal campaign of denial. Armenian churches and monasteries were destroyed, Armenian cemeteries flattened, and, in several cities (e.g. Van), Armenian quarters were demolished.

In 1914, the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople presented a list of the Armenian holy sites under his supervision. The list contained 2,549 religious places of which 200 were monasteries while 1,600 were churches. In 1974 UNESCO stated that after 1923, out of 913 Armenian historical monuments left in Eastern Turkey, 464 have vanished completely, 252 are in ruins, and 197 are in need of repair (in stable conditions).

Commemoration

Memorials

See also: List of Armenian Genocide memorials

The Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide memorial in Yerevan, Armenia

Over 135 memorials, spread across 25 countries, commemorate the Armenian Genocide.

In 1965, the 50th anniversary of the genocide, a 24-hour mass protest was initiated in Yerevan demanding recognition of the Armenian Genocide by Soviet authorities. The memorial was completed two years later, at Tsitsernakaberd above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The 44 metres (144 ft) stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. Twelve slabs are positioned in a circle, representing 12 lost provinces in present day Turkey. At the center of the circle there is an eternal flame. Each April 24, hundreds of thousands of people walk to the genocide monument and lay flowers around the eternal flame.

Another memorial, at Alfortville, Paris, was bombed on May 3, 1984, by a hit-team headed by Grey Wolves member Abdullah Çatlı and paid by the Turkish intelligence agency (MİT).

Art

See also: Armenian Genocide Related Music

The earliest example of the Armenian genocide on art was a medal issued in St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering. It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been commissioned to commemorate the event.

Several eyewitness accounts of the events were published, notably those of Swedish missionary Alma Johansson and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire. Years later, having returned to Germany, Wegner was imprisoned for opposing Nazism, and his books were subjected to Nazi book burnings. Probably the best known literary work on the Armenian Genocide is Franz Werfel's 1933 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It was a bestseller that became particularly popular among the youth of the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi era.

Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 novel Bluebeard features the Armenian Genocide as an underlying theme. Other novels incorporating the Armenian Genocide include Louis de Berniéres' Birds without Wings, Edgar Hilsenrath's German-language The Story of the Last Thought, and Polish Stefan Żeromski's 1925 The Spring to Come. A story in Edward Saint-Ivan's 2006 anthology "The Black Knight's God" includes a fictional survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

The first film about the Armenian Genocide appeared in 1919, a Hollywood production entitled Ravished Armenia. It resonated with acclaimed director Atom Egoyan, influencing his 2002 Ararat. There are also references in Elia Kazan's America, America or Henri Verneuil's Mayrig. At the Berlin Film Festival of 2007 Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani presented another film about the events, based on Antonia Arslan's book, La Masseria Delle Allodole (The Farm of the Larks). Richard Kalinoski's play, Beast on the Moon, is about two Armenian Genocide survivors.

Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926–1936)

The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period. In 1915, at age 10, Gorky fled his native Van and escaped to Russian-Armenia with his mother and three sisters, only to have his mother die of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. His The Artist and His Mother painting is based on a photograph with his mother taken in Armenia before his mother's passing.

In 1975, famous French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour recorded the song "Ils sont tombés" ("They Fell"), dedicated to the memory of Armenian Genocide victims.

American composer and singer Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his collaborations with Armenian composer Ara Gevorgyan. The song "Adana", named for the province of a 1909 pogrom of the Armenian people, tells the story of the Armenian Genocide. "Adana" has been translated into 17 languages and recorded by singers around the world.

The American band System of a Down, composed of four descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, has promoted awareness of the Armenian Genocide, through its lyrics and concerts.

In late 2003, Diamanda Galás released the album Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead, an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek victims of the genocide in Turkey. "The performance is an angry meditation on genocide and the politically cooperative denial of it, in particular the Turkish and American denial of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides from 1914 to 1923".

Documentary films

On April 17, 2006 The Armenian Genocide documentary premiered nationwide in the U.S. on PBS TV

Promotional poster for the 1919 Hollywood film Ravished Armenia

• 1945 – Fatherland (dir. G. Balasanyan, L. Isahakyan and G. Zardaryan)
• 1964 – Where Are My People? (dir. J. Michael Hagopian)
• 1975 – The Forgotten Genocide (dir. J. Michael Hagopian)
• 1983 – Assignment Berlin (dir. Hrayr Toukhanian)
• 1988 – An Armenian Journey (dir. Theodore Bogosian)
• 1988 – Back To Ararat (dirs. Jim Downing, Göran Gunér, Per-Åke Holmquist, Suzanne Khardalian)
• 1990 – General Andranik (dir. Levon Mkrtchyan)
• 1991 – The Armenian Genocide (DVD). Thousand Oaks, California: Armenian Film Foundation. 1991. OCLC 60768143.
• 1992 – Secret History: The Hidden Holocaust (dir. Michael Jones)
• 2000 – I Will Not Be Sad in This World (dir. Karina Epperlein)
• 2000 – Destination Nowhere: The Witness (dir. Dr. J. Michael Hagopian)
• 2003 – Germany and the Secret Genocide (dir. Dr. J. Michael Hagopian)
• 2003 – Voices From the Lake: A Film About the Secret Genocide (dir. J. Michael Hagopian)
• 2003 – Desecration (dir. Hrair "Hawk" Khatcherian)
• 2003 – The Armenian Genocide: A Look Through Our Eyes (dir. Vatche Arabian)
• 2004 – My Son Shall Be Armenian (dir.Hagop Goudsouzian)
• 2005 – Hovhannes Shiraz (dir. Levon Mkrtchyan)
• 2006 – The Armenian Genocide (dir. Andrew Goldberg)
• 2006 – Screamers (dir. Carla Garapedian)
• 2008 – The River Ran Red (dir. J. Michael Hagopian)

Films

• 1919 - Ravished Armenia, a Hollywood film about the real-life story of survivor Aurora Mardiganian
• 1977 - Nahapet
• 1991 - Mayrig by Henri Verneuil
• 1982 - The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (dir. Sarky Mouradian)
• 2002 - Ararat (dir. Atom Egoyan)
• 2007 - La Masseria Delle Allodole
• 2009 - Ravished Armenia, restored and edited 24-minute segment of original 1919 film

Music

• 1998 - War?

Images from the genocide

• Armenian Refugees
• 
  An Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field "within sight of help and safety at Aleppo."
• 
  Food relief
• 
  Woman with baby
• 
  Transport of Armenians
• 
  transport to Greece
• 
  transport to Greece
• 
• 
  in Van
• 
  Tents in Aleppo
• Armenian refugees marching across the Syrian desert.
  Armenian refugees marching across the Syrian desert.
• 
  Aleppo, Syria.
• 
  Syria
• 
  Near East relief a comman sight among the Armenian refugees in syria
• 
  Beirut
• 
  Port Said, Egypt.
• 
  Bitlis
• 
  Sivas
• 
  Armenian refugee children near Athens, 1923, after the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
• 
  Near East Relief 5,000 children from Karput en route on donkey back and foot

Demographics and maps

• 
  1893-96, Armenian population
• 
  1914, Armenian population.
• 
  1921, Armenian population values.

See also

• Armenian-Turkish relations
• Armenian Genocide survivors
• Anti-Armenianism
• Fall of the Ottoman Empire
• Armenian diaspora
• Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
• Assyrian Genocide
• Greek genocide
• Insulting Turkishness

Further reading

• Adalian, Rouben Paul. "The Armenian Genocide," in William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny, eds. Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. (2004), ch 2 online edition
• Adalian, Rouben P. Historical Dictionary of Armenia (2002).
• Ahnert, Margaret Ajemian. The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of Armenian Genocide. Beaufort Books 2007. 240 pp
• Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (2007) excerpt and text search
• Andreopoulos, George J., ed. Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. 1994. 265 pp. Compares Armenia with Cambodia, East Timor and Kurdistan.
• Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (2005), scholarly history of the wartime massacres; 344 pages excerpt and text search
• Bloxham, Donald. "Rethinking the Armenian Genocide." History Today 2005 55(6): 28-30. Issn: 0018-2753 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. "Patterns of Twentieth Century Genocides: the Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan Cases." Journal of Genocide Research 2004 6(4): 487-522. Issn: 1462-3528 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Dadrian, Vahakn, N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (1997) online edition
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict. 1999. 214 pp.
• Dadrian, Vahakn, N. * Herzig, Edmund, and Marina Kurkchiyan. The Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of National Identity (2005) online edition
• Hovannisian, Richard G. ed. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. (1986), important essays by scholars; excerpt and text search
• Hovannisian, Richard G. ed. The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. Vol. 2: Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century. 1997. 493 pp.
• Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2004), ch 5 and 6
• Melson, Robert, Revolution and Genocide. On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, The University of Chicago Press, 1996
• Panossian, Razmik. The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars. 2006. 442 pp.
• Papazian, Bertha S. The Tragedy of Armenia: A Brief Study and Interpretation (1919) full text online
• Somakian, Manoug Joseph. Empires in Conflict: Armenia and the Great Powers, 1895-1920. 1995. 276 pp.

World responses

• Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. "Down in Turkey, far away': Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany," Journal of Modern History Volume 79, Number 1, March 2007, pp 80–111
• Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. New York: HarperCollins, (2003). 475 pp excerpt and text search
• Hovannisian, Richard G. "The Allies and Armenia, 1915-18." Journal of Contemporary History 1968 3(1): 145-168. Issn: 0022-0094 Fulltext: in Jstor
• Libaridian, Gerard. "The Ideology of the Young Turk Movement," pp. 37–49. In Gerard Libaridian (Ed.) A Crime of Silence, The Armenian Genocide: Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. (London: Zed Books, 1985).
• Nassibian, Akaby Britain and the Armenian Question: 1915-1923. (1984).
• Power, Samantha. "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. Harper, 2003
• Peterson, Merrill D. "Starving Armenians": America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1930 and After. (2004). 199 pp.
• Severance, Gordon and Diana Severance. Against the Gates of Hell: The Life & Times of Henry Perry, a Christian Missionary in a Moslem World (2003)
• Winter, Jay, ed. America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (2004), 325pp excerpts and text search

Memory

• Auron, Yair. The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide (2005)
• Dyer, Gwynne. "Turkish ‘Falsifiers’ and Armenian ‘Deceivers’: Historiography and the Armenian Massacres," Middle Eastern Studies 12 (January 1976), pp. 99–107.
• Gunter, Michael M. Pursuing the Just Cause of Their People: A Study of Contemporary Armenian Terrorism (1986) online edition
• Hovannisian, Richard G., ed. Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. 1999. 316 pp.
• Peroomian, Rubina. Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience (1993), focus on work of Armenian authors: Zabel Esayan (1878–1943), Suren Partevian (1876–1921), Aram Andonian (1875–1952), and Hakob Oshakan (1883–1948).
• Ravitch, Norman. The Armenian Catastrophe: Of History, Murder & Sin," Encounter, December 1981, pp. 69–84.

Primary sources

• Davis, Leslie A. The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917. (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, Publisher, 1989).
• Kirakossian, Arman J. ed. The Armenian Massacres, 1894-1896: U.S. Media Testimony (2004), 317 pp
• Miller, Donald E. and Miller, Lorna Touryan, eds. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. 1993. 242 pp.
• Morgenthau, Henry. Ambassador Morgethau's Story (1918), detailed report by U.S. Ambassador to Turkey full text online
• Ohandjanian, Artem, ed. The Armenian Genocide, Volume 2 Documentation. (Munich: Institute fur Armenische Fragen 1988).
• Sanasarian, Eliz. "Gender Distinction in the Genocide Process: A Preliminary Study of the Armenian Case." Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (1989) 4(4):449-61.
• Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1916) 736 pages; also known as the Bryce Report or Bryce-Toynbee Blue Book. full text online

Online resources

• older books, full text online
• online documents and commentary from Armenian forum
• primary sources on the Armenian Genocide
• "Teaching the Armenian Genocide: Resources for Teachers, Students and Educators" (PDF). The Armenian Genocide Resource Center (AGRC) of Northern California. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
• "The Armenian Genocide: A Bibliography". University of Michigan, Dearborn: Armenian Research Center. Retrieved January 16, 2009.

External links

• Armenian Genocide Resource Library for Teachers
• The Armenian Genocide Institute-Museum based in Yerevan, Armenia
• Armenian National Institute (dedicated to the study, research, and affirmation of the Armenian Genocide) based in Washington, DC
• Armenian Genocide Museum of America
• Armenian Genocide on the Armeniapedia.org website (Wegner photos)
• The Armenian Genocide, at www.theforgotten.org, has videos of interviews with survivors
• Online Encyclopedia of Mass violence (Chronological Index & Articles)

Interactive media

• Armenian Genocide 1915–1923, an interactive presentation