The Armenian Genocide (also known as the Armenian Holocaust) was the systematic mass extermination and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empire (most of whom were citizens) by the Ottoman government from approximately 1914 to 1923. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to the region of Angora (Ankara), 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, the majority of whom were eventually murdered.
The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases—the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre. Most Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.
Other ethnic groups were similarly targeted for extermination in the Assyrian genocide and the Greek genocide, and their treatment is considered by some historians to be part of the same genocidal policy.
Specifically the annihilation of the Armenians came to define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters and to coin the word genocide in 1943. The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out. It is the second-most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.
Turkey denies that the word genocide is an accurate term for these crimes, but in recent years has been faced with increasing calls to recognize them as such. As of 2019, governments and parliaments of 32 countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States, have recognized the events as a genocide.
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.” The IAGS also condemned Turkish attempts to deny the factual and moral reality of the Armenian Genocide. 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.
BACKGROUND
The western portion of historical Armenia, had come under Ottoman jurisdiction in 1555. Armenians were mainly concentrated in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, although large communities were also found in the western provinces and 200,000 (20% of the population) in Constantinople.
The Armenian community was allowed to rule itself under its own system of governance with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government. Most Armenians—approximately 70%—lived in poor and dangerous conditions in the rural countryside, with the exception of the wealthy, Constantinople-based Amira class, a social elite. There were almost three million Armenians living in the empire in 1878 (400,000 in Constantinople and the Balkans, 600,000 in Asia Minor and Cilicia, 670,000 in Lesser Armenia and the area near Kayseri, and 1,300,000 in Western Armenia).
The Armenians were subject to the whims of their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors, who would regularly overtax them, subject them to brigandage and kidnapping, force them to convert to Islam, and otherwise exploit them without interference from central or local authorities. They had the rights of the non-Muslims to property, livelihood and freedom of worship, but they were in essence treated as second-class citizens but were considered “infidel” or “unbeliever”. Non-Muslims were prohibited from building new places of worship leading to non-Muslim communities being clustered around existing houses of worship.
Testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law wherein a Muslim could be punished, they were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses and camels. Their houses could not overlook those of Muslims; and their religious practices were severely circumscribed, e.g., the ringing of church bells was strictly forbidden.
From 1640-76, the Armenians remained, by and large, passive during these years, but then began to question their second-class status and press for better treatment from their government. There were complaints of widespread “forced land seizure … forced conversion of women and children, arson, protection extortion, rape, and murder”.
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 ended with Russia’s decisive victory but entire Armenian districts had been devastated by massacres carried out with the connivance of Ottoman authorities.
After the 1878 Berlin treaty, security conditions in the Armenian provinces went from bad to worse and abuses proliferated. In the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were massacred.
The Adana massacre of 1909 involved pogroms against Armenians by 4,000 Turkish civilians and soldiers with 15,000 and 30,000 people killed.
In 1912, the First Balkan War ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the loss of 85% of its European territory. It resulted in the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans with hundreds of thousands of Muslims and 850,000 of these refugees were settled in areas where the Armenians resided. The muhacirs resented the status of their relatively well-off neighbors and came to play a pivotal role in the killings of the Armenians and the confiscation of their properties during the genocide.
WW I. On 2 November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers and against the Allies. The battles of the Caucasus Campaign, the Persian Campaign and the Gallipoli Campaign affected several populous Armenian centers. In November 1914 Shaykh ul-Islam proclaimed Jihad (Holy War) against the Christians: this was later used as a factor to provoke radical masses in the implementation of the Armenian Genocide.
In February 1915, all ethnic Armenians serving in the Ottoman forces were relieved from their posts and assigned to the unarmed Labour battalions. Transferring Armenian conscripts from active combat to passive, unarmed logistic sections was an important precursor to the subsequent genocide. Many of these Armenian recruits were executed by local Turkish gangs.
On the night of 23–24 April 1915, known as Red Sunday, the Ottoman government rounded up and imprisoned an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders of the Ottoman capital, Constantinople and were gradually deported and assassinated. The date 24 April is commemorated as Genocide Remembrance Day by Armenians around the world.
Deportations. The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. The Ottoman government deliberately withheld the facilities and supplies that would have been necessary to sustain the life of hundreds of thousands of Armenian deportees. The roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death.
Rape was an integral part of the genocide as military commanders told their men to “do to [the women] whatever you wish”, resulting in widespread sexual abuse. Deportees were displayed naked in Damascus and sold as sex slaves in some areas, including Mosul constituting an important source of income for accompanying soldiers. Around a quarter of young women, whose appearance was “more or less pleasing”, were regularly raped by the gendarmes, and that “even more beautiful ones” were violated by 10–15 men.
Concentration camps. A network of 25 concentration camps on Turkey’s present-day borders with Iraq and Syria was set up to dispose of the Armenians who had survived the deportations. Ottoman authorities refused to provide food and water to the victims, increasing the mortality rate. Muslims were eager to obtain Armenian women. Authorities registered such marriages but did not record the deaths of the former Armenian husbands.
Mass graves containing over 60,000 people and large numbers of mounds of corpses were filled with Armenians who died due to hunger and disease. Dysentery swept through the camps
The “Special Organization” composed of hundreds, then thousands of prisoners freed were charged with escorting the convoys of Armenian deportees. The population of a village were taken all together and then burned, the shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in the various camps. 80,000 Armenians in 90 villages across the Muş plain were burned in “stables and haylofts”.
Drowning. 50,000 women and children were loaded into boats and taken out to the Black Sea and Euphrates River and thrown overboard”.
Physicians designed methods for poisoning victims and using Armenians as subjects for lethal human experimentation – morphine overdose, toxic gas and typhoid inoculation.
Confiscation of Property. All property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities. An assessment of $3.7 billion (about $53 billion today) worth of material losses owned solely by the Armenian church was confiscated. 2,000 churches and 200 monasteries were destroyed. The total losses of personal property and assets of both Turkish and Russian Armenia totaled an estimated $347 billion today. By the early 1930s, all properties belonging to Armenians who were subject to deportation had been confiscated. Since then, no restitution of property confiscated during the Armenian Genocide has taken place. The mass confiscation of Armenian properties was an important factor in forming the economic basis of the Turkish Republic while endowing Turkey’s economy with capital. It provided the opportunity for ordinary lower class Turks (i.e. peasantry, soldiers, and laborers) to rise to the ranks of the middle class. An étatist Turkish “national economy” was unthinkable without the destruction and expropriation of Armenians.
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 or changed into mosques, Armenian cemeteries flattened, and, in several cities (e.g., Van), Armenian quarters were demolished.
Aside from the deaths, Armenians lost their wealth and property without compensation. Businesses and farms were lost, and all schools, churches, hospitals, orphanages, monasteries, and graveyards became Turkish state property. After the end of World War I, Genocide survivors tried to return and reclaim their former homes and assets, but were driven out by the Ankara Government.
In 1914, a list of the Armenian holy sites contained 2,549 religious places – 200 monasteries and 1,600 churches. 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).
MEMORIALS. Over 135 memorials, spread across 25 countries, commemorate the Armenian Genocide.
In 1967, a memorial was completed at Tsitsernakaberd above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The memorial contains a 44 metres (144 ft) stele which 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 24 April, hundreds of thousands of people walk to the monument, which is the official memorial of the genocide, and lay flowers around the eternal flame. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, situated in Tsitsernakaberd, presents a rich collection of books and archival materials (photographs, documents, demographic tables, documentaries) about the history of the Armenian Genocide; it is also a research institute and a library. The museum holds a permanent, online and temporary exhibitions, which give a detailed and documented description of that period and of the atrocities. Visits to the museum are a part of the protocol of the Republic of Armenia. Many foreign dignitaries have already visited the Museum, including Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, Presidents of France Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande and other well-known public and political figures.