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Wilsonian Armenia border

Armenian Genocide FrontPage

Armenian History FrontPage

Armenian Apostolic Church

Lebanon FrontPage

I should like to see any power in this world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people whose history is ended, whose wars have been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, and whose prayers are no more answered.

Go ahead, destroy this race! Destroy Armenia! See if you can do it.

Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their homes and churches.

Then, see if they will not laugh again, see if they will not sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

-William Saroyan

THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Summary of Events Leading up to the Genocide

Somewhat surprisingly to many, Armenians and Turks lived in relative harmony in the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Armenians were known as the "loyal millet". During these times, although Armenians were not equal and had to put up with certain special hardships, taxes and second class citizenship, they were pretty well accepted and there was relatively little violent conflict. Things began to change for a number of reasons. Nationalism, a new force in the world, reared its head and made ethnic groupings self-conscious, and the Ottoman Empire began to crumble. It became known as "the sick man of Europe" and the only thing holding it together was the European powers' lack of agreement on how to split it up.

As other Christian minorities gained their independence one by one, the Armenians became more isolated as the only major Christian minority. Armenians and Turks began to have conflicting dreams of the future. Some Armenians began to call for independence like the Greeks and others had already received, while some Turks began to envision a new Pan-Turkic empire spreading all the way to Turkic speaking parts of Central Asia. Armenians were the only ethnic group in between these two major pockets of Turkish speakers and the nationalist Turks wanted to get rid of them altogether.

As European powers began to ask for assurances that Armenians receive better treatment, the government began to treat the Armenians worse and worse. From 1894-6 hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in the Hamidian Massacres ordered by Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

A coup by 'progressive' Young Turks in 1908 replacing the Sultans government was supported by Armenians. Unfortunately, promised reforms never came, and in fact a triumvirate of extreme Turkish nationalists took complete dictatorial control, Enver, Jemal and Talat. It was they who masterminded the plan to completely eradicate the Armenian race in a step towards fulfilling their pan-Turkic dreams.

The Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909 were still fresh in their minds.

Contemporary political cartoon portraying Hamid as a butcher of the Armenians

Hamidian massacres

During the long reign of Sultan Hamid, unrest and rebellion occurred in many areas of the Ottoman Empire. One of the most serious of these incidents occurred in some Armenian populated parts of Anatolia. Although the Ottomans had crushed other revolts in the past, the harshest measures were directed against the Armenian community. They observed no distinction between the nationalist dissidents and the Armenian population at large, and massacred them with brutal force.However, this occurred in the 1890s, at a time when the telegraph could spread news around the world and when the Christian European powers were vastly more powerful than the weakening Ottoman state.

Political cartoon portraying Sultan Hamid as a butcher for his harsh actions against the Ottoman Armenians

Events leading to the massacres

The origin of Armenian unrest can be traced, in large part, to the success of Imperial Russia in the Russo-Turkish War, 1877-78. At the end of the war, based on the Treaty of San Stefano the Ottoman government had to give away a large part of territory (including the cities of Kars and Batumi) to the Russians. The Russian government claimed they were the supporters of the beleaguered Christian communities within the Ottoman Empire and clearly, the Russians could now beat the Ottomans. The Treaty of Berlin - which reduced the magnitude of Russia's gains on the other side of the Black Sea - stated that the Ottoman government had to give legal protection to the Christian Armenians, but in the real world, the treaty's protections were not implemented. Template:History of Armenia Template:Armenian Genocide The combination of Russian military success, clear weakening of Ottoman power, and hope that one day all of the Armenian territory might be ruled by Russia led to a new restiveness on the part of the Armenians still living inside the Ottoman Empire. Added to this was the fact that the Ottomans never applied justice evenly in disputes between Christians and Muslims (see Dhimmi).

Starting around 1890 the Armenians began clamoring to obtain the protections promised them at Berlin. Unrest occurred in 1892 at Marsovan and in 1893 at Tokat. Armenians wanted reforms in the Ottoman Empire and an end to the discrimination imposed upon them, with demands for the right to vote and the establishment of a constitutional government. A near revolt occurred in the Sassoun Mountains of Bitlis Province. Armenian peasants refused to pay the Kurdish incremental taxes, a double taxation system imposed on the Armenians by Kurdish chieftains. In 1892, the governor of the Mus district in Bitlis Province encouraged Armenian resistance claiming that the Armenians: 'Couldn't serve two masters at the same time.'

Hamid's response

In response to the resistance in Sassoun, the Turkish governor of Muş responded by inciting the local Muslims against the Armenians. The historian Lord Kinross claims that this was often achieved by gathering Muslims in a local mosque and claiming that the Armenians had the aim of "striking at Islam. The Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, sent the Ottoman army into the area and also armed groups of Kurdish insurrectionists. The violence spread and affected most of the Armenian towns in the Ottoman empire. The worst atrocity occurred when the cathedral of Urfa, in which three thousand Armenians had taken refuge, was burned. The historian Osman Nuri, in the second volume of his three-volume biography of Abdul Hamid, accused Sultans military contingent of 'torching and killing many people.'

1896 Bank Takeover

On August 26 1896 a group of Armenian revolutionaries raided the headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul. Guards were shot and more than 140 staff members were taken hostage - all in an attempt to gain international attention for the plight of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Template:Main

Massacres

In response, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred, both in Istanbul and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Abdul Hamid's Private First Secretary wrote in his memoirs about Abdul Hamid that he 'decided to pursue a policy of severity and terror against the Armenians, and in order to succeed in this respect he elected the method of dealing them an economic blow ... he ordered they absolutely avoid negotiating or discussing anything with the Armenians and to inflict upon them a decisive strike to settle scores.'

The killings occurred from 1895 until 1897. In that last year, Sultan Hamid declared that the Armenian question was closed. All the Armenian revolutionaries had either been killed, or had escaped to Russia. The Ottoman government closed Armenian societies and restricted Armenian political movements.

Death toll

Most estimates of number of victims run from 80,000 to 300,000.

The British ethnographer William Ramsay, who visited the Ottoman empire for his own studies, estimated that from 1894 to 1897, 200,000 Armenians were killed.
Armenophile Johannes Lepsius estimated more than 89,000 dead. ^{[citation
needed]}
The German government estimated that up to December 20, 1895, 80,000 Armenians were killed. ^{[citation
needed]}
The British Ambassador White, based on the data submitted to him by British consuls, estimated that up to early December 1895, 100,000 Armenians were killed. ^{[citation
needed]}
The German author, E. Jackh (a German Foreign ministry operative and Turkophile estimated that 200,000 Armenians were killed, 50,000 expelled and one million pillaged. ^{[citation
needed]}
R. J. Rummel, a professor who coined the term democide, estimated that 15,000 Armenians were killed by Sultan Hamid.
The most complete figures covering the entire era from 1894 to 1897 were probably provided by the French historian, Pierre Renouvin, the President of the Commission in charge of assembling and classifying French diplomatic documents. In a volume based on authenticated documents, he stated that 250,000 Armenians were killed. ^{[citation
needed]}
Armenian and other estimates run from 250,000 dead to as high as 350,000 dead.
Turkish estimates run from 20,000 to 30,000 killed.

These events are recalled by the Armenians as the "Great Massacres". The Armenians believed the Hamidian measures proved the capacity of the Turkish state to carry out a systematic policy of murder and plunder against a minority population. The formation of Armenian revolutionary groups began roughly around the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 and intensified with the first introduction of Article 166 of the Ottoman Penal code 166, and the raid of Erzerum Cathedral. Article 166 was meant to control the possession of arms, but it was used to target Armenians by restricting them to possess arms. Local Kurdish tribes were armed to attack the defenseless Armenian population. Some diplomats believed that the aim of these groups was to commit massacres so as to incite counter-measures, and to invite "foreign powers to intervene," as Istanbul's British Ambassador Sir Philip Currie observed in March 1894. Even some Turkish authors admit the existence of those revolutionaries was just a pretext for the massacres.

These mass killings clearly were a first step towards the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917.

The Genocide 1915

"Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"

Adolf Hitler, 1939

The Genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government during World War I represents a major tragedy of the modern age. In this the first Genocide of the 20th century, almost an entire nation was destroyed. The Armenian people were effectively eliminated from the homeland they had occupied for nearly three thousand years. This annihilation was premeditated and planned to be carried out under the cover of war.

During the night of April 23-24, 1915, Armenian political, religious, educational, and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested, deported to the interior, and mercilessly put to death. Next, the Turkish government ordered the deportation of the Armenian people to "relocation centers" - actually to the barren deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. The Armenians were driven out brutally from the length and breadth of the empire. Secrecy, surprise, deception, torture, dehumanization, rape and pillage were all a part of the process. The whole of Asia Minor was put in motion.

The greatest torment was reserved for the women and children, who were driven for months over mountains and deserts, often dehumanized by being stripped naked and repeatedly preyed upon and abused. Intentionally deprived of food and water, they fell by the hundreds of thousands along the routes to the desert.

There were some survivors scattered throughout the Middle East and Transcaucasia. Thousands of them, refugees here and there, were to die of starvation, epidemics, and exposure. Even the memory of the nation was intended for obliteration. The former existence of Armenians in Turkey was denied. Maps and history were rewritten. Churches, schools, and cultural monuments were desecrated and misnamed. Small children, snatched from their parents, were renamed and farmed out to be raised as Turks. The Turks "annexed" ancestors of the area in ancient times to claim falsely, by such deception, that they inhabited this region from ancient days. A small remnant of the Armenian homeland remained devastated by war and populated largely by starving refugees, only to be subsequently overrun by the Bolshevik Red Army and incorporated into the Soviet Union for seven decades, until its breakup in 1990. The word " genocide" had not yet been coined. Nonetheless, at the time, many governmental spokesmen and statesmen decried the mass murder of the Armenians as crimes against humanity, and murder of a nation.

Reports of the atrocities gradually came out and were eventually disseminated the world over by newspapers, journals, and eyewitness accounts. In the United States a number of prominent leaders and organizations established fundraising drives for the remnants of the "Starving Armenians". In Europe the Allied Powers gave public notice that they would hold personally responsible all members of the Turkish government and others who had planned or participated in the massacres. Yet, within a few years, these same governments and statesmen turned away from the Armenians in total disregard of their pledges. Soon the Armenian genocide had become the "Forgotten Genocide".

In effect, the Turkish government had succeeded in its diabolical plan to exterminate the Armenian population from what is now Turkey. The failure of the international community to remember, or to honor their promises to punish the perpetrators, or to cause Turkey to indemnify the survivors helped convince Adolph Hitler some 20 years later to carry out a similar policy of extermination against the Jews and certain other non-Aryan populations of Europe.

The Armenian settlements ,Churches, schools and population in 1914.

Name of Armenian Region and settlement (1914)	Number of Armenian settlements (1914)	Number of Armenian Churches (1914)	Number of Armenian Schools (1914)	1914 Population
Erzerum	425	482	322	215,000
Van	450	537	192	197,000
Diarbekir	249	158	122	124,000
Kharput	279	307	204	204,000
Bitlis	618	671	207	220,000
Sivas	241	219	204	225,000
Trebizond	118	109	190	73,390
Western Anatolia	237	281	300	371,800
Cilicia & Northern Syria	187	537	176	309,000
European Turkey	58	67	79	194,000
TOTAL	2,925	3,368	1,996	2,133,190

The Armenian population in 1914 and 1922

Name of the Region	Population in 1914	Deported or Killed	Population in 1922
Erzerum	215,000	213,500	1,500
Van	197,000	196,000	500
Diarbekir	124,000	121,000	3,000
Kharput	204,000	169,000	35,000
Bitlis	220,000	164,000	56,000
Sivas	225,000	208,200	16,800
Trebizond	73,390	58,390	5,000
Western Anatolia	371,800	344,800	27,000
Cilicia & Northern Syria	309,000	239,000	70,000
European Turkey	194,000	31,000	163,000
TOTAL	2,133,190	1,745,390	387,800

The Death Marches

World War One gave the Young Turk government the cover and the excuse to carry out their plan. The plan was simple and its goal was clear. On April24th 1915, commemorated worldwide by Armenians as Genocide Memorial Day, hundreds of Armenian leaders were murdered in Instambul after being summoned and gathered. The now leaderless Armenian people were to follow. Across the Ottoman Empire (with the exception of Constantinople, presumably due to a large foreign presence), the same events transpired from village to village, from province to province.

The remarkable thing about the following events is the virtually complete cooperation of the Armenians. For a number of reasons they did not know what was planned for them and went along with "their" government's plan to "relocate them for their own good." First, the Armenians were asked to turn in hunting weapons for the war effort. Communities were often given quotas and would have to buy additional weapons from Turks to meet their quota. Later, the government would claim these weapons were proof that Armenians were about to rebel. The able bodied men were then "drafted" to help in the wartime effort. These men were either immediately killed or were worked to death. Now the villages and towns, with only women, children, and elderly left were systematically emptied. The remaining residents would be told to gather for a temporary relocation and to only bring what they could carry. The Armenians again obediently followed instructions and were "escorted" by Turkish Gendarmes in death marches.

The death marches led across Anatolia, and the purpose was clear. The Armenians were raped, starved, dehydrated, murdered, and kidnapped along the way. The Turkish Gendarmes either led these atrocities or turned a blind eye. Their eventual destination for resettlement was just as telling in revealing the Turkish governments goal: the Syrian Desert, Der Zor. Those who miraculously survived the march would arrive to this bleak desert only to be killed upon arrival or to somehow survive until a way to escape the empire was found. Usually those that survived and escaped received assistance from those who have come to be known as "good Turks," from foreign missionaries who recorded much of these events and from Arabs.

After The Genocide

After the war ended, the Turkish government held criminal trials and found the triumvirate guilty in abstentia. All three were later executed by Armenians. Turkey agreed to let the US draw the border between the newly born Republic of Armenia and the Turkish government. What is now called Wilsonian Armenia included most of the six western Ottoman provinces as well as a large coastline on the Black Sea. Cilicia, a separate Armenian region on the Mediterranean, was to be a French mandate. Mustafa Kemal's forces pushed the newly returned Armenian refugees and forces from these lands and forced a new treaty to be written which was an insult to Armenian victims. They were basically told never to return and that they would never receive compensation. The Kars and Ardahan provinces of Armenia were taken as well in an agreement with the Soviet Union.

Contemporary Events

On the 50th anniversary of the genocide, the scattered survivors of the genocide and their children around the world began commemorating the genocide on April 24th, the day which marked the start of the full-scale massacres in 1915. Many Armenian Genocide Monuments have been built around the world since, as well as smaller plaques and dedications.

The Genocide Monument in Armenia is designed to memorialize the innocent victims of this first genocide of the 20th century.

The Turkish government has in the past few decades been denying that a genocide ever occurred and spending millions of dollars to further that view. This is adding insult to injury and will cause bad feelings to continue much longer than would otherwise be the case between the peoples. Those who say forget about it, it is in the past, are wrong. Unless crimes like this are faced up to and compensated for, they will be committed again and again by people who do not fear prosecution or justice. Read what Hitler said before beginning the Jewish Holocaust here.

A class action suit against New York Life insurance company by genocide survivors was filed in 1999. They were sued for not being forthcoming in paying up for policies of those killed in the genocide. The suit was settled in 2004 for $20 million, and payouts began to individuals and some Armenian charitable organizations.

A 2002 study by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), a New York-based human rights organization, ruled that the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians fits into the internationally accepted definition of genocide. The study was commissioned by TARC - a group of Armenians and Turks set up by the US State Department.

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