By , there were fewer than , Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed. But to Turks, what happened in was, at most, just one more messy piece of a very messy war that spelled the end of a once-powerful empire. They reject the conclusions of historians and the term genocide, saying there was no premeditation in the deaths, no systematic attempt to destroy a people.
In the United States, a powerful Armenian community centered in Los Angeles has been pressing for years for Congress to condemn the Armenian genocide. Turkey, which cut military ties to France over a similar action, has reacted with angry threats.
A bill to that effect nearly passed in the fall of , gaining a majority of co-sponsors and passing a committee vote. The roots of the genocide lie in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Initially, it seemed that the new government would accommodate some Armenian social grievances.
But in spring , Armenian demonstrations for autonomy boiled over into violence. Ottoman soldiers, irregular troops, and civilians murdered as many at 20, Armenians in and around the city of Adana; up to 2, Muslims were killed by Armenians during the fighting.
Between and , CUP activists veered increasingly towards a strident, nationalist vision for the Empire. Dense areas of Armenian settlement across eastern Anatolia presented a demographic obstacle to these ambitions. Following several years of political upheaval, CUP leaders seized dictatorial power in a coup on January 23, Mass atrocities and genocide are often perpetrated within the context of war.
In anticipation of threatened Allied landings at the strategically important Gallipoli peninsula, Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian leaders in Constantinople on April 24, , and deported them east. This roundup is commemorated today by Armenians as the beginning of the genocide. The Ottomans claimed that Armenian revolutionaries had established contact with the enemy and were preparing to facilitate a Franco-British landing. When challenged by the Entente Powers and the then-neutral United States, they explained the deportations as a precautionary measure.
Beginning in May the government expanded the deportations—regardless of distance from combat zones—marching civilians to holding camps in desert regions to the south [today: northern and eastern Syria, northern Saudi Arabia, and Iraq]. Due to the Ottoman wartime alliance with Germany, many German military officers, diplomats, and relief workers witnessed firsthand the atrocities committed against Armenians.
Their reactions ranged from horror and formal protests to, in some instances, tacit support of the Ottomans. This generation of Germans would carry the memory of these violent events with them into the s and 40s, coloring their view of actions against Jews under the Nazis. Taking orders from the central government in Constantinople, regional officials implemented mass shootings and deportations, assisted by local civilians.
Ottoman military and security organs and their collaborators murdered the majority of Armenian men of fighting age, as well as thousands of women and children. During forced marches through the desert, convoys of surviving elderly men, women, and children were exposed to arbitrary attacks from local officials, nomadic bands, criminal gangs, and civilians.
Turkey bans 'genocide' conference. Armenian quest for lost orphans. Image source, Library of Congress. Arguments have raged for decades about the Armenian deaths in What happened? What is genocide? Were the killings systematic? This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Armenia's mass killings - explained in 60 seconds. What was the political context? Was anyone held to account? Image source, AFP. Who recognises it as genocide and who does not?
What is the political impact of the row? Are Armenia-Turkey relations still frosty? Related Topics. Turkey World War One Armenia. Published 12 November Published 22 December Published 27 February In the post-war period nearly four hundred of the key CUP officials implicated in the atrocities committed against the Armenians were arrested.
A number of domestic military tribunals were convened which brought charges ranging from the unconstitutional seizure of power and subversion of the legal government, the conduct of a war of aggression, and conspiring the liquidation of the Armenian population, to more explicit capital crimes, including massacre.
Some of the accused were found guilty of the charges. Most significantly, the ruling triumvirate was condemned to death. They, however, eluded justice by fleeing abroad. Their escape left the matter of avenging the countless victims to a clandestine group of survivors that tracked down the CUP arch conspirators.
Talaat, the principal architect of the Armenian genocide, was killed in in Berlin where he had gone into hiding. His assassin was arrested and tried in a German court which acquitted him. Most of those implicated in war crimes evaded justice and many joined the new Nationalist Turkish movement led by Mustafa Kemal. In a series of military campaigns against Russian Armenia in , against the refugee Armenians who had returned to Cilicia in southern Turkey in , and against the Greek army that had occupied Izmir Smyrna where the last intact Armenian community in Anatolia still existed in , the Nationalist forces completed the process of eradicating the Armenians through further expulsions and massacres.
When Turkey was declared a republic in and received international recognition, the Armenian Question and all related matters of resettlement and restitution were swept aside and soon forgotten. In all, it is estimated that up to a million and a half Armenians perished at the hands of Ottoman and Turkish military and paramilitary forces and through atrocities intentionally inflicted to eliminate the Armenian demographic presence in Turkey.
In the process, the population of historic Armenia at the eastern extremity of Anatolia was wiped off the map. With their disappearance, an ancient people which had inhabited the Armenian highlands for three thousand years lost its historic homeland and was forced into exile and a new diaspora.
The surviving refugees spread around the world and eventually settled in some two dozen countries on all continents of the globe. Triumphant in its total annihilation of the Armenians and relieved of any obligations to the victims and survivors, the Turkish Republic adopted a policy of dismissing the charge of genocide and denying that the deportations and atrocities had constituted part of a deliberate plan to exterminate the Armenians.
When the Red Army sovietized what remained of Russian Armenia in , the Armenians had been compressed into an area amounting to no more than ten percent of the territories of their historic homeland. Armenians annually commemorate the Genocide on April 24 at the site of memorials raised by the survivors in all their communities around the world.
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