The
Armenian Genocide of 1915 was one of the first mass exterminations of
a race or people group which occurred in the 20th century,
and was also one of the largest instances of ethnic cleansing in
world history. For during World War I the Muslim Ottoman Empire
carried out a series of unthinkable atrocities against it's Christian
Armenian minority populations living within the empire. Armenian
intellectuals were the first to be rounded up and executed, while the
rest of ordinary Armenians were deported in death marches across
Anatolia into the Syrian desert of Deir Zor. As a result of these
horrors, it has been estimated that at least 1.5 million Armenians
perished in the genocide of 1915. But to better understand the origin
of this evil, we must first peer into the history of Armenia prior to
the events that would culminate into the First World War, that most
dark era in human history and in human suffering.
Armenia
is a relatively small landlocked country located in the Caucasus
region in what is known as West Asia. The Republic of Armenia is
bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan to
the east, and Iran to the south. Armenia's largest city Yerevan has
been the capital of Armenia since 1918, and it is one of the oldest
continuously inhabited cities in the world. Located near the Hrazdan
River, Yerevan is the industrial, administrative, and cultural hub
for the entire country and also serves as the throne of the Araratian
Pontifical Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the national
Church of Armenia. The majority of Armenians are a Christian people
who practice an ancient form of Christianity which is known as
Oriental Orthodoxy. With the Kingdom of Armenia officially adopting
Christianity as the state religion in 301 AD, Armenia is arguably the
world's oldest Christian country. In more ancient times before the
birth of Christianity, the geographical territories which make up
what we know today as the Armenian Highlands were part of a large
settlement known as Urartu. The Kingdom of Urartu came to power in
the 9th century BC, but fell into decline after being
conquered by the Medes in the 6th century BC. In the 15th
century AD the Armenian homeland would be taken over again, this time
by the Ottoman Turks. Under Turkish rule Armenians would suffer an
existence of second class status along with other ethic and religious
minorities who had to pay higher taxes. Unfortunately many
non-Muslims would suffer under the rule of the Turks for nearly 500
years until the end of World War I. Now that we have briefly covered
the history of Armenia, let us examine the events which led up to the
Armenian Genocide in greater detail.
The
holocaust of Armenian Christians which took place during World War I,
was not the first time the Armenians as a people had experienced
death on a massive scale by the hands of their Turkish oppressors.
For example, in the mid 1890's the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II
ordered the killings of Christian Armenians, beginning in
Constantinople and then spread his campaign eastward throughout the
various Armenian provinces of Asia Minor. For prior to and during
Hamid's rule, the Ottoman Empire found itself in a significant state
of economic decline. So much so that it was even dubbed as “The
Sick Man of Europe” by the Russian Czar Nicholas I. In an effort to
revive and maintain power in his dying dynasty, Hamid began to
promote a pan-Islamic ideology. For at this time in the Muslim empire
a wave of nationalism began to move among the Christian Armenians of
Anatolia. The Sultan feared that the Islamic culture of the empire as
well as its very existence as a nation and regional power were at
stake. So, in an act of fear and desperation, Hamid began the
massacres of the Armenians in an effort to solve the Armenian
Question. A question first asked following the 1878 Congress of
Berlin which quite simply stated, how should the Armenians living
within the Ottoman Empire be treated? Hamid's killings of Armenians
in response to the Armenian Question would last until 1897. The total
number of Armenians killed in the Hamidian Massacres has been
estimated by historians to range from between 100,000 to 300,000
Armenian lives lost. And in addition to the Armenians that died,
around 25,000 Assyrians also perished in the massacres.
As
a result of this Ottoman oppression, Armenian intellectuals in the
late 19th century began to unite and organize in their
struggle for freedom. It was also at this time that young Turkish
intellectuals came together in the aspirations of forging new social
and political reforms across the empire. These young politically
charged Turkish revolutionaries would be known as The Young Turks.
Originating as an underground sect at first, or better yet as a
secret society, the Young Turks would eventually rise to the surface
openly as an established political force. For in July 1908 the Young
Turks started a revolution and staged a coup that successfully
removed Sultan Abdul Hamid II from power. Amazingly, some Armenian
revolutionaries cooperated with the Young Turks to bring down the
Sultan, a man who was responsible for the deaths of their ancestors.
With the dismissal of Hamid II the Armenians supported the new
Turkish government, which promised them equal rights. Now within the
broader Young Turk movement there were several off-shoots, but the
most dominate faction in the movement was called the Committee of
Union and Progress (CUP). In response to the Armenians who helped
depose the sultan in 1908, an Ottoman counter-coup erupted in 1909 as
a military revolt aimed against the Committee of Union and Progress.
The usurpers managed to seize Constantinople for just ten days, but
it was enough to ignite a massacre against Armenians living in Adana
Province. For after word traveled to Adana of a mutiny in
Constantinople, the local Muslims were fearful of an Armenian
uprising. Over the course of about a month around 20,000 to 25,000
Armenians were killed in Adana, along with 1,300 Assyrians. So here
we see that even before the genocide of 1915, tens of thousands of
Armenians had already been murdered by the Turks. But as devastating
as both the Hamidian and Adana massacres were for the Armenians,
unfortunately the worst was yet to come.
World
War I officially commenced just five weeks after the assassination of
Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand took place in Sarajevo, the
capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the 28th of June in
1914, by a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. And this
singular historical event would go on to produce the largest and most
extensive war the world had ever seen up until that time. For soon
most of Europe, Russia, the Ottoman Turks, and even Japan would begin
a four year frenzy of fighting which would end in the transformation
of the world into a more modern and secular global society. In the
war Russia was the foremost enemy of the Turks. For the Ottoman goal
was to push Russia out of the Caucasus region and out of the steppes
of Central Asia, in the hopes of forging an alliance with the Turkic
peoples of Central Asia and ultimately creating one great unified
Turkish empire. However, the Russians defeated the Turks in the
Battle of Sarikamish as part of Turkey's Caucasus campaign. Thus the
Young Turks' plan for a united Turkish state was destroyed. The
Ottoman minister of defense Enver Pasha publicly blamed the Turkish
defeat on the Armenians, due to four battalions of Armenian soldiers
who voluntarily fought alongside Russian forces in the Caucasus
against the Turks. And this Armenian action would go on to serve as a
pretext for the Turks to carry out the Armenian Genocide.
The
Armenian Genocide, also known traditionally among modern day
Armenians as Medz Yeghern (Great Crime) is officially held to have
begun on the 24th of April in 1915. For it was on this
date that the Ottoman government apprehended and arrested about 250
Armenian intellectuals and cultural leaders living in Constantinople.
They were then imprisoned, tortured, and some were even publicly
executed. The reason behind this Turkish targeting of Armenian
intellectuals was that by crushing the Armenian leadership the Turks
could more easily control the Armenian masses who, without proper
representation, would be severely weakened. For after the alliance
between the Armenians and the Russians, the Turks now believed that
the Armenians were a threat to the stability of the empire and even
classified the Armenians as enemies of the state. Thus the Young Turk
government began to arrest and disarm the Armenians and subsequently
began the mass deportation of Armenians into the Syrian desert,
whereby being deprived of both food and water, many would die from
exhaustion in the blistering heat of the sun.
At
the time of the Genocide in 1915, ethnic Armenian populations were
scattered all throughout Turkey - the geographical area known from
centuries past as Asia Minor. When the deportations began, Armenians
in the eastern provinces were rounded up into caravans and marched
into the desert on foot. Whereas Armenians living in the western
provinces were herded into boxcars and shipped eastward aboard the
Berlin-Baghdad Railway. This railway was built by the Germans in the
hopes of boosting their economy by securing a direct line from
Germany to the oil rich lands of Mesopotamia, and to also compete
with the British Empire in what they had accomplished in India. For
Germany greatly desired to become a world power and thus sided with
the Ottoman Empire as a means to gain power and influence in the
Middle East. The Turks in turn became allies of the Germans in the
aspiration of expanding the Ottoman Empire westwards into Europe.
However, by the time the Great War began the Berlin-Baghdad Railway
was still largely incomplete. But the Germans, by observing the
diligent work ethic of the Armenians, had the idea to relocate the
Armenians from Asia Minor and bring them to Mesopotamia in order to
aide the Germans in their industry. The Ottomans on the other hand
were more brutal with their investment of Armenian labor. For the
Turks would go on to enslave and force many Armenians to build parts
of the railroad: the same railroad which would be used to ship those
same Armenian workers off to their deaths.
It
has also been speculated that the Germans were instrumental in the
exterminations of Armenians, due to Germany being an ally of the
Turks at the time of the First World War. The Germans may not have
been direct aggressors towards the Armenians, but could have at least
been complicit to the Turkish atrocities committed against the
Armenians by turning a blind eye. Going further, some schools of
thought have even suggested that the measures taken by the Turks to
execute the Armenian Genocide during World War I would go on to serve
as the blueprint for what the Germans undertook in the Jewish
Holocaust during World War II. And just as the Jews have experienced
certain criticism over the years, which casts doubt and questions if
the Jewish Holocaust ever happened, so too do Armenians living today
suffer from their own version of Holocaust deniers; especially the
adamant voices coming forth from the Republic of Turkey. For to this
day the Turkish government blatantly denies that the Armenian
Genocide ever took place, and takes absolutely no responsibility for
their involvement in the deaths of the 1.5 million Armenians who
perished in 1915.
Now
when the first arrests and deportations of Armenians occurred, the
Turks decided that they must do something in order to address the
Armenian problem. The Turks would then implement what they called,
“Shiddetli” a Turkish code word meaning, “Severe Measures to be
Applied” against the Armenians. And these severe measures included
not only death marches, but also death camps. For the Armenians who
survived the marches through the desert were then rounded up into
concentration camps in Deir Zor. But on their way to the camps many
Armenians would die at the hands of Kurdish bandits, who robbed and
murdered them even before they reached the desert death camps. It
took several weeks and maybe even months of traveling on foot before
the Armenians finally reached Deir Zor. However, some Armenians did
manage to fight back against the Turks in the city of Urfa. The
Armenians resisted the Turks and defended their families
courageously, but the Turks managed to get the upper-hand over these
brave souls by assaulting them with weapons they obtained from
Germany. Thus we see more indirect responsibility for Armenian
casualties perpetrated by the German government and military.
The
majority of the Armenians who survived the death marches ended up
dying of starvation in the death camps. In other areas, such as
Trabzon for example, the Turks forced many Armenians of all ages into
boats where they were then dumped into the Black Sea and drowned.
Several were shot dead as they traveled, and there were even some
reports of beheadings. In addition to all the killings, human
trafficking also became the sad fate of many. For Turkish soldiers
were known to take young Armenian girls by force and enslave them
into the various Turkish harems throughout the Ottoman Empire. Thus,
the sufferings that the Armenians endured was indeed a genocide: a
word first coined by Dr. Raphael Lemkin in 1943. From the Greek genos
meaning race, combined with the Latin cidery
meaning to kill, this word genuinely describes what the Armenians
went through during World War I. By the time the War ended in
1918 it has been estimated by scholars that around 1.5 million
Armenians were exterminated by the Turks. But if we include the
300,000 Armenians who perished in the Hamidian Massacres in the
1890's, and add to that amount the 25,000 Armenians who were killed
at Adana in 1909, and then combine the 1.5 million who died in 1915,
we come to a figure of nearly two million Armenians annihilated.
Now
although the Armenian Genocide is an extremely important and critical
event which occurred in modern history, it has also been
disrespectfully neglected, forgotten, and even denied. It is revealed
however, that during World War I American newspapers thoroughly and
extensively published articles describing the horrible atrocities
carried out upon the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. American
religious leaders and politicians both stood up for the cause of the
suffering Armenians. One such American politician who pleaded for the
lives of the Armenians, was the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
Henry Morgenthau. Though Morgenthau sincerely spoke up for the
Armenian cause, and stood up to the Ottoman Empire's crimes against
humanity, he was unfortunately unable to hinder the Turkish
government from their severe measures aimed at and against the
Armenian race. However, for the remaining period of the war,
Morgenthau was able to raise funds in order to help and assist with
the plight of the Armenians who survived the Genocide of 1915.
The
War ended in 1918, and in 1919 the British Empire pressured the
Turkish government to begin war crimes tribunals for all those
responsible for the Armenian Genocide. Soon a series of trials were
held in Constantinople, and the Turkish military tribunals concluded
in their findings that the Young Turks were indeed guilty and
responsible for the preparation and execution of the Armenian
Genocide. The main three Young Turk leaders who carried out the
genocide were Enver, Talat, and Jemal Pasha. These three were tried
in absentia, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Enver, would flee
to Germany and then to Russia, where in 1922 he was shot while
fighting with a local army in Modern day Tajikistan. Talat also fled
to Germany, where in 1921 he was shot point blank in the head by an
Armenian student. Jamal escaped to Georgia, but in 1922 he was shot
and killed by two Armenians.
In
the aftermath of World War I the Ottoman Empire dissolved and lost
its control over the various provinces and peoples scattered
throughout what we know today as the modern Middle East. But even
though the Turks lost the war, this did not stop the newly formed
Republic of Turkey from modernizing and thriving economically. For
under the leadership of the first president of Turkey (Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk) did the once religiously ruled Ottoman Empire
transform itself into a more modern and secular state. Initially, not
all Turks were in favor of the abolition of the caliphate, which
ended up producing a split political system: the new republic of
Turkey on one side and an Islamic form of government on the other.
But beginning on the
29th
of October in 1923, the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed, and on the
3rd
of March in 1924, the caliphate was officially abolished. Also,
after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, all non-Russian countries
proclaimed their independence. Once the Russian Empire was toppled,
the First Republic of Armenia was established. In 1922, Armenia
became a founding member of the Soviet Union. Seven decades later on
the 21st of September in 1991, Armenia declared its
statehood, and on the 26th of December in 1991, the Soviet
Union ceased to exist and Armenia's independence was officially
recognized.
In recent times, the 46th
president of the United States of America (Joe Biden) has formally
and officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. This makes Biden the
first U.S. president to publicly announce America's stance concerning
the genocide before a global audience. However, in the 1980's
president Reagan made a passing reference to the “genocide of the
Armenians” when commenting on the Jewish Holocaust. Other than
these two exceptions, all past American administrations have dodged
the question regarding the Armenian Genocide. A possible reason for
this American denial may be the fear of weakening relations with
Turkey, the very government which perpetrated the genocide and which
also is the main Armenian Genocide denier. The Turkish government has
admitted that killings of Armenians did take place during World War
I, but has additionally stated that a large number of Turks were also
killed by Armenians in the fighting and that the figures attributed
to the amount of Armenians killed in the war have been grossly
inflated. In addition to the Republic of Turkey many other countries
have also denied that the Armenian Genocide ever took place, but
according to the Armenian National Institute at least 30 countries
from all across the world have now publicly acknowledged that what
happened to the Armenians in World War I was in fact a genocide. So,
with a continual fight for recognition and the push for the
acceptance of the Armenian Genocide from more and more nations,
hopefully one day all Armenians living today will finally be able to
completely morn for their ancestors and be at peace knowing that
their memory is eternal.
References:
Captivating
History. The
Armenian Genocide: A Captivating Guide to the Massacre of the
Armenians by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.
(Captivating History, 2019).
Balakian,
P. The
Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response.
(New York, NY: Parennial, 2004).
Butler,
D.A. Shadow
of the Sultan's Realm: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the
Creation of the Modern Middle East.
(Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, Inc., 2011).
McMeekin,
S. The
Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for
World Power.
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010).
