The Armenian Genocide was the Ottoman Empire’s government’s systematic extermination, deportation, mass murder and starvation of some 1.5 million Armenians, starting in 1915. The male population was killed through massacre and forced labour, while women, children, the elderly and the invalid were deported into the Syrian Desert, deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape and massacre. Assyrians and Greeks were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman authority and is generally considered part of the same genocidal policy.
The Origins of the Genocide
The western portion of historical Armenia, known as Western Armenia, had come under the control of the Ottoman Empire in 1555, after which it was known as ‘Turkish’ or ‘Ottoman’ Armenia. Most Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were grouped into a semi-autonomous community, the Armenian millet, which was led by a Christian spiritual leader (most Armenians were Apostolic, Catholic or Protestant), and they were allowed to mostly govern themselves without Ottoman interference. However, they lived under the dhimmi system, which officially gave non-Muslims rights to property, livelihood and freedom of worship, but, in essence, treated them as second-class citizens.
Between 1839 and 1876, the Ottoman government initiated the Tanzimat, a series of reforms to improve the status of minorities, but these were not implemented because the Muslim population rejected the principle of equality for Christians. Armenians were the target of looting and murder by Muslims (including Turks, Kurds and Circassians), and tax anomalies throughout the middle of the 1800s, to which the government answered promising to punish those responsible, but no steps to do so were taken.
During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, entire Armenian districts were devastated by massacres permitted by the Ottoman authorities, which meant Armenians saw the invading Russians as the only guarantors of their security. Once the war ended, the Armenian leadership met the Russian authority to try to guarantee their protection, security and self-determination in the Treaty of Berlin. However, these reforms never took place, as the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II stated that Armenians did not make up a majority in the provinces and they exaggerated or made up the abuse reports.
Hamidian massacres (1894-1896)
Security conditions in the Armenian provinces worsened and abuses proliferated. In 1890, Abul Hamid II created a paramilitary outfit known as the Hamidiye, tasked to deal with the Armenians as they wished. Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions in Armenian-majority towns, which were crushed and oppressed by the Hamidiye, sometimes through a massacre. In October 1895, 2,000 Armenians assembled in Constantinople to ask for the paramilitary group to have its powers reduced, but Ottoman police units violently broke the rally up. Soon, massacres of Armenians broke out in the city, spreading to the provinces of Turkish Armenia. Estimates vary, but it is believed between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were killed, resulting in 50,000 orphaned children. Although the massacres were mainly aimed at the Armenians, they turned into anti-Christian attacks in some cases, such as the Diyarbekir massacre, where some 25,000 Assyrians were killed.
The Young Turks Revolution of 1908
On the 24th of July 1908, Armenians’ hopes for equality brightened when a coup d’état removed Abdul Hamid II from power and restored the country to a constitutional monarchy. The coup was led by members of the Young Turk movement, which aimed to restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876, bring in multi-party politics under the Ottoman Parliament, modernize and centralize the Empire while also achieving a greater secularization of the legal system. The movement was made up of two distinct groups – the liberal constitutionalists and the nationalists –, where the former managed to partially persuade the latter to ensure rights for all Ottoman minorities. Two of the main factions within the Young Turk movement were the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a right-wing party, and the Freedom and Accord Party, a liberal party that came to power in after the revolution. However, after the 1913 Ottoman coup d’état, the Ottoman Empire would be run by a triumvirate of CUP members, known as the Three Pashas – Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Djemal Pasha.
The Adana massacre of 1909
A countercoup took place in early 1909 when some pro-Hamid and pro-Islam protesters started rioting against the CUP forces, which was partially repressed. However, a massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Muslims took place in the city of Adana expanded to a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the province. Reports suggest between 20,000 and 30,000 Armenians were killed, while some 1,300 Assyrians were also murdered.
Conflict in the Balkans and the Caucasus
In 1912, the First Balkan War broke out and ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which lost 85% of its European territory. A few million Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus (known as muhacirs) were expelled from these territories, a migration which had already started at a slower speed several years earlier. These refugees moved primarily to the Ottoman Empire, 850,000 of whom settled in areas where the Armenians resided. The muhacirs resented the status of their relatively well-off neighbours, and some of them came to play a pivotal role in the killings of the Armenians and the confiscation of their properties during the genocide.
World War I
On 2 November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. In order to take over Caucasian territories from Russia, the Young Turk government wanted Ottoman Armenians to persuade Russian Armenians to rise against their country. However, Ottoman forces were almost completely destroyed by the Russian army when they tried to take over the region, especially during the Battle of Sarikamish. Enver Pasha publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians in the region for having actively sided with the Russians. In February 1915, Enver Pasha called for the removal of all ethnic Armenians from the Ottoman forces and for their demobilization. They were consequently assigned to the unarmed Labour battalions, a form of unfree labour, where they would ultimately be executed. It is through this manner that a great fraction of Armenian men between the ages of 18 and 45 was killed.
On 19 April 1915, the Ottoman authority demanded that the city of Van gave over 4,000 soldiers under the pretext of conscription. However, it was clear to the Armenian population that their goal was to massacre the able-bodied men of Van so that there would be no defenders. The siege of Van began when an Armenian woman was harassed, and the two Armenian men who came to her aid were killed by Ottoman soldiers. The Armenian defenders protected the 45,000 residents and refugees from Ottoman forces and managed to make them withdraw. The conflict is now seen as a defensive action by Armenians to resist their massacre.
The Genocide
Ottoman authorities had previously begun a propaganda initiative to show Ottoman Armenians as a threat to the empire’s security. Armenians were proclaimed to be in a league with enemy Russia to achieve public approval of their deportations. The genocide was part of the nationalist and anti-Christian movement that the Young Turks aimed to expand.
Deportation of Armenian intellectuals
On the night of the 24th of April 1915, known now as Red Sunday, the Ottoman government arrested and imprisoned between 235 and 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders of Constantinople, and later of other locations across the Empire, who were all moved to two holding centres in Ankara. Eventually, the total number of arrests and deportations amounted to 2,345 Armenians – mostly clergymen, journalists, lawyers, teachers or politicians – most of whom were not nationalists and did not have any political affiliations. Most of these detainees were later relocated within the Ottoman Empire and killed. Some, however, were saved thanks to intervention from various influential people and were allowed to return to Constantinople.
Mass deportations: death marches and concentration camps
In May 1915, the Ottoman Empire legalized a measure for the deportation of Armenians to other places due to what Talaat Pasha called “the Armenian riots and massacres”, referring to the events in Van. The CUP passed the Tehcir Law, giving it the authorisation to deport anyone it sensed as a threat to national security, allowing the slaughter of Armenians. The New York Times reported the process as “systematic”, “authorised” and “organized by the government”, while historian Hans-Lukas Kieser states that officials were aware that the deportation order was genocidal. The law also allowed for Armenian property to be confiscated by authorities, including land, livestock and homes.
Many Armenians (most of them women, children and the elderly) were escorted out into the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor, and from there forced to march into the Syrian Desert. The Young Turk government deliberately withheld the facilities and supplies that would have been necessary to sustain the life of the Armenian deportees during their journey, knowing it condemned them to certain death. The New York Times reported that “the people were forced to satisfy their hunger with food begged”, and that “no shelter of any kind was provided”, meaning Armenians were “left under the scorching desert sun without food and water”. Major General von Kressenstein noted that “the Turkish policy of causing starvation” was proof of their “resolve to destroy the Armenians”. Rape was also an integral part of the genocide, with Ottoman soldiers allowed to do to the women whatever they wished, resulting in widespread sexual abuse. Some deportees were even sold as sex slaves in some areas.
A network of 25 concentration camps was set up by the Ottoman government to dispose of the Armenians. Some camps were only temporary transit points, others were briefly used as mass graves, while others were built specifically for those whose life expectancy was just a few days. Scholar Hilmar Kaiser states that, here too, the Ottoman authorities refused to provide food and water to the victims, increasing the mortality rate. One witness report describes mass graves containing over 60,000 people, Armenians having to search horse droppings for grains and hundreds of orphans who were fed only bread.
Massacres: mass burnings, drowning, use of poison and drug overdoses
One way through which the Ottoman authority exterminated the Armenian population was through the mass burnings of the populations of villages. According to one source, 80,000 Armenians in 90 villages across the Muş plain alone were burned to death. Many Armenians were also killed through drowning at sea and in rivers, like the Black Sea and the Euphrates and its tributaries. Historian Dadrian places the number of Armenians killed by drowning in the Trabzon province – on the Black Sea – at 50,000. A witness recalled “thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized” at sea. Ottoman physicians also contributed to the planning and execution of the genocide by designing methods for poisoning victims and using Armenians as subjects for lethal human experimentation. Victims were affected by morphine overdose, toxic gases and typhoid inoculation.
Results of the Armenian Genocide
According to documents that once belonged to Talaat Pasha, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. However, it is believed through a footnote by Talaat himself that the Armenian population was undercounted by 30%, while Protestant Armenians were not taken into account either. It is therefore believed that the population of Armenians was approximately 1,700,000 before the start of the genocide, with this number plunging to 284,157 in 1917, meaning some 1.5 million Armenians disappeared. However, this number is not accepted by everyone, and estimates vary from anywhere between 800,000 and the aforementioned 1.5 million.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians left the region in what is known as the Armenian Diaspora. Tens of thousands of them moved to Russia, the USA, France, Ukraine and Iran, amongst other countries, during this period.
As of 2017, 29 countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, as well as 48 states out of 50 of the United States, have recognized the events as a genocide. The government of Turkey, together with its close ally Azerbaijan, directly denies the historical factuality of the Armenian Genocide and opposes the recognition of the genocide by other nations.
The Greek and Assyrian Genocide
The Greek genocide was the systematic killing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population carried out in Anatolia between 1914 and 1922. It was started by the Young Turks government of the Ottoman Empire and was part of the same anti-Christian and pro-nationalist policy that caused the Armenian and Assyrian genocide. The attack against the indigenous Greek population included massacres, forced deportations and death marches, and expulsions and arbitrary executions. It is believed that anywhere between 450,000 and 750,000 Greeks were killed during this period, with most of the refugees and survivors fleeing to Greece or Russia. By the end of the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks of Anatolia had either fled or had been killed.
The Assyrian genocide was the mass slaughter of the Assyrian population of the Ottoman Empire and those in neighbouring Persia by Ottoman troops of the Young Turks government. The progrom took place at the same time that the Armenian and Greek genocides took place, while the reasons were too largely similar. The attacks on Assyrians were often carried out upon the initiatives of local politicians and Muslim tribes between 1914 and 1920, and included massacres of men and forceful relocations, with many dying from disease and starvation during their flight. It is believed that somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Assyrians died during this period.
Lyle Hausman 