Armenian genocide

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 24th of April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople. It was the opening move of the Armenian genocide, the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Around one million Armenians would die. Most perished on death marches to the Syrian desert, driven forward by paramilitary escorts, deprived of food and water, robbed, raped, and massacred. The campaign was spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, known as the CUP. How did a population that had lived in Anatolia since the sixth century BCE come to be marked for elimination? Why did the empire's rulers conclude that women and children were collectively guilty of treason? And how did a state built partly on seized Armenian wealth come to deny, for more than a century, that any of it happened? Talaat Pasha called it the definitive solution to the Armenian Question. The questions it left behind have outlasted the empire that asked them.

• 2. The Loyal Millet

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  The presence of Armenians in Anatolia has been documented since the sixth century BCE, roughly 1,500 years before Turkmens arrived under the Seljuk dynasty. The Kingdom of Armenia adopted Christianity as its national religion in the fourth century CE, founding the Armenian Apostolic Church. After the Byzantine Empire ended in 1453, two Islamic powers, the Ottomans and the Iranian Safavids, contested Western Armenia, which was permanently severed from Eastern Armenia by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab. The Ottoman millet system gave non-Muslims a subordinate but protected place. Sharia law encoded Islamic superiority yet guaranteed property rights and freedom of worship to non-Muslim dhimmis in exchange for a special tax. On the eve of World War I in 1914, around two million Armenians lived in Ottoman territory, in a region with a total population of 15 to 17.5 million. The Armenian Patriarchate counted 2,925 Armenian towns and villages for 1913 to 1914, of which 2,084 sat in the highlands beside the Russian border. Most Armenians were peasant farmers, though they were overrepresented in commerce. As middleman minorities, despite the wealth of some, their overall political power stayed low, which made them especially vulnerable. Armenians had once been called the loyal millet, in contrast to Greeks and others who challenged Ottoman rule. After 1878 the authorities began to see them as a threat instead.

• 3. Land, Reform, And Massacre

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  In the eastern provinces, Armenians lived in semi-feudal conditions and routinely faced forced labor, illegal taxation, and unpunished robberies, murders, and sexual assaults. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government issued reforms meant to centralize power and equalize subjects regardless of religion. Islamic clergy and Muslims in general strongly opposed equalizing non-Muslims, so the reforms stayed largely theoretical. When the Kurdish emirates were abolished in the mid-nineteenth century, the state began directly taxing Armenian peasants who had previously paid only Kurdish landlords; those landlords kept exacting levies illegally. From the mid-nineteenth century, Armenians faced large-scale land usurpation as Kurdish tribes settled and Muslim refugees, mainly Circassians, arrived after the Russo-Circassian War. When Sultan Abdul Hamid II came to power in 1876, the state began confiscating Armenian land in the east and handing it to Muslim immigrants, a systematic policy to thin the Armenian population that lasted until World War I. Some 300,000 Armenians left the empire. Russia's decisive victory in the 1877 to 1878 war forced the Ottomans to cede territory, and the 1878 Congress of Berlin extracted promises of reform with no enforcement mechanism. In 1891, Abdul Hamid created the Hamidiye regiments from Kurdish tribes, letting them act with impunity. From 1895 to 1896, at least 100,000 Armenians were killed by Ottoman soldiers and mobs let loose by the authorities, many villages forcibly converted to Islam. The killings aimed to restore a social order in which Christians accepted Muslim supremacy. That logic of violent demographic control would soon find a far more radical instrument.

• 4. Young Turks And The Turn

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  The Committee of Union and Progress was a secret, revolutionary faction of the Young Turks, based in Salonica, from which the charismatic conspirator Mehmed Talaat emerged. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation, founded in 1890 and the most influential Armenian party, allied with the CUP in December 1907. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution forced Abdul Hamid to reinstate the 1876 constitution, a moment celebrated by Ottomans of all faiths. In early 1909, a countercoup reached Adana, where armed Muslims attacked the Armenian quarter and Ottoman soldiers armed the rioters instead of protecting Armenians. Between 20,000 and 25,000 people, mostly Armenians, were killed in Adana and nearby towns. The 1912 First Balkan War cost the empire almost all of its European territory and expelled masses of Muslims from the Balkans, intensifying anti-Christian sentiment and a desire for revenge. The Balkan Wars ended the Ottomanist vision of pluralism, and the CUP turned toward radical Turkish nationalism. Leaders like Talaat and Enver Pasha came to see non-Muslim concentrations in strategic areas as internal tumors to be excised. In January 1913, the CUP launched another coup and installed a one-party state. Around 150,000 Greek Orthodox from the Aegean coast were forcibly deported in May and June 1914 by CUP-backed bandits. The historian Matthias Bjornlund argues the perceived success of those deportations let CUP leaders imagine even more radical policies, in his words, as yet another extension of a policy of social engineering through Turkification.

• 5. Onset Of Annihilation

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  A few days after World War I began, the CUP allied with Germany on the 2nd of August 1914. On the 29th of October 1914, the empire entered the war by attacking Russian Black Sea ports. At least 10 percent of Ottoman Armenians were mobilized, leaving communities without fighting-age men. Minister of War Enver Pasha took command for the invasion of Russian territory and tried to encircle the Russian Caucasus Army at the Battle of Sarikamish, fought from December 1914 to January 1915. Unprepared for the harsh winter, his forces were routed, losing more than 60,000 men. Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians, a theory that became consensus among CUP leaders. The governor of Van, Djevdet Bey, ordered the Armenians there to surrender their arms on the 18th of April 1915, a demand designed as a trap. Armenians fortified themselves and repelled the Ottoman attack that began on the 20th of April. Russian forces captured Van on the 18th of May and found 55,000 corpses in the province, about half its prewar Armenian population. During the night of the 23rd to the 24th of April 1915, hundreds of Armenian activists, intellectuals, and community leaders were rounded up in Constantinople and across the empire. The order came from Talaat, intended to eliminate anyone capable of organizing resistance, and most of those arrested were murdered. That same day, Talaat banned all Armenian political organizations.

• 6. The Death Marches

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  At the orders of Talaat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian desert in 1915 and 1916. On the 23rd of May 1915, Talaat ordered the deportation of all Armenians in Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum, and the Council of Ministers passed the Temporary Law of Deportation to give the campaign a cover of legality. On the 21st of June, he extended the order to all Armenians throughout the empire, even Adrianople, 2,000 km from the Russian front. The men were usually separated during the first few days and executed; boys above the age of twelve, sometimes fifteen, were treated as adult men. Execution sites were chosen near major roads and rugged terrain, lakes, wells, or cisterns to conceal corpses. At least 150,000 Armenians passed through Erzindjan toward the killing site at the nearby Kemah gorge. More than 500,000 passed through the Firincilar plain south of Malatya, one of the deadliest areas, where arriving convoys found gorges already filled with the bodies of earlier ones. Men were often drowned tied back-to-back, a method not used on women. So many bodies floated down the Tigris and Euphrates that they sometimes blocked the rivers and had to be cleared with explosives; some traveled as far as the Persian Gulf. Women and children, the great majority of deportees, were marched through mountains without food or water, some forced to walk as far as 1,000 km in the summer heat. Around 99 percent of Armenians deported from Erzerum never reached their destination.

• 7. Conversion And Confiscation

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  An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Armenians were forcibly converted to Islam, a systematic state policy involving the bureaucracy, police, judiciary, and clergy. It is estimated that as many as two million Turkish citizens in the early 21st century may have at least one Armenian grandparent. Talaat Pasha personally authorized conversions and tracked the loyalty of converted Armenians until the war's end. The process demanded the eradication of Armenian names, language, and culture, and for women, immediate marriage to a Muslim. Young women and girls were often appropriated as house servants or sex slaves; deportees were displayed naked in Damascus and sold in some areas, with some sent as far as Tunisia or Algeria. Behind the killing ran a financial engine. Killers were entitled to a third of Armenian movable property, with another third going to local authorities and the last to the CUP. A campaign to Turkify the economy had begun in June 1914 with a law forcing many non-Muslim merchants to hire Muslims. The Ottoman and Turkish governments passed a series of Abandoned Properties Laws that administered confiscated property with no provision to return it, presuming the owners had ceased to exist. Historians Taner Akcam and Umit Kurt argue that the Republic of Turkey and its legal system were built, in a sense, on the seizure of Armenian cultural, social, and economic wealth, and on the removal of the Armenian presence. In 2006, the National Security Council ruled that property records from 1915 must stay closed to protect national security.

• 8. Denial And Memory

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  Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha publicly recognized that 800,000 Ottoman citizens of Armenian origin had died as a result of state policy, saying that humanity, civilizations are shuddering, and forever will shudder, in face of this tragedy. The postwar Ottoman Special Military Tribunal sentenced eighteen perpetrators, including Talaat, Enver, and Djemal, to death, though only three were executed because the rest had fled. On the 15th of March 1921, Talaat was assassinated in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, an operation of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation; a German jury acquitted the killer. The Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide in 1944, became interested in war crimes after reading about Tehlirian's trial. The historian Margaret Lavinia Anderson notes the genocide reached an iconic status as the apex of horrors conceivable before World War II. According to historian Stefan Ihrig, the Nazis viewed post-1923 Turkey as a post-genocidal paradise and incorporated the genocide, its lessons, tactics, and benefits, into their own worldview. Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day falls on the 24th of April each year. On the 24th of April 1965, 100,000 Armenians protested in Yerevan, and a memorial was completed two years later at Tsitsernakaberd. The Turkish government still maintains the deportation was legitimate and not genocide, a position supported by most Turkish citizens. As of the latest count, 34 UN member states have formally recognized it, along with the Holy See and the European Parliament, concurring with the academic consensus that almost all historians outside Turkey now share.