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The "Forgotten
Genocide"
The general
public and even many historians know very little about the
genocide of
Armenians by the government of the
Ottoman Empire. Civilian populations have often fallen
victim to the brutality of invading armies, bombing raids,
lethal substances, and other forms of indiscriminate killings.
In the Armenian case, however, the government of the Ottoman
Empire, dominated by the so-called Committee of Union and
Progress or
Young Turk Party,
turned against a segment of its own population. In international
law there were certain accepted laws and customs of war that
were aimed in some measure at protecting civilian populations,
but these did not cover domestic situations or a government's
treatment of its own people--only after World War I and the
Holocaust was that included in the
United Nations'
Genocide Convention. Nonetheless, at the time of the Armenian
deportations and massacres beginning in 1915, many governments
and statespersons termed the atrocities as crimes against
humanity. Except for the Young Turk leaders, no government
denied or doubted what was occurring. The governments of
Germany and Austro-Hungary, while allied with the Ottoman
Empire, received hundreds of detailed eyewitness accounts from
their officials on the spot and privately admitted that the
Armenians were being subjected to a policy of annihilation. In
the United States charity drives began for the remnants of the
"starving Armenians." Examples of headlines from the New York
Times in 1915 read: "[Ambassador Morgenthau] Protests
Against the War of Extermination in Progress" (September16);
"Only200,000 Armenians Now Left in
Turkey: More than 1,000,000 Killed, Enslaved, or Exiled"
(October 22); "Five Missionaries Succumb to Shock of Armenian
Horrors"(November3); "Million Armenians Killed or in Exile:
American Committee on Relief Says. Victims...Steadily
Increasing" (December15). Between 1915 and 1918, hundreds
of declarations, promises, and pledges were made by world
leaders regarding the emancipation, restitution, and
rehabilitation of the Armenian survivors. Yet, within a few
years those same governments and statespersons turned away from
the Armenian question without having fulfilled any of those
pledges. And, after a few more years, the Armenian calamity had
virtually become "the forgotten genocide."
History of the Armenians
The Armenians are an ancient people. They
inhabited the highland region between the Black, Caspian, and
Mediterranean seas for nearly 3,000 years. They are noted
in Greek and Persian sources as early as the sixth century BC.
On a strategic crossroad between East and West, Armenia was
sometimes independent under its national dynasties, sometimes
autonomous under native princes who paid tribute to foreign
powers, and sometimes subjected to direct foreign rule. The
Armenians were among the first people to adopt
Christianity
and to develop a distinct national-religious culture.
The Turkish invasions of Armenia began in the eleventh century
AD. and the last Armenian kingdom fell three centuries later.
Most of the territories that had once formed the ancient and
medieval Armenian kingdoms were incorporated into the Ottoman
Empire in the sixteenth century. The Armenians were included in
a multinational and multi-religious realm, but as a Christian
minority they had to endure discrimination and second-class
citizenship. They had to pay special taxes and they
weren't allowed to bear arms. Despite these disabilities,
most Armenians lived in relative peace so long as the Ottoman
Empire was strong and expanding. But as the empire’s became
corrupt and started to break down in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. When this happened, oppression and
intolerance increased. Also, the Ottoman Empire was
unable to modernize and compete with the West. Armenian leaders
wanted to change the way Armenians were treated, but this was
hard to do because the Armenians were dispersed throughout the
empire and no longer constituted an absolute majority in much of
their historic homelands. It was hard to rally the people
behind the idea of ending the oppression. Ultimately,
leaders had to organize underground political parties and
encourage the population to learn to defend itself.
Massacres: Preface to genocide
During the reign of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II
(1876-1909), Pogroms
organized by the sultan’s agents resulted in the deaths of up to
200,000 Armenians. This happened between 1894-1896.
Thousands were exiled, and hundreds of towns and villages were
looted and burned. The people in the towns and villages
who stayed at to convert Islam. The sultan did this by
starting a wave of religious fanaticism among the Moslem
population. He told his agents that the Armenians were revolting
against Islam, and he sent those agents to do away with the
Armenian infidels. This murderous winter of 1895
devastated much of the Armenian population and its property in
some 20 districts of eastern Turkey.
The
Young Turk dictatorship
After the terror of 1894-1896, many Armenians had given up hope.
Yet some comfort was found in the fact
that various non-Armenian groups were also trying to organize
against the sultan’s tyranny. Several of those opposition groups
merged into the Committee of Union and Progress, popularly
referred to as the Young Turks. In 1908 a military
coup
led by
the Young Turks forced Abdul-Hamid to become a constitutional
monarch. The Armenians were excited and felt like they (the
Armenian Christians and the Turkish Muslims were finally coming
together to fight for the same cause. But then from
1908 to 1914, the Young Turks became
xenophobic
nationalists, determined to eliminate the
Armenian people. In 1909 more than 20,000 Armenians were
massacred in the region of Cilicia. The Young Turks blamed
Abdul-Hamid, but there was evidence that the Young Turks had
taken part in the massacre. At the time, no one knew that
the Young Turks had taken part in this, so the Young Turks used
this massacre to their advantage. They took full control
of the government and suspended everyone's constitutional rights
for several years. During this time in power they began to
envision a new, homogeneous Turkish state. They wanted a nation
of people who were adhered to traditional Turkish culture and
religion. This began spreading this idea of "Turkism."
he
Armenians were seen as an obstacle to creating a homogeneous
state, and the Young Turks felt justified in using unlimited violence for the greater good of
producing a homogeneous state and society. In Accounting for
Genocide, Helen Fen concluded:
The
victims of twentieth century premeditated genocide-the Jew,the
Gypsies, the Armenians-were murdered in order to fulfill the
state's design for
a new order. . . .war was used in both cases. . .to transform
the nation to correspond to the ruling elite's formula by
eliminating the
groups conceived as alien, enemies by definition.
The
Genocidal Process
On the night of April 23-24, 1915,
Armenian political, religious, educational, and intellectual
leaders in Constantinople (Istanbul) were arrested, sent to
Anatolia, and put to death. Then in May, the Minister of Internal
Affairs Talaat Pasha declared that the Armenians were
untrustworthy and could aid the Turkish enemy now being fought
against in World War 1. He ordered
ex post facto
the Armenians be sent away from
their homes if they lived in a war zone. They were all
sent to the barren deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia.
Armenians serving in the
Ottoman armies were now taken out in batches and murdered. Of
the remaining population, the adult and teenage males were
killed under the direction of Young Turk agents and their
followers. Women and children were driven for months over
mountains and deserts. They were intentionally deprived of food and water,
and hundreds of thousands died along
the routes to the desert. In this manner the Armenian people
were effectively eliminated from their homeland of several
millennia. Of the
refugee survivors scattered
throughout the Arab provinces and the Caucasus, thousands died of starvation
and disease.
Even the
memory of the Armenian way of life was destroyed. Churches and
cultural monuments were desecrated and small children, snatched
from their parents, were renamed and given out to be raised as
non-Armenians and non-Christians.
Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American Ambassador to Turkey at the
time, tried to reason with the Young Turk leaders and to alert
the United States and the world to the tragic events. but,
except for some donations for relief efforts, his actions were
in vain. His description of the genocide begins: The Central
Government now announced its intention of gathering the two
million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the
empire and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable
region. Had they under taken such a deportation in good faith,
it would have represented the height of cruelty and injustice.
As a matter of fact, the Turks never had the slightest idea of
re-establishing the Armenians in this new country. . . .
Ambassador Morgenthau concluded: I am confident that the whole history of
the human race contains no terrible episode as this. Estimates
of Armenian dead vary from 600,000 to two million. A United
Nations Human Rights sub-commission report in 1985 gives the
figure of "at least one million," but the important point in
understanding a tragedy such as this is not the exact and precise
count of the number who died-that will never be known-but the
fact that more than half the Armenian population perished and
the rest were forcibly driven from their ancestral homeland.
Another important point is that what befell the Armenians was by
the will of the government. While a large segment of the general
population participated in the looting and massacres, many
Muslim leaders were shocked by what was happening, and thousands
of Armenian women and children were rescued and sheltered by
compassionate individual Turks,
Kurds, and Arabs...
The
Aftermath
The Ottoman Empire and its allies were defeated in World War 1 at the end of 1918.
Because of the defeat, there was talk of punishing those who led
the massacre of Armenians. The Young Turk leaders had fled
the country, the new Turkish prime minister admitted that the
Turks had committed such misdeeds "as to make the conscience of
mankind shudder forever." United States General James G. Harbord, after an inspection tour of the former Armenian
population centers in 1919, reported on the organized nature of
the massacres and concluded: "Mutilation, violation, torture,
and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred
beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is
seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all
the ages." The Paris Peace Conference declared that the lands of
Armenia would never be returned to Turkish rule, and a Turkish
military court martial tried and sentenced to death the
notorious organizers of the genocide in absentia (in
absentia means they weren't present at the time). No attempt was made to carry out the sentence,
however, and thousands of other culprits were neither tried nor
even removed from office. Within a few months the judicial
proceedings were suspended, and even accused and imprisoned war
criminals were freed and sent home. The release of these people
signaled a major shift in the political
winds. The former Allied Powers, having become bitter rivals
over the spoils of war, concurred that the Armenians should be
freed but did nothing to make it happen. They hoped that the United States would
come and use the military to establish a rule and protect the
remaining Armenians. The United States, however, was recoiling from its involvement in the
world war and turning its back on the
League of Nations.
Moreover, the Allied Powers saw that there was a new Turkish nationalist movement
occurring. The people heading this movement did not want
to give any land back to the Armenians and didn't even want
Armenian refugees to come back. The Allied didn't do
anything to stop this movement, and in 1923, they recognized new Turkey
as a nation. Nothing was done to compensate the Armenian survivors
for their losses. It
was as
if the Armenians had never existed in the Ottoman Empire. All
Armenians who had returned to their homes after the war were
again uprooted and driven into exile. The 3,000-year presence of
the Armenians in Asia Minor came to a violent end. Armenian
place-names were changed, and Armenian cultural monuments were
obliterated.
During
the 1920s and 1930s, memory of the Armenian genocide gradually faded, and in the
aftermath of the horrors and havoc of World War 11, it virtually
became the "forgotten genocide." In recent years, growing
awareness of the Holocaust and commitment to the prevention and
punishment of the crime of genocide has brought the memory of
the Armenian Genocide back.
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