The Armenian Genocide refers to the atrocities carried out during World War I against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Genocide occurs when a group of people is intentionally killed to eliminate their existence. The Turkish government orchestrated and oversaw the Armenian Genocide against the whole Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians suffered deportation, expropriation, kidnapping, torture, homicide, and starvation. As a result of forced migration from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, a sizable portion of the Armenian population perished from starvation and dehydration in the desert. The Ottoman Empire saw the massacre of a large number of Armenians.
One of the most heinously brazen and horrific atrocities ever done in the world was the Armenian Genocide. Following their failure to take the Russian regions they intended to, the Turks of the Ottoman Empire persecuted thousands of Armenians. The Ottoman Empire held the Armenian Christian community responsible for their degeneration and downfall. The Turkish government continues to deny its involvement in this massacre and refuses to acknowledge the scope of these events, even though most historians now view this incident as a planned and methodical effort to wipe out a whole population. They say that a disease or someone else’s fault caused a large number of casualties in the Armenian community. This case study will demonstrate how the Armenian Genocide contributed to the outbreak of World War I, what the main motivation was for continuing this heinous crime, what strategies the Turkish government employed to carry it out, and how other nations reacted to it.
Most of the activists argued that the Near East and the Russian Caucasus of World War I were directly related to the demise of the Armenian people.[1]. Turkey engaged in combat with the Entente Powers and the Central Powers. World War I provided the Young Turk autocracy with an opportunity to comprehend its nationalist sentiments and inflame their sense of superiority. Due to financial links, tight military ties, and regional support for war with Russia, they were effectively biased in favor of Germany.[2]
On August 2, 1914, the Young Turk government concluded a covert military agreement with the German government, and on November 11, it formally declared war on the Central Powers. Ottoman armies assaulted the Caucasus to advance their military position in the Persian Empire after repelling an earlier Russian intrusion. In an unsuccessful attempt to push the British out of Egypt that winter, the Turks suffered catastrophic destruction in the Caucasus and at the Suez Canal.
They were subjected to heavy fire from the Russian forces. They had to contend with extremely unfavorable weather conditions, which caused the Ottoman forces to disintegrate and made their loss certain. This setback infuriated the Ottoman monarch, who chose to lay the blame for it entirely on the nation’s small Armenian minority. Furthermore, they declared the Armenians were traitors and promised to support the Russian army in its fight against the Turks. All of these causes caused the Turkish government to begin deporting and persecuting Armenians. Historians claim that the region had become a ticking time bomb of ethnic and religious tensions that sparked World War I due to the conflict over the territory, the loss of Ottoman power, and the ambition of Young Turk leadership. I.
Although the majority of scholars agree that the Ottoman Turk rulers (Muslims) were tolerant of other religions, the decimation of the Armenian population (Christians) illustrated racial and religious intolerance in the nation. The millet framework, a network structure that granted minority groups limited power to address their problems while still under Ottoman rule, was used to weed out those who were not Muslims. The Turkish government set in motion a plan to kill the Armenian ethnic minority in order to calm their anger over their defeat by Russian troops.[3]
The Ottoman sultans executed their plots in a variety of methods, including bombing hundreds of buildings, drowning Christian Armenians in rivers, tossing them from cliffs, crucifying, and burning them alive. Executing Armenian intellectuals in front of their community was the first step. Mass shootings were taken out by the Turkish squadron in areas where the Armenian population predominated, as well as in any gathering locations where Armenians congregated for meetings or discussions. Additionally, women were raped, and children were taken and converted to Islam before being given to a Turkish family.
Armenians were also exiled from the land and sent to trek the desert of Mesopotamia without clothing or drink until they died (Journeyman Picture. Between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians had been killed by the middle of the 1920s when the massacres and extraditions finally ended, and many more had been forcibly exiled from the country. According to records, one of the bloodiest government-orchestrated mass murders in history occurred during this time.[4] The entire collaboration of the Armenians during the events is astonishing. They cooperated with their government’s plan to “relocate them for their own good” despite not knowing what was planned for them. For the conflict, the Armenians were asked to surrender their hunting gear. Communities were assigned quotas to meet, and they had to purchase extra weaponry from the Turks. Later, the government claimed ownership of the weapons, providing evidence that the Armenians were planning a coup. The healthy men were called up to serve in the war. These men either died instantaneously or through working themselves to death. Now that only women, children, and the elderly remained in the villages and towns, they were gradually abandoned. The surviving citizens would be instructed to assemble at a temporary location and bring only what they could carry. The Turkish Gendarmes led the Armenians into death marches while they obeyed their orders. Armenians were forced to travel across Anatolia on death marches while being raped, malnourished, dehydrated, killed, and kidnapped. These crimes were either carried out by the Turkish Gendarmes, or they ignored them. They only revealed the Syrian Desert as the Turkish government’s intended location for resettlement. Those who had somehow made it through the march would eventually reach this barren desert, where they would either perish right away or endure until they could find a way to flee the empire. Most of the time, those who survived and managed to flee were helped by people who later came to be known as “good Turks” by Western missionaries who recorded these occurrences from the Arabs.
The Young Turk government used World War I as justification to carry out its intentions for Genocide. The Central Committee of the Young Turk Party, which was presided over by Mehmed Talât, Ismail Enver, and Ahmed Djemal, was responsible for orchestrating the Armenian Genocide. They were a racist organization whose leaders included Drs. Zia Gökalp, Mehmed Nazim, and Behaeddin Shakir. On April 24, Armenians around the world remember this terrible catastrophe since it was on this day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, intellectuals, and professionals in Constantinople were apprehended, deported, and murdered. Five thousand destitute Armenians were also murdered on that day in Constantinople, both outside and inside their homes. The same things happened to the leaderless Armenian population in every village throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Individual acts that are knowingly committed as part of a generalized or well-planned attack planned against any regular citizen or a recognizable segment of the civilian population are considered crimes against humanity. This awful and widespread crime frequently occurs during the conflict since the combatants’ primary goal is to harm their adversary or rival nation as much as possible, putting human values aside. Governments defend their actions by arguing that suffering large numbers of casualties is a necessary indicator of the enemy army’s effectiveness.[5]. Following the Nuremberg preliminary proceedings, the world came together to establish a system of international effort where crimes against humanity were sanctioned and investigated.[6]
After World War I ended, the Turkish court determined that the leaders of the Young Turk government were guilty of murder. This fact has been established and validated. It insisted that the murderous plan was carried out in the strictest of secrecy. The men were later put to death by Armenians. Representatives of the governments of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria, and all the other significant Powers at the time denounced the Armenian Genocide. The last two were allies of the Ottoman Empire, while the first three were its enemies. The United States, which had a neutral stance toward the Ottoman Empire, denounced the Armenian Genocide and served as the primary voice for Armenians. Turkey consented to allow the United States to erect a border between the recently established Republic of Armenia and the Turkish government. The Wilsonian is now the name of the new Armenia. Armenia contained the majority of the six western Ottoman provinces in addition to a sizable Black Sea coastline. It was planned for Cilicia, a distinct Armenian province on the Mediterranean, to be governed by France. The recently returned Armenian refugees and forces were driven from these regions by Mustafa Kemal’s soldiers, who also forced the writing of a new treaty that was disrespectful to the Armenian victims. They were essentially warned not to come back and wouldn’t get paid. In a deal with the Soviet Union, the Armenian provinces of Kars and Ardahan were also annexed.[7]
The governments of Great Britain, France, and Russia declared in 1915 that The Young Turk must be held accountable for gravely violating the human rights of the Armenian people and that strong sanctions and punishment should be imposed. However, no significant steps were made that would have forced Turkish leaders to compensate Armenians for the horrific Genocide they suffered. Other nations refuse to acknowledge the Genocide due to significant post-war political interests.[8] Turkish people today still reject the conclusions of historians and the term “destruction,” claiming that there was no deliberate attempt to destroy a people when these events occurred. It is undeniably still immoral and offensive to Turkishness to try to bring up the tragedy of the Armenians in Turkey today. During the Cold War, relations between the European Union and Turkey warmed. A remarkable Armenian people group in the US, centered in Los Angeles, has been pushing Congress for a long time to condemn the Armenian Genocide. In addition, the US Senate passed a resolution in 2019 acknowledging and commemorating the Armenian massacre following years of debate on the subject.
Finally, the Turkish government currently asserts that Armenians were only expelled from the eastern “conflict zone” and rejects the idea that there was an Armenian genocide. However, the Armenian Genocide did not merely occur in the alleged “war zone” but also throughout Anatolia, which is modern-day Turkey. The Holocaust of the Jews and the Armenian genocide share many similarities. They both practice a long-forgotten faith. Both belonged to the states’ respective religious minorities. Both have been persecuted in the past. New democracies exist in both. They are both encircled by foes. Both are skilled and artistic minorities who have faced discrimination due to jealousy. On the day of dispatching his Death’s Heads battalions into Poland, Hitler told his generals, “Go, slaughter without compassion… nobody today recalls the annihilation of the Armenians.”
Bibliography
Charny, Israel W., and Daphna Fromer. “Denying the Armenian genocide: Patterns of thinking as defence‐mechanisms.” Patterns of prejudice 32, no. 1 (1998): 39-49.
Hovannisian, Richard G. “The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial.” In The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 111-134. Routledge, 2017.
Johanson, Paula, ed. The Armenian Genocide. Greenhaven Publishing LLC, 2017.
Smith, Roger W., Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton. “Professional ethics and the denial of Armenian genocide.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (1995): 1-22.
Totten, Samuel, and William S. Parsons. A century of Genocide: Critical essays and eyewitness accounts. Routledge, 2008.
[1] Johanson, Paula, ed. The Armenian Genocide. Greenhaven Publishing LLC, 2017.
[2] Totten, Samuel, and William S. Parsons. A century of Genocide: Critical essays and eyewitness accounts. Routledge, 2008
[3] Totten, Samuel, and William S. Parsons. A century of Genocide: Critical essays and eyewitness accounts. Routledge, 2008.
[4] Hovannisian, Richard G. “The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial.” In The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 111-134. Routledge, 2017.
[5] Smith, Roger W., Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton. “Professional ethics and the denial of Armenian genocide.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (1995): 1-22.
[6] Hovannisian, Richard G. “The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial.” In The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 111-134. Routledge, 2017.
[7] Charny, Israel W., and Daphna Fromer. “Denying the Armenian genocide: Patterns of thinking as defence‐mechanisms.” Patterns of prejudice 32, no. 1 (1998): 39-49.
[8] Hovannisian, Richard G. “The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial.” In The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 111-134. Routledge, 2017.
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