Armenian genocide

The **Armenian genocide** refers to the systematic mass murder, deportation, forced assimilation and conversion to Islam of the mainly Christian Armenians in the Islamic Ottoman Turkish Empire, ruled by the Young Turks back then. By 2025, 34 countries have recognized the Armenian genocide as a genocide.

## Planning

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. War Minister Enver Pasha launched a disastrous military campaign against the Russian forces in the Caucasus in the hope of capturing Baku. His forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and many of his men froze to death.

Returning to Istanbul, Enver Pasha largely blamed the Armenians living in the region for actively siding with the Russians. Despite the tensions, the Armenians had thrived under Ottoman rule. Most Armenians were better educated and wealthier than their Turkish counterparts, who were jealous of the Armenians' success.

The resentment was fueled by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would support fellow countries of fellow Christians, especially Russia, which shared an unstable border with the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to the Muslim Ottoman caliphate.

In 1914, the Ottoman War Office had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians as a liability and a threat to the Ottomans' security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

The Ottoman government, moving quickly, arrested an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals on the night of 24 April 1915. Its acts of genocide against the Armenians continued for nine years until 1922, when around 388,000 Armenians remained. The massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896 and 1909 were still fresh in their minds.

## Atrocities

In the beginning, in 1915 at 1916, Armenians were kicked out of their homes, which were claimed by Turks. During a Turkification campaign, the government squads kidnapped children, converted them to Islam, and gave them to Turkish families. In some places, the Turks raped and forced women to join Turkish harems or serve as slaves. Women would mark their bodies with scars or burn part of their face to be unfit to join a harem. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.

Meanwhile, the Turks created the Special Organization (_Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa_), which in turn organized killing squads or butcher battalions to carry out, as one officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian elements.” The killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. People were drowned in rivers, thrown off cliffs, crucified, or burned alive.

Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1913-1916), wrote in 1919, "I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915".

Ottoman Empire also forcibly seized armenian properties during the genocide, those properties never given back to the Armenians.

## Denial

Guenter Lewy claims in his book _The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide_ that there is not enough evidence that the Young Turks regime organized the killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. According to Lewy, even though their fate in World War I proved tragic, it was not a "real" genocide because "there were no centrally organized and state-sponsored premeditation and genocidal intention".

A major obstacle for the wider recognition of the genocide in the world is the official position of Turkey, which states that there was no systematic attempt to annihilate the Armenian population and that the 1915 massacres happened because of the Tehcir Law deportation and the war.

Talaat Pasha, one of the leaders who planned the Armenian Genocide, said "we never regret" for what happened. This shows that the Ottoman leaders did not feel sorry for the killings.

In December 2008, a group of Turkish scholars launched an online petition for people who wanted to apologize for what happened. Those who created the petition failed to use the word "genocide" but used the "Great Catastrophe" regarding the event.

Many Turks viewed the Armenians as a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war and argued that people of various ethnicities were killed during the violence. Turkey and its leaders fear that recognizing the word "genocide" could cost considerable sums of money in reparations, as well as public embarrassment.

## Related pages

- Holodomor
- The Holocaust
- Assyrian Genocide
- Rwandan genocide
- Cambodian genocide
- Pontic Greek Genocide

## Infobox (infobox)

- **child**: yes
- **label1**: Trial, Trials
- **data1**: Ottoman Special Military Tribunal


## Infobox (civilian attack)

- **title**: Armenian Genocide
- **partof**: World War I
- **image**: Column of deportees walking through Harput vilayet during the Armenian genocide.jpg
- **alt**: see caption
- **caption**: Column of Armenian Deportation, deportees Guard, guarded by Gendarme, gendarmes in Mamuret-ul-Aziz Vilayet
- **location**: Ottoman Empire
- **date**: 1915–1917
- **type**: Genocide, death marches, Forced conversion, forced Islamization
- **target**: Ottoman Armenians
- **fatalities**: 600,000–1,500,000
- **perps**: Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)