Argumentative Essay On The Armenian Genocide

The barbaric acts of witch hunts can be found all through history. A witch hunt is a campaign against a person or a group of people who hold unorthodox views. The two most notable witchhunts of religion are the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. During the Armenian Genocide, the Turks waged a war against the Christian Armenians. With the Holocaust, it was Hitler and his Nazis against the Jews. The cause of these two witch hunts can be boiled down into one category, and that is hatred of another group, because of their beliefs.

April 24, 1916 Dear Ottoman leaders, My name is Alex Petrossian. I am 25 and I am walking through the eternal desert with my fellow Armenians without food or water. It was almost as if we were walking through the sins of the Ottomans. They stripped us naked and left us to rot in desert as the sun evaporates the skin off our bones.

Since a hundred years ago, the discussion over the barbarous actions of the Ottoman Empire murdering and deporting of its Armenian community has come down to one question. Was the viscous acts of the Ottoman Empire considered Genocide or not? This is the real global issue that has been debated for so long throughout the world. While the vast American-Armenian community truly believes the word Genocide should be openly used to describe the massacre that took place a hundred years ago, the United States has not let the word out of their mouth. Many Armenians wonder why the United States choose not to express the G-Word when they know more than a million Armenians were massacred during the final days of the Ottoman Empire.

Genocide, it is not just murder, it is extermination. The world has lost an abounding amount of lives due to the vicious acts of genocide. There have been many ‘preventive’ measures being performed such as the conference in Montreal held in 2007. At said conference the United Nations (officials) not only spoke about preventing genocide, they also listened to 75 year-old, Marika Nene. Nene experienced the anti-gypsy massacres that occurred during World War II. “I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers (...) they violated me. I still have nightmares about it.” Genocide has affected millions of lives and Marika Nene is just one of them. Many have often inquired the following question, ‘can the world resolve the problem of genocide?’

The Armenian Genocide is the name given to the events of 1915-1923 in the Ottoman Empire, which was renamed Turkey after its founding father, Mustafa Ataturk. The Muslim majority destroyed the Armenians' homes, churches, and livelihoods in a continuous murderous event that took its course over 8 years. An estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians died in this Genocide, and other ethnicities died as well including Greeks and Azerbaijanis who happened to be living in Armenian neighborhoods. (University of Michigan) The victims were sometimes forced to walk on endless marches that were intended to move the entire population out of the country and east to the mountains. Any Armenians who died on the march were left on the road to rot. The Armenian Genocide was first recognized by the Russian Empire in 1915, who saw what was happening before Europe did. The leaders of the Ottoman Empire, including Ataturk, were creating a modern Turkey for Turks, at the expense of all the minorities of the Ottoman Empire, and without mercy for any who would resist.

The Armenian Genocide, also sometimes called the first genocide, happen in April 1915. The Ottoman government had a plan to decimate the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. There was approximately 1.5 Christian Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at that time. The Armenian Genocide physically annihilated approximately 664,000 to 1.2 Christian Armenian from the Spring of 1915 to the Fall of 1916. They went through starvation, illness due to exposure and massacres.

Though a majority of the Armenian population in Turkey lived in poverty and despair, a small minority had excelled as best they could within their second class status, with many serving as professionals, businessmen, lawyers, doctors, artists, architects and skilled craftsmen. When World War I broke out in 1914, leaders of the Young Turk regime sided with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). The outbreak of war would provide the perfect opportunity to solve the ‘Armenian question’ once and for all for the Young Turks. The world’s attention became fixed upon the battlegrounds of France and Belgium where the young men of Europe were soon falling dead by the hundreds of thousands. The Eastern Front eventually included the border between Turkey and Russia. With war at hand, unusual measures involving the civilian population would not seem too out of the ordinary. At this time, about forty thousand Armenian men were serving in the Turkish Army. In the fall and winter of 1914, all of their weapons were confiscated and they were put into slave labor battalions building roads or were used as human pack animals. Under the brutal work conditions they suffered a very high death rate. Those who survived would soon be shot outright. For the time had come to move against the Armenians. The decision to annihilate the entire population came directly from the

The Turks conquered a lot of Armenia’s ancestral lands, which became part of the Ottoman Empire. Today the Ottoman Empire is known as Turkey. The Turks let the Armenians have some freedom in the lands that they had conquered from the Armenians until 1890. There were religious rebellions, and Muslims wanted their religion to stay in power, so the Ottoman Empire leaders came up with a plan to use the Armenians as people who are against their religion. This put the whole religious rebellion blame on the Armenians. The Turks killed Armenian villagers periodically in different areas in the conquered Armenian lands, because they did not like the fact that there were Christians in their country. After the Ottoman Empire lost its national strength the Young Turks, which was a nationalistic movement took over Turkey. The Young Turks murdered the Armenians in order to create inspiration towards the Islamic nationalism. This is when the Armenian Genocide had occurred in the 20th century, which resulted in 1,500,000 murders of Armenians. These people were not just simply murdered with a gun shot, they were raped, enslaved, suffered from hunger, hung, and even had their heads cut off. Yet still some nations like The United States of America has still not declared the killings of the 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 as Genocide. To this day the Armenian race is still struggling to conquer back their ancestral lands, which

The genocide began on April 24, 1915, when “300 Armenian political leaders, educators, writers, clergy and dignitaries in Istanbul were taken from their homes, briefly jailed and tortured, then hanged or shot” just for being a non-believer in the Muslim religion (UHRC, par. 19). After this, many Armenian men were being arrested for no real reason. They were then taken and shot or bayoneted by Turkish soldiers. Now, it was time for the Armenian women and children. These people were “ordered to pack a few belongings and be ready to leave home, under the pretext that they were being relocated to a non-military zone for their own safety when they were actually being taken on death marches heading south toward the Syrian Desert” (UHRC, par. 21). Over a million people took part in these “death marches” with almost ¾ of people dying while traveling through the desert.

There are more than one ways that the holocaust is very similar to the Genocide in Armenia. Like Hitler, The Turkish government had devised and set into motion a plan to exterminate more than one million of turkeys Armenians. Like the holocaust in Germany, the genocide in Armenia had a lot to do with religion and in almost a super similar situation to the holocaust, it all started to go bad when a group called the "young Turks" decided they wanted all the power and wanted any religion but theirs out of turkey. By April of 1915 hundreds were arrested and thousands were taken from their homes and put on death marches without food and water through the desert and just like in the holocaust, people were also tortured and killed in very cruel manors.

It is estimated that about 1.3 to 2.1 million Armenians were killed in this great massacre ( Beckett 188). The impact of the Armenian genocide was not only that the Turks mass-murdered millions of Armenians, but that they also wiped out the Armenian culture and heritage with it. This genocide is truly significant and especially at the time it occurred, since it echoed the great lengths an empire could go to ensure

The denial of the Armenian genocide and the use of the term “alleged” are insults to those who have agitated over the years in highlighting the genocide and the Armenian people themselves. The pictorial anger and anguish of this painful traumatic experience had left the survivors of this horrific event with deep scars beyond repairs. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a dark world for the Armenians who were held helpless and bound at the treacherous hand of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. The Armenian Genocide includes: the context of power of the Ottoman Empire, the phases of destruction and Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge the genocide and provide support to the Armenians.

Genocide is one of the evillest moral crimes any ruling authority such as a government can commit against its people and it happens more than we think. A general definition of Genocide is the intention to destroy or murder people because of their race, beliefs, or even political and economic status. As we have been taught in this course Raphael Lemkin, created the term ‘Genocide’ 1944. Lemkin combined the ancient Greek word ‘genos’ which means race and the Latin word ‘cide’ which translates to killing. There are many examples of genocide in the world but the most recognizable is that of the Holocaust and how the German powers that be sought and attempted to kill all Jews. A recent example is the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 where the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana caused a violent reaction resulting in mass killings. In efforts to reduce Genocide, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and was placed in force in 1951. On July 1, 2002 the International Criminal Court (ICC) came into force. The ICC not only accepted the UNCG’s definition of Genocide but expanded it to include crimes against humanity such as enslavement, deportation, torture, rape, enforced disappearance and apartheid. There have been many organizations created throughout the world to defend and prevent genocide and even communities, religions and even colleges are forming organizations and these are just some examples of how

At first the Armenians were hopeful that their more modern government would help their region and give them equal rights. However, shortly after they came to power, the Young Turks made it clear that their numbers one priority was to “Turkify” all of the empire. On April 15, 1915, the genocide truly began. The government first arrested and murdered several hundred Armenian intellectuals. Secondly, they went into regular Armenians’ houses and grabbed them from their homes and took them on death marches in the scorching heat of the Mesopotamian desert until they dropped dead with no food, no water, no clothes. If you stopped to rest you would be shot. On top of these death marches, there were special organizations called “killing squads” that went around drowning, stabbing, and burning Armenians. In 1922 as the genocide began to end, “there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire” (“The Armenian Genocide”). So in the end, the Armenian Genocide is one of the many Genocides that have happened and are happening currently that we are not educated on. If this particular genocide is either forgotten or unspoken, it really is a little bit of

The Armenian genocide has several main causes: European meddling in Ottoman internal affairs, nationalism, economic jealousy, and Armenian involvement in the Russian war effort. Though, a lot of the causes are interrelated. For example, nationalism and European meddling go hand in hand. What exactly was the Armenian genocide? Well, the Armenian genocide was a state orchestrated machine of mass-murder and rape of the Armenian people, and several other ethnic groups, of the Ottoman Empire 1915-1923. The Armenians were one of many ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire, and they had lived in eastern Asia Minor for around three thousand years prior to the atrocity .