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Armenian Genocide

Decent Essays

From 1915 to 1918, the Turkish leaders of the Ottoman Empire carried out the killings of 1.5 million Armenians living there at the time. Over the course of those terrible 3 years, innocent people were murdered with death marches, execution, drowning, burning and other inhumane ways. Turkey has refused to take blame, and even denied the genocide’s existence and occurrence. There has been much dispute about whether or not countries outside of Armenia and Turkey should recognize these mass killings of Armenians in 1915-16 as a genocide or something else. The Ottoman Empire was multinational, but had always favored Muslims to Jews and Christians, so when World War I started and a substantial group of Christian Armenians were still in Turkey and …show more content…

Their goal was to create a completely Turkish state in the Ottoman Empire, and they saw the Armenians as an obstacle. The Turks were also Muslim, and greatly outnumbered the Armenians, who were Christian. The extreme hatred for Christians not only sprung from the Young Turk’s goal of being homogeneously Turkish, but also they were allied with Germany and against France, Britain, and Russia in World War I. Since they were allied with Germany and had hatred for Christians, the objective of mass Armenian killings, could almost seem justified. Talaat Pasha, one of the leaders of the Young Turks said that there were to be no Christians allowed. At the beginning of the genocide in 1915, hundreds of Armenian leaders in their communities were arrested, sent eastbound toward the Syrian deserts, and executed under the rule of the Young Turks and Talaat. Quickly, churches were burned, Armenian schools were closed, and any teachers who refused to convert to Islam were killed. Eventually there were deportation orders that were posted all around calling for the of Armenians to camps in the Syrian deserts. However, there were no such camps prepared for the deported Armenians and nearly half of them died on the journey there. The women were raped and abused, the men mutilated and both men and women were murdered …show more content…

When reminiscing about his grandfather’s - also named Hakob - story, he told us the event in which, “the Turk gendarmes had brought the Armenian deportees, had packed them into that large cave, had shut its entrance and had set fire to it.” Another testimony about the same event came from a man named Martiros Ashekyan. He said that nearly 40,000 people were in that cave when they were burned alive. There was no justified reason for all of these people to die, especially in such horribly violent ways. Although the term “genocide” had not been created while this one was occurring, the word is now widely used and accepted. There is no reason for the Turkish government today, to refuse to own up and admit to their crimes against humanity other than shame and fear of humiliation. With the pressing accusations against them - that have proof - are the Turkish not humiliating themselves more now by acting childish with their denial of these events? They’ve claimed in the past that more Turks died in the massacres occurring for 1915-1918, they’ve said that since there were other small groups of people who ended up being prosecuted who were not Armenian, that the whole

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