Armenian Genocide Controversy

Between the years of 1915 and 1918 the Ottoman Empire, under the Young Turks began a deliberate program of removing and exterminating the Armenian population; a population already dismantled through previous massacres. The Armenians were a minority in both population and religion. Because most Armenians were Christians, they were made an easy scapegoat in an empire that was mostly Islamic. With the world’s eyes on the First World War, the Armenian Genocide went mostly unnoticed and there were no punishments such as ones received by Germany after the Holocaust. The United States has deliberately avoided the recognition of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in order to maintain an ally in the Middle East and to avoid American genocidal policies,

During World War I, the government of Turkey sought to rid their country of the Armenians. The Turks and other ethnic groups hated the Armenians for their ability to prosper, even as a minority group with limited rights. This hatred led to the desire to cleanse the Ottoman Empire of Armenian influence. The Turkish people say that the Ottoman empire went through a civil war during this time, which explains the deaths of so many Armenians. Although the Turks claim otherwise, the treatment of the Armenian people during World War I qualifies as a genocide through scale, government involvement, and the usage of the genocide process.

On the 24 April 1915, as the Ottoman Empire was being dismantled, a fiercely nationalistic Muslim political party known as the Young Turks began the process of exterminating approximately 1 500 000 Armenian Christians. The Young Turks aimed to create a state that was free from any Armenians and from Christians in particular. The genocide lasted 8 years, until 1923, during which time the Armenian Christian population in the Ottoman Empire was reduced from approximately 2 million to approximately 500 000. Still today, Turkey refuses to call what took place ‘genocide’. The modern Turkish government argues that the intent was to relocate the Armenians or, in some cases, that the genocide was completely fabricated by the Armenians, as a bid to gain support from the outside Christian world.

The Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against its minority Armenian population from 1915-1917 left an estimated 1.5 million dead and to date, not one individual has been tried for these egregious crimes. The mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in World War I and Jews by the Nazis in World War II shocked the conscience of the international community and led to the creation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), in order to hold the perpetrators of crimes of this magnitude accountable. In its preamble, the UN charter sets the objective to "establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained". The genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire and Nazis made it clear that an international standard must be set in order to protect the rights of individuals. The UN has attempted to establish international law with the creation of the CPPCG and other resolutions, however, these resolutions are simply words on paper unless they are properly enforced. In this essay I will be examining whether the United Nations have been successful in its enforcement international law, specifically the CPPCG.

The Armenian Genocide also referred as the Armenian Holocaust was a horrific act done by the Turkish Ottoman government to exterminate and kill many Armenians. Millions of Armenians lost their lives due to this event and Turkey refutes that any event ever happened or occurred. The start of the genocide took place in April 24 1915 where the ottoman empire took many Armenian leaders to eventually murder them. The event was carried out during and after World War 1. The genocide was implemented in two phases which where the wholesale killing of the male population, then the death marches of the children and women leading to starvation because their food and water were deprived as well as their dignity since they raped and robbed them. There were

Many contemporaries of that time said that they did not meet a single Armenian who would not know the Turkish language. It just shows how closely the Armenian people were tied to the Ottoman Empire.The Ottoman Empire never renounced the invention of the Great Turan - pan-Turkic state, which was to extend Turkish territories by occupying the Caucasus, North Caucasus, the Crimea, the Volga region, Central Asia up to the Altai and partly Mongolia. The Armenians had always prevented implementation of these plans; in addition, the Armenians had ties with the Russians. Therefore, it was one of the leading aspects to exterminate the Armenians. The plans for the extermination of the Armenian population were developed in October 1911 at a congress of the party "Union and Progress" ( "Ittihad ve Terakki") and took shape in the World War First. In September 1914, at a secret meeting chaired by the Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha was established the leaders of the Young Turks Nazim, Shakir Behaetdin and Sukru. Nazim claimed; “If we remain satisfied with the sort of local massacres which took place in Adana or elsewhere ...if this purge is not general and final, it will inevitably lead to problems. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished”.The same attitude had other participants in the

The Holocaust is one of the most well known events in history. It had a great affect on the Jewish population and the Zionist movement. The Holocaust is very similar to the Turkish massacre of the Armenians during World War I. Alike the Holocaust, it also had a large effect on the Armenian population. Both of these are horrific events in history because of the mass numbers that were killed. The Holocaust, which had a great effect on the Jewish population, is comparable on a much larger scale to the Massacre of the Armenians in Turkey during World War 1 because of the incredibly large numbers of lives lost during the specific massacres.

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.

The Armenian Genocide Ronald Reagan, once said, like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it, the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. The ethic group the Ottoman Empire was deporting and killing were Christians. They were forced from their homes and into deportation and massacres from 1915 to 1918, one of the most brutal and traumatizing genocide that we have knowledge of. The Armenian Genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century, after World War 1. It occurred when two million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire. For three thousand years, an

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.

I have selected to look at the Armenian genocide as the central topic for my Senior Project. The Armenian Genocide is the term given to the systematic killings of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during the first World War. This event is important because it is argued to be the first modem genocide and was one of the events studied in the attempt to define what a genocide is. The Armenian genocide is so important for study because of it's close relation to the creation of the nation of Turkey and the national identity to Armenian diaspora found around the world. The hundred years sense the start of the killings in 1915 have been a rocky road. The Turkish government refuses to recognize the event as a genocide and this has had

Turkey’s involvement in the World War 1 provided cover for extreme elements of the very nationalistic Young Turks regime to carry out the genocide. The genocide started in 1915, culminated in 1917 and was characterized by mass deportation, slaughter, starvation and raped. Those Armenians who were conscripted in the Turkish army were executed and this was explained as a natural occurrence of war. Pasha was the Leader and chief executor in the mass execution.

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 .

Approximately one and a half million Armenians were killed from 1915-1923. The remaining part was either Islamized or exiled.” The Armenian Genocide was a horrific event that caused the Armenians to have a major loss in population. From this, the Armenians should have been given reparations, but were not and that still affects them to this day.