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. The extermination of the Armenians was on a large scale and was executed by the government of Turkey, suggesting …show more content…
As provided by the first document, the Armenians were specifically targeted by the Turkish government, meaning that they were singled out as a ethnicity (Document 1). The document provides historical context as to what had happened inside the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and it shows that there was identification of the Armenians as people that should be exterminated. Similarly, the Turkish Minister restated the fact that the government had called for the end of all Armenians (Document 2). The minister’s point of view as a government official shows that the government was involved in the plan and was supportive of it. The photo in document 5 shows the large pile of dead bodies of Armenian people, presumably massacred by the government as shown by the neatness of the stacking (Document 5). Armin T. Wegner, the photographer, took this photo to prove that Armenians were being targeted, and to show what he has been seeing during his time in the Ottoman Empire. Because the Armenian people had been classified as a group that needed to be eradicated, the government had identified them, and completed the first part of the genocide process. The dehumanization of the Armenian people by stripping them of their belongings is reminiscent of the second step in the genocide process, expropriation. Before the war had taken place, there were 2200 …show more content…
Most of the Armenian population was forced into Syria from Armenia and Anatolia, where they would either be sent off to starve, or be massacred later on (Document 1). This document provides context to their concentration by showing that they had been moved to another state in order to bring them closer together. The German soldier and medic, Armin T. Wegner, took a photo of dead Armenians stacked together (Document 5). Wegner’s purpose was to show that the bodies had been stacked together neatly, rather than strewn about as they would have been in a war. There would have been no time to stack the bodies in this manner during a war, and, due to the large number of bodies, it can be concluded that they were concentrated together before being killed. The final step of the genocide process is the extermination of the targeted group in an effective and cost effective manner. The photo taken by Wegner in Document 5 shows the dead bodies of a large group of Armenians. The methodical stacking of the bodies in order to save space suggests that the government was trying to kill the Armenians in the most efficient way possible. In Document 3, the American Ambassador to Turkey reports what he had heard about the massacres against the Armenians. As an American, he has an unbiased point of view and opinion at this point in World War I. Morgenthau discusses the
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,
Meticulous plans were laid so that the Armenian populace could be exterminated with as little resistance as possible. The first step was to kill or disband all Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman Empires army so that there would be little powerful resistance when the
(armenian-genocide.org). It started when the Turkish government arrested hundreds Armenian intellectuals. They then executed them. They took the Armenian soldiers and removed their weapons and made them do labor, such as building roads and other things. This lead to the deaths of many people. If the men did not die in labor they were shot. The technology used to kill thousands of people were the telegraphs and the trains. “The telegraph system allowed for the kind of centralization that heretofore was impossible.” (armenian-genocide.org).It allowed people to send messages to kill people it was a government service so the Ottoman Empire had to order the massacres. After that happened the Turkish government would take people out of their homes and put them to death. The men were first, they were taken and shot, or other Armenians would be forced to walk out into the desert for days without food and water, until they died. If they did not keep walking they were shot. The deportations occurred from 1915-1916. They happened secretively and were disguised as resettlement programs. (armenian-genocide.org). People went without resistance because the the Armenian soldiers were killed earlier and they were the strongest and they fought for what they believed in. With them gone, others saw that they did not have a choice so they just went with little or no resistance. Nobody really know how many people were murdered and how many just died on the walk to their new home. The Ottoman government was not concerned about the Armenians eating while they were being deported. Lots of Armenians died of starvation because they were not fed and given water. This is one of the biggest ways the Ottoman government got rid of the Armenian population. The Turks did not take the young children. The young children were forced to convert to Muslim. They were also renamed and given Turkish names because the Turks wanted to keep the next
Mass extermination and deportation of Western population of Armenia, Cilicia and other provinces of the Ottoman Empire carried out by the ruling circles of Turkey in 1915-1923. The policy of genocide against Armenians was due to several factors. The leading role among them was the ideology
During this time people were also dying from different things that was going on as well. Some of the things like hydration, starvation, and also a lot of different types of diseases that were going around. Also a lot of the Armenian children were removed from their families and converted to islam. During the court proceedings after the war had ended in 1918 nearly all of them were found guilty of treason, massacres, war crimes, and the majority of them were sentenced in absentia to death. Many of these reported incessantly about the ongoing violence and massacres. Several published reports and memoirs, books, and photographs of the events.
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 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 Republic was crying for help from the allied forces, which included Great Britain, France, and Soviet Union, but the forces did little to help them. The one thing the forces did was give a warning to Turkey saying “the Allied governments announce publicly that they will hold all the members of the Ottoman Government, as well as such of their agents as are implicated, personally responsible for such matters” (The Armenian Genocide). The warning had no effect. The Armenians were left for dead. So one of the first genocides in history was in full effect. Although there is many examples to prove the Armenian Genocide actually happened, “Turkish government has denied
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
The aggressors engaged in the genocide because the Armenians were the first Christian nation and wanted independence. What really occurred in the genocide was a massacre against many of Armenian men, women, and the elderly. There were many attempts made to stop the Turks in the genocide but the Russian troops were the ones who helped the surviving Armenians. The Armenian men were shot in small groups while being tied together with rope. The children were converted from Christians into Muslims and the boys went through a painful circumsion. The women and the elderly were forced onto a death march which lastly months. If they tried to rest they were brutally beaten and focused to get back and march. Those who survived the march were killed when they got to the destination by being drowned, thrown off a cliff, or burned alive. At least 600,000 Armenians were killed in the
The Armenian Genocide was one of the worst planned killings in history taking over one and half million lives. First having disputes with the Turkish government in 1894, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. This is also known as the Armenian Holocaust. Being part of a religious minority in the region the Armenian people were seen as inferior to the Muslims and having very few political and legal rights. Issues increased during World War One when Ottoman religious authorities began a holy war against all christians expect their allies. Turkish military leaders began to think if the Allies won that the Armenians would turn and fight for them. As the war continued
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 massacres were an attempt to create a new pure Turkish state. Under the Turks, the ethnic and religious diversity of the Ottoman Empire disappeared; for this the Arabs rebelled and freed themselves from tyranny. In order to do this, forced migration of the Armenian people occurred. When the Turks were not gaining the results they wanted, massacres were performed to quicken results. This attempt to restore the Ottoman empire back to its former Islamic state from the 1800s failed.
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.