What would happen if the world shared a single religion, culture and ethnic background? It would not be nearly as diverse and complex which is one of the many things that gives the sense that people set their own standards and values for themselves. That should be a right that no one should be able to take away. The Armenian Genocide was a genocide as defined by the UN Resolution 260 A III, in which Armenians were killed and tortured in whole or in part, by intentionally inflicting life-threatening conditions that would bring about their ethnic destruction in whole or in part, and by forcing them to migrate their children from one group to another.
I. The killing and torturing of Armenians in part or whole defines the UN Resolution 260 A
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2. “The bodies, some of which had been mutilated, were left for vultures or wild animals to pick apart. Even in death, dignity and respect were denied” (Whitehorn, “Victims”).
3. “The great massacres of 1894–1896, followed by others in 1909–1912, constituted a profound shock to the Armenian community, which was stripped of its land, ancestry, and culture” (“Armenian Genocide”).
C. Many Armenians had to witness family, friends, and loved ones suffer as they were exterminated.
1. This was a testimony of Deli Sarkas, a man who lost his mother, father, and brother to the Armenian Genocide, “I stepped into a totally empty shell. Where once it had been full of life, now there was absolutely nothing. I opened my mouth to call out for my mother and father and my brothers, hoping that by saying their names out loud I could conjure them up from the dead. But 1 was mute..." (Rowe).
2. “Ungor stresses a continuous policy of Turkification beginning with the expulsion of the Greeks, the Armenian Genocide, and massacres of Syriac communities and, in the mid-1920s and 1930s, by the killings, deportations, and mass deaths of hundreds of thousands of Kurds” (Chorbajian).
3. “In 1906 Boghos Nubar, heir to his father's title and family fortune, took the lead, along with a group of wealthy Armenians in Egypt, to found the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) in Cairo, Egypt. Growing out of the concern for the tens of thousands of Armenians made destitute by the massive loss
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.
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 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 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.
The Armenian Genocide started in April of 1915 and extended on for three years, ending when the Ottoman Empire surrendered in 1918. This was the first genocide of the twentieth century. During World War I when they saw a decline in the Ottoman Empire authority and witness the military loses increase. They blamed the Armenian people for these problems (used them as scapegoats”) and the genocide had started (EDB UTEXAS).
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.
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
A French historian, Ernest Renan, once remarked, “In the creating of nations, the act of forgetting is as important as remembering” (qtd. in Anderson 2). For Turkey, this meant “obliterating the memory of a group that inhabited their country before they did” (Anderson 2). Due to hardships inside the Turkish government after its losses of many European provinces, a transnationalist ideology was created, and the war against the Armenians started. From 1915 to 1917, almost one and a half million Armenian men, women, and children were deported to the south from the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey and sent to their deaths. Mass murders and widespread deportations of the Armenian
Most know about the horrific and shameful acts of violence against the Jewish during World War II. It is taught and studied in world history classes within every country. However, many have not heard of the Armenian Genocide. It is still a debated and controversial topic. Against what all documents and witnesses who have survived show and tell, the Turkish government still denies the existence of this terrible event. This act of ignorance is highly irresponsible and insulting towards the survivors of this horrible event. By accepting the existence of such shameful act, the new Republic of Turkey can move forward and fix their foreign affairs with opposite parties.
These murders included aids of Armenian villages and cities and the ruthless killings included women and children. At the time of April 24, 1915 the Armenian genocide begun. On that day, the Turkish government would arrest and murder hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. After that they would go after random houses and send those people on death marches. These people would be stripped naked and they would be forced to walk in the tremendous heat through the Mesopotamian desert and they would eventually die from a lack of food or water. The people who would stop for a break were immediately shot dead. The Young Turks would then turn their ‘Special Organization’ to organized killing squads. These people were usually ex-convicts and murderers. These people would drown the Armenians, throw them off cliffs, burn them alive, and crucify them (“Armenian Genocide”). Since there was a surge of brand new technology, communication was an easier and more tactical way of organizing these mass murders. There were orders being sent to every police station and it was to be carried out at the same time on the same day. By the time it begun the perpetrators kept in touch by telegraph. They also created something called Istanbul- Baghdad railway and this railway was used to transport tens of thousands of Armenians in the middle of the Syrian desert where they
The Armenian Genocide was carried out during World War 1 between the years nineteen fifteen and nineteen eighteen. It was planned and managed by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. The mass of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the mass was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Large numbers of Armenians were systematically massacred all over the Ottoman Empire. Women and children were abducted and terribly abused. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was confiscated. After a year of calm at the end of World War One, the slaughter was renewed between nineteen twenty and nineteen twenty three the turks organized massacres of Armenians in and as a result of Turkish atrocities more than one million of Armenians were slaughtered, died from cold, hunger and epidemics, hundreds of thousands Armenians were captivated, assimilated, deported by force from their native places (Armenocide.am). Today, most historians call this event genocide–“a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people.” The Armenian people were issued to deportation, seizure, persecution, massacre, and hunger. Ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or
Have you ever heard of the Armenian Genocide war? Let me explain to you how it all started. The Armenian Genocide was a mass extermination of Armenians, Assyrians, and greeks carried out by the Ottoman from 1915 until 1923. It was the first major genocide of the 20th century. During World war I, the Turkish national government had overseen the deportations and killings of all the millions Armenians in eastern Turkey. They had caused the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish national government had seen this as them being able to take over the Armenians.