The Decline Of The Ottoman Empire

There were many reasons that could be tied to why the Armenian Genocide happened, but there is no reason bigger than the fact that the Turkish Government was unsatisfied with the religious state of the Armenians. The Armenians had established their national religion as Christianity unlike Turkey who was mostly Muslim. The main group that enforced this was called the Young Turks. The Young Turks were a group that had taken control of Turkey. According to the United Human Rights Council, “[The Turkish Government] exploited the religious, cultural, economic and political differences between Turks and Armenians so that the average Turk came to regard Armenians as strangers among them.” It started with the Armenians

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.

After the interview the Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens, many Armenian’s where murdered. As years passed in 1908 a new government came to place overthrowing Sultan Abdul Hamid which was called “young Turks” at first the Armenian’s had hope that things could probably change for them now that they had a different government. But they soon realized that the way these “young Turks” thought was “non- Turks and especially Christian non- Turks were a grave threat to the new state” ( History.com 2010).

“On that day (April 24, 1915) 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were collected, deported and killed. Tragically, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were also slaughtered in their homes and the streets."(https://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-armenian-genocide) In this essay I will discuss who the aggressors and target groups were from the genocide Armenia, why the aggressors engaged in Armenia and what actually occurred, and the attempts made to stop Armenia.

The first Armenian Genocide happened back in 1894 and 1896. Armenian citizens had always been neglected and denied certain rights, such as participation in the government, and were currently protesting to try and make their voices heard. During one such protest, Turkish

At the beginning of the twentieth century from 1915 to 1923 conflicts arose between a group called the Young Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman empire. Many Armenians were driven from their homes and forced to march from the land they once called home to the deserts of Syria. Others were killed in massacres that took place across the Ottoman empire and those who remained were forced to convert. During the eight year genocide about one and a half million Armenians perished and another million were deported. Tragedies like these lead many to wonder how humans could commit such awful crimes towards each other. Religious differences, political suspicions, and treating Armenians as social inferiors were issues between Turks and Armenians that led up to, and exploded during the Armenian Genocide.

Armenia became the first nation to accept Christianity as their religion. An era of great accomplishments followed; a distinct alphabet, the flourishing of literature and art, and a unique style of architecture. In the eleventh century a Turkish invasion happened in the Armenian homeland (“United Human Rights Council”). The Ottoman Empire came to power in the thirteenth century, but became one of the most powerful states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and by this time, Armenia has been caught up in it (Yapp). In the eighteen hundreds the Ottoman Empire was in a serious decline. Greeks, Serbs and Romanians had achieved their independence, while the Armenians and Arabs remained stuck in the bankrupt empire, that was now under the rule of the autocratic Sultan Abdul Hamid II (“United Human Rights Council”). Armenians were not treated equally and had to deal with certain type of treatments and hardships (“Armenian Genocide”). Armenians began to press for political forms for the right to vote and to end the discriminatory practices such as the special taxes made especially for them because they were Christians (“United Human Rights Council”). The Sultan responded with merciless persecutions and

The Armenian Genocide was the mass-massacre of Armenians by a group of reformers that took power in 1908, known as the “Young Turks” (Vahagn 797). These reformers believed that the Armenians posed a threat to Turkey, especially during World War I. Due to this, the Armenians were discriminated against before the genocide, as the “Christian Armenians were thought to

The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, was the organized killing of Armenians. While there is no clear agreement on how many Armenians lost their lives, there is general agreement among Western scholars that over a million Armenians may have perished between 1914 and 1918. It all happened during the Ottoman Empire, present-day Turkey, where 2 million Armenians lived. The Armenian Genocide is the second-most studied massacre, after the Holocaust. To date Twenty-two countries have officially recognized what happened as genocide, but Turkey to this day rejects the events as genocide. One starts to wonder what could cause such hatred to commit such a heinous crime, and then go to great lengths to deny the fact that it

The Armenian genocide is a huge part of history that is often looked over. The genocide still occurred even if the Turkish wont admit to the facts. They claim they had no intent on the killings; which by definition makes it not a genocide. The Armenians faced human right deprival and death by the Ottomans and their suffering should be recognized. The denial of the human rights impacted the international community because it leads to many Armenians migrating to live elsewhere. Some Armenians today can now be found in Turkey, but many are found in the Republic and other

“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”).

Furthermore, consequently the causes that started this horrible event were that the Ottoman Turks historically discriminated the Armenians, and so the constitutional governments in Europe led the Armenians to begin to ask for more equal rights under the government of the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s. The Ottoman Empire did not give nearly as many rights to Armenians as to Muslims. They could not serve in the military, they could not testify against

The Armenians are a group of people who were attacked repeatedly throughout history, gained and lost territory, and were subject to discrimination. The highest level of discrimination ever demonstrated is genocide. These discriminatory acts toward the Armenians first arose after the First Balkan War of 1912 tore Europe apart and broke the bonds between previously united countries (Cooper and Akcam par. 7). During the decline of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians banded themselves together and fought against the Turks, Michael Gunter, a professor and author, believes that, “This was an inevitable result of psychology on which the Armenian people had nourished itself during an entire generation” (par. 19). Afterwards in 1915, when the genocide truly began, the Van Rebellion and suspected collaboration with the Russian Ottomans signaled the deportation of Armenians to Iraq. While the Armenians were in Iraq, the Turks organized killings and death by privation, a state in which essential aspects of life such as food and warmth are lacking (Cooper and Akcam par. 8). Within months of their arrival, the nearby Tigris and Euphrates rivers were filled with bodies of Armenians; dysentery and other diseases became prevalent due to the pollution of this important water source. Others who did not die or become ill due to the contaminated water water suffered through concentration camps established by the Turks (Cohan par. 22).

In the ottoman empire there was robbery, beating, kidnapping and murder of Armenians at the hands of the ottoman Turkish soldiers. The government wanted to eliminate the empire's Christian population, which included the Armenians. This disturb United States ambassador Henry Morgenthau.

Background: In order to fully understand the Armenian experience in Turkey as natives and then as minorities, it is crucial to discuss the historical background before the genocide, within the genocide, and after the genocide. In the pre-genocidal period, Armenians were living under the Millet system, which is the Arabic word for nation. In fact, the Millet system didn’t refer to an ethic group but to a religious community instead. Although under the millet system Armenians were subordinated and paid additional taxes, they were protected under the Islamic Law. However, since the beginning of the persecution of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, the phenomenon of migration had taken a dramatical turn. Natives had to leave