1 בס''ד נפלאות הבריאה The Armenian Genocide Editor: Sam. Eisikovits [email protected] 2 The Armenian massacre: This is what happened in 1915 Gillian Brockell The word genocide was coined in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his Jewish family in the Holocaust. But it wasn’t the Nazis who first got him thinking about how to stop the intentional destruction of national, ethnic or religious groups. Decades earlier, when he was in college, he heard about the assassination of Talaat Pasha, one of the main organizers of the deportation and mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, by an Armenian man who had survived it. The subsequent trial of the assassin opened his eyes to the suffering of the Armenian people. “At that moment,” Lemkin wrote later in his autobiography, “my worries about the murder of the innocent became more meaningful to me. I didn’t know all the answers, but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world.” The Ottoman Empire killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. On Saturday, President Biden is expected to acknowledge it as genocide, making him the first president to do so since Ronald Reagan. It’s a move that could further strain relations with U.S. ally Turkey. What it means for the United States to recognize massacre of Armenians as genocide The Ottoman Empire comprised many different ethnic and religious groups but was largely controlled by Muslims. In 1908, a group called the Young Turks seized control, first of a society called the Committee of Union and Progress, and then of the government. CUP promised modernization, prosperity and secular, constitutional reforms. At first, it seemed as though this vision included ethnic Armenians, most of whom were poor peasants on the eastern side of Anatolia (what is now Turkey). But over the next few years, CUP grew increasingly focused on Turkish nationalism; by 1913, it was a full-on dictatorship. When World War I broke out, Armenians found themselves physically on both sides of the battlefront between the Ottomans and the Russians. The 3 Ottoman government drafted Armenian men to fight, but when the military suffered heavy losses, it blamed them on Armenians, accusing them of collaborating with the enemy. The Armenian soldiers were disarmed and murdered by Ottoman troops. On April 24, 1915, the government arrested about 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals. This is seen by many as the beginning of the massacre, and April 24 now marks Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. In the following months, most of those Armenian leaders were killed. The military forced Armenian villagers from their homes and on long, cruel marches to concentrations camps in what is now northern Syria and Iraq. Many of them died along the way; others died in the camps of starvation and thirst. Meanwhile, irregular forces and locals rounded up Armenians in their villages and slaughtered them. Historians estimate that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians died. The few survivors were often forced to convert to Islam, and Armenian orphans were adopted by Muslim families. The empty homes and businesses were also given to Muslims, some of whom had recently been forced out of the Balkans. At this point in the war, the United States was still neutral. Henry Morgenthau Sr. was the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and witnessed many of the atrocities. In a July 16, 1915, cable, he told the State Department: “It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress.” He pleaded with Ottoman officials to stop it, and with President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. (He didn’t.) Eventually, Morgenthau fundraised for Armenian refugees and published a book recounting the horrors he had witnessed. The Republic of Turkey rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, led by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who had been part of the Young Turks takeover and a revered general. Ataturk brought the long-promised secular reforms and modernization, though, by that time, the country he united was missing millions of its ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks. Nations often resist exploring the darkest corners of their past. Many Americans, for example, are angered by the characterization of the nation’s founders as enslavers of Africans and killers of Indigenous people. Former 4 president Donald Trump even tried to introduce a new history curriculum to paper over some of the uglier chapters of our history. But in Turkey, that avoidance is enshrined into law; publicly denigrating “Turkishness” is punishable by six months to two years in prison. Some of Turkey’s most well-known authors and journalists have been prosecuted under this law just for acknowledging the mass killings of Armenians in 1915. Turkish officials have acknowledged that atrocities took place, but they regard it more as a civil war than a coordinated campaign to destroy the Armenian people. So was it a genocide? The majority of historians say yes. As did the man who created the very word “genocide.” Armenian Genocide Armenian Genocide Part of World War I Location Ottoman Empire Date 1915–1917 Target Ottoman Armenians Attack type Genocide, ethnic cleansing, expulsion, death march Deaths Estimated around 1 million Perpetrators Committee of Union and Progress 5 Trials Ottoman Special Military Tribunal The Armenian Genocide was the systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing of around one million ethnic Armenians from the Armenian Highlands, Anatolia and adjoining regions by the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), during World War I. During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians; massacres turned into genocide following the catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Sarikamish (January 1915), a loss blamed on Armenian treachery. Ottoman leaders took isolated indications of Armenian resistance as evidence of a nonexistent widespread conspiracy. The mass deportation of Armenian across Anatolia was intended as the "definitive solution to the Armenian Question" and to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence. Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman Army were disarmed pursuant to a February order, and were later killed. On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from Constantinople (now Istanbul). At the orders of Talat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children, and elderly or infirm people were sent on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre. In the Syrian Desert, they were dispersed into a series of concentration camps; in early 1916 another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement during the Turkish War of Independence after World War I. The Armenian Genocide resulted in the destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Asia Minor. With the destruction and expulsion of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethno-national Turkish state. Before World War II, the Armenian Genocide was widely considered the greatest atrocity 6 in history. As of 2021, 30 countries have recognized the events as genocide. Against the academic consensus, Turkey denies that the deportation of Armenians was a genocide or wrongful act. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire The presence of Armenians in the Anatolia has been documented since the sixth century BCE, more than a millennium before Turkish incursion and presence. The Kingdom of Armenia adopted Christianity as its national religion in the fourth century CE, establishing the Armenian Apostolic Church. Following the Byzantine Empire's fall in 1453, two Islamic empires—the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Safavid Empire— contested Western Armenia; it was permanently separated from Eastern Armenia by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab. Sharia law encoded Islamic supremacy but guaranteed property rights and freedom of worship to non-Muslims (dhimmis) in exchange for a special tax, but they were also pejoratively referred to in Ottoman Turkish as gavurs, a word connoting that they were "disloyal, avaricious, and not to be trusted". Most Armenians were grouped together into a semi- autonomous community (millet), led by the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople. The millet system institutionalized the inferiority of non- Muslims, but granted the Armenians significant autonomy. Around two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I. According to the Armenian Patriarchate's 1913–1914 estimates, there were 2,925 Armenian towns and villages in the empire, of which 2,084 were in the Armenian Highlands in the vilayetss of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzerum, Harput, and Van. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians lived elsewhere, scattered throughout central and western Asia Minor. The Armenian population was mostly rural, especially in the Armenian Highlands, where 90 percent were peasant farmers. Armenians were a minority in most parts of the empire, living alongside their Turkish, Kurdish, and Greek Orthodox neighbors. According to the Patriarchate's figure, 215,131 Armenians lived in urban areas, especially Constantinople, Smyrna, and Eastern Thrace. In the nineteenth century, a few urban Armenians became extremely wealthy through their connections to Europe as the Greek War of Independence raised doubt over the loyalty of Greek Orthodox subjects. Land conflict and reforms Armenians in the eastern provinces lived in semi-feudal conditions and commonly encountered forced labor, illegal taxation, and unpunished 7 crimes including robberies, murders, and sexual assaults.