Armenian Genocide: Overview

Introduction

Between 1915 and 1923, almost the entire Armenian population was systematically driven from their homeland in the Ottoman Empire by Turkish officials. Many Armenian men were massacred outright or subject to forced labor. Eventually, men, women, and children were forced to march to desert areas of Syria and Iraq, denied basic human rights such as food and shelter, and frequently subject to crimes such as robbery and rape. Over one million Armenians—more than half of their population—are believed to have died in the process, including in mass killings. This ethnic cleansing campaign was largely hidden from public view by the events of World War I. The deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population is known as the Armenian Genocide or the Armenian Holocaust, and also referred to by Armenians as the Great Calamity.

Centuries of animosity between ethnic Turks and ethnic Armenians led to this period of violence. Members of the Turkish army claimed to be acting under orders as they forcibly removed Armenians from their villages. The Turks maintained that the exodus was temporary and gave promises of safe conduct, which were not fulfilled, as many Armenians were systematically starved, beaten, killed, and mutilated. Those Armenians who remained in their villages also faced riots and killings. The displacement caused by the events was largely responsible for the creation of the Armenian diaspora, with ethnic communities established in various countries, including the United States. The systematic nature of the campaign has led most historians, as well as Armenian activists, to label it a genocide. In contrast, the Turkish government long rejected the genocide classification even after acknowledging the atrocities, claiming that there was no formal policy of extermination.

Recognition of the Armenian Genocide has been a hotly debated issue in the United States, complicated in the early twenty-first century by Turkey's influence as a key US military ally in the Middle East. After much international and domestic pressure, the US Senate voted in 2019 to formally recognize the historic persecution of the Armenian people as genocide. However, the administration of US president Donald Trump opposed that measure, expressing support for Turkey. After taking office in 2021, Joe Biden became the first US president to officially acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, illustrating the ongoing debate around the subject. By the mid-2020s, the debate had also expanded to incorporate the situation involving the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, with tensions between the ethnic Armenians in majority in the area and Azerbaijan escalating to the point where some were labeling it another genocide against Armenians.

Understanding the Discussion

Committee of Union and Progress (CUP): The most influential branch of the Turkish government at the time of the Armenian Genocide.

Deportation: The act of systematically removing an individual or a group from a political state.

Diaspora: A population with a common ethnicity, culture, or race that has been removed from its homeland. By driving vast numbers of Armenians from their homes, the Ottoman Empire created a mass of displaced Armenians, known as the Armenian diaspora.

Extermination: The process of eliminating by destruction or complete annihilation.

Genocide: The act of killing, inflicting fatal conditions, or preventing births among a population based on that population's ethnicity, religion, or race.

Special Order: The division of the CUP that was responsible for the deportations of Armenian civilians during World War I.

History

Modern Armenia lies south of the Black Sea, sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan, northeast of Iraq and Iran. In 1915, when the killings and deportations of ethnic Armenians began, Armenia lacked defined boundaries and had been subject to the far-reaching Ottoman Empire since the fourteenth century. Most Armenians had settled in the provinces of Greater or Historic Armenia to the east of Turkey—some inhabiting areas as far west as Constantinople—where their socioeconomic status and cultural differences forced them to live in poverty alongside the wealthier Turks. Armenians also had to pay exorbitant taxes in exchange for property under Ottoman rule. Despite all this, however, the Armenians were still able to maintain a wholly singular culture and tradition.

The Turk-Armenian conflict of the twentieth century had been building since the first century when Armenians adopted Christianity, to the great chagrin of their Turkish Muslim neighbors. The result of the religious clash was an intense intercultural animosity. This erupted into gang-based attacks and massacres on both sides throughout the twentieth century as Armenians fought for political independence and the Turks struggled to maintain control.

The source of this violent conflict can be attributed to the gradual collapse of the once-powerful Ottoman Empire. In 1832, the countries subject to Ottoman rule began to declare independence. By 1914, when Turkey entered World War I, more than three quarters of the empire's territory had fallen away. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire drove anti-Christian sentiment and fears of Armenian rebellion to an even higher degree, and convinced many Turks that the only way to salvage the empire was to evacuate the threatening minority. This sentiment increased when the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), often known as the Young Turks, came to power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908. The Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War (1912–13) was blamed by many Turks on Christian groups, while Armenians used the opportunity to press European nations to support their autonomy, further inflaming the ethnic conflict.

In 1914 the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany. A major defeat in battle in early 1915 prompted many Turks to again blame the Armenians, and non-Muslims in the Ottoman military were disarmed, forced into labor, and often massacred. Killings soon spread to villages, with Armenian attempts at resistance generating even harsher persecution. A mass arrest of Armenian intellectuals in April 1915 is sometimes cited as the official beginning of the genocide; most of those individuals were eventually murdered. Along with massacres, the Ottomans began rounding up Armenians for deportation, a process that was increasingly systematized and formalized by the government. Death marches were conducted, with survivors generally left in concentration camps in remote desert regions. Though records are unclear, it is estimated that at least 600,000 and likely over 1 million people died either by direct killings or due to exhaustion and disease on the marches.

The killings, deportation, and related deaths that characterized the Armenian Genocide went unnoticed by the international community until 1916, when Lord James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee compiled a volume of first-person Armenian accounts of their experiences titled "The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire." The Turkish government immediately denounced this information as propaganda. However, it became public knowledge that the CUP had been forcing Armenians out of their homeland under the pretense of relocating them as a preventative measure for rebellion. This volume revealed that Armenians were perishing en masse in a manner that resembled genocide, and that Turkish brutality was mostly to blame. When the United States declared war on Germany and joined the Allies in 1917, many American soldiers witnessed the deportations.

At the end of the First World War, the few surviving Armenians filtered back into Turkey to find that their communities and their cities had been destroyed. In 1923, Turkey and the Allied forces signed the Treaty of Lausanne, which neither documented "Armenia" as an entity, nor recognized, officially or informally, any crimes against the Armenians. The actions of the Turkish officials, Armenians claimed, should be labeled genocide. The Turkish officials disagreed, maintaining that many more Turks than Armenians died as a result of massacres and hate crimes during those years.

The destruction of Turkish records and poorly kept population counts contributed to the scarcity of information about the Armenian Genocide. Furthermore, Turkey continued to insist that the Armenians were in no way exterminated and that the deportations were necessary to prevent insurrection in a time of war. Turkish officials claimed that the government fully intended to fulfill the promise of safe conduct of all Armenians to residences for a temporary term of exile. The Turkish government argued that the Armenian death toll was far lower than estimates by Armenians and human rights groups, and that the deaths were primarily the result of food shortages and other wartime hardships. Turkish officials also pointed out the numerous Muslim deaths that took place at the time of the alleged genocide.

Armenians have insisted that the deportations constituted a planned extermination designed to eliminate the entire Armenian population. They have claimed that the Armenian Genocide was a government conspiracy plotted years ahead of time by the CUP, and that the outbreak of World War I provided a convenient excuse for the Turks to enact their longstanding plans for annihilation. Circumstantial evidence related to the CUP has suggested that officials planned the evacuation and extermination of the Armenians. Furthermore, telegrams sent between members of the CUP's Special Organization have also suggested that extermination was the purpose of the evacuation. However, all Turkish correspondence specifically discussing the Armenian Genocide was destroyed in the years following the war: proof, claim the Armenians, that the Turks had conspired to formulate a secret mission to exterminate the Armenians. The Turks, however, have dismissed this theory.

Turkish-Armenian relations continued to remain strained. Armenian descendants continued to press for acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide as the first genocide of the twentieth century, while Turkish officials denied the characterization of the events as genocide. Although the governments of both Turkey and Armenia have held negotiations on establishing diplomatic relations and opening their borders, progress has been elusive. Meanwhile, over the last several decades, a new type of evidential literature has emerged: survivor testimony. Victims of the Armenian Genocide have purged painful memories by speaking about the events and have shed light on that shadowed period in history.

The Armenian Genocide has continued to be a contentious issue around the world. For decades, Armenians and Armenian Americans pushed the US Congress to pass a bill that would officially acknowledge the historic mass slaughter as genocide, as other countries and even many individual US states did. However, many diplomats suggested that if the United States were to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, its relationship with Turkey could be irreparably damaged—a particular concern in the early twenty-first century as Turkey served as a US ally in the war against terrorism in the Middle East and a bridge to US involvement in Iraq. For example, the United States' use of the Turkish airspace and naval ports might be revoked by the Turkish government. Such a rupture could significantly injure American military operations in the Middle East and pose an even greater threat to the American soldiers stationed there. Public acknowledgement of genocidal conspiracy could also potentially seriously hinder Turkish efforts to join the EU. With these diplomatic and military considerations complicating the picture, many viewed the Armenian cause as a moral dilemma for the United States government.

The Armenian Genocide Today

In the 2010s, the debate surrounding the use of "genocide" to refer to the killings of Armenians intensified as official recognition of the genocide became more widespread (despite a 2015 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that denying the genocide is not a crime). In one high-profile example, in April 2015 Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church described the events as the first genocide of the twentieth century during a Mass on the hundredth anniversary of the start of the killings. In response, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan recalled his ambassador to the Vatican. The following summer, Pope Francis visited Tsitsernakaberd, the genocide memorial in Armenia's capital, on a visit to the country, and gave a speech in which he once again referred to the events of 1915 as a genocide, leading to further condemnation by the Turkish government. In June 2016 the German parliament passed a resolution officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide, and the Turkish ambassador to Germany was also recalled.

In the United States, President Barack Obama campaigned on the promise of recognizing the killings as a genocide, but did not do so while in office. With the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group, the United States' alliance with Turkey became even more important; however, Armenian American groups repeatedly expressed displeasure with the US government's refusal to acknowledge the wrong done to their ancestors as genocide. After his election in 2016, US president Donald Trump expressed strong support for Turkey's president Erdogan. After the US House of Representatives passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide as such in 2019, Trump's allies in Congress initially blocked it in the Senate. However, the resolution was approved by the Senate in December 2019, drawing condemnation from Turkey. Trump continued to oppose the measure from becoming official policy.

Much like Obama had before him, Joe Biden suggested during his 2020 presidential campaign that he would officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. After Biden won the election and took office in 2021, he soon followed through, giving a speech on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on April 24. This was seen as a landmark for directly referring to the events as a genocide. The move earned praise from Armenia and many Armenian Americans but was harshly criticized by Turkish officials.

There has long also been hostility, including incidents of armed conflict, between the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, located within Azerbaijan but comprised of an ethnic Armenian majority that operated as an autonomous ethnic enclave hoping for independence, and Azerbaijan. However, a major escalation that occurred in the early 2020s had some comparing the situation to the twentieth-century incident involving Turkey. After Azerbaijan instituted a harsh, lengthy blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh in late 2022, the country commenced an offensive in 2023 that ended with an essential seizure of the region. Reportedly fearing ethnic cleansing, almost the entire area's population of ethnic Armenians, or more than 100,000, fled, largely to Armenia. Many, including Armenian Americans, accused Azerbaijan of committing genocide and criticized countries like the United States for failing to prevent such a tragedy or intervene. By 2024, the self-proclaimed republic had officially been dissolved.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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