Wednesday, April 24, 2024

109 years ago, the Armenian Genocide

Today Armenians all over the world commemorate the 109th anniversary of the April 1915 Genocide.


ANF
NEWS DESK
Wednesday, 24 April 2024,

In April 1915, the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic extermination of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923, when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey.

The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923, virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.

The Ottoman Empire was ruled by the Turks who had conquered lands extending across West Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe. The Ottoman government was centered in Istanbul (Constantinople) and was headed by a sultan who was vested with absolute power. The Turks practiced Islam and were a martial people.

The Armenians, a Christian minority, lived as second class citizens subject to legal restrictions which denied them normal safeguards. Neither their lives nor their properties were guaranteed security. As non-Muslims, they were also obligated to pay discriminatory taxes and denied participation in government. Scattered across the empire, the status of the Armenians was further complicated by the fact that the territory of historical Armenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Russians.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, the Ottoman Empire formed part of the Triple Alliance with the other Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and it declared war on Russia and its Western allies, Great Britain and France.

The Ottoman armies initially suffered a string of defeats, which they made up with a series of easy military victories in the Caucasus in 1918 before the Central Powers capitulated later that same year.

Whether retreating or advancing, the Ottoman army used the occasion of war to wage a collateral campaign of massacre against the civilian Armenian population in the regions in which warfare was being conducted. These measures were part of the genocidal program secretly adopted by the CUP and implemented under the cover of war. They coincided with the CUP's larger program to eradicate the Armenians from Turkey and neighboring countries for the purpose of creating a new Pan-Turanian empire. Through the spring and summer of 1915, in all areas outside the war zones, the Armenian population was ordered deported from their homes. Convoys consisting of tens of thousands, including men, women, and children, were driven hundreds of miles toward the Syrian desert.

The deportations were disguised as a resettlement program. The brutal treatment of the deportees, most of whom were made to walk to their destinations, made it apparent that the deportations were mainly intended as death marches. Moreover, the policy of deportation surgically removed the Armenians from the rest of society and disposed of great masses of people with little or no destruction of property. The displacement process, therefore, also served as a major opportunity orchestrated by the CUP for the plundering of the material wealth of the Armenians and proved an effortless method of expropriating all of their immovable properties.

The government had made no provisions for the feeding of the deported population. Starvation took an enormous toll, much as exhaustion felled the elderly, the weaker and the ill. Deportees were denied food and water in a deliberate effort to hasten death. The survivors who reached northern Syria were collected at a number of concentration camps whence they were sent further south to die under the scorching sun of the desert. Through methodically organized deportation, systematic massacre, deliberate starvation and dehydration, and continuous brutalization, the Ottoman government reduced its Armenian population to a frightened mass of famished individuals whose families and communities had been destroyed in a single stroke.

Most of those implicated in war crimes evaded justice and many joined the new Nationalist Turkish movement led by Mustafa Kemal. In a series of military campaigns against Russian Armenia in 1920, against the refugee Armenians who had returned to Cilicia in southern Turkey in 1921, and against the Greek army that had occupied Izmir where the last intact Armenian community in Anatolia still existed in 1922, the Nationalist forces completed the process of eradicating the Armenians through further expulsions and massacres. When Turkey was declared a republic in 1923 and received international recognition, the Armenian Question and all related matters of resettlement and restitution were swept aside and soon forgotten.

In all, it is estimated that up to a million and a half Armenians perished at the hands of Ottoman and Turkish military and paramilitary forces and through atrocities intentionally inflicted to eliminate the Armenian demographic presence in Turkey.

The surviving refugees spread around the world and eventually settled in some two dozen countries on all continents of the globe. Triumphant in its total annihilation of the Armenians and relieved of any obligations to the victims and survivors, the Turkish Republic adopted a policy of dismissing the charge of genocide and denying that the deportations and atrocities had constituted part of a deliberate plan to exterminate the Armenians.

(Compiled with information from the Armenian National Institute)

Armenian Genocide: The Mass Murder of Christians in Turkey
Armenian Genocide
Armenian people are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Ottoman soldiers. Kharpert, Ottoman Empire, April 1915. The Armenian Genocide was officially recognized by the USA in April 24, 2021. Credit: Wikipedia

The Armenian Genocide, the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey and adjoining regions by the Ottoman government between 1914 and 1923, is commemorated on April 24th every year.

The Armenian Genocide was an atrocity that occurred within the context of a wider religious cleansing across Asia Minor that lasted 10 years and included Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. They were all Christians who were also subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

The religious cleansing was actually the first in modern times, and it fit the pattern of genocides that would follow in the century ahead.

It is worth noting that the Nazis in the following decades were transfixed by the events that occurred in Turkey in those nightmarish years of mass killings and deadly deportations—and saw in them a pattern that they could emulate for their own twisted ends.

The Armenians, in many ways, bore the brunt of the slaughter, but ethnic Greeks and Assyrians were also massacred in similar ways—and for the same reason: They were scapegoats in a crumbling empire that saw Christians as a dangerous and potentially treasonous population inside the country.

There was a strong nationalistic impulse to create a “Turkey for the Turks,” and that meant a homogeneous population based on “Turkishness” and the Muslim faith.

The persecution of Armenians began in 1914

Initially, it was just a campaign of boycotting Armenian businesses and shops. But within months, it culminated in acts of violence and the murder of key Armenian politicians and persons of importance. By April 15, 1915, almost 25,000 Armenians were slain in the province of Van.

On April 24, 1915, the Ottomans arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople and sent them to Chankri and Ayash, where they were later murdere

On the same day, the editors and staff of Azadamart, the leading Armenian newspaper of Constantinople, were arrested, to be executed on June 15th in Diyarbekir, where they had been taken and imprisoned.

The Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople and Zohrab, an Armenian deputy in the Ottoman Parliament, petitioned the Turkish authorities on behalf of the arrested Armenians of Constantinople. The answer was that the government was dissolving the Armenian political organizations.

Within nine months, more than 600,000 Armenians were massacred. Of those who were  deported during that time, more than 400,000 died of the brutalities and privations of the southward march into Mesopotamia, raising the number of victims to one million. This became known to the rest of the world outside Turkey as the Armenian Genocide.

In addition, 200,000 Armenians were forcibly converted to Islam to give Armenia a new Turkish sense of identity and strip Armenians of their historical past as the first Christian state in the world.

On August 30, 1922, Armenians who were living in Smyrna were victims of yet more Turkish atrocities. The “Smyrna Disaster” of 1922, which was aimed at Christian Greeks who were living in the seaside city, involved thousands of Armenians as well. Turkish soldiers and civilians set all the Greek and Armenian neighborhoods on fire, forcing Greeks and Armenians to flee to the harbor, where thousands were killed or drowned.

Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is a national holiday in Armenia. Credit Wikipedia

On April 24, 1919, prominent figures of the Armenian community who had survived the atrocities held a commemoration ceremony at the St. Trinity Armenian church in Istanbul. Following its initial commemoration in 1919, the date became the annual day of remembrance for the Armenian Genocide.

Yet, somehow, ever since the horrific events of 1915, Turkey has methodically denied the fact that the Armenian genocide occurred. Despite Turkish denials, the genocide has been unanimously verified by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and become internationally recognized with the intention of upholding moral responsibility above political purposes.

President Biden recognizes the Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide was officially recognized by US President Biden on April 24, 2021 in an official declaration. It ended a consistent policy of non-recognition that guided Biden’s predecessors.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” the American President said.

DEM Party calls for confrontation with the Armenian Genocide

DEM Party Central Executive Committee commemorated the victims of the Armenian Genocide that took place 109 years ago and called on the Turkish state to face the genocide.



ANF
NEWS DESK
Wednesday, 24 April 2024, 15:13

Making a written statement on the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the DEM Party Central Executive Committee said: "Confronting historical truths, apologising to the aggrieved peoples and beliefs and resorting to restorative justice are indispensable steps to understand each other and the past, to heal historical wounds with a sincere approach and to build a common future. This is also the way to develop a sense of conscience and justice, to share the pain and to build a democratic, peaceful and equal future together in a society and geography.”

The statement further said the following: "109 years have passed since the Great Catastrophe (Metz Yeghern), a massacre of ethnic identity and belief that began on 24 April 1915 when more than two hundred Armenian intellectuals were taken from their homes and sent to their deaths. This process continued with the exile and massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Other Christian peoples of these lands also paid a heavy human cost and were massacred as a result of these policies and practices.

It is clear that postponing or failing to confront the truths and shames that have made the Middle East and Caucasus geography and the lands we live on barren does not serve social peace and speaking the truth. Confronting crimes against humanity is also an important step towards building a common and equal future and social peace.

Making the existence of different peoples and beliefs, identities and cultures in these lands forgotten; in other words, erasing and ignoring differences and creating a homogenous society, making one race, one religion and one language dominant, has continued since the early 20th century until today.

Unfortunately, even today, the fact that different ethnic identities, languages, cultures or beliefs in these lands are not superior to one another is not generally accepted in society and politics. Legal and constitutional arrangements and requirements corresponding to social pluralism are not fulfilled. The dominance of those who are united and reconciled in the understanding of monism, even if they belong to different political affiliations, continues.

It is of the utmost importance to live peacefully and on equal terms with the Armenian people, one of the ancient peoples of this land and geography, and with our Armenian compatriots. At the same time, developing diplomatic, commercial, economic and cultural relations with the state of Armenia, which is a part of our region, is both the need and interest of the peoples and the way to build peace in the Caucasus region.

With these feelings and thoughts, as the ancient peoples of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, we once again share 109 years of pain and mourning; we feel the Great Catastrophe, this human tragedy in the depths of our hearts, and once again commemorate those who lost their lives in that process with sorrow and respect."

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