Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

- Adolf Hitler, persuading his associates that a Jewish holocaust would be tolerated by the West.

The Armenian Genocide, which began in 1915, is nowadays considered to be the first genocide of the 20th Century, even though the term 'genocide' was not coined till 1945¹.

It has to be said that Hitler, in posing his rhetorical question, may have had a valid point for once in his infamous career. The Turks who perpetrated this appalling crime against humanity denied at the time that anything like genocide was taking place. The present-day Republic of Turkey persists in that denial, in spite of mountains of hard evidence and documentary proof - both textual and photographic - of what went on.

What is Genocide?

The United Nations (UN) considers that genocide is a crime under international law, and describes it as an odious scourge condemned by the civilized world. (For more details of the UN Resolution on genocide see Appendix: The UN and Genocide.)

Genocide is a crime committed against very large numbers of people. It requires skillful and detailed large-scale planning and administration, as well as access to very considerable resources of personnel, equipment and logistical support. Only a government can carry out such an operation: the scope of genocide makes it a state crime. Long before the UN Resolution on genocide, the international community condemned the Armenian Genocide as a crime against humanity.

Lest We Forget

The ever-present danger is that the world will forget what happened. In the 21st Century the Armenian Genocide is in great danger of being, in the words of a newspaper columnist, 'airbrushed from history'. The world moves on; the past becomes dim and distant; the horrors of yesteryear pass out of living memory; and, in the process, something important is allowed - purely because it happens to suit the politicians of the day - to slip away from our collective consciousness, and become lost to us.

Dedication

• This Guide Entry is respectfully dedicated to the Armenian people and to all the victims of the 'odious scourge' of genocide. May they never be forgotten.

The Armenian Nation

Present-day Armenia is a mountainous republic in southern Transcaucasia. It is a landlocked country situated between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. To the north lies Georgia; to the east and south-west, Azerbaijan. The Araks river to the south-east forms most of Armenia's border with Iran, and to the north-west lies Turkey.

Armenia (whose capital city is Yerevan) is a predominantly Christian country which once included Mount Ararat. This is where, according to Biblical tradition, Noah's Ark came to rest after the Flood. The Armenian language is of Indo-European origin.

The Armenian Nation (Ermeni Millet) has a very long history stretching back to the 6th Century BC with settlements in Assyrian Urarty (Ararat). At its height, the Armenian Empire was one of the most powerful in the whole of Asia, its influence extending far and wide.

The Armenians are a staunchly nationalistic people and have a well-developed cultural heritage with high achievements in fine art, architecture, sculpture and various crafts, notably ceramics.

Armenian Christianity

Christianity was brought to Armenia by two of Jesus's disciples, Thaddeus and Bartholomew (both of whom are mentioned in St Matthew's Gospel). For a few hundred years, however, it could be practised only in a clandestine manner since it was subject to strong persecution. But in 303 Armenia became the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as its national religion.

A century later, in 405, an alphabet of 38 letters was devised for the Armenian language, and a grammar was written. During that century there occurred a number of disagreements and schisms within the Christian world, as a result of which the Armenian Church became separated from the other churches, notably the Roman and Greek churches. Since then it has developed its own theology, its own liturgy and even its own calendar.

The Ottoman Empire

Fast-forward now through a thousand years of history, to the era of the Ottoman Empire. This Turkish empire gradually conquered the whole of Asia Minor and much of south-east Europe, captured Constantinople, and probably peaked in the 16th Century under the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (1494 - 1566), known as Suleiman The Magnificent.

Bulgaria, Serbia, Kosovo and the Balkans, Hungary and Transylvania, Persia and Arabia, Egypt and Syria, Algiers and Venice - all came under the yoke of this mighty Islamic empire.

After the death of Suleiman, however, decline gradually set in. Major parts of the empire, such as Greece and Egypt, managed through wars to gain their independence. Through a series of humiliating treaties the economy of the Ottoman Empire was starting to suffer, and by the 19th Century it was in a sorry state.

Ethnic and Religious Tensions

Although the Ottomans gave refuge to a large number of the Jews who were so brutally persecuted under the Spanish Inquisition and were finally expelled from Spain in 1492, they nevertheless had a long history themselves of persecuting Christians. The Ottoman Turks were a warlike Islamic people, and the Sultan of Constantinople who headed them was all-powerful.

The Armenians were of course a Christian minority and were at best tolerated as second-class citizens who did not deserve the normal protection of the law. They were afforded no security of property or even of life. The land of Armenia had been carved up between the Ottomans and the Russians, and the Armenian nation had been scattered and dispersed throughout the Ottoman Empire.

The 19th Century decline in the Ottoman Empire, such that it had become 'the sick man of Europe'², created huge internal upheavals which inevitably contributed to jealousy, suspicion and hatred of the Armenians. Massacres by the Ottomans took place in Armenia in the late 19th Century, causing world public opinion to further turn against the Empire. These massacres were designed to demoralise and terrorise the Armenian population. They took some 300,000 lives and left hardly any Armenian family unscathed.

The Young Turks

In 1908 a new political grouping of nationalist reformers, called the Young Turks, seized power by means of a revolution. Then as a result of a coup in 1913 the leader of the Young Turks, Ismail Enver, known as Enver Pasha (Pasha being the title given to a high-ranking officer), became a virtual dictator.

He was ably assisted by Ahmed Jemal (Jemal Pasha) and Mehmet Talaat, known as Talaat Bey (Bey being a courtesy title meaning Governor or Prince - Talaat was also Grand Vizier or Prime Minister). For the Armenians, the writing was well and truly on the wall.

Just as Hitler was later to envision an Aryan state, so the Young Turks aspired to create an exclusively Turkish state purged of all non-Turkic inhabitants.

The more you look at the Armenian Genocide, the more you realise how much Hitler was influenced by it. Just as Hitler's notion of an 'Aryan' race encompassed all non-Jewish Caucasian peoples, so the Young Turks' idea of a 'Turkic' race encompassed not just the Turks of Turkey but also the historically and culturally related peoples of Turkmenistan and the central Asian region - but of course excluding the Armenians and other 'undesirable elements'.

The Young Turks also sought closer links with Imperial Germany, and at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany and Austria/Hungary, declaring war on Great Britain, France and Russia.

Under Cover of War

Genocide is so much easier to accomplish while there's a war going on!

The Young Turks formed the CUP, a so-called Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti) led by Enver, Talaat and Jemal. In the earlier part of the war the Ottoman forces experienced both defeats and victories, but win or lose they still managed to pursue a policy of the massacre of Armenian civilians wherever their battles were being fought. This was in the service of a grander vision of 'cleansing' Turkey and her neighbours of their Armenian populations as part of the process of creating a new Turkish empire.

Even outside the zones of armed conflict, Armenians were deported from their homes during the first half of 1915. In their tens of thousands they were driven - men, women and children - over hundreds of miles, into the deserts of Syria.

This was said to be a programme of resettlement, but these Armenians were forced with great brutality to walk all the way, and it was clear that these were death convoys. The double advantage for the CUP was that while removing enormous numbers of Armenians from their midst it left all their wealth and properties intact and easy to plunder.

Torture and Killings

In addition to these death marches there were mass killings of Armenians. Most of the able-bodied Armenian menfolk had already died in forced labour details, or were simply split up into groups and executed. They had often been tortured first.

The pretext for this was the accusation that they were 'revolutionaries' who had secret arms caches and must be made to give up their arms. There were plenty of instances of unarmed Armenians actually buying arms from the Turks so that they could be seen to give them up. But this availed them little.

The tortures were characterised by the most fiendish ingenuity and diabolical inventiveness. The Turks even researched the medieval methods employed by the Spanish Inquisition and other masters of the art, and vied with each other in devising the latest techniques.

We will not dwell here on the details of the horrendous cruelties (skillfully devised to ensure that the hapless victims were subjected to unimaginable terror and excruciating pain over the longest possible time), except perhaps to mention one particularly innovative torturer whose speciality was nailing horseshoes to the soles of his victims' feet.

Torture sessions were usually carried out at night, when Turks would gather outside the torture centres, blowing whistles and beating drums in an attempt to drown out the screams so that the local population wouldn't hear them.

The Death Convoys

With all this going on, the people who were sent on the death convoys offered scant resistance, and were frequently set upon by groups of killers formed specially for that purpose. These groups mostly comprised released convicts who were happy to do duty as butchers within a secret organisation which received its clandestine orders direct from the top.

A large proportion of those deported, including women and children, were thus massacred along the way. These massacres were generally carried out with the utmost cruelty, often by the sword in unimaginably horrific scenes of bloodshed.

Those who witnessed and survived such scenes were inevitably deeply traumatised and dehumanised by their experiences. Many of these younger women and children were then grossly abused before being sent into slavery in Turkish homes.

For the deportees in the death convoys there was no food or water, a deliberate ploy by the authorities to speed up the dying process. The old, the weak and the sick just fell and died by the wayside, their corpses left to the vultures.

Those who managed to struggle through eventually found themselves in Syria, where they were rounded up into concentration camps. Those who had not already succumbed to exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, or the epidemics that raged through the camps, were then sent south, to die under the desert sun.

The Survivors

Thus through a process of planned deportations, organised massacres, deliberate withholding of the most basic necessities for human subsistence, and constant brutality, such Armenians as survived were reduced to a pitiful group of starving wretches who had been dispossessed of all their property and whose families and entire communities had been exterminated.

That any Armenians survived at all is thanks to humanitarian relief efforts. The international community had long been condemning the genocide. As early in the process as May 1915 the British, French and Russian allies warned the leaders of the Young Turks that they would be held personally to account for such crimes against humanity.

In the United States, too, there was strong public indignation and outrage. Worthy of particular mention in this respect is Henry Morgenthau Sr, US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau was the man 'on the ground' and had detailed first-hand knowledge of the atrocities being committed, and it was chiefly through him that the truth of the situation was publicised in the USA.

Committees were set up to provide humanitarian relief to the desperate Armenians, and this effort saved tens of thousands of them. Later there were rehabilitation programmes set up on a large scale, including refugee camps, medical facilities, orphanages and other facilities.

On the genocide itself detailed reports, with documentary evidence and eye-witness testimonies, were prepared under the auspices of the American, British and German authorities.

Yet there was no decisive action taken by the victorious allies, either to punish the Ottoman Empire for what it had perpetrated, or to insist to the successor Turkish governments on reparations or any compensation to the surviving Armenians.

Witnesses to the Genocide

The Young Turks took pains to keep the whole thing as secret as possible, and decreed restrictions on reporting and photography; but there were many foreign people who were in the Ottoman Empire at the time and saw what was going on.

• The Americans were the first to relay the news to the outside world, news which hit the headlines in the Western press at the time.

• The Germans were there as allies of the Ottomans, and while many German officers approved of what was going on, others reported back to Germany about the annihilation of the Armenian civilians.

• The Russians, too, witnessed at first hand the devastation of the Armenian communities when the Russian Army moved into Anatolia (the peninsula that forms the greater part of Turkey).

• The Arabs saw for themselves what was happening when the deportees were sent into Syria.

• The Turkish officials who were caught up in the genocide gave evidence to the tribunals set up after the war in an attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice.

And finally, many of the victims of the barbarities have themselves recorded their Personal Experiences and first-hand accounts of some of the things that went on.

After the War

After the war there were nearly 400 key members of the CUP arrested and sent before tribunals to answer accusations of complicity in the atrocities against the Armenian people. The accusations ranged from more general ones - for example, conspiracy to liquidate the Armenian nation - to more specific ones concerning particular massacres.

Some of the accused were found guilty. In particular the three ringleaders - Enver, Jemal and Talaat - were condemned to death. The sentences were never carried out, however, because the arch-villains had already fled the country.

It was left to clandestine revenge groups of Armenian survivors to track down the guilty. Talaat went into hiding in Berlin, but was winkled out and assassinated in 1921. His assassin was arrested and stood trial in a German court. He was acquitted.

Kemal Atatürk

Most of the people who were guilty of war crimes managed, however, to escape justice, and after the collapse of the Young Turks regime many of them joined a new nationalist movement headed by Mustafa Kemal.

Born in Thessaloniki in 1881, Kemal presided over the abolition of the empire of the Ottoman Sultanate. A virtual dictator, he instigated various reforms and advocated a strong Turkish nationalism. In 1935 he took the title Atatürk (Father of the Turks).

In the early 1920s some Armenian refugees had returned to southern Turkey, in addition to which an Armenian community still existed in Izmir (Smyrna), which had been occupied by the Greek forces. Against these enclaves, and against Russian Armenia, Kemal spearheaded a series of military campaigns which, by dint of further massacres, expulsions and deportations, completed the unfinished business of the eradication of the Armenians.

Turkey became a Republic in 1923, with Kemal as its President. The Armenian question, with all attendant outstanding matters of possible reparations, let alone repatriation, was dismissed out of hand and consigned to history.

The Result of the Genocide

The best estimates are that the attempts of the Ottomans and their Turkish successors to eliminate the Armenian nation resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 Armenians.

Their historic homeland was devastated and virtually wiped off the map. The ancient Armenian civilisation, which had existed in this part of the world for some three thousand years, saw its roots destroyed and its remnant forced into exile. These survivors were dispersed around the world to more than twenty countries and in every continent.

What remained of Russian Armenia - which was no more than perhaps ten percent of their historic land - was taken by the Red Army in 1920 and became part of the USSR.

To this day the Turkish Republic flatly denies that any genocide took place, and likewise denies that any massacres or deportations which may or may not have taken place had anything to do with any deliberate policy of extermination of the Armenian nation.

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau takes a different view:

When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact... I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.

- Henry Morgenthau Sr, US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1919

Further Resources

• The Novel - The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel. Undoubtedly one of the great novels of the 20th Century, it is based on the true story of the last-ditch stand of a courageous band of Armenian villagers on a mountain-top.

  This may be out of print, but is well worth tracking down. Meanwhile you can click here for a brief account of The Musa Dagh episode.

• The Video - News videos and reports on the Web.

• The Newspaper Story - 'Why the Armenian Holocaust must not be airbrushed from history': a newspaper report dated November 2000 on the refusal of both British and American governments to perpetuate the memory of the Armenian Genocide.

• The Film - Ararat, by Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan.

• The BBC - Search BBCi on The Armenian Genocide

Appendix: The UN and Genocide

[Return to What is Genocide?]

United Nations Resolution 260(III)A of 9 December 1948 considers that genocide is a crime under international law and describes it as an odious scourge condemned by the civilized world.

It defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

It makes the following acts punishable:

1. Genocide;
2. Conspiracy to commit genocide;
3. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
4. Attempt to commit genocide;
5. Complicity in genocide.

The UN Resolution goes on to say that persons committing any of these acts shall be punished whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

[Return to What is Genocide?]