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Under Turkish Rule- Part 1

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  • #21
    ANATOMY OF A MASSACRE: HOW THE GENOCIDE UNFOLDED
    Simon Usborne

    The Independent - United Kingdom
    Published: Aug 28, 2007

    This graphic, with its network of lines and blobs, reveals the scale
    of what some historians have called the "first holocaust of the 20th
    century". An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and
    1917, either at the hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact
    figures are unknown, but each larger blob - at the site of a
    concentration camp or massacre - potentially represents the deaths
    of hundreds of thousands of people.

    The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened,
    stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First
    World War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the
    beleaguered Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition
    by siding with Russia.

    On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of
    Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were
    marched from their homes - the majority towards Syria and modern-day
    Iraq - via an estimated 25 concentration camps.

    In 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates
    are strewn with corpses of exiles... It is a plan to exterminate the
    whole Armenian people." Winston Churchill would later call the forced
    exodus an "administrative holocaust".

    Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes
    the 1.5 million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not
    constitute what is now termed genocide - defined by the UN as a
    state-sponsored attempt to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
    ethnic, racial or religious group". Instead, Ankara claims the deaths
    were part of the wider war, and that massacres were committed by
    both sides.

    Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the
    Armenians (and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it
    remains illegal in Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last
    year, the Turkish foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as
    "unfounded".

    One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian
    genocide was Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered
    the killing, "mercilessly and without compassion", of Polish men,
    women and children, he concluded: "Who, after all, speaks today of
    the annihilation of the Armenians?"
    General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”

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