Question

[armo for life]

Hi I’m a new member who found this forum very informative.
I have a few comments Turks make to deny the Armenian genocide.
I would like to prove them wrong with historical facts and other realities, but I need help!! Here are their comments.

1 The Armenian genocide was not premeditated nor did the government perpetrate it.

2 Killings and other tragedies took place as a result of the 1914-1917 war, but we cannot call them genocide.

3 If Armenians were massacred, the reason was the Armenian rebellion against the Turkish government. Civil war or inter-communal clashes took place and both parties committed crimes.

4 Armenians weren’t deported but transported to safer locations further away from the war front.

5 Armenians weren’t deported, but relocated because they had collaborated with the Russians and turned against Turks.

6 Turkish victims outnumber Armenian victims.

7 All the proof brought forth by Armenians come from Turkey’s enemy, the Allie’s sources. They had put great effort to make Turkey’s faults seem bigger than they really are.

Waiting anxiously for your response.

[Joseph]

Hi I’m a new member who found this forum very informative.
I have a few comments Turks make to deny the Armenian genocide.
I would like to prove them wrong with historical facts and other realities, but I need help!! Here are their comments.

1 The Armenian genocide was not premeditated nor did the government perpetrate it.

2 Killings and other tragedies took place as a result of the 1914-1917 war, but we cannot call them genocide.

3 If Armenians were massacred, the reason was the Armenian rebellion against the Turkish government. Civil war or inter-communal clashes took place and both parties committed crimes.

4 Armenians weren’t deported but transported to safer locations further away from the war front.

5 Armenians weren’t deported, but relocated because they had collaborated with the Russians and turned against Turks.

6 Turkish victims outnumber Armenian victims.

7 All the proof brought forth by Armenians come from Turkey’s enemy, the Allie’s sources. They had put great effort to make Turkey’s faults seem bigger than they really are.

Waiting anxiously for your response.

Please read this thread: http://www.armeniangenocide.com/foru...read.php?t=631

[armo for life]

Thanks
I found all my answers except for these 2 Turkish arguments.


1 The Armenian genocide was not premeditated nor did the government perpetrate it.

2 Killings and other tragedies took place as a result of the 1914-1917 war and we cannot call them genocide.

[Joseph]

Thanks
I found all my answers except for these 2 Turkish arguments.


1 The Armenian genocide was not premeditated nor did the government perpetrate it.

2 Killings and other tragedies took place as a result of the 1914-1917 war and we cannot call them genocide.

1. The Armenian Genocide was premeditated (actions prior to 1915):

a. Prior to the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Authorities murdered and/or exiled the Armenian cultural elite, intellectuals etc.
b. in 1914 Armenian conscripts in the Ottoman army were disarmed en masse, turned in slave labor work battalions and subsequently massacred. By 1915, consription meant certain death for the Christian population and the call from the government included those from the ages of 10 years of age to 65. Those that followed government orders were outright massacred. This process eliminated the vast majority of the male population and assisted the authorities in their genocidal plans.
c. Local kamikams, valis (governors and other officials) who were friendly or at least magnanimous towards the local Christian population were replaced with hostile individuals whose occupation was to harrass the local Christian population and stir-up the local Muslim population. This happened throughout Anatolia.
d. Kurd were recruited in "Butcher Battalions"- as Jevdet Bey liked to refer to them, for the sole purpose of murder, plunder and slaughter of the Christian population.


During the Genocide:

a. The remaining women, children and old folks by goverment decree were ordered out of their towns and villages with often less than a days notice, forced to relinquish their possesions and force marched into the desert wtih no provisions (food and water) and were prevented from seeking provisions during the march. The US Consul in Kharpert, Leslie Davis documented the forced marches from the area of Mamuret al- aziz and noted that the Armenians were taken to the most barren, desert areas and marched in circles for months in order to prevent any survivors.

b. Even Armenians that were willing to convert to Islam to save their lives were still killed.

2. Yes, tragedies did occur not only to Armenians, but also Anatolian Greeks, and Assyrians who also suffered genocide. It was actually a Christian Genocide. Turks suffered shortages of provisions and disease and other hardships due to the CUP's insistence on instigating a war, slaughtering the Christian population which further spread cholera and starvation. The instances of the Christians defending themselves in places such as Van, Musa Dagh, Dilman often resulted in many Turkish soldiers and Kurdish brigands being killed.


The Following is from the Armenian National Institute but in addition, you should certainly read the latest from Dadrian, Bloxham, Akcam, and most importantly the memiors of U.S. Console in Kharpert, Leslie Davis called "The Slaughterhouse Province":


What is the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
The atrocities committed against the Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire during W.W.I are called the Armenian Genocide. Genocide is the organized killing of a people for the express purpose of putting an end to their collective existence. Because of its scope, genocide requires central planning and a machinery to implement it. This makes genocide the quintessential state crime as only a government has the resources to carry out such a scheme of destruction. The Armenian Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918. The Armenian people was subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation. The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Large numbers of Armenians were methodically massacred throughout the Ottoman Empire. Women and children were abducted and horribly abused. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was expropriated. After only a little more than a year of calm at the end of W.W.I, the atrocities were renewed between 1920 and 1923, and the remaining Armenians were subjected to further massacres and expulsions. In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity.


Who was responsible for the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
The decision to carry out a genocide against the Armenian people was made by the political party in power in the Ottoman Empire. This was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (or Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti), popularly known as the Young Turks. Three figures from the CUP controlled the government; Mehmet Talaat, Minister of the Interior in 1915 and Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) in 1917; Ismail Enver, Minister of War; Ahmed Jemal, Minister of the Marine and Military Governor of Syria. This Young Turk triumvirate relied on other members of the CUP appointed to high government posts and assigned to military commands to carry out the Armenian Genocide. In addition to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Interior, the Young Turks also relied on a newly-created secret outfit which they manned with convicts and irregular troops, called the Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa). Its primary function was the carrying out of the mass slaughter of the deported Armenians. In charge of the Special Organization was Behaeddin Shakir, a medical doctor. Moreover, ideologists such as Zia Gokalp propagandized through the media on behalf of the CUP by promoting Pan-Turanism, the creation of a new empire stretching from Anatolia into Central Asia whose population would be exclusively Turkic. These concepts justified and popularized the secret CUP plans to liquidate the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turk conspirators, other leading figures of the wartime Ottoman government, members of the CUP Central Committee, and many provincial administrators responsible for atrocities against the Armenians were indicted for their crimes at the end of the war. The main culprits evaded justice by fleeing the country. Even so, they were tried in absentia and found guilty of capital crimes. The massacres, expulsions, and further mistreatment of the Armenians between 1920 and 1923 were carried by the Turkish Nationalists, who represented a new political movement opposed to the Young Turks, but who shared a common ideology of ethnic exclusivity.


How many people died in the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923. There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of W.W.I. Well over a million were deported in 1915. Hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps. Among the Armenians living along the periphery of the Ottoman Empire many at first escaped the fate of their countrymen in the central provinces of Turkey. Tens of thousands in the east fled to the Russian border to lead a precarious existence as refugees. The majority of the Armenians in Constantinople, the capital city, were spared deportation. In 1918, however, the Young Turk regime took the war into the Caucasus, where approximately 1,800,000 Armenians lived under Russian dominion. Ottoman forces advancing through East Armenia and Azerbaijan here too engaged in systematic massacres. The expulsions and massacres carried by the Nationalist Turks between 1920 and 1922 added tens of thousands of more victims. By 1923 the entire landmass of Asia Minor and historic West Armenia had been expunged of its Armenian population. The destruction of the Armenian communities in this part of the world was total.


Were there witnesses to the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
There were many witnesses to the Armenian Genocide. Although the Young Turk government took precautions and imposed restrictions on reporting and photographing, there were lots of foreigners in the Ottoman Empire who witnessed the deportations. Foremost among them were U.S. diplomatic representatives and American missionaries. They were first to send news to the outside world about the unfolding genocide. Some of their reports made headline news in the American and Western media. Also reporting on the atrocities committed against the Armenians were many German eyewitnesses. The Germans were allies of the Turks in W.W.I. Numerous German officers held important military assignments in the Ottoman Empire. Some among them condoned the Young Turk policy. Others confidentially reported to their superiors in Germany about the slaughter of the Armenian civilian population. Many Russians saw for themselves the devastation wreaked upon the Armenian communities when the Russian Army occupied parts of Anatolia. Many Arabs in Syria where most of the deportees were sent saw for themselves the appalling condition to which the Armenian survivors had been reduced. Lastly, many Turkish officials were witnesses as participants in the Armenian Genocide. A number of them gave testimony under oath during the post-war tribunals convened to try the Young Turk conspirators who organized the Armenian Genocide.


What was the response of the international community to the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
The international community condemned the Armenian Genocide. In May 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia advised the Young Turk leaders that they would be held personally responsible for this crime against humanity. There was a strong public outcry in the United States against the mistreatment of the Armenians. At the end of the war, the Allied victors demanded that the Ottoman government prosecute the Young Turks accused of wartime crimes. Relief efforts were also mounted to save "the starving Armenians." The American, British, and German governments sponsored the preparation of reports on the atrocities and numerous accounts were published. On the other hand, despite the moral outrage of the international community, no strong actions were taken against the Ottoman Empire either to sanction its brutal policies or to salvage the Armenian people from the grip of extermination. Moreover, no steps were taken to require the postwar Turkish governments to make restitution to the Armenian people for their immense material and human losses.


Why is the Armenian Genocide commemorated on April 24? [top of list]
On the night of April 24, 1915, the Turkish government placed under arrest over 200 Armenian community leaders in Constantinople. Hundreds more were apprehended soon after. They were all sent to prison in the interior of Anatolia, where most were summarily executed. The Young Turk regime had long been planning the Armenian Genocide and reports of atrocities being committed against the Armenians in the eastern war zones had been filtering in during the first months of 1915. The Ministry of War had already acted on the government's plan by disarming the Armenian recruits in the Ottoman Army, reducing them to labor battalions and working them under conditions equaling slavery. The incapacitation and methodic reduction of the Armenian male population, as well as the summary arrest and execution of the Armenian leadership marked the earliest stages of the Armenian Genocide. These acts were committed under the cover of a news blackout on account of the war and the government proceeded to implement its plans to liquidate the Armenian population with secrecy. Therefore, the Young Turks regime's true intentions went undetected until the arrests of April 24. As the persons seized that night included the most prominent public figures of the Armenian community in the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, everyone was alerted about the dimensions of the policies being entertained and implemented by the Turkish government. Their death presaged the murder of an ancient civilization. April 24 is, therefore, commemorated as the date of the unfolding of the Armenian Genocide.


Are the Armenian massacres acknowledged today as a Genocide according to the United Nations Genocide Convention? [top of list]
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide describes genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Clearly this definition applies in the case of the atrocities committed against the Armenians. Because the U.N. Convention was adopted in 1948, thirty years after the Armenian Genocide, Armenians worldwide have sought from their respective governments formal acknowledgment of the crimes committed during W.W.I. Countries like France, Argentina, Greece, and Russia, where the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants live, have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. However, as a matter of policy, the present-day Republic of Turkey adamantly denies that a genocide was committed against the Armenians during W.W.I. Moreover, Turkey dismisses the evidence about the atrocities as mere allegations and regularly obstructs efforts for acknowledgment. Affirming the truth about the Armenian Genocide, therefore, has become an issue of international significance. The recurrence of genocide in the twentieth century has made the reaffirmation of the historic acknowledgment of the criminal mistreatment of the Armenians by Turkey all the more a compelling obligation for the international community.

[Joseph]

Thanks
I found all my answers except for these 2 Turkish arguments.


1 The Armenian genocide was not premeditated nor did the government perpetrate it.

2 Killings and other tragedies took place as a result of the 1914-1917 war and we cannot call them genocide.

1. The Armenian Genocide was premeditated (actions prior to 1915):

a. Prior to the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Authorities murdered and/or exiled the Armenian cultural elite, intellectuals etc.
b. in 1914 Armenian conscripts in the Ottoman army were disarmed en masse, turned in slave labor work battalions and subsequently massacred. By 1915, consription meant certain death for the Christian population and the call from the government included those from the ages of 10 years of age to 65. Those that followed government orders were outright massacred. This process eliminated the vast majority of the male population and assisted the authorities in their genocidal plans.
c. Local kamikams, valis (governors and other officials) who were friendly or at least magnanimous towards the local Christian population were replaced with hostile individuals whose occupation was to harrass the local Christian population and stir-up the local Muslim population. This happened throughout Anatolia.
d. Kurd were recruited in "Butcher Battalions"- as Jevdet Bey liked to refer to them, for the sole purpose of murder, plunder and slaughter of the Christian population.


During the Genocide:

a. The remaining women, children and old folks by goverment decree were ordered out of their towns and villages with often less than a days notice, forced to relinquish their possesions and force marched into the desert wtih no provisions (food and water) and were prevented from seeking provisions during the march. The US Consul in Kharpert, Leslie Davis documented the forced marches from the area of Mamuret al- aziz and noted that the Armenians were taken to the most barren, desert areas and marched in circles for months in order to prevent any survivors.

b. Even Armenians that were willing to convert to Islam to save their lives were still killed.

2. Yes, tragedies did occur not only to Armenians, but also Anatolian Greeks, and Assyrians who also suffered genocide. It was actually a Christian Genocide. Turks suffered shortages of provisions and disease and other hardships due to the CUP's insistence on instigating a war, slaughtering the Christian population which further spread cholera and starvation. The instances of the Christians defending themselves in places such as Van, Musa Dagh, Dilman often resulted in many Turkish soldiers and Kurdish brigands being killed.


The Following is from the Armenian National Institute but in addition, you should certainly read the latest from Dadrian, Bloxham, Akcam, and most importantly the memiors of U.S. Console in Kharpert, Leslie Davis called "The Slaughterhouse Province":


What is the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
The atrocities committed against the Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire during W.W.I are called the Armenian Genocide. Genocide is the organized killing of a people for the express purpose of putting an end to their collective existence. Because of its scope, genocide requires central planning and a machinery to implement it. This makes genocide the quintessential state crime as only a government has the resources to carry out such a scheme of destruction. The Armenian Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918. The Armenian people was subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation. The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Large numbers of Armenians were methodically massacred throughout the Ottoman Empire. Women and children were abducted and horribly abused. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was expropriated. After only a little more than a year of calm at the end of W.W.I, the atrocities were renewed between 1920 and 1923, and the remaining Armenians were subjected to further massacres and expulsions. In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity.


Who was responsible for the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
The decision to carry out a genocide against the Armenian people was made by the political party in power in the Ottoman Empire. This was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (or Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti), popularly known as the Young Turks. Three figures from the CUP controlled the government; Mehmet Talaat, Minister of the Interior in 1915 and Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) in 1917; Ismail Enver, Minister of War; Ahmed Jemal, Minister of the Marine and Military Governor of Syria. This Young Turk triumvirate relied on other members of the CUP appointed to high government posts and assigned to military commands to carry out the Armenian Genocide. In addition to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Interior, the Young Turks also relied on a newly-created secret outfit which they manned with convicts and irregular troops, called the Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa). Its primary function was the carrying out of the mass slaughter of the deported Armenians. In charge of the Special Organization was Behaeddin Shakir, a medical doctor. Moreover, ideologists such as Zia Gokalp propagandized through the media on behalf of the CUP by promoting Pan-Turanism, the creation of a new empire stretching from Anatolia into Central Asia whose population would be exclusively Turkic. These concepts justified and popularized the secret CUP plans to liquidate the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turk conspirators, other leading figures of the wartime Ottoman government, members of the CUP Central Committee, and many provincial administrators responsible for atrocities against the Armenians were indicted for their crimes at the end of the war. The main culprits evaded justice by fleeing the country. Even so, they were tried in absentia and found guilty of capital crimes. The massacres, expulsions, and further mistreatment of the Armenians between 1920 and 1923 were carried by the Turkish Nationalists, who represented a new political movement opposed to the Young Turks, but who shared a common ideology of ethnic exclusivity.


How many people died in the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923. There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of W.W.I. Well over a million were deported in 1915. Hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps. Among the Armenians living along the periphery of the Ottoman Empire many at first escaped the fate of their countrymen in the central provinces of Turkey. Tens of thousands in the east fled to the Russian border to lead a precarious existence as refugees. The majority of the Armenians in Constantinople, the capital city, were spared deportation. In 1918, however, the Young Turk regime took the war into the Caucasus, where approximately 1,800,000 Armenians lived under Russian dominion. Ottoman forces advancing through East Armenia and Azerbaijan here too engaged in systematic massacres. The expulsions and massacres carried by the Nationalist Turks between 1920 and 1922 added tens of thousands of more victims. By 1923 the entire landmass of Asia Minor and historic West Armenia had been expunged of its Armenian population. The destruction of the Armenian communities in this part of the world was total.


Were there witnesses to the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
There were many witnesses to the Armenian Genocide. Although the Young Turk government took precautions and imposed restrictions on reporting and photographing, there were lots of foreigners in the Ottoman Empire who witnessed the deportations. Foremost among them were U.S. diplomatic representatives and American missionaries. They were first to send news to the outside world about the unfolding genocide. Some of their reports made headline news in the American and Western media. Also reporting on the atrocities committed against the Armenians were many German eyewitnesses. The Germans were allies of the Turks in W.W.I. Numerous German officers held important military assignments in the Ottoman Empire. Some among them condoned the Young Turk policy. Others confidentially reported to their superiors in Germany about the slaughter of the Armenian civilian population. Many Russians saw for themselves the devastation wreaked upon the Armenian communities when the Russian Army occupied parts of Anatolia. Many Arabs in Syria where most of the deportees were sent saw for themselves the appalling condition to which the Armenian survivors had been reduced. Lastly, many Turkish officials were witnesses as participants in the Armenian Genocide. A number of them gave testimony under oath during the post-war tribunals convened to try the Young Turk conspirators who organized the Armenian Genocide.


What was the response of the international community to the Armenian Genocide? [top of list]
The international community condemned the Armenian Genocide. In May 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia advised the Young Turk leaders that they would be held personally responsible for this crime against humanity. There was a strong public outcry in the United States against the mistreatment of the Armenians. At the end of the war, the Allied victors demanded that the Ottoman government prosecute the Young Turks accused of wartime crimes. Relief efforts were also mounted to save "the starving Armenians." The American, British, and German governments sponsored the preparation of reports on the atrocities and numerous accounts were published. On the other hand, despite the moral outrage of the international community, no strong actions were taken against the Ottoman Empire either to sanction its brutal policies or to salvage the Armenian people from the grip of extermination. Moreover, no steps were taken to require the postwar Turkish governments to make restitution to the Armenian people for their immense material and human losses.


Why is the Armenian Genocide commemorated on April 24? [top of list]
On the night of April 24, 1915, the Turkish government placed under arrest over 200 Armenian community leaders in Constantinople. Hundreds more were apprehended soon after. They were all sent to prison in the interior of Anatolia, where most were summarily executed. The Young Turk regime had long been planning the Armenian Genocide and reports of atrocities being committed against the Armenians in the eastern war zones had been filtering in during the first months of 1915. The Ministry of War had already acted on the government's plan by disarming the Armenian recruits in the Ottoman Army, reducing them to labor battalions and working them under conditions equaling slavery. The incapacitation and methodic reduction of the Armenian male population, as well as the summary arrest and execution of the Armenian leadership marked the earliest stages of the Armenian Genocide. These acts were committed under the cover of a news blackout on account of the war and the government proceeded to implement its plans to liquidate the Armenian population with secrecy. Therefore, the Young Turks regime's true intentions went undetected until the arrests of April 24. As the persons seized that night included the most prominent public figures of the Armenian community in the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, everyone was alerted about the dimensions of the policies being entertained and implemented by the Turkish government. Their death presaged the murder of an ancient civilization. April 24 is, therefore, commemorated as the date of the unfolding of the Armenian Genocide.


Are the Armenian massacres acknowledged today as a Genocide according to the United Nations Genocide Convention? [top of list]
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide describes genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Clearly this definition applies in the case of the atrocities committed against the Armenians. Because the U.N. Convention was adopted in 1948, thirty years after the Armenian Genocide, Armenians worldwide have sought from their respective governments formal acknowledgment of the crimes committed during W.W.I. Countries like France, Argentina, Greece, and Russia, where the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants live, have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. However, as a matter of policy, the present-day Republic of Turkey adamantly denies that a genocide was committed against the Armenians during W.W.I. Moreover, Turkey dismisses the evidence about the atrocities as mere allegations and regularly obstructs efforts for acknowledgment. Affirming the truth about the Armenian Genocide, therefore, has become an issue of international significance. The recurrence of genocide in the twentieth century has made the reaffirmation of the historic acknowledgment of the criminal mistreatment of the Armenians by Turkey all the more a compelling obligation for the international community.

[Joseph]

FACT SHEET: ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

The University of Michigan-Dearborn

Dearborn, MI 48128



The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 (with subsidiaries to 1922-23). One and a half million Armenians were killed, out of a total of two and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Most Armenians in America are children or grandchildren of the survivors, although there are still many survivors amongst us.

Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. Also on that day in Constantinople, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes.

The Armenian Genocide was masterminded by the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party (Committee for Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyet, in Turkish]) which was dominated by Mehmed Talât [Pasha], Ismail Enver [Pasha], and Ahmed Djemal [Pasha]. They were a racist group whose ideology was articulated by Zia Gökalp, Dr. Mehmed Nazim, and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir.

The Armenian Genocide was directed by a Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa) set up by the Committee of Union and Progress, which created special "butcher battalions," made up of violent criminals released from prison.

Some righteous Ottoman officials such as Celal, governor of Aleppo; Mazhar, governor of Ankara; and Reshid, governor of Kastamonu, were dismissed for not complying with the extermination campaign. Any common Turks who protected Armenians were killed.

The Armenian Genocide occurred in a systematic fashion, which proves that it was directed by the Young Turk government.

First the Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed.

Then the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were rounded up on April 24, 1915, and then killed.

Finally, the remaining Armenians were called from their homes, told they would be relocated, and then marched off to concentration camps in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor where they would starve and thirst to death in the burning sun.

On the march, often they would be denied food and water, and many were brutalized and killed by their "guards" or by "marauders." The authorities in Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast, did vary this routine: they loaded Armenians on barges and sank them out at sea.

The Turkish government today denies that there was an Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were only removed from the eastern "war zone." The Armenian Genocide, however, occurred all over Anatolia [present-day Turkey], and not just in the so-called "war zone." Deportations and killings occurred in the west, in and around Ismid (Izmit) and Broussa (Bursa); in the center, in and around Angora (Ankara); in the south-west, in and around Konia (Konya) and Adana (which is near the Mediterranean Sea); in the central portion of Anatolia, in and around Diyarbekir (Diyarbakir), Harpout (Harput), Marash, Sivas (Sepastia), Shabin Kara-Hissar (ţebin Karahisar), and Ourfa (Urfa); and on the Black Sea coast, in and around Trebizond (Trabzon), all of which are not part of a war zone. Only Erzeroum, Bitlis, and Van in the east were in the war zone.

The Armenian Genocide was condemned at the time by representatives of the British, French, Russian, German, and Austrian governments—namely all the major Powers. The first three were foes of the Ottoman Empire, the latter two, allies of the Ottoman Empire. The United States, neutral towards the Ottoman Empire, also condemned the Armenian Genocide and was the chief spokesman in behalf of the Armenians.

The American people, via local Protestant missionaries, did the most to save the wretched remnants of the death marches, the orphaned children.

Despite Turkish denial, there is no doubt about the Armenian Genocide. For example, German ambassador Count von Wolff-Metternich, Turkey's ally in World War I, wrote his government in 1916 saying: "The Committee [of Union and Progress] demands the annihilation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the [Ottoman] government must bow to its demands."

German consuls stationed in Turkey, including Vice Consul Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richner of Erzerum [Erzurum] who was Adolf Hitler's chief political advisor in the 1920s, were eyewitnesses. Hitler said to his generals on the eve of sending his Death's Heads units into Poland, "Go, kill without mercy . . . who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians."

Henry Morgenthau Sr., the neutral American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent a cable to the U.S. State Department in 1915:

"Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses [sic] it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion."
Morgenthau's successor as Ambassador to Turkey, Abram Elkus, cabled the U.S. State Department in 1916 that the Young Turks were continuing an ". . . unchecked policy of extermination through starvation, exhaustion, and brutality of treatment hardly surpassed even in Turkish history."

Only one Turkish government, that of Damad Ferit Pasha, has ever recognized the Armenian genocide. In fact, that Turkish government held war crimes trials and condemned to death the major leaders responsible.

The Turkish court concluded that the leaders of the Young Turk government were guilty of murder. "This fact has been proven and verified." It maintained that the genocidal scheme was carried out with as much secrecy as possible. That a public facade was maintained of "relocating" the Armenians. That they carried out the killing by a secret network. That the decision to eradicate the Armenians was not a hasty decision, but "the result of extensive and profound deliberations."

Ismail Enver Pasha, Ahmed Cemal Pasha, Mehmed Talât Bey, and a host of others were convicted by the Turkish court and condemned to death for "the extermination and destruction of the Armenians."

[Joseph]

Planning

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers when Ottoman gunboats attacked Russian naval bases and shipping in the Black Sea. In November 1914, Enver, now the Minister of War, launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus in hopes of capturing Baku. Nearly 90% of the Ottoman IIIrd Army was destroyed by Russian forces in the Battle of Sarikamis and many more froze to death after Enver issued a retreat order in January 1915. Returning to Constantinople, Enver largely blamed the Armenians living in the region for actively siding with the Russians.[9] In 1914, the Ottoman Empire's War Office had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a liability and threat to the country's security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:
“ In order to justify this enormous crime [of the Armenian Genocide] the requisite propaganda material was thorougly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening the straits [of the Dardanelles]." These vile and malicious incitements [were such, however, that they] could persuade only people who were not even able to feel the pangs of their own hunger.[10] ”


?smail Enver, one of the chief architects of the Armenian Genocide.
Legislation
Further information: Tehcir Law
In May 1915, Talaat requested that government's cabinet and grand vizier pass and enact a law which would legitimize the deportations of Armenians living both near the Russian front and interior. On May 29, 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation, giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security.[11] Several months later, the Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation was passed, stating that all property, including land, livestock and homes, belonging to Armenians was to be confiscated by the authorities. Only one politician in the Ottoman parliament, Senator Ahmed Riza, a founder-member of the Liberal Union, protested against the legislation:
“ It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as “abandoned goods” for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its efforts is selling their goods...Nobody can sell my property if I am unwilling to sell it....If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can’t do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it.[12] ”
At the same time, Enver ordered that all Armenians in the Ottoman forces, some as old as forty-five to sixty, to be disarmed, demobilized and assigned to labor battalion units (in Turkish, amele taburlari). Many of the Armenian recruits were taken and executed by Turkish soldiers and armed squads known as chetes (groups whose roles were similar to Nazi Germany's Einsatzgruppen) in remote areas.[13] Those who initially survived were turned into road laborers (hamals) and construction mules but were eventually killed thereafter.[14] The Ottoman government also created a bureaucratic administration divided into three levels that were permitted to act freely from the governing establishment, similar to the Sonderkommandos formed by the Nazis during World War II. They were the Katibi Mesul, "Responsible Secretaries", Murrahas, "Delegates" and Umumi Müfettish, "General Inspectors". The administration's purpose was to ensure that the orders by the government were "implemented strictly." [15]
April 24
Further information: April 24 circular


Armenian intellectuals were arrested and later executed en masse by Ottoman authorities on the night of April 24, 1915.
In a swift move enacted by the Ottoman government, an estimated 250 Armenians from the intelligentsia were arrested on the night of April 24, 1915.[16]
The Special Organization (Te?kilat-? Mahsusa)
Further information: Teskilati Mahsusa and Special Organization (Ottoman Empire)
While there was an official 'special organization' founded in December 1911 by the Ottoman government, a second organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was founded by the lttihad ve Terraki. [citation needed]This organization technically appeared in July 1914 and was supposed to differ from the one already existing in one important point; mostly according to the military court, it was meant to be a "government in a government" (needing no orders to act).[citation needed]


Starving Armenian children
Later in 1914, the Ottoman government decided to influence the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization.[citation needed] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison.[citation needed] Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.[citation needed] Vehib, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human species.” [citation needed]
The organization was led by the Central Committee Members Doctor Nazim, Behaeddin Sakir, Atif Riza, and former Director of Public Security Aziz Bey.[citation needed] The headquarters of Behaeddin Sakir were in Erzurum, from where he directed the forces of the Eastern vilayets. Aziz, Atif and Nazim Beys operated in Istanbul, and their decisions were approved and implemented by Cevat Bey, the Military Governor of Istanbul.[citation needed]
According to the military tribunals set up after the war and other records, the criminals were chosen by a process of selection.[citation needed] They had to be ruthless butchers to be selected as a member of the special organization. [citation needed] The Mazhar commission, during the military court, had provided some lists of those criminals.[citation needed] In one instance, of 65 criminals released, 50 were in prison for murder. Such a disproportionate ratio between those condemned for murder and others imprisoned for minor crimes is reported to have been generalized. This selection process of criminals was, according to some researchers in the field of comparative genocide studies, who specialize in the Armenian cases, clearly indicative of the government's intention to commit mass murder of its Armenian population.[citation needed]
Process and camps of deportation
Many went to the Syrian town of Dayr az-Zawr and the surrounding desert. The fact that the Turkish government ordered the evacuation of ethnic Armenians at this time is not in dispute. It is claimed, based on a good deal of anecdotal evidence, that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to care for the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived. The Ottoman government also prevented the deportees from supplying themselves. The Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves. In any event, the foreseeable consequence of the government's decision to move the Armenians was a significant number of deaths.
It is believed that twenty-five major concentration camps existed, under the command of ?ükrü Kaya, one of the right hands of Talat Pasha.[17]


Major concentration camps


The bodies of dead Armenians lie in a grove of trees in eastern Ottoman Empire, 1915.


The remaining bones of the Armenians of Erzinjan.

Dayr az-Zawr
35°17?N 40°10?E Ras al-Ain Bonzanti
37°25?N 34°52?E Mamoura
Intili, Islahiye, Radjo, Katma,
Karlik, Azaz, Akhterim, Mounboudji,
Bab, Tefridje, Lale, Meskene,
Sebil, Dipsi, Abouharar, Hamam,
Sebka, Marat, Souvar, Hama,
Homs Kahdem
The majority of the camps were situated near what are now the Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, and some were only temporary transit camps.[18] Others are said to have been used only as temporary mass burial zones—such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz—that were closed in Fall 1915.[19] Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.[20] As with Jewish kapos in the concentration camps, the majority of the guards inside the camps were Armenians.[21]
Even though nearly all the camps, including all the major ones, were open air, the rest of the mass killings in other minor camps was not limited to direct killings, but also to mass burning,[22] poisoning[23] and drowning.[24]

Results of deportations

The Ottoman government ordered the evacuation or deportation of many Armenians living in Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia.

[Joseph]

Part 1

Genocide: The Armenian Experience

(Corrected from the second revised edition, 1984)
© The Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation, 2000

Mass murder of civilians and genocide-the organized extermination of an entire people-are often used by repressive regimes as tools of political intimidation and conflict resolution. Armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons as well as the means to legitimate their bloody exploits, governments have annihilated whole populations with impunity, confident that they can dictate the writing of history. Authoritarian rulers are also certain that the public forgets such tragedies quickly and easily. As militarism increases, worldwide resources become scarcer, and their distribution grows more unequal, "final solutions" become more attractive to governments in crisis.

The genocide of the Armenian people during the First World War was the final act in the long history of repression of Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government. Along with other groups, Armenians were turned into an exploited and oppressed people by an increasingly repressive regime. To improve the lot of the largely peasant Armenian population, Armenian political parties had long struggled for a new social order based on equality between the various religious and ethnic groups as well as on political and economic justice. That vision contradicted the ideology of Turkish elites, both imperial and republican, who sought the solution to social problems in extreme nationalism, turkification of subject peoples and lands, and militarism.

The Genocide perpetrated by the Ittihad ve Terakke (Committee for Union and Progress) government, beginning in 1915, is, in this context, significant for world history as well as the victim people. It is the first genocide in the twentieth century, the best documented, the most successful, and the least remembered. This event brought to an end three millennia of collective existence for Western Armenians in their homeland. Yet, for "strategic" considerations, it is justified and covered up by the current Turkish government as well as some of its allies.


Calculated Policies

In his work, The Tragedy of Armenia, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and eyewitness to the tragedy, Henry Morgenthau, expresses his firm conviction that Armenians were the victims of a preconceived plan of annihilation. He cites numerous sources of information about the massacres, their nature, and their scope:

During the spring of 1914 they [the Ottoman government] evolved their plan to destroy the Armenian race. Now, as four of the Great Powers were at war with them and the two others were their allies, they thought the time opportune . . . They concluded that, once they had carried out their plan, the Great Powers would find themselves before an accomplished fact and that their crime would be condoned . .
The facts contained in the reports received at the Embassy from absolutely trustworthy eyewitnesses surpass the most beastly and diabolical cruelties ever before perpetrated or imagined in the history of the world. The Turkish authorities had stopped all communication between the provinces and the capital in the naive belief that they could consummate this crime of ages before the outside world could hear of it. But the information filtered through the Consuls, missionaries, foreign travellers and even Turks.


Renowned sociologist Irving L. Horowitz of Rutgers University points out the significance of the genocide of the Armenians by the Ittihadists as a precedent-setting case. In his study, Taking Lives : Genocide and State Power, Horowitz describes the Genocide as an act without parallel in any earlier era and "the fate of the Armenians as the essential prototype of genocide in the twentieth century." The civilized world, according to Horowitz, was too absorbed in its own horrors of the First World War to recognize the uniqueness of the destruction of the Armenian people.

Historian Howard Sachar, of George Washington University, devotes considerable space to the Genocide in his Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924. He argues that the Ittihadist regime viewed deportations and massacres as merely effective diplomacy, the realization of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's injunction that "the best way to finish with the Armenian Question is to finish with the Armenians." Sachar concludes, "By any standards this was surely the most unprecedented, indeed the most unimaginable racial annihilation, until then, in modern history." In his history of the First World War, The World Crisis, Winston S. Churchill describes the Armenian massacres:

In 1915, the Turkish Government began, and ruthlessly carried out, the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor . . . The clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be. It is supposed that about one and a quarter millions of Armenians were involved, of whom more than half perished. There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.
In her book, Accounting for Genocide, political sociologist Helen Fein recounts Germany's perception of their ally's policy during the First World War. Count Wolf-Metternich, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, understood that the Ittihadists sought to exterminate the Armenian people as an end in itself even though such a policy inhibited the war effort. He writes the Reich Chancellor in June 1916:

I have discussed with Talaat Bey and Hallil Bey the deportation of the Armenian workers from Amanus stretch, which deportation hampers the conduct of the war. These measures, I told the ministers, among other things, gave the impression as if the Turkish government were itself bent on losing the war . . . But no one any longer has the power to control the many-headed hydra of the Committee, to control the chauvinism and the fanaticism . . . there is not much to gain from the Armenians . . . Turkification means to expel or kill everything non-Turkish.

Helen Fein agrees with historian Ulrich Trumpener of Princeton University who, in his book, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1918, asserts that Germany was aware of and indifferent to the Ottoman policy of mass extermination.



Genocide as Radical Solution

The Genocide involved several premeditated steps, beginning with the disarming and emasculation of the Armenian population. In the early part of 1915, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were removed from combat positions, disarmed, and transformed into road laborers. They were driven by the whips and bayonets of Turkish soldiers into the mountains, where they were murdered en masse.

At the same time Armenian civilians, who since the 1908 Young Turk revolution had the right to bear arms for their own protection, were ordered by the government to disarm. Most Armenians understood what their fate would be if they did not have the means to defend themselves--the disarming of Armenians before the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896 was still an integral part of their collective consciousness. Many, nonetheless, surrendered their arms rather than provoke the hostility of the authorities. The arms they gave up were taken as evidence that a revolution was planned; the bearers were thrown into prison on charges of treason, tortured, and massacred shortly thereafter. The punishment of those suspected of concealing arms or discovered to be concealing arms was even more dreadful.

After the disarming of the population, the men in villages and towns throughout the Empire were issued official deportation orders by public criers and proclamations. The men were led away from their homes by Turkish soldiers and shot at the first desolate place.

Leo Kuper, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, describes the genocidal process in his study Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century:

The emasculation of the Armenian population was completed by the culling of Armenian leaders. Throughout the country, the government arrested and deported the elite, the educated, the deputies, the publicists, the writers, the poets, the jurists, the advocates, the notaries, the civil servants, the doctors, the merchants, the bankers and generally all those with substantial means and influence. This measure was presumably designed to deprive Armenians of leadership and representation so that the deportations might be completed without public clamor and without resistance. The effect was to leave the Armenian population a defenseless and easy prey for the next stage, that of deportation.
The Genocide continued throughout 1915 and 1916 with the elimination of the women, children, old men, and the sick, who suffered a harsher fate than the young men. The former were organized into caravans by the government and forced by Turkish soldiers to walk endlessly along pre-arranged routes. Their destination was the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia, but few made it that far. Denied provisions for survival, many faced slow and painful deaths by thirst, hunger, exposure, and exhaustion. Others were killed outright by local Turks, Kurds, and Turkish soldiers, who attacked the caravans with regularity and impunity.

After Armenians were removed from their homes, the Ittihadists resettled non-Armenians, including many of the Turks who were driven out of Western Thrace during the Balkan wars, on Armenian land. In Armenia. The Survival of a Nation, Christopher Walker notes, "Government resettlement of Turks, Kurds, or Circassians was from this time onwards a central feature of the process of killing Armenians. Resettlement of refugees is too complicated a process to be conjured out of the air; the frequency with which it occurs in 1915 highlights again the deliberateness of government policy.


Eyewitness to Horror

By focusing on statements dealing with the overwhelming fact of the Genocide, its premeditated nature, and its numerical or geographical scope, there is a danger of losing sight of the individual human suffering referred to by such phrases as "untold horrors," "unparalleled brutality," "hellish massacres," "lethal savagery," and "unimaginable racial annihilation."

The following brief excerpts from the official British Blue Book, compiled by historian Arnold J. Toynbee at the direction of Lord Bryce, provide an idea of the inhumanity embodied in the Genocide:

In Harpoot and Mezre the people have had to endure terrible tortures. They had their eyebrows plucked out, their breasts cut off, their nails torn off; their torturers hew off their feet or else hammer nails into them just as they do in shoeing horses. This is all done at nighttime, and in order that the people may not hear their screams and know their agony, soldiers are stationed round the prisons, beating drums and blowing whistles . . . Harpoot has become the cemetery of the Armenians. [From a statement by a German eyewitness, communicated by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief]
At the first large station a sight burst upon my view which, although I knew and was prepared for it, was nevertheless a shock. There was a mob of a thousand or more people huddled about the station and environs, and long strings of cattle-trucks packed to suffocation with human beings. It was the first glimpse of the actual deportation of the Armenians . . . There was no confusion, no wailing, no shouting, just a mob of subdued people, dejected, sad, hopeless, past tears. [From a narrative of a physician who had resided in the Ottoman Empire for ten years]

In volume III of the seven-volume Source Records of the Great War, in which Talaat Pasha's infamous extermination orders are reprinted, appears a statement by Dr. Martin Niepage, the leader of the German missionary movement in the Ottoman Empire. He records the horror witnessed by German missionaries:

When I returned to Aleppo in September, 1915, from a three month's holiday at Beirut, I heard with horror that a new phase of Armenian massacres had begun which were far more terrible than the earlier massacres under Abdul-Hamid, and which aimed at exterminating, root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and progressive Armenian nation, and at transferring its property to Turkish hands.

Herr Greif, of Aleppo, reported corpses of violated women lying about naked in heaps on the railway embankment at Tell-Abiad and Ras-el-Ain. Another, Herr Spiecker, of Aleppo, had seen Turks tie Armenian men together, fire several volleys of small shot with fowling pieces into the human mass, and go off laughing while their victims slowly perished in frightful convulsions. Other men had their hands tied behind their back and were rolled down steep cliffs. Women were standing below, who slashed those who had rolled down with knives until they were dead. A German I know saw hundreds of Christian peasant women who were compelled, near Ourfa, to strip naked by the Turkish soldiers. For the amusement of the soldiers they had to drag themselves through the desert in this condition for days together in a temperature of 40° centigrade, until their skins were completely scorched. Another witness saw a Turk tear a child out of its Armenian mother's womb and hurl it against the wall.


As did many eyewitness survivors, Rev. Abraham Hartunian recorded his own experiences during the Genocide. His son, Rev. Vartan Hartunian, translated these memoirs as Neither To Laugh Nor To Weep. The clergyman writes:

Many of our teachers, professors, and doctors--those of the educated class--were captured and with the words "So you are the intellect of this people!" had their heads placed in vises and squeezed till they burst.

Many children were herded out of the deserts, thrown alive into ditches, and covered over with dirt and sand, to smother beneath the earth. Many were thrown into rivers or dashed to the ground. Many were killed by ripping their jaws and tearing their faces in half.

Many women were stripped naked and lined up, and, their abdomens slashed one by one, were thrown in ditches and wells to die in infinite agony. The Kaymakam [mayor] of Der-el-Zor, holding a fifteen-year-old girl before him, directed his words to a murderous band and then, throwing her to the ground, clubbed her to death with the order, "so you must kill all Armenians, without remorse."


The atrocities witnessed by missionaries, relief workers, and survivors is confirmed by officials of the United States government, who were stationed at consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire. American consuls sent numerous reports and dispatches between 1915 and 1918 to their superiors at the American embassy in Constantinople and the State Department in Washington, D.C.

Jesse B. Jackson, American consul at Aleppo for over a decade, describes the Genocide in detail as he and his aides witnessed it:

[Joseph]

Part 2

One of the most terrible sights ever seen in Aleppo was the arrival early in August, 1915, of some 5,000 terribly emaciated, dirty, ragged and sick women and children . . . These people were the only survivors of the thrifty and well to do Armenian population of Sivas, carefully estimated to have originally been over 300,000 souls!

From these camps the gendarmes took several hundred almost daily and pushed them on towards the desert beyond the reach of help, going from Aleppo first to Meskene, then to Hamam, Rakka, Sebha, Abou-Harari, and finally to Deir-el-Zor and the surrounding villages, about half way between Aleppo and Bagdad on the Euphrates river. At Meskene they died in such numbers that one of my employees who was sent there to distribute relief to the sufferers late in 1916 said that he had seen more than 150 long mounds where the dead had been buried in trenches (dug by themselves), wherein from 100 to 300 bodies had been buried . . . He also told of having seen many hundreds of skeletons lying strewn along the highways between Aleppo and Deir-el-Zor and Aleppo and Ourfa at which no effort whatever had been made to bury.

It is without doubt a carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.

In a June 1915 report to the State Department, the American consul general in Beirut, W. Stanley Hollis, conveys his sense of the Ittihadist government's brutality:

Women with little children in their arms or in the last days of pregnancy were driven along under the whip like cattle. Three different cases came under my knowledge where the woman was delivered on the road, and because her brutal driver hurried her along she died of hemorrhage . . . Some women became so completely worn out and hopeless that they left their infants beside the road. Many women and girls have been outraged. At one place the commander of gendarmerie openly told the men to whom he consigned a large company, that they were at liberty to do what they choose with the women and girls.


Leslie A. Davis, American consul at Kharpert, explains the reality of the deportations in his communications:

I have visited their encampment a number of times and talked with some of the people. A more pitiable sight cannot be imagined. They are almost without exception ragged, filthy, hungry and sick. That is not surprising in view of the fact that they have been on the road for nearly two months with no change of clothing, no chance to wash, no shelter and little to eat . . .

As one walks through the camp mothers offer their children and beg one to take them. In fact, the Turks have been taking their choice of these children and girls for slaves, or worse . . .

There are very few men among them, as most of them have been killed on the road. All tell the same story of having been attacked and robbed by the Kurds. Most of them were attacked over and over again and a great many of them, especially the men, were killed. Women and children were also killed. Many died, of course, from sickness and exhaustion on the way and there have been deaths each day that they have been here . . . Those who have reached here are only a small portion, however, of those who started. By continuing to drive these people on in this way it will be possible to dispose of all of them in a comparatively short time . . .

Not many men have been spared, however, to accompany those who are being sent into exile, for a more prompt and sure method has been used to dispose of them. Several thousand Armenian men have been arrested during the past few weeks. These have been put in prison and each time that several hundred had been gathered up in that way they were sent away during the night . . . There have been frequent rumors that all of these were killed and there is little doubt that they were . . . The fate of all the others has been pretty well established by reliable reports of a similar occurrence on Wednesday, July 7 . . . On Wednesday morning they were taken to a valley a few hours distant where they were all made to sit down. Then the gendarmes began shooting them until they had killed nearly all of them. Some who had not been killed by bullets were then disposed of with knives and bayonets. A few succeeded in breaking the rope with which they were tied to their companions and running away, but most of these were pursued and killed. A few succeeded in getting away . . .

The entire movement seems to be the most thoroughly organized and effective massacre this country has ever seen.



The Terror of the State

From the Turkish government's point of view, the genocide of Armenians was the final solution to one aspect of a fundamental set of problems it faced. These included the democratization of political institutions, the implementation of agrarian reform, and the recognition of Kurdish aspirations--problems which remain to be resolved. From the Armenian point of view, the Genocide constituted the violent end to a long and oppressive Ottoman rule, which lacked respect for life and liberty. The Genocide also brutally stopped a process of development which had once promised a renewed life in a just and democratic society.

Before 1914, more than two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. By the end of the First World War no more than 100,000 Armenians remained in what is now Turkey. About a half-million homeless refugees fled to Russian Armenia, other areas of the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Thus, at least 1.5 million Armenians lives were claimed by the Genocide. Survivors who live with tragic memories and their descendants who share the suffering are found in a score of countries today.

The fate of Armenians, according to Irving Horowitz, illustrates that different forms of state authority and different power elites can generate the appropriate ideology and mobilize the machinery of death necessary to exterminate a people. The Sultan began the destruction of the Armenian minority in the name of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turks continued the process in the name of Turkish nationalism. The Kemalists, who replaced the defeated Young Turks in 1923, completed this process in the name of development and hegemonic integration. Horowitz concludes, "Hence, between 1893 and 1923 roughly 1,800,000 Armenians were liquidated, while another 1,000,000 were exiled, without a single political or military elite within the state assuming responsibility for the termination of the slaughter. . ."

Helen Fein places the Genocide within its political context:

The victims of twentieth-century premeditated genocide the Jews, the Gypsies, the Armenians were murdered in order to fulfill the state's design for a new order. War was used in both cases to transform the nation to correspond to the ruling elite's formula by eliminating groups conceived of as alien, enemies by definition.

In their joint study of Armenians for the Minority Rights Group, entitled The Armenians, David Lang and Christopher Walker conclude, as well, that the Genocide was systematic and ably executed from the highest government level to meet pan-Turkic political aims. They write:

The mass-murder was not just a matter of "isolated incidents." It was carefully thought out and planned months, if not years, in advance. Nor did it result from religious intolerance, though the Young Turks mobilized the innate fanaticism of the village Mullahs and the greed of Turkish have-nots. There were in fact Muslim leaders who were shocked by the measures taken and protested against them.




Rejecting Genocide

For many, including the recognized and community-supported political parties in the Diaspora, accounting for the unpunished Genocide constitutes a fundamental aspect of Armenian aspirations for a free and collective national existence. That vision remains relevant; Armenians refuse to be relegated to the dustbin of history either through genocide or by its denial, even if that means being a burden on the conscience of humanity.

The Genocide, which ended three thousand years of Armenian life in Armenia, generated new claims, sanctioned in international law by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. These include the recognition of the Genocide and the application of elementary justice. By international law, the present Turkish government bears responsibility for the crimes committed by its predecessors, even if republican Turkey had repudiated those crimes--something it has consistently failed to do.

Unless principles of justice are called upon to prevail in relations between nations, mass extermination as a tool of political dominance may become more common in the future than it has been up to now. If Armenians and other victims of genocide do not do everything in their power to pursue their battle against genocide, they will have failed in their responsibility toward future generations. Then not only genocide, but the total destruction of humanity, will be looked upon with indifference.


Bibliography

Churchill, Winston S. The World Crisis. 4 vols. in 5. New York: C. Scribner's sons, 1923-1929.

Davis, Leslie A. The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Dimplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917. Edited by Susan K. Blair. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989, 216p.

Fein, Helen. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. New York: Free Press, 1979, 468p.

Hartunian, Abraham H. Neither to Laugh Nor to Weep: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide. Translated by Vartan Hartunian. Second Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Armenian Heritage Press, 1986, 206p.

Horowitz, Irving L. Taking Lives: Genocide & State Power. 4th Expanded Revised Edition. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996, 256p.

Kuper, Leo. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981, 256p.

Lang, David Marshall and Christopher J. Walker. The Armenians. New Revised Edition. London: Minority Rights Group, 1987, 20p.

Morgenthau, Henry. The Tragedy of Armenia. London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co., 1918, 16p. [Reprinted by New Age Publishers, Plandome, New York, 1975.]

Sachar, Howard M. Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969, 518 + xxxiiip.

Source Records of the Great War. 7 vols. Indianapolis: The American Legion, 1931.

Toynbee, Arnold J. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. London: Sir Joseph Causton and Sons, 1916, 684 + 30p.

Trumpener, Ulrich. Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1918. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 433p.

Walker, Christopher. Armenia: The Survival of a Nation. Revised Second Edition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990, 476p.

[Joseph]

he Key Distortions and Falsehoods in the Denial of the Armenian Genocide.
(A Response to the Memorandum of the Turkish Ambassador)


Prepared by the Zoryan Institute

Revised August 1999



© 1999 by The Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation
19 Day Street
Cambridge, MA 02140
U.S.A.

All rights reserved



In April 1999 there was an initiative of some sixty Congressmen in the United States House of Representatives to pass a resolution "to provide in a collection all United States records related to the Armenian Genocide and the consequences of the failure to enforce the judgments of the Turkish courts against the responsible officials, and deliver the collection to the House International Relations Committee, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for incorporation into its holdings of official documentation on genocide and for purposes of public awareness and education, and to the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan, Armenia." After enumerating eighteen findings affirming the historicity and importance of remembering the Armenian genocide, the Resolution went on to require that the above be done "Within six months of the enactment of this resolution...in an act documenting and affirming the United States record of protest and recognition of this crime against humanity."

It is the collection of the National Archives, which contain the World War I and post-World War I documentary records of the U.S. State Department that are at issue here. That department was entrusted with the task of collecting, through its officials stationed in Turkey at the time, evidence on the decision-making, organization, and implementation of the mass murder of the Ottoman Armenian population.

The Turkish government, through its ambassador in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter to all Congressmen, dated May 27, 1999, which included an eleven-page report titled "An Objective Look At H.Res.155," with a view to blocking the passage of a resolution that proposes to utilize for purposes of research and scholarship the holdings of a strictly American institution.

What follows is a revised version of the refutation the Zoryan Institute made to the Turkish ambassador's report. This rebuttal was endorsed by Congressman Steven Rothman and sent to all members of Congress. As of the date of this writing, the outcome of this Congressional resolution is not yet known.



...the troubles in Van and elsewhere merely served as a convenient excuse for getting a program of mass deportations and large-scale extermination started.

[These measures led to] the Armenian holocaust....

[The annihilation of the Armenians] was not the unfortunate by-product of an otherwise legitimate security program but the result of a deliberate effort by the Ittihad ve Terakki [Young Turk] regime to rid the Anatolian heartland of a politically troublesome ethnic group.

- Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914-1918. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 203, 219, 268.


Slowly, yet with increasing authoritativeness, the reality of the Turkish genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people has come to be accepted as established, incontrovertible fact. Such a process...has overcome formidable obstacles, especially the well-orchestrated, shameful, as yet ongoing campaign by the Turkish government to impose silence by promoting a variety of coopting devices, by disseminating various falsifications of the historical record, and through cajolery and intimidation.

- Richard Falk, (Milbank Professor of International Law, Princeton University). From his foreword to the Special Issue of the Journal of Political and Military Sociology v. 22, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 1, titled, "The Armenian Genocide in Official Turkish Records," Roger Smith, guest editor.


Because the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were not prosecuted, the Nazi-organized Holocaust against the Jews became possible. There is a direct linkage between the failure to prosecute the crimes against humanity before World War II and their commission during World War II.

This failure did not occur because there was no offense or because there was no jurisdiction. Both existed, and still the prosecutions did not occur. This reluctance to act, in spite of the offense and in spite of the jurisdiction, made the Nazis more brazen and the Holocaust more likely.

- David Matas, "Prosecuting Crimes Against Humanity: The Lessons of World War I," Fordham International Law Journal (1989-90): 104.


"The future of Holocaust denial may be foreshadowed by the persistent denial of the Armenian genocide."

--Katherine Bischoping, "Method and Meaning in Holocaust-knowledge Surveys." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 463.