ORIGINS OF THE GENOCIDE
In the case of the Armenian genocide, there was a special set of circumstances that erupted in mass murder. The Ottoman Empire was slowly declining from 1688 to 1913. Between 1688 to 1911, the Ottoman Empire had lost 424,000 square miles and 5 million people due to a series of wars of succession. These losses brought tremendous humiliation among the Muslim Ottoman population. The great Muslim superiority and power were disintegrating. They had a deep desire to reclaim their greatness through a new identity and revenge. Within, the empire there was a Christian minority, the Armenians were the largest. Christians were seen as infidels to the Muslim population. The Armenians were discriminated against by the government and the Muslim community. In the late nineteenth century, the Armenians sought to gain equal rights and freedoms. The Armenian revolutionary organizations appealed to foreign powers to protect them from the continuous oppression. Over time the Western governments pressured the Ottoman government to grant Christians equal status within the Empire. The Ottomans saw this as outside powers involving themselves in internal affairs of the Ottoman state as well as an attack on their sovereignty. Armenians became the scapegoats for the slow deterioration of the Empire. They thought the Christians wanted to carve up the empire with the Foreign powers and force themselves into positions of power. Propaganda portrayed them as a degenerate community with economic power. This caused an outbreak of massacres across the Armenian territories. As planned by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, 80,000-200,000 Armenians were killed between 1894-1896. This set the stage for organized mass murder against Christian minorities.
In the wake of the Balkan Wars, Turkish nationalism grew among the Muslim population. The CUP government or Young Turks became a triumvirate of three leaders, Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Jemal Pashas. They believed the rise of the Empire would no longer be through multiethnic pan-Ottomanism, but by building a nation that will unit all Turks. Turkish nationalism grew into a racial ideology declaring the Turks were the superior race and Armenians were the reason for the Empire’s decline. It was not until World War I that the CUP government was able to implement its policy to murder all Armenians.
THE GENOCIDE
After the Turkish army’s loss at the Battle of Sarikamis during World War I, the CUP government initiated their plan to murder the Armenian population. They attributed the defeat to Armenian treachery. The CUP proclaimed the Armenians had “Stabbed the Turks in the Back.” The government claimed the Armenians were a threat to the state and those living on the border of Russia were suspected traitors. In April 1915, The Turkish army launched a series of attacks against the Armenian population in Van. The Armenians held their positions for weeks. Once, the Turkish army crushed the resistors, the CUP had a justification for murder. This became the pretext for deporting almost the entire population of Armenians into the Syrian desert and their subsequent murder.
In April, The CUP created the “Temporary Law of Deportation” and the “Temporary Law of Confiscation and Expropriation.” On April 24, 1915, they killed 235 leading members of the Armenian community in Istanbul based on the uprising in Van. Later, the local representatives rounded up the local Armenian populations with unofficial orders to deport them to the desert to be murdered. First, the Armenians were told they were to be transferred to safe-havens. All the Armenians in the local towns gathered in the town center to be deported. In most towns, the local population looted and pillaged the Armenian homes. Then, the Armenians were transferred to the Special Organization units who led them on foot or by train to the Der-el-Zor desert in Syria where tens of thousands were either murdered or died from hunger or thirst during the death march. Near Aleppo, Armenians were forced into concentration camps, where they received harsh treatment. They did not receive food and lived in unsanitary conditions. Thousands of children and women were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam and were raised as “Turks” or were forced to be servants or sex-slaves. The estimated number of Armenians killed during the deportations is based on a political agenda. The number swings from 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians murdered between 1915-1918.
AFTERMATH
With the loss of World War I, the Ottoman Turks feared the Allied powers would dismember the Ottoman state and occupy Constantinople. The Allied powers recognized the murder of the Armenian population during the war as crimes against humanity and pressured the Ottoman government to prosecute the CUP members in charge of the systematic murders. In hopes of gaining favor with the British government, the Ottoman government arrested and put major CUP leaders on trial. They were indicted and tried in the Ottoman Extraordinary Courts-martial. Over a hundred former CUP leaders were convicted, including Talat and Enver Pasha. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk “Father of the Turks”), the Turkish National War began and Turkish Nationalist sentiment grew. The Turkish population wanted an end to the trials. Kemal forced the hands of the British government to release the remaining CUP prisoner and denied the indictments. After Kemal’s success in halting the trials, he established a national narrative of the murders of millions of Armenians declaring the Armenians were disloyal to the Turkish Army by fighting on the Russian side. It became a state policy to justify the deportations and mass murder in order to defend the Turkish people. Turkey has largely written the massacre of the Armenians out of their history and has continued to deny the state’s role in the murders. Today, most countries and the United Nations have acknowledged the Armenian genocide. However, in order to maintain United States –Turkish relations, the US has not formally declared it a genocide.
It is indisputable that the CUP members of the Ottoman government made a premeditated decision to systematically kill the Armenian population in the Ottoman state, which was formally declared by the 1919 trials in Extraordinary Court-martials. Nevertheless, the problem was how can foreign powers force a state to prosecute and convict their own nation’s leaders. The Armenian genocide brought international attention to the attempted murder of a population-based on their religion and ethnicity. It was not until after the Holocaust that such crimes would be defined and prosecuted in the future.
Photo credits: David Seide