Armenian Genocide §

Background

The destruction of the Ottoman Armenians was the culmination of more than four decades of escalating coercion against a Christian minority that the late-Ottoman state had come to regard as both subversive and dispensable. Three structural pressures converged. First, the Eastern Question had since the Treaty of San Stefano and the Treaty of Berlin made the welfare of the Armenians of the six eastern vilayets a matter of European diplomatic supervision, an arrangement that Sultan Abdul Hamid II read as an existential intrusion on Ottoman sovereignty. Second, the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96 had already shown that mass violence against the Armenian population could be used as a political instrument without significant international cost editorial. Third, the Committee of Union and Progress, having seized power decisively after the 1913 coup, embraced an increasingly racialised vision of the Ottoman polity drawn from Turkist intellectual currents and from the demographic engineering practised against Balkan Muslims during the same years.

The catastrophic Ottoman defeat at Sarıkamış in the winter of 1914–15, in which War Minister Enver Pasha lost most of his Third Army to Russian fire and the Caucasian winter, was publicly blamed on Armenian disloyalty. Whatever Enver privately believed, the political utility of that scapegoat was immediate. Through the spring of 1915 the army disarmed Armenian conscripts, transferred them into labour battalions (amele taburlari), and worked them to death. According to Kévorkian and Akçam, the disarmament was substantively complete before any of the deportation orders were issued.

The event

The genocide is conventionally dated from the night of 24/25 April 1915, when several hundred Armenian intellectuals, professionals and clergy were rounded up in Constantinople under personal direction of Interior Minister Talaat Pasha (the 24 April arrests). Most were taken inland and killed. The date was designated Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in 1919 by the surviving leadership and remains the global commemorative anchor.

The destruction unfolded in three overlapping phases.

The first was the systematic extermination of Armenian men. Across the eastern vilayets through April and May, conscripts in labour battalions were shot in batches, while local notables were summoned to government buildings, taken into custody and killed. By June, in most provincial centres, the male Armenian population over the age of about twelve was gone.

The second phase was deportation. The Temporary Law of Deportation of 27 May 1915 supplied retroactive legal cover for orders that had already been issued. Women, children and the elderly were marched south, in waves, through the mountain passes of Anatolia and along the Euphrates toward the Syrian desert. Convoys were guarded by gendarmes and çete irregulars from the Special Organisation (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa), reinforced by Kurdish tribal auxiliaries. The deportations were not relocation. The official destination was a chain of holding camps along the Euphrates and at Deir ez-Zor, where survivors were systematically starved and where, in the spring and summer of 1916, the residual population was massacred outright in the desert ravines south of the camp. Kévorkian's province-by-province reconstruction, the most thorough documentary inventory in the literature, concludes that in many provinces 80–90% of the Armenian population was gone by the end of 1916.

The third phase was economic. The Temporary Law on Abandoned Properties of 26 September 1915 transferred Armenian movable goods, real estate, businesses and bank accounts to state-appointed commissions. As Akçam has shown in The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity, the proceeds funded the deportations themselves and underwrote the construction of a new Muslim mercantile class in cities such as Trabzon, Adana and Aintab.

Casualty estimates converge on a range of 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 Armenians killed, against a pre-war population that the Armenian Patriarchate had reckoned at roughly 2.1 million and the Ottoman government at roughly 1.3 million. Survivors fled to Russian-held Caucasia, to French Cilicia (briefly), to Lebanon and Syria, and onward to North America, France, Argentina and Egypt. The diaspora that the genocide created has been a defining variable in Armenian politics ever since.

Parallel destruction reached the Assyrian Christians of the southeastern vilayets (Sayfo) and, on a smaller scale, the Pontic and Anatolian Greek Orthodox communities. Several of the same officials oversaw all three campaigns; the CUP's logic was, in the assessment of Bloxham, a Christian-removal project rather than narrowly an Armenian one.

Aftermath

The post-armistice Ottoman courts-martial of 1919–20, convened under Sultan Mehmed VI under Allied pressure, tried the surviving CUP leadership. Talaat, Enver and Djemal Pasha, already in exile, were sentenced to death in absentia in July 1919. The verdicts found explicitly that the deportations and massacres were organised state policy. The proceedings collapsed after the Kemalist victory and the surviving accused walked free; but the evidentiary record they generated, including the wartime telegrams of the Interior Ministry, has anchored every subsequent historical reconstruction.

ARF gunmen executed several of the principal organisers in Rome, Berlin and Tiflis over the next three years (Operation Nemesis). Soghomon Tehlirian shot Talaat Pasha on a Berlin street in March 1921 and was acquitted by a German jury after a trial that became the first Western legal forum to air the documentary record of the killings.

The genocide vanished from international politics in the 1920s. The Treaty of Sèvres had recognised Armenian title to much of eastern Anatolia, but Lausanne (1923) deleted both the territorial provisions and the minority protections, and Western governments shifted to a working relationship with the Republic of Turkey. The events of 1915 became known as the "forgotten genocide" until Armenian mobilisation in the 1960s and 70s, beginning with the 1965 Yerevan demonstrations, pushed them back into international view.

Memory and politics

The Armenian Genocide was the original case the legal concept of genocide was designed to capture. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944, repeatedly cited the 1915 deportations in his preparatory writings; the events were squarely in mind during the drafting of the 1948 UN Convention. By the convention's three-part test, actus reus, mens rea, and protected group, the case is overwhelming on the documentary record editorial. The current scholarly consensus, articulated most directly by Suny and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (1997 and 2005 resolutions), is that genocide was committed.

Recognition by states has been gradual and political. The European Parliament recognised the genocide in 1987; France in 2001; Germany in 2016; the US Congress in 2019 and President Biden in April 2021. More than thirty states have followed. Turkey continues officially to dispute the characterisation, maintaining a position that the wartime deaths were the unintended consequence of legitimate security relocations during a multi-front war contested. The denial position is sustained by a state-funded historiographical apparatus and increasingly thinly held by Turkish scholars themselves: Akçam became the first Turkish historian to use the word genocide in print, and Göçek has documented the institutional architecture of denial in detail.

The genocide remains a structuring fact of Armenian political life, through the diaspora, through the Tsitsernakaberd commemorative complex (1967), through cultural production from Werfel to Egoyan, and through the unresolved question of restitution. It also continues to shape Turkish-Armenian and Turkish-Azerbaijani relations: the closure of the Turkish-Armenian land border in 1993 and the failure of the Zurich Protocols both turned, in part, on Ankara's refusal to deal with recognition as a separable diplomatic question.