Armenian Genocide - Research Paper Example

?THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE The Armenian Genocide took place in the period before and after the First World War. It began around April 1915. It was planned and executed by the Ottoman government of theOttoman Empire. It was a systematic massacre of the Armenian population of the Empire. This continued until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. This was in 1923. The killing took place with varying degrees of intense. Before the start of the genocide, the Armenian population was around two million in the Ottoman state. However, in around 1918, there were only about one million Armenians left. Of these, hundreds of thousands had been rendered homeless. They were merely refugees in the state.Come 1923; the Anatolian Turkey’s Armenian population had perished1. Earlier on, the Turks were expanding towards the South West. They conquered a stretch of land. They became the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. The empire’s government was headed by a sultan who had absolute power vested upon him. The headquarters were in Istanbul (Constantinople). The rulers were Muslims besides being martial.On the other hand, the Armenians were Christians. They were the minority group. They lived as second class citizens under legal biasness. The Armenians had no right for security from the government. Both their lives and property were jeopardized. Heavy taxes were imposed on them being non-Muslims. They were also not allowed to take part in the governing of the state.The original Armenian territory was shared between the Russians and the Ottoman Empire. This only served to complicate the matter. The Ottoman Empire was one of the most powerful states in the sixteenth century. With the growing of its economy, its populations also prospered.This included its minority population. Come the nineteenth century, the state was experiencing an economic regress. All its conquered land in Europe and Africa had been lost. The Empire’s geographical size was reduced quite significantly2. There was a lot of pressure build up in the empire as a result of the economic decline. This weakened the interethnic bond which the empire enjoyed earlier on. The Islamic Turks became suspicious of any Armenian who eyed a post in the government of the Empire. No minority group in the country had ever shared power with the Muslim majority. In addition, rights movements in the Empire’s former colonies had caused the secession of several countries from the empire. This further intensified the unrest in the Empire.The Armenians formed political organizations which demanded for better representation in the governing of the Empire. They also demanded for the fortification of their security3. They wanted to be part of the police force and to enjoy a more stringent police protection. These were termed the Armenian Question. With the fear of affecting the traditional way of governing the Empire, the government was steadfast not to heed to the Armenian pressure. The earlier regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II had quelled the Armenian grumbles with a series of killings. More than three hundred thousand people were killed from the Armenian population. A lot of their property was also destroyed. They got scared and their spirit was dampened. Following the Empire’s crisis, a political group by the name the Young Turks forcefully took power. This was in 1908. A coup staged in 1913 by a faction ofthe Young Turks called the Committee of Union and Progress overthrew the government. Enver, Talaat and Jemal; the ministers of War, Interior and the marine respectively were its leaders. The CUP came up with the idea of forming an entirely Turkish state. This included expanding eastward towards other Turkic people, most of who were under the Russian Empire rule. In addition to that, the CUP worked towards creating a strong diplomatic relation with the Imperial Germany. With the break out of the First World War in 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined hands with Austria-Hungary and Germany to declare war on Russia, France and the Great Britain4. In the initial stages, the Ottoman Empire’s armies faced a couple of defeats. They redeemed their glory in 1918 by easily emerging victorious in the Caucasus. This war served as a scapegoat for the Ottoman military to wage war over the innocent Armenian population. They claimed that the Armenian killings were part of the collateral damage. They were executing a secret mass killing pact that had been skillfully planned. Their main aim was to get rid of all the Armenians in the country and the countries around. They wanted to come up with a new empire fully occupied and ruled with the Turks. In the pretext of conducting a resettlement program, the Ottoman Empire drove away the Armenian population that lived outside the war zone. This took place in 1915. Tens of thousands of Armenians of all ages and gender were driven in a convoy towards the Syrian Desert which was hundreds of miles away. The deportation was mainly a gimmick to kill the deportees. Most of them were made to march in the searing heat of the desert to their destinations.The deportees were brutally treated. The Armenians were handpicked and removed from the rest of the society which was quite fishy. There was almost no destruction of their property. Masses of people with Armenian descent were collected and deceitfully relocated to their death beds. This cover up process of relocation offered a clear platform for the Ottoman government to seize the Armenian’s property5. It was a calm and effortless process. Mass killings marred the deportation exercise. This clarified the fact that the CUP had a genocidal intent. Furthermore, the Armenian soldiers who were in the Ottoman forces were disarmed. They were forced into hard labor which led to their eventual death. Others were out rightly murdered. This saw to it that the strong proportion of the Armenian population was faced off. It then ushered in the deportation process which could now continue with little resistance. From time to time, the fleet transporting the Armenians was attacked along the way by specially constituted gangs of murderers who massacred the Armenians. The government of the Empire formed a special task force for persecution purposes which included a gang of butchers. Most of these were those who had been convicted and were released from prison for these purposes. The most vicious of the members of the CPU headed the killing unit.They executed the express orders from the central government. The on rout massacres claimed the lives of a good number of the Armenian population. The killings were carried out using swords which made it a bloody affair. It was brutal and merciless. The survivors went through psychological trauma, having been forced to witness their friends and relatives butchered to death. Younger women along with orphaned children were abducted and forced to assimilate into Islam and Turkish culture. They in turn lost their dignity and sense of identity. They were thrown into forced labor and had to assimilate to a new language6. There were absolutely no arrangements by the government for feeding the deportees. Apart from the expected exhaustion and fatigue, starvation took a toll on the deportees. They were intentionally denied food or water. This was meant to speed up the death process. Those who made it to the final destination faced more trouble. They were made to trek further south in the heat of the desert sun. They all died. The Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire was reduced to feeble individuals. It was not frequent for the deportation victims to resist being deported. In fact, there was only one occasion where a whole Armenian settlement survived death. These were the mountaineers of Dagh Musa. They climbed the high zones in their villages where they succeeded to protect themselves until vessels in the Mediterranean owned by the French spotted them. The siege was lifted in May 1915 following the withdrawal of the Russian Army.This forced the inhabitants to flee. They were followed and massacred with no mercy by the irregular Turkish forces. Advancing Russian forces saved the Armenian population that occupied the city of Van in the East. Other towns in the inland that attempted to oppose the Ottomans were brought down by artillery. Only heaps of rubble was left of such places. To a big extent, most of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide are living thanks to the intervention on a humanitarian basis headed by Ambassador Henry of the US. The Allied powers were against the Ottoman Empire’s genocide policy. They issued a direct warning to the government but it fell on deaf ears. It took a relentless effort from Morgenthau to finally get to publicize the atrocities of the genocide in the United States. A relief committee was formed in the US Congress. This solicited for funds which were used to feed the Armenians who were now starving to death. This committee was dubbed the Near East Relief. Thanks to it, tens of thousands of lives were salvaged. Following the end of the war, the committee then conducted a broader network exercise to rehabilitate the survivors7. Amenities such as health centers, schools, refugee camps, orphanages were set up. During the period after the war, about four hundred CUP officials who masterminded the genocide were arrested. There were a couple of military tribunals which were convened domestically. Various high profiled figures were charged with charges ranging from subversion of legal government, to unconstitutional seizure of power, to conspiring the facing off of the Armenian demography, to mass massacre, to execution of a war aggression, to deportation and persecution. Those convicted were sentenced to death. This never came to pass as they eluded the death penalty simply by fleeing to countries abroad. The duty of avenging the atrocities of the genocide was left unofficially in the hands of the numerous groups of survivors. These hunted and executed the CUP conspirators. The chief Architect of the Armenian Genocide, Taalal, was hunted all the way to Birlin Germany where he had gone to hide. He was mercilessly assassinated in 1921. The man who killed him was charged in a Birlin based court which later set him free8. It is unfortunate that majority of those implicated with crimes against humanity eluded justice. A Turkish nationalist movement headed by Kemal Mustafa absorbed most of these criminals. They in fact conducted further massacres and expulsion of the left Armenians around 1922. These surviving Armenians faced the staging strings of military campaigns against them by the nationalist movement. They were mainly the Russian Armenia who had gone back to Turkey in the southern town of Cilicia. In 1923, Turkey was declared a republic. It got international recognition. Following this, the so called Armenian question was simply swept away. All legal suites against the genocide perpetrators were dropped. Issues regarding resettlement and compensation were merely forgotten. A reliable estimate puts the death toll of the Armenian victims of the Armenian Genocide at around one and a half million. A combined effort of the Turkish Army, Ottoman Forces and paramilitary Army brought this to pass. Intentionally malicious atrocities were perpetrated to face off the Armenian population from the demographical structure of Turkey. These literally cleared off the face of the world the whole historic Armenia population in eastern Anatolia. The Armenians who were the occupants of their home highlands for over three thousand years were pushed into exile. They lived as refugees across the world. They are now settled in all the continents of the world in a total of about twenty four countries. The Republic of Turkey emerged victorious in its war against the Armenian population. It went ahead and dismissed the charge of genocide. They denied that there was any conspiracy or plan to get rid of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.By around 1920, the Armenians were condensed to about just ten percent of what was their original territory. Today the government of the republic of Turkey does not acknowledge the Armenian genocide. It denies that it ever took place. The government claims that the Armenians were only being moved from the war zone in the East. Contrary to these allegations, the genocide actually took place in a wider area than just the eastern war zone. There were massacres and forceful movement of the Armenian population in the south and central as well9. The British, French, German, Russian, and Australian governments have maintained their stand in condemning the genocide. They did it during the genocide and have maintained their stand. The United States was nonpartisan in its relations towards the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. It has however joined the other European powers in condemning the genocide. In conjunction with local protestant missionaries, the Armenian people played a huge role in saving the orphaned children and the death marches. Even with the republic of Turkey denying, there has never been any doubt that the genocide took place. There is a lot of evidence to support this. There is even a letter that Germany, an ally to the Ottoman Empire, received from its then ambassador confirming the genocide. It in fact said that the Empire was demanding for the death of the remaining few Armenians within its territory. Eye witnesses say that Adolf Hitler made reference to the Armenian genocide when he sent his soldiers out to go kill without showing remorse. He claimed that no one was remembering the Armenian genocide then, and that the same would become of the Jewish Holocaust. There is even a cable that was sent to the American Department of State in 1915 by its neutral Ambassador during the genocide. This further confirms the Armenian genocide. Reports from eye witnesses are quite shocking. There is an allegation that a race extermination campaign is ongoing. It is being conducted under the decoy of reprisal against rebellion. Peaceful Armenians are increasingly being deported and killed10. There is just one regime in the government of Turkey that acknowledged the Armenian genocide. This was the government under Damad Pasha Ferit. This government in fact tried and convicted the perpetrators of the genocide. Most of them served the death penalty. The court found them guilty as charged with the murder of the Armenians. The court pointed out that the murders were secretly planned and carried out. It acknowledged that there was a skim to wipe out the Armenian population from the Ottoman Empire. The public was not made aware and the government was not in a hurry to achieve this inhuman mission. The former president of the United States of America asked all Americans in a press release in April 24th of 1990 to join hands with the Armenians in the commemoration of the genocide. A similar press release was issued to the media by former president Bill Clinton 1994. In the same year, the lower house of the Russian Congress, The Duma, voted in favor of recognizing the genocide. On the floor of the Israeli Congress, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister officially condemned the genocide. He clarified this stand of the government in response to contrary claims by the Turkish Ambassador. This was expected considering the genocide of the Armenians was quite similar to that of the Jews11. The genocide caused a great deal of loss to the Armenian population of the world. It was a clear undisputable crime against humanity. The clearest loss that the Armenians faced was the loss of life. The most fundamental aspect of any human being is his livelihood. Any phenomenon that jeopardizes the livelihood of a human being is detrimental enough. The livelihood of the Armenians was not only jeopardized, it was actually taken away from them. They died in cold blood. They lost their right to life. This was a violation of not just the earthly legal statements, but also the religious outlines. The friends and family members of those who died were forced to live without their loved ones. Some were even forced to watch the butchering of their loved ones. This was traumatizing and changed their lives forever. They are forced to live with the picture of the suffering and death of their loved ones engraved in their minds. The Armenians also lost their property. They were forcefully made to relocate from their homes and in the process lost all their accrued property. Their lands and houses were taken up by opportunists. Some of them also lost their culture, religion and language. They were abducted and forced to assimilate into new ways of life. Armenians across the world commemorate the genocide every year. It is commemorated on the 24th of April of every year. A monument comprising of twelve slabs in a circle the center of whose has an eternal flame was constructed. People walk to the monument on the memorial day of the genocide to lay reeds and flowers around it. The Armenian genocide is a mark that shall never be erased from the history of the earth. References Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2009. Freedman, Jeri. The Armenian Genocide. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2008. Hovannisian, Richard G. The Armenian genocide: history, politics, ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Kevorkian, Raymond. The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. Connecticut: Cengage, 2008. Lewy, Guenter. The Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey: a disputed genocide. Michigan: University of Michigan, 2008. Read More