Objective 3: Was it Genocide?

Recap Armenians lived in the region for thousands of years Ottoman Empire took over Armenia in the 1500s Ottoman empire was at the height of its power in the 16th + 17th centuries, but was crumbling around WWI Armenians + other Christians were considered a threat

Hamidian Massacres Some Armenians looked to Christian Russia to help free them from Turkish rule “Pogroms” or massacres started by Sultan Abdul Hammid 1896-98---200,000 killed by king’s forces 1909– massacre in Adana 30,000 killed

“The Armenian Question” Problem: Crumbling Empire Nationalism means: more Christians getting independence= Christians are a threat to the Empire Ottoman Empire losing land + power Armenians= largest group of Christians, largest threat Solution: Armenians are a threat, get rid of them

Genocide: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Precursors to Genocide: Second Class Citizenship British ethnographer William Ramsay, writing in the late 1890s after having visited the Ottoman Empire, described the conditions of the Armenians: Turkish rule ... meant unutterable contempt ... The Armenians (and Greeks) were dogs and pigs ... to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was sacred or safe from violence – capricious, unprovoked violence – to resist which by violence meant death.

Pattern: Stage 1 Remove any and all weapons: Send young men to war… put them in labor battalions (don’t give them weapons)

Stage 1: April 24, 1915: Arrest and kill any and all intellectual, political, religious, social, economic leaders (ie teachers, artists, poets, philosophers, bankers, church leaders, etc)

Execute/ kill all able bodied men

Pattern Stage 2 Deportation Armenians from across the empire were told they were being deported “for their own safety” to another part of the empire… The Syrian Desert

Armenian women and children were forced to march into the desert, escorted by armed soldiers

Pattern: Stage 3 Direct and indirect murder Along the way, any who resisted were killed, women were raped and killed, any who disobeyed were killed Indirectly, the marchers were denied food and water, drinking water out of a muddy puddle would be grounds for death

The Armenian Genocide Result: By the end of 1915, approximately 1,000,000 Armenians had died

What happened to everyone? Most men were killed

What happened to everyone? Most women, children, and the elderly died along the way of starvation and dehydration

What happened to everyone? Many of the attractive young women were taken as brides in Muslim harems and forced to convert to Islam Tattoos were a sort of property stamp

What happened to everyone? Some young children were adopted and raised as Muslims… they never knew they were Armenian

What happened to everyone? Some young children made it into orphanages sponsored by foreign humanitarian groups

What happened to everyone? Some escaped through Aleppo, Syria to other parts of the world

Numbers No one knows exactly how many people died There were about 2+ million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915… by 1923… only about 200,000 could be officially accounted for and mostly in Istanbul