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Instigation
Ottoman Turkey entered World War I on the side of the Axis, and the Allies of Britain and France encouraged active resistance within the empire, while the Russian armies began a campaign to invade Turkey from the East. Armenians were quick to join on the allied side, believing promises of independence made by the European powers. Threatened both within and without its borders, the Ottomans reacted with terrible resolve. Entire communities of Greeks and Armenians were eradicated, the allies retreated from Gallipoli, leaving Greeks to face slaughter, and in 1915, the Turkish government decided to once and for all “solve the Armenian question”.

The Central Committee of the Young Turk Party (the Committee for Union and Progress), led by Mehmed Talat Pasha, Ismail Enver Pasha and Ahmed Djemal Pasha, set up a special organization to supervise the extermination of the Armenians. These men were vehemently racist, using ideology articulated by Zia Gokalp, Dr. Mehmed Nazim and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir. A secret military directive ordered the arrest and prompt execution of Armenian community leaders, first in Istanbul and Ankara, then throughout the country.

A Terrible Resolve
All Armenians serving in the Ottoman army were separated from their divisions and killed. On April 24, 1915, Armenian political and intellectual leaders were rounded up and killed. Finally, the systematic elimination of the Armenian population began, as the government recruited the army, Kurds and the Turkish people to deport the entire Armenian population. Told they would be relocated, Armenian families were forced into death marches into the Syrian, Mesopotamian and Arabian deserts. The names Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor are branded in the memory of those who survived the horrors. Pictures and films taken by the Turkish army illustrate the horrible atrocities; villagers were stripped of their possessions before being forced into a march; many were branded or held down while soldiers attached horseshoes to their feet with steel spikes before being force-marched into the deserts. In Trabezon on the Black Sea Coast, authorities loaded Armenians on barges and sank them out at sea.

The killing was systematic and widespread throughout the country, occurring throughout Anatolia, Izmit, Bursa, Ankara, Konya, Adana, Diyarbarkir, Harput, Marash, Sepastia, Jebin Karahisar, Urfa, Trebizond, Erzerum, Bitlis and Van.

An example of the depth of the slaughter was the town of Bitlis, which had a population of 16,000 before the genocide began. The fortress held out against the Turkish army for months before they broke through. Andranik's forces (numbering 270 men in all) liberated the town, but whenthey did, they found only 500 Armenians remaining.

The American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. repeatedly appealed to the Western powers to intervene; describing in graphic horror the genocide that was occurring around him. In one cable he related, "Deportation of an excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports or eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion."

His successor, Abram Elkus, cabled the 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.'

But no intervention came.

Even the German ambassador Count von Wolff-Metternich, Turkey's ally in World War I, expressed amazement at the Turkish resolve, cabling in 1916, '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.'

During the “relocation" many were flogged to death, bayoneted, buried alive in pits, burned alive by the thousands, drowned in rivers, beheaded, raped or abducted into harems. Many simply died from thirst and heat exhaustion. An estimated one-and-a-half to two million people perished in the genocide, the first of the 20th century.

Despite absolute documentation of the mass murders, through films, lists, documents and eye-witnesses, universal condemnation by world powers, Turkey refuses to this day to admit it ever occurred. This despite the admission of its own government under Damad Ferit Pasha, who held war crimes trials and condemned to death the major leaders possible. Calling it a war action, or even a 'mass suicide' as a Turkish minister called it on television as recently as 1997, the Turkish government under Ataturk refused to acknowledge the event, and then set about a campaign of misinformation and denial. This has gone to absurd steps, with the Turkish government funding professorships in prominent universities to academics who write revisionist histories about the genocide.

The genocide and its repercussions are a haunting reminder of the human capacity to forget horror. As Hitler said when sending his Death Squads into Poland, "Go, kill without mercy… who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Like survivors of the Holocaust, and like countless generations before them, Armenians who escaped the genocide immigrated into other lands, so that more Armenians now live outside of the country then in. It is unknown how many (but there were many) Armenian children were adopted and converted to Islam during the genocide, and how many changed their identities to survive, eventually forgetting their culture over time. Some have suggested 100,000 or more. Large populations live in the both Americas, throughout Europe, the Middle East, the CIS, Asia and Australia. Approximately nine million Armenians populate the world, with barely 1.75 million in the Republic.

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