The Armenian people are one of the most ancient. He came from such a distant antiquity, when there were no French, English, Italians, Russians - there were not even Romans and Hellenes. And the Armenians already lived on their land. And it was only later, much later, that it turned out that many of the Armenians live on their own land. temporarily.
They wanted to solve the Armenian issue in the simplest way
It will take a long time to tell how the people who lived on the Armenian Highlands for more than three thousand years defended themselves in the fight against numerous conquerors. How the Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Parthians, Byzantines, Turkmens, Mongols, Seljuks, Turks attacked the Armenians. As more than once, a country with a dark green and brown landscape was stained with the blood of its inhabitants.
The Ottoman Turks began their conquest of Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula in the 14th century. In 1453, Constantinople was taken by the Turks and the Byzantine Empire, the Second Rome, ceased to exist. By the beginning of the 16th century, the whole of Asia Minor was already in the hands of the Turks, and, as the poet Valery Bryusov, who devoted much time to studying Armenian history and poetry, wrote, “a deep darkness of savagery and ignorance descended on it. Much less than the Seljuks and Mongols, the Ottoman Turks were inclined towards a cultural life; their calling was to crush and destroy, and the burden of such oppression had to be seen by all the peoples they conquered, including the Armenians.
Now let's fast forward to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1908, the Young Turks, who overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid II, came to power in Turkey. Very quickly they showed themselves to be extreme nationalists. And under Abdul Hamid, the Turks slaughtered Armenians: in the 1890s, 300 thousand peaceful defenseless people were killed, these beatings led to the fact that the leading powers of the world began to discuss Armenian question- The position of the Armenians in Turkey. But the new Turkish rulers decided to act much more decisively than the Sultan did.
The Young Turks, led by Enver Pasha, Talaat Bey, Jemal Pasha, were first obsessed with the ideas of pan-Islamism - the whole world is only for Muslims! - and then Pan-Turkism: the most ferocious nationalism imaginable. They imagined Great Turkey, stretching over a significant part of Europe and almost all of Asia. And the execution of these plans they wanted to start with the extermination of Christian Armenians. Like Sultan Abdul Hamid, they wanted to solve the Armenian issue in the simplest way, by exterminating the entire Armenian people.
The purpose of the deportation is robbery and destruction
At the beginning of 1915, a secret meeting of the Young Turk leaders took place. The speeches at this gathering that later became famous speak for themselves. One of the leaders of the Young Turks party (Ittihad ve Teraki party), Dr. Nazim Bey, said then: “The Armenian people must be destroyed at the root so that not a single Armenian remains on our land (in the Ottoman Empire. - Yu.Ch.) and the very name was forgotten. Now there is a war going on (World War I. - Yu.Ch.), there will be no such opportunity again. The intervention of the great powers and the noisy protests of the world press will go unnoticed, and if they find out, they will be presented with a fait accompli, and thus the question will be settled. This time, our actions must take on the character of the total extermination of the Armenians; it is necessary to destroy every single one ... I want the Turks and only the Turks to live and reign supreme on this land. Let all non-Turkish elements disappear, no matter what nationality and religion they belong to.”
Other participants of the meeting spoke in the same cannibal spirit. It was here that a plan was drawn up for the total extermination of the Armenians. The actions were cunning, methodical and merciless.
Initially, the government, under the pretext of mobilization into the army, called all young Armenians into service. But soon they were quickly disarmed, transferred to "worker battalions" and secretly shot in separate groups. On April 24, 1915, several hundred of the most prominent representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia were arrested and then treacherously destroyed in Istanbul: writers, artists, lawyers, representatives of the clergy.
So April 24 went down in the history of the Armenian people as a black day. Today, Armenians around the world every year remember Metz Yeghern- "The Greatest Atrocity" inflicted on their people. On this day, the Armenian Church (Armenians - Christians) prays for the victims of the genocide.
Having done away with the main active male part of the population in this way, the Young Turks proceeded to the massacre of women, children and the elderly. Everything went under the motto of the imaginary resettlement of Western Armenians in Mesopotamia (later the Nazis would use such tactics, destroying the Jews). As a distraction, the Turkish government officially declared that, based on military considerations, it was temporarily “isolating” the Armenians, deporting them deep into the empire. But it was a lie. And no one believed in it.
Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946), US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1913-1916), he later wrote a book about the Armenian Genocide, the first genocide of the 20th century: “The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; this is indeed a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities ordered these deportations, they were actually passing the death sentence on an entire nation, they understood this very well and, in conversations with me, did not make any special attempt to hide this fact.
And here are some figures showing what "deportation" meant. Of the 18,000 deported Erzurum Armenians, only 150 reached their destination. From the cities of Kharberd, Akn, Tokat and Sebastia, 19,000 were deported, of which only 350 people survived ...
He knocked horseshoes to the feet of his victims.
Armenians were simply and frankly killed. And, it's cruel. Having lost their human appearance, the Turks drowned their victims in the sea and rivers, suffocated them with smoke and burned them with fire in intentionally locked houses, threw them off cliffs, and killed them after unheard-of torture, mockery and atrocities.
The local authorities hired butchers who, for the killer's trade, treated the Armenians like cattle, and received 1 pound a day for their work. Women were tied with children and thrown down from a great height. People were thrown into deep wells or pits, buried.
Many foreign observers told in their books - references to them can be found, for example, in the collection "Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire", published in Yerevan in 1983 - about severe beatings with sticks, gouged out eyes, nails and hair, sawed off and chopped off noses, arms, legs and other parts of the body, about cauterization with a red-hot iron, hanging from the ceiling. Everything that the sophisticated fantasy of an inveterate killer can only imagine was used.
Henry Morgenthau in The Tragedy of the Armenian People. The story of Ambassador Morgenthau" recalled 1919: "I had a conversation with a responsible Turkish official who told me about the torture used. He made no secret of the fact that the government approved of them, and, like all Turks from the ruling class, he himself ardently approved of such treatment of a nation he hated. This official said that all these details of the torture were discussed at a night meeting at the Unity and Progress headquarters. Each new method of inflicting pain was regarded as an excellent discovery, and officials are constantly scratching their heads to invent some new torture. He told me that they even consulted the records of the Spanish Inquisition... and adopted everything they found there. He did not tell me who got the prize in this terrible competition, but the strong reputation that Dzhevdet Bey, Vali Vana, has won for himself in Armenia, gives him the right to excel in unprecedented meanness. Throughout the country, Cevdet was known as the “horseshoe from Bashkale”, since this expert in torture invented what, of course, was a masterpiece, the best of everything known before: it was he who knocked horseshoes to the feet of his Armenian victims.
After such massacres, some Turkish governors hurried to telegraph and report to the center that not a single Armenian was left in the districts they ruled. Under the guise of this, not only Armenians were slaughtered, but also people of other nationalities, for example, the Chaldeans, the Aisors, whose only fault was that they were not Turks and fell under a hot knife.
The French publicist Henri Barbie, who visited Western Armenia in 1916, noted in his travel notes: “Whoever passes through devastated Armenia now cannot help but shudder, these endless expanses of ruins and death say so much. There is not a single tree, not a single cliff, not a single patch of moss that would not be a witness to the beatings of a person who would not be defiled by the streams of spilled blood. There is not a single channel, river or river that would not carry hundreds, thousands of dead bodies to eternal oblivion. There is not a single abyss, not a single gorge that would not be open-air graves, in the depths of which open heaps of skeletons would not turn white, since almost nowhere the murderers gave themselves neither the time nor the trouble to bury their victims.
In these vast areas, once bustling with flourishing Armenian settlements, ruin and desolation reign today.”
“Decree on “Turkish Armenia””
Obviously, the Young Turks wanted to implement their policy of genocide of Armenians in Eastern Armenia and Transcaucasia. Fortunately, the defeat of Germany and its allied Turkey in 1918 forced them to leave Transcaucasia alone.
The total number of victims of the Armenian genocide? Under Sultan Abdul Hamid, 350 thousand people died, under the Young Turks - 1.5 million. 800 thousand Armenian refugees ended up in the Caucasus, the Arab East, Greece and other countries. If in 1870 about 3 million Armenians lived in Western Armenia and Turkey, then in 1918 - only 200 thousand.
Ambassador Henry Morgenthau was right. He wrote in fresh wake: “I am sure that in the whole history of mankind there are no such horrifying facts as this massacre. The great beatings and persecutions seen in the past seem almost insignificant compared to the suffering of the Armenian nation in 1915.”
Did the world know about these crimes? Yes, I knew. How did you react? The powers of the Entente, who considered the Armenians as their allies in the fight against the Turks, escaped with the publication of a statement (May 24, 1915), where they blamed the government of the Young Turks for the massacre of the Armenians. The US has not even made such a statement.
Maxim Gorky, Valery Bryusov, Yuri Veselovsky in Russia, Anatole France, Romain Rolland in France, James Bryce in England, Fridtjof Nansen in Norway, and the revolutionary Social Democrats (“Tesnyaks”) in Bulgaria (Turks) protested fervently in the press. had a habit of slaughtering Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and other Slavs in their possessions), Karl Liebknecht, Johannes Lepsius, Joseph Markwart, Armin Wegner - in Germany and many other progressive figures of that time in almost all countries of the world.
The young Soviet government in Russia also took the side of the Armenians. On December 29, 1917, it adopted the “Decree on “Turkish Armenia””. This document was signed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Stepan Shaumyan, the Extraordinary Commissioner for Caucasian Affairs, was instructed to provide all possible assistance to the Armenian refugees "forcibly evicted during the war by the Turkish authorities." On Lenin's instructions, then Soviet Russia sheltered tens of thousands of Armenians in the North Caucasus, in the Crimea and in other regions of the country.
More than 20 countries of the world recognized the fact of the Armenian genocide (including the Parliament of the Russian Federation voted for it). In the same line of accusers are: the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the UN Subcommittee on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, the UN War Crimes Commission, the World Council of Churches and many other authoritative organizations.
In a number of EU countries (Belgium and Switzerland, for example), criminal liability has been introduced for denying the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide. In October 2006, the French Parliament passed a bill that would make denial of the Armenian Genocide a criminal offense similar to Holocaust denial.
But modern Turkey, almost a century later, has not recognized either the fact of genocide or individual cases of massacres. The topic of the Armenian genocide is still in fact taboo in Turkey. Moreover, the Turks do not limit themselves to the denial of the genocide - they would like to erase the very memory of the Armenians in modern Turkey. So, for example, the words “Armenian Highlands” disappeared from Turkish geographical maps, they were replaced by the name “Eastern Anatolia”.
Behind the desire of the Turkish authorities to deny everything and everything, there are, first of all, fears that the world community may demand from Turkey compensation for material damage or even the return of territories to Armenia. After all, according to the UN Convention “On the non-applicability of the statute of limitations to war crimes and crimes against humanity” (dated November 26, 1968), genocide is a crime for which liability does not expire, no matter how much time has passed since the events occurred.
Original taken from mamlas in Why Armenians are not Jews
On this topic: Genocide: no statute of limitations... || History of the Armenians of Georgia || That's where the example of the Nazis took || Ordinary Armenian Genocide || I am Armenian, but I am against Nazism on the genocide
Holocaust rehearsal
Armenian question: how "dangerous microbes" were made from "potential rebels"
Genocide, concentration camps, experiments on people, the "national question" - all these horrors in the public mind are most often associated with the Second World War, although, in fact, their inventors were by no means the Nazis. Entire peoples - Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks - were brought to the brink of complete annihilation at the beginning of the 20th century, during the years of the Great War. And back in 1915, the leaders of England, France and Russia, in connection with these events, for the first time in history, voiced the wording "crimes against humanity." ©
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Deported Armenian women, children and old people. Ottoman Empire. 1915
Today's Armenia is only a small part of the territory where millions of Armenians lived for centuries. In 1915, they - mostly unarmed civilians - were expelled from their homes, deported to concentration camps in the desert, killed in every possible way. In most civilized countries of the world, this is officially recognized as genocide, and to this day those tragic events continue to poison the relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan with Armenia.
"Armenian Question"
The Armenian people formed on the territory of the South Caucasus and modern Eastern Turkey many centuries earlier than the Turkish people: already in the second century BC, the kingdom of Great Armenia existed on the shores of Lake Van, around the sacred Mount Ararat. In the best years of the possession of this "empire" covered almost the entire mountainous "triangle" between the Black, Caspian and Mediterranean seas.
In 301, Armenia became the first country to officially adopt Christianity as a state religion. In the future, for centuries, the Armenians defended themselves from the attacks of Muslims (Arabs, Persians and Turks). This led to the loss of a number of territories, a decrease in the number of people, and their dispersion throughout the world. By the beginning of the new time, only a small part of Armenia with the city of Erivan (Yerevan) became part of the Russian Empire, where the Armenians found protection and patronage. Most of the Armenians fell under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and Muslims began to actively settle on their lands - Turks, Kurds, refugees from the North Caucasus.
Not being Muslims, the Armenians, like the Balkan peoples, were considered representatives of the "second-class" community - "dhimmi". Until 1908, they were forbidden to carry weapons, they had to pay higher taxes, often they could not even live in houses higher than one floor, build new churches without the permission of the authorities, and so on.
But, as often happens, the persecution of Eastern Christians only increased the disclosure of the talents of an entrepreneur, trader, artisan, capable of working in the most difficult conditions. By the 20th century, an impressive stratum of the Armenian intelligentsia had also formed, and the first national parties and public organizations began to emerge. Literacy rates among Armenians and other Christians in the Ottoman Empire were higher than among Muslims.
70% of Armenians, however, remained simple peasants, but among the Muslim population there was a stereotype of a cunning and rich Armenian, a “merchant from the market”, whose success a simple Turk envied. The situation was somewhat reminiscent of the position of the Jews in Europe, their discrimination and, as a result, the emergence of a powerful stratum of wealthy Jews due to hard “natural selection”, who do not fold in the most severe conditions. However, in the case of the Armenians, the situation was further aggravated by the presence in Turkey of a huge number of impoverished Muslim refugees from the North Caucasus, from the Crimea and from the Balkans (the so-called Muhajirs).
The scale of this phenomenon is evidenced by the fact that by the time of the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, refugees and their descendants accounted for up to 20% of the population, and the entire era from the 1870s to 1913 is known in Turkish historical memory as "sekyumu" - "disaster" . The last wave of Turks expelled by the Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks swept just on the eve of the First World War - they were refugees from the Balkan wars. Often they transferred the hatred from the European Christians who expelled them to the Christians of the Ottoman Empire. They were ready, roughly speaking, to “revenge”, robbing and killing defenseless Armenians, although in the Balkan wars up to 8 thousand Armenian soldiers fought against the Bulgarians and Serbs in the ranks of the Turkish army.
First pogroms
The first waves of Armenian pogroms swept through the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. It was the so-called Erzurum massacre of 1895, massacres in Istanbul, Van, Sasun and other cities. According to the American researcher Robert Andersen, already at that time at least 60,000 Christians were killed, who were “pressed like grapes,” which even provoked protests from the ambassadors of European powers. The German Lutheran missionary Johannes Lepsius collected evidence of the extermination of at least 88,243 Armenians in 1894-96 alone and the robbery of more than half a million. In response, the Armenian Dashnaks, driven to despair, staged a terrorist attack - on August 26, 1896, they seized hostages in a bank building in Istanbul and, threatening with an explosion, demanded that the Turkish government implement reforms.
But the coming to power of the Young Turks, who announced a course of reform, did not improve the situation. In 1907, a new wave of Armenian pogroms swept through the cities of the Mediterranean. Thousands of people died again. In addition, it was the Young Turks who encouraged the resettlement of refugees from the Balkans to the Armenian lands (about 400 thousand people were settled there), banned public organizations with “non-Turkish” goals.
In response, the Armenian political parties turned to the European powers for support, and with their active support (primarily from Russia), a plan was imposed on the weakened Ottoman Empire, which finally provided for the creation of two autonomies from six Armenian regions and the city of Trebizond. They, in agreement with the Ottomans, were to be controlled by representatives of the European powers. In Constantinople, of course, they perceived this option for resolving the “Armenian issue” as a national humiliation, which later played a role in the decision to enter the war on the side of Germany.
Potential rebels
In the First World War, all the warring countries actively used (or at least sought to use) "potentially rebellious" ethnic communities in the territory of the enemy - national minorities, one way or another suffering from discrimination and oppression. The Germans supported the British Irish in their struggle for their rights, the British supported the Arabs, the Austro-Hungarians supported the Ukrainians, and so on. Well, the Russian Empire actively supported the Armenians, for whom, compared to the Turks, it, as a predominantly Christian country, was at least the "lesser of the evils." With the participation and assistance of Russia, at the end of 1914, an allied Armenian militia was formed, commanded by the legendary General Andranik Ozanyan.
The Armenian battalions provided great assistance to the Russians in the defense of northwestern Persia, where the Turks also invaded later during the battles on the Caucasian front. Through them, weapons and groups of saboteurs were supplied to the Ottoman rear, where they managed to carry out, for example, sabotage on telegraph lines near Van, attacks on Turkish units in Bitlis.
Also in December 1914 - January 1915, the Sarykamysh battle took place on the border of the Russian and Ottoman empires, in which the Turks suffered a crushing defeat, losing 78 thousand soldiers killed, wounded and frostbite out of 80 thousand participating in the battles. Russian troops captured the border fortress of Bayazet, expelled the Turks from Persia and advanced deep into Turkish territory with the help of Armenians from the border areas, which caused the leaders of the Young Turk party Ittihat another flurry of reasoning "about the betrayal of the Armenians in general."
Enver Pasha
Subsequently, critics of the concept of genocide in relation to the entire Armenian people will cite these arguments as the main ones: the Armenians were not even “potential”, but accomplished rebels, they were “the first to start”, they killed Muslims. However, in the winter of 1914-1915, most Armenians still lived a peaceful life, many men were even drafted into the Turkish army and honestly served their country, as it seemed to them. The leader of the Young Turks, Enver Pasha, even publicly thanked the Armenians for their loyalty during the Sarykamysh operation, sending a letter to the archbishop of Konya province.
However, the moment of enlightenment was brief. The "first sign" of a new round of repressions was the disarmament in February 1915 of about 100 thousand soldiers of Armenian (and at the same time - Assyrian and Greek origin) and their transfer to rear work. Many Armenian historians claim that some of the conscripts were immediately killed. The confiscation of weapons from the civilian Armenian population began, which alerted (and, as it soon turned out, rightly so) people: many Armenians began to hide pistols and rifles.
US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau subsequently called this disarmament "a prelude to the annihilation of the Armenians". In some cities, the Turkish authorities took hundreds of hostages until the Armenians surrendered their "arsenals". Collected weapons were often photographed and sent to Istanbul as evidence of "betrayal". This became a pretext for further whipping up hysteria.
In Armenia, April 24 is celebrated as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide. This is a non-working day: every year hundreds of thousands of people climb the hill to the memorial complex in memory of the victims of the First World War, lay flowers at the eternal flame. The memorial itself was built back in Soviet times, in the 1960s, which was an exception to all the rules: in the USSR, they did not like to remember the First World War.
The date of April 24 was not chosen by chance: it was on this day in 1915 that mass arrests of representatives of the Armenian elite took place in Istanbul. In total, more than 5.5 thousand people were captured, including 235 of the most famous and respected people - businessmen, journalists, scientists, those whose voice could be heard in the world, who could lead the resistance.
A month later, on May 26, the Minister of the Interior of the Ottoman Empire, Talaat Pasha, presented a whole "Law on Deportation" dedicated to "the fight against those who oppose the government." Four days later, he was approved by the Majlis (parliament). Although the Armenians were not mentioned there, it was clear that the law was written primarily "for their souls", as well as for the Assyrians, Pontic Greeks and other "infidels". According to researcher Fuat Dündar, Talaat stated that "the deportation was carried out in order to finally resolve the Armenian issue." So, even in the term itself, later used by the Nazis, there is nothing new.
Biological justification was used as one of the justifications for the deportation and murder of Armenians. Some Ottoman chauvinists called them "dangerous microbes". The main propagandist of this policy was the governor of the district and the city of Diyarbakir, Dr. Mehmet Reshid, who "had fun", among other things, by nailing horseshoes to the feet of the deportees. US Ambassador Morgenthau, in a telegram to the State Department dated July 16, 1915, described the extermination of the Armenians as a "campaign of racial extermination."
Placed on the Armenians and medical experiments. By order of another "doctor" - 3rd Army doctor Teftik Salim - to develop a vaccine against typhus, experiments were carried out in Erzincan hospital on disarmed soldiers, most of whom eventually died. The experiments were carried out directly by the professor of the medical school of Istanbul, Hamdi Suat, who injected blood infected with typhus into experimental subjects. By the way, he was later recognized as the founder of Turkish bacteriology. After the end of the war, during the consideration of the case by the Special Military Tribunal, he said that he "worked only with convicted criminals."
In the phase of "ethnic cleansing"
But even simple deportation was not limited to sending people in railway cattle cars to barbed-wire concentration camps in the desert (the most famous is Deir ez-Zor in the east of modern Syria), where most died of hunger, unsanitary conditions or thirst. Often it was accompanied by massacres, which took on the most disgusting character in the Black Sea city of Trebizond.
Armenian refugee camp
Official Said Ahmed described what was happening in an interview with British diplomat Mark Sykes: “At first, the Ottoman officials took away the children, some of them the American consul tried to save. The Muslims of Trebizond were warned of the death penalty for defending the Armenians. Then they separated the adult men, declaring that they should take part in the work. Women and children were sent towards Mosul, after which the men were shot at pre-dug ditches. Women and children were attacked by “chettes” (released from prisons in exchange for the cooperation of criminals - RP), who robbed and raped women, and then killed them. The military had strict orders not to interfere with the Chettes.
As a result of the investigation conducted by the 1919 tribunal, the facts of the poisoning of Armenian children (right in schools) and pregnant women by the head of the Trebizond Health Department, Ali Seib, also became known. Mobile steam baths were also used, in which children were killed with superheated steam.
The killings were accompanied by robberies. According to the merchant Mehmet Ali, the governor of Trebizond Jemal Azmi and Ali Seib embezzled jewelry worth from 300,000 to 400,000 Turkish gold pounds. The American consul in Trebizond reported seeing daily "a crowd of Turkish women and children following the police like vultures and seizing everything they could carry", and the house of Commissioner Ittihat in Trebizond was full of gold.
Beautiful girls were publicly raped and then killed, including by local officials. In 1919, at the tribunal, the chief of police of Trebizond said that he was sending young Armenian women to Istanbul as a gift from the governor to the leaders of the Young Turks. Armenian women and children from another Black Sea city, Ordu, were loaded onto barges and then taken out to sea and thrown overboard.
Historian Ruben Adalyan in his book “Armenian Genocide” cites the memories of miraculously survived Takuhi Levonyan: “During the march we had no water and food. We walked for 15 days. There were no shoes left on his feet. Finally we reached Tigranakert. There we washed by the water, soaked some dry bread and ate. There was a rumor that the governor wanted a very beautiful 12-year-old girl... At night they came with lanterns and were looking for one. They found it, took it away from the sobbing mother and said that they would return it later. They later returned the child, almost dead, in a terrible state. The mother sobbed loudly, and of course the child, unable to bear what had happened, died. The women could not comfort her. Finally the women dug a hole and buried the girl. There was a big wall and my mother wrote on it, "Here Shushan is buried."
Public executions of Armenians on the streets of Constantinople
An important role in the persecution of Armenians was played by the organization "Teshkilat-i-Mahusa" (translated from Turkish - Special Organization) with headquarters in Erzurum, subordinate to Turkish counterintelligence and equipped with tens of thousands of "chettes". The leader of the organization was a prominent Young Turk, Behaeddin Shakir. At the end of April 1915, he organized a rally in Erzurum at which the Armenians were accused of betrayal. After that, attacks began on the Armenians of the Erzurum region, and in mid-May a massacre took place in the city of Hynys, where 19,000 people were killed. The villagers from the outskirts of Erzurum were deported to the city, where some of them died of starvation, and some were thrown into the river in the Kemakh gorge. Only 100 "useful Armenians" were left in Erzurum, who worked at important military installations.
According to the American historian Richard Hovhannisian, who grew up in a family of Armenian refugees, 15,000 Armenians were also killed in the city of Bitlis, not far from Van. Most were thrown into a mountain river, and their houses were handed over to Turkish refugees from the Balkans. In the vicinity of Mush, Armenian women and children were burned alive in boarded-up sheds.
The extermination of the population was accompanied by a campaign to destroy the cultural heritage. Architectural monuments and churches were blown up, cemeteries were plowed up for fields, the Armenian quarters of the cities were occupied by the Muslim population and renamed.
Resistance
On April 27, 1915, the Armenian Catholicos called on the United States and Italy, which were still neutral in the war, to intervene and prevent the killings. The allied powers of the Entente countries publicly condemned the massacre, but in the conditions of war they could do little to alleviate their plight. In a joint Declaration dated May 24, 1915, Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire spoke for the first time about "crimes against humanity": "In view of the new crimes, the governments of the Allied States publicly declare to the Sublime Porte that all members of the Ottoman government are personally responsible for these crimes." Fundraising began in Europe and the United States to help Armenian refugees.
Even among the Turks themselves, there were those who opposed the repressions against the Armenian population. The courage of these people should be especially noted, because in the conditions of war for such a position one could easily pay with one's life. Dr. Jemal Haidar, who witnessed human medical experiments, described them as "barbaric" and "scientific crimes" in an open letter to the Minister of the Interior. Haidar was supported by the chief physician of the Erzincan Red Crescent Hospital, Dr. Salaheddin.
There are cases of saving Armenian children by Turkish families, as well as speeches by officials who refused to take part in the killings. Thus, the head of the city of Aleppo, Jalal Bey, spoke out against the deportation of Armenians, saying that “Armenians are defending themselves” and that “the right to live is the natural right of any person.” In June 1915, he was removed from office and replaced with a more "nationally oriented" official.
The governor of Adrianople, Hadji Adil Bey, and even the first head of the Deir ez-Zor concentration camp, Ali Sued Bey, tried to alleviate the fate of the Armenians as best they could (he was also soon dismissed from his post). But the most firm was the position of the governor of the city of Smyrna (now Izmir) Rahmi Bey, who managed to defend the right of Armenians and Greeks to live in their native city. He provided convincing calculations for official Istanbul that the expulsion of Christians would deal a mortal blow to trade, and therefore most of the local Armenians lived relatively quietly until the end of the war. True, about 200 thousand citizens died already in 1922, during another Greco-Turkish war. Only a few managed to escape, among whom, by the way, was the future Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis.
Protested against the inhuman actions of the allies and the German ambassador in Constantinople, Count von Wolf-Metternich. The German doctor Armin Wegner has collected a large photo archive - his photograph of an Armenian woman walking under a Turkish escort has become one of the symbols of 1915. Martin Nipage, a German teacher at a technical school in Aleppo, wrote a whole book about the barbaric massacres of Armenians. Missionary Johannes Lepsius managed to visit Constantinople again, but his requests to the leader of the Young Turks Enver Pasha for the protection of the Armenians remained unanswered. Upon his return to Germany, Lepsius tried without much success to draw public attention to the situation in the allied country for the Germans. Numerous facts of the murders of Armenians were described in his book by Rafael de Nogales Mendez, a Venezuelan officer who served in the Ottoman army.
But first of all, of course, the Armenians themselves resisted. After the start of the deportations, uprisings broke out throughout the country. From April 19 to May 16, the inhabitants of the city of Van heroically held the line, with only 1,300 "fighters" - partly from among the elderly, women and children. Having lost hundreds of soldiers and failed to take the city, the Turks ravaged the surrounding Armenian villages, killing thousands of civilians. But up to 70,000 Armenians hiding in Van eventually escaped - they waited for the advancing Russian army.
The second case of a successful rescue was the defense of Mount Musa Dagh by the Mediterranean Armenians from July 21 to September 12, 1915. 600 militia held back the onslaught of several thousand soldiers for almost two months. On September 12, posters hung on trees calling for help were noticed by an Allied cruiser. Soon, an Anglo-French squadron approached the foot of the mountain overlooking the sea, which evacuated more than 4,000 Armenians. Almost all other Armenian uprisings - in Sasun, Mush, Urfa and other cities of Turkey - ended in their suppression and the death of the defenders.
Soghomon Tehlirian
After the war, at the congress of the Armenian party "Dashnaktsutyun" it was decided to start a "retribution operation" - the elimination of war criminals. The operation was named after the ancient Greek goddess Nemesis. Most of the performers were Armenians who had escaped the genocide and were determined to avenge the death of their loved ones.
The most famous victim of the operation was the former Minister of the Interior and Grand Vizier (Chief Minister) Talaat Pasha. Together with other leaders of the Young Turks, he fled to Germany in 1918, went into hiding, but was tracked down and shot dead in March 1921. The German court acquitted his murderer, Soghomon Tehlirian, with the wording "temporary loss of mind due to the suffering experienced," especially since Talaat Pasha had already been sentenced to death in his homeland by a military tribunal. The Armenians also found and destroyed several more ideologists of the massacres, including the already mentioned governor of Trebizond Jemal Azmi, the leader of the Young Turks Behaeddin Shakir and another former grand vizier Said Halim Pasha.
Genocide controversy
Is it possible to call what happened in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 a genocide, there is still no consensus in the world, mainly because of the position of Turkey itself. American-Israeli sociologist, one of the leading experts on the history of genocides, founder and executive director of the Holocaust and Genocide Institute, Israel Czerny, noted that “the Armenian genocide is remarkable because in the bloody 20th century it was an early example of mass genocide, which many recognize as rehearsal of the Holocaust.
One of the most controversial issues is the number of victims - an accurate count of the number of dead is impossible, because the very statistics on the number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War was very crafty, deliberately distorted. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, which quotes the calculations of the famous historian Arnold Toynbee, about 600 thousand Armenians died in 1915, and the American political scientist and historian Rudolf Rummel speaks of 2,102,000 Armenians (of which, however, 258 thousand lived in the territories of today's Iran, Georgia and Armenia).
Modern Türkiye, as well as Azerbaijan at the state level, do not recognize what happened as genocide. They believe that the death of the Armenians was due to negligence from hunger and disease during the expulsion from the combat zone, was a consequence of the civil war, which also killed many Turks themselves.
The founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, said in 1919: “Whatever happens to non-Muslims in our country, this is a consequence of their barbaric adherence to the policy of separatism, when they became an instrument of external intrigue and abused their rights. These events are far from those forms of oppression that were committed without any justification in the countries of Europe.”
Already in 1994, the doctrine of denial was formulated by the then Prime Minister of Turkey, Tansu Çiller: “It is not true that the Turkish authorities do not want to state their position on the so-called “Armenian issue.” Our position is very clear. Today it is obvious that in the light of historical facts the Armenian claims are unfounded and illusory. In any case, the Armenians were not subjected to genocide.”
The current President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, noted: “We did not commit this crime, we have nothing to apologize for. Who is guilty, he can apologize. However, the Turkish Republic, the Turkish nation has no such problems.” True, on April 23, 2014, speaking in parliament, Erdogan for the first time expressed condolences to the descendants of Armenians who "died during the events of the early twentieth century."
Many international organizations, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and more than 20 countries of the world (including the statement of the Russian State Duma of 1995 “On the condemnation of the genocide of the Armenian people”), about 10 countries at the regional level (for example, 43 from the 50 US states).
In some countries (France, Switzerland), the denial of the Armenian Genocide is considered a criminal offense, several people have already been convicted. As a form of genocide, only Sweden, the Australian state of New South Wales and the American state of New York have so far recognized the killings of Assyrians.
Turkey spends heavily on public relations campaigns and donates to universities whose professors are in a position similar to Turkey's. Critical discussion of the "Kemalist" version of history is considered a crime in Turkey, which makes it difficult to debate in society, although in recent years, intellectuals, the press and civil society have begun to discuss the "Armenian issue". This causes a sharp rejection of the nationalists and the authorities - "dissenting" intellectuals who are trying to apologize to the Armenians are poisoned by all means.
The most famous victims are the Turkish writer and Nobel Prize winner in literature, Orhan Pamuk, forced to live abroad, and the journalist Hrant Dink, a newspaper editor for Turkey's now very small Armenian community, who was killed in 2007 by a Turkish nationalist. His funeral in Istanbul turned into a demonstration where tens of thousands of Turks marched with placards "We are all Armenians, we are all Grants."
§ 1. The beginning of the First World War. The course of hostilities on the Caucasian front
On August 1, 1914, the First World War began. The war was fought between coalitions: the Entente (England, France, Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey) for the redistribution of spheres of influence in the world. Most of the states of the world took part in the war voluntarily or involuntarily, which is why the war got its name.
During the war, Ottoman Turkey sought to implement the program of "Pankturkism" - to annex the territories inhabited by the Turkic peoples, including the Transcaucasus, the southern regions of Russia and Central Asia to Altai. In turn, Russia sought to annex the territory of Western Armenia, seize the Bosphorus and Dardanelles and go to the Mediterranean Sea. Fighting between the two coalitions unfolded on many fronts in Europe, Asia and Africa.
On the Caucasian front, the Turks concentrated an army of 300,000 headed by Minister of War Enver. In October 1914, Turkish troops launched an offensive and managed to capture some border territories, and also invaded the western regions of Iran. During the winter months, during the battles near Sarykamysh, Russian troops defeated the superior Turkish forces and drove them out of Iran. During 1915 hostilities continued with varying success. At the beginning of 1916, Russian troops launched a large-scale offensive and, having defeated the enemy, captured Bayazet, Mush, Alashkert, the large city of Erzerum and the important port on the Black Sea coast of Trabizon. During 1917 active hostilities did not take place on the Caucasian front. The demoralized Turkish troops did not try to launch a new offensive, and the February and October revolutions of 1917 in Russia and the change of government did not give the Russian command the opportunity to develop the offensive. On December 5, 1917, a truce was concluded between the Russian and Turkish command.
§ 2. Armenian volunteer movement. Armenian battalions
The Armenian people took an active part in the First World War on the side of the Entente countries. In Russia, about 200,000 Armenians were drafted into the army. More than 50,000 Armenians fought in the armies of other countries. Since the aggressive plans of tsarism coincided with the desire of the Armenian people to liberate the territories of Western Armenia from the Turkish yoke, the Armenian political parties carried out active propaganda to organize volunteer detachments with a total number of about 10 thousand people.
The first detachment was commanded by the outstanding leader of the liberation movement, the national hero Andranik Ozanyan, who later received the rank of general of the Russian army. The commanders of other detachments were Dro, Amazasp, Keri, Vardan, Arshak Dzhanpoladyan, Hovsep Argutyan and others. Subsequently, the commander of the VI detachment was Hayk Bzhshkyan - Guy, later known as the commander of the Red Army. Armenians were enrolled in the detachments - volunteers from various regions of Russia and even from other countries. Armenian detachments showed courage and participated in all major battles for the liberation of Western Armenia.
The tsarist government at first encouraged the volunteer movement of the Armenians in every possible way, until the defeat of the Turkish armies became obvious. Fearing that the Armenian detachments could serve as the basis for the national army, the command of the Caucasian Front in the summer of 1916 reorganized the volunteer detachments into the 5th rifle battalion of the Russian army.
§ 3. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire
In 1915-1918. The Young Turk government of Turkey planned and carried out the genocide of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. As a result of the forced eviction of Armenians from their historical homeland and massacres, 1.5 million people died.
Back in 1911 in Thessaloniki, at a secret meeting of the Young Turk party, it was decided to turkish all subjects of the Muslim faith, and to destroy all Christians. With the outbreak of the First World War, the Young Turk government decided to take advantage of the favorable international situation and implement its long-planned plans.
The genocide was carried out according to a certain plan. Firstly, they drafted men liable for military service to deprive the Armenian population of the possibility of resistance. They were used as work units and gradually destroyed. Secondly, the Armenian intelligentsia, which could organize and lead the resistance of the Armenian population, was destroyed. In March-April 1915, more than 600 people were arrested: MPs Onik Vramyan and Grigor Zohrap, writers Varuzhan, Siamanto, Ruben Sevak, composer and musicologist Komitas. On the way to the place of exile, they were subjected to insults and humiliation. Many of them died on the way, the survivors were subsequently brutally murdered. On April 24, 1915, the Young Turk authorities executed 20 Armenian political prisoners. The famous composer Komitas, who witnessed these atrocities, lost his mind.
After that, the Young Turk authorities began to evict and destroy the already defenseless children, the elderly and women. All Armenian property was looted. On the way to the place of exile, the Armenians were subjected to new atrocities: the weakened were killed, women were raped or kidnapped for harems, children died of hunger and thirst. Of the total number of exiled Armenians, barely a tenth made it to the place of exile - the desert of Der-el-Zor in Mesopotamia. Of the 2.5 million Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, 1.5 million were destroyed, and the rest dispersed throughout the world.
Part of the Armenian population was able to escape thanks to the help of Russian troops and, leaving everything, fled from their homes to the Russian Empire. Part of the Armenian refugees found salvation in the Arab countries, in Iran and in other countries. Many of them, after the defeat of the Turkish troops, returned to their homeland, but were subjected to new atrocities and destruction. About 200 thousand Armenians were forcibly Turkified. Many thousands of Armenian orphans have been rescued by American charitable and missionary organizations active in the Middle East.
After the defeat in the war and the flight of the Young Turk leaders, the new government of Ottoman Turkey in 1920 conducted an investigation into the crimes of the former government. For planning and carrying out the Armenian genocide, the military tribunal in Constantinople found guilty and sentenced in absentia to death Thaleat (Prime Minister), Enver (Minister of War), Jemal (Minister of the Interior) and Behaeddin Shakir (Secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Turks). Their sentence was carried out by the Armenian avengers.
After the defeat in the war, the Young Turk leaders fled Turkey and found shelter in Germany and other countries. But they did not succeed in escaping revenge.
On March 15, 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian shot Taleat in Berlin. The German court, having considered the case, acquitted Tehlirian.
Petros Ter-Petrosyan and Artashes Gevorkyan killed Dzhemal in Tiflis on July 25, 1922.
Arshavir Shikaryan and Aram Yerkanyan shot Bekhaeddin Shakir on April 17, 1922 in Berlin.
Enver was killed in August 1922 in Central Asia.
§ 4. Heroic self-defense of the Armenian population
During the genocide of 1915, the Armenian population of some regions, through heroic self-defense, was able to escape or died with honor - with weapons in their hands.
For more than a month, the inhabitants of the city of Van and nearby villages heroically defended themselves against regular Turkish troops. Self-defense was led by Armenak Yekaryan, Aram Manukyan, Panos Terlemazyan and others. All Armenian political parties acted in concert. They were saved from final death by the offensive of the Russian army on Van in May 1915. Due to the forced retreat of the Russian troops, 200 thousand residents of the Van vilayet were also forced to leave their homeland together with the Russian troops in order to escape from a new massacre.
For almost a year, the highlanders of Sasun defended themselves against regular Turkish troops. The ring of siege was gradually shrinking, and most of the population was slaughtered. The entry of the Russian army into Mush in February 1916 saved the inhabitants of Sasun from final destruction. About a tenth of the 50,000 population of Sasun escaped, and they were forced to leave their homeland and move within the Russian Empire.
The Armenian population of the town of Shapin - Garaisar, having received an order to resettle, took up arms and fortified itself in the nearby dilapidated fortress. For 27 days, the Armenians fought off the attacks of regular Turkish forces. When food and ammunition were already running out, it was decided to try to break out of the encirclement. About a thousand people were saved. The rest were brutally killed.
An example of heroic self-defense was shown by the defenders of Musa-Ler. Having received an order to evict, the 5,000-strong Armenian population of seven villages in the Suetia region (on the Mediterranean coast, near Antioch) decided to defend themselves and fortified themselves on Mount Musa. Self-defense was led by Tigran Andreasyan and others. For a month and a half there were unequal battles with Turkish troops armed with artillery. From the French cruiser "Guichen" they noticed the call of Armenians for help, and on September 10, 1915, the surviving 4,058 Armenians were transported to Egypt on French and British ships. The history of this heroic self-defense is described in the novel by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel "40 Days of Musa Dagh".
The last focus of heroism was the self-defense of the population of the Armenian quarter of the city of Edessia, which lasted from September 29 to November 15, 1915. All the men died with weapons in their hands, and the Young Turkish authorities exiled the surviving 15 thousand women and children to the deserts of Mesopotamia.
Foreigners who witnessed the genocide of 1915-1916 condemned this crime and left descriptions of the atrocities committed against the Armenian population by the Young Turk authorities. They also refuted the false accusations of the Turkish authorities about the alleged uprising of the Armenians. Johann Lepsius, Anatole France, Henry Morgenthau, Maxim Gorky, Valery Bryusov and many others raised their voices against the first genocide in the history of the 20th century and the ongoing atrocities. Today, the parliaments of many countries have already recognized and condemned the genocide of the Armenian people committed by the Young Turks.
§ 5. Consequences of genocide
During the Genocide of 1915, the Armenian population in their historical homeland was barbarously exterminated. Responsibility for the Armenian Genocide lies with the leaders of the Young Turk party. Turkish Prime Minister Taleat subsequently declared with cynicism that the "Armenian Question" no longer exists, since there are no more Armenians, and that he did more in three months to resolve the "Armenian Question" than Sultan Abdul-Hamid did in 30 years of his reign. .
The Kurdish tribes also actively participated in the extermination of the Armenian population, trying to seize the Armenian territories and plunder the property of the Armenians. The German government and command are also responsible for the Armenian genocide. Many German officers commanded Turkish units that took part in the genocide. The Entente powers are also to blame for what happened. They did nothing to stop the mass extermination of the Armenian population by the Young Turkish authorities.
During the genocide, more than 2 thousand Armenian villages, the same number of churches and monasteries, Armenian quarters of more than 60 cities were destroyed. The Young Turk government appropriated the valuables and deposits plundered from the Armenian population.
After the Genocide of 1915, there was practically no Armenian population left in Western Armenia.
§ 6. Culture of Armenia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries
Prior to the 1915 Genocide, Armenian culture experienced a significant upsurge. This was due to the rise of the liberation movement, the awakening of national self-consciousness, the development of capitalist relations both in Armenia itself and in those countries where a significant number of the Armenian population lived compactly. The division of Armenia into two parts - Western and Eastern - was reflected in the development of two independent trends in Armenian culture: Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian. The major centers of Armenian culture were Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tiflis, Baku, Constantinople, Izmir, Venice, Paris and other cities, where a significant part of the Armenian intelligentsia was concentrated.
A huge contribution to the development of Armenian culture was made by Armenian educational institutions. In Eastern Armenia, in the urban centers of Transcaucasia and the North Caucasus, and in some cities of Russia (Rostov-on-Don, Astrakhan), at the beginning of the 20th century, there were about 300 Armenian schools, male and female gymnasiums. In some rural areas there were elementary schools where they taught to read, write and count, as well as the Russian language.
About 400 Armenian schools of various levels operated in the cities of Western Armenia and large cities of the Ottoman Empire. Armenian schools did not receive any state subsidies either in the Russian Empire, or even more so in Ottoman Turkey. These schools existed thanks to the financial support of the Armenian Apostolic Church, various public organizations and individual patrons. The most famous among the Armenian educational institutions were the Nersisyan school in Tiflis, the Gevorkyan theological seminary in Etchmiadzin, the Murad-Rafaelyan school in Venice and the Lazarev Institute in Moscow.
The development of education largely contributed to the further development of Armenian periodicals. At the beginning of the 20th century, about 300 Armenian newspapers and magazines of various political trends were published. Some of them were published by the Armenian national parties, such as: "Droshak", "Hnchak", "Proletariat", etc. In addition, newspapers and magazines of socio-political and cultural direction were published.
Constantinople and Tiflis became the main centers of Armenian periodicals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most popular were the Mshak newspaper published in Tiflis (edited by Gr. Artsruni), the Murch magazine (edited by Av. Araskhanyants), in Constantinople - the Megu newspaper (edited by Harutyun Svachyan), the Masis newspaper . Karapet Utujyan). Stepanos Nazaryants published the Hyusisapail (Northern Lights) magazine in Moscow.
Armenian literature at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century experienced a rapid flourishing. A galaxy of talented poets and novelists appeared both in Eastern and Western Armenia. The main motives of their work were patriotism and the dream to see the homeland united and free. It is no coincidence that many of the Armenian writers in their work turned to the heroic pages of the rich Armenian history, as an example for inspiration in the struggle for the unification and independence of the country. Thanks to their creativity, two independent literary languages took shape: Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian. Poets Rafael Patkanyan, Hovhannes Hovhannisyan, Vahan Teryan, prose poets Avetik Isahakyan, Gazaros Aghayan, Perch Proshyan, playwright Gabriel Sundukyan, novelists Nardos, Muratsan and others wrote in Eastern Armenian. Poets Petros Duryan, Misak Metsarents, Siamanto, Daniel Varudan, poet, prose writer and playwright Levon Shant, novelist Grigor Zohrap, great satirist Hakob Paronyan and others wrote their works in Western Armenian.
Prose writer Hovhannes Tumanyan and novelist Raffi left an indelible mark on the Armenian literature of that period.
In his work, O. Tumanyan reworked many folk legends and traditions, sang the national traditions, life and customs of the people. His most famous works are the poems "Anush", "Maro", the legends "Akhtmar", "The Fall of Tmkaberd" and others.
Raffi is known as the author of the historical novels "Samvel", "Jalaladdin", "Khant" and others. Among his contemporaries, his novel "Kaytser" (Sparks) was a great success, where the call to the Armenian people to stand up for the liberation of their homeland was clearly heard, not really hoping for help from the powers.
Significant progress has been made in the social sciences. Professor of the Lazarev Institute Mkrtich Emin published ancient Armenian sources in Russian translation. The same sources in French translation were published in Paris at the expense of the well-known Armenian philanthropist, Egyptian Prime Minister Nubar Pasha. A member of the Mkhitarist cogregation, Father Ghevond Alishan wrote fundamental works on the history of Armenia, gave a detailed list and description of the surviving historical monuments, many of which were subsequently destroyed. Grigor Khalatyan published for the first time a complete history of Armenia in Russian. Garegin Srvandztyan, traveling through the regions of Western and Eastern Armenia, collected huge treasures of Armenian folklore. He has the honor of discovering the record and the first edition of the text of the Armenian medieval epic "Sasuntsi David". The famous scientist Manuk Abeghyan was engaged in research in the field of folklore and ancient Armenian literature. The well-known philologist, linguist Hrachya Acharyan studied the vocabulary of the Armenian language and made comparisons and comparisons of the Armenian language with other Indo-European languages.
The famous historian Nikolai Adonts in 1909 wrote and published in Russian a study on the history of medieval Armenia, Armenian-Byzantine relations. His major work "Armenia in the era of Justinian", published in 1909, has not lost its significance to this day. The well-known historian and philologist Leo (Arakel Babakhanyan) wrote works on various issues of Armenian history and literature, and also collected and published documents related to the “Armenian Question”.
Armenian musical art developed. The creativity of folk gusans was raised to new heights by gusan Jivani, gusan Sheram and others. Armenian composers who received a classical education appeared on the stage. Tigran Chukhajyan wrote the first Armenian opera Arshak II. Composer Armen Tigranyan wrote the opera "Anush" based on the poem of the same name by Hovhannes Tumanyan. The famous composer, musicologist Komitas laid the foundation for the scientific study of folk musical folklore, recorded the music and words of 3 thousand folk songs. Komitas gave concerts and lectures in many European countries, introducing Europeans to the original Armenian folk musical art.
The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century were also marked by the further development of Armenian painting. A famous painter was the famous marine painter Hovhannes Aivazovsky (1817-1900). He lived and worked in Feodosia (in the Crimea), and most of his works are devoted to the marine theme. The most famous of his paintings are "The Ninth Wave", "Noah descends from Mount Ararat", "Lake Sevan", "Massacre of Armenians in Trabizon in 1895" and etc.
Outstanding painters were Gevorg Bashinjaghyan, Panos Terlemezyan, Vardges Surenyants.
Vardges Surenyants, in addition to easel painting, was also engaged in mural painting, painted many Armenian churches in different cities of Russia. The most famous are his paintings "Shamiram and Ara the Beautiful", "Salome". A copy of his painting "Armenian Madonna" today adorns the new cathedral in Yerevan. Forward
Every year on April 24, the world celebrates the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide in memory of the victims of the first ethnic extermination in the 20th century, which was carried out in the Ottoman Empire.
On April 24, 1915, representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia were arrested in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, from which the mass extermination of Armenians began.
At the beginning of the 4th century AD, Armenia became the first country in the world in which Christianity was established as the official religion. However, the centuries-old struggle of the Armenian people against the conquerors ended with the loss of their own statehood. For many centuries, the lands where the Armenians historically lived were not just in the hands of the conquerors, but in the hands of conquerors who professed a different faith.
In the Ottoman Empire, Armenians, not being Muslims, were quite officially treated as second-class people - “dhimmi”. They were forbidden to carry weapons, they were subject to higher taxes and were deprived of the right to testify in court.Complex inter-ethnic and inter-confessional relations in the Ottoman Empire escalated significantly by the end of the 19th century. A series of Russian-Turkish wars, mostly unsuccessful for the Ottoman Empire, led to the appearance on its territory of a huge number of Muslim refugees from the lost territories - the so-called "Muhajirs".
The Muhajirs were extremely hostile towards Armenian Christians. In turn, by the end of the 19th century, the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, tired of their lack of rights, demanded more and more loudly equalization of rights with the rest of the inhabitants of the empire.
These contradictions were superimposed by the general decline of the Ottoman Empire, which manifested itself in all spheres of life.
Armenians are to blame
The first wave of massacres of Armenians on the territory of the Ottoman Empire took place in 1894-1896. The open resistance of the Armenians to the attempts of the Kurdish leaders to impose tribute on them turned into massacres not only of those who participated in the protests, but also of those who remained on the sidelines. It is generally accepted that the murders of 1894-1896 were not directly sanctioned by the authorities of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, their victims, according to various estimates, were from 50 to 300 thousand Armenians.
Massacre at Erzurum, 1895 Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Public Domain
Periodic local outbreaks of reprisals against Armenians also occurred after the overthrow of the Sultan of Turkey Abdul-Hamid II in 1907 and the Young Turks came to power.
With the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War, slogans began to sound louder and louder in the country about the need for “unity” of all representatives of the Turkish race to confront the “infidels”. In November 1914, jihad was declared, which fueled anti-Christian chauvinism among the Muslim population.
To all this was added the fact that one of the opponents of the Ottoman Empire in the war was Russia, on whose territory a large number of Armenians lived. The authorities of the Ottoman Empire began to consider their own citizens of Armenian nationality as potential traitors who could help the enemy. Such sentiments were strengthened as more and more failures on the eastern front took place.
After the defeat committed by the Russian troops of the Turkish army in January 1915 near Sarykamysh, one of the leaders of the Young Turks, Ismail Enver, aka Enver Pasha, declared in Istanbul that the defeat was the result of Armenian treason and that it was time to deport the Armenians from the eastern regions, who were threatened with Russian occupation.
As early as February 1915, extraordinary measures were taken against the Ottoman Armenians. 100,000 soldiers of Armenian nationality were disarmed, and the right of civilian Armenians to bear arms introduced in 1908 was abolished.
Destruction Technology
The government of the Young Turks planned to carry out the mass deportation of the Armenian population to the desert, where people were doomed to certain death.
Deportation of Armenians along the Baghdad railway. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
On April 24, 1915, the implementation of the plan began from Istanbul, where about 800 representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia were arrested and killed within a few days.
On May 30, 1915, the Majlis of the Ottoman Empire approved the "Law on Deportation", which became the basis for the massacre of Armenians.
The deportation tactic consisted in the initial separation from the total number of Armenians in a particular settlement of adult men, who were taken out of the city to deserted places and destroyed in order to avoid resistance. Young Armenian girls were handed over as concubines to Muslims or simply subjected to massive sexual violence. Old men, women and children were driven in columns under the escort of gendarmes. Columns of Armenians, often deprived of food and drink, were driven into the desert regions of the country. Those who fell without strength were killed on the spot.
Despite the fact that the disloyalty of the Armenians on the eastern front was declared the reason for the deportation, repressions against them began to be carried out throughout the country. Almost immediately, the deportations turned into massacres of Armenians in their places of residence.
A huge role in the massacres of Armenians was played by the paramilitary formations of the “chettes” - criminals specially released by the authorities of the Ottoman Empire to participate in massacres.
In the city of Hynys alone, the majority of whose population was Armenian, about 19,000 people were killed in May 1915. 15,000 Armenians became victims of the massacre in the city of Bitlis in July 1915. The most cruel methods of reprisals were practiced - people were cut into pieces, nailed to crosses, driven onto barges and drowned, burned alive.
Those who reached alive the camps around the desert of Der Zor, the massacre overtook there. Within a few months of 1915, about 150,000 Armenians were massacred there.
Disappeared forever
A telegram from US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to the State Department (July 16, 1915) describes the extermination of the Armenians as a "campaign of racial extermination." Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Henry Morgenthau Sr
Foreign diplomats received evidence of the large-scale destruction of Armenians almost from the very beginning of the genocide. In the joint Declaration of May 24, 1915, the Entente countries (Great Britain, France and Russia) recognized the massacres of Armenians for the first time in history as a crime against humanity.
However, the powers involved in a major war were unable to stop the mass destruction of people.
Although the peak of the genocide occurred in 1915, in fact, the massacres of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire continued until the end of the First World War.
The total number of victims of the Armenian genocide has not been finally established to this day. The most frequently heard data is that from 1 to 1.5 million Armenians were exterminated in the Ottoman Empire in the period from 1915 to 1918. Those who could survive the massacre left their native lands en masse.
According to various estimates, from 2 to 4 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire by 1915. Between 40,000 and 70,000 Armenians live in modern Turkey.
Most of the Armenian churches and historical monuments associated with the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire were destroyed or turned into mosques, as well as utility rooms. Only at the end of the 20th century, under pressure from the world community, the restoration of some historical monuments began in Turkey, in particular the Church of the Holy Cross on Lake Van.
Map of the main areas of destruction of the Armenian population. concentration camps
Nikolai Troitsky, political observer for RIA Novosti.
Saturday, April 24 is the Day of Remembrance of the victims of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. This year marks the 95th anniversary of the start of this bloody massacre and terrible crime - the mass extermination of people along ethnic lines. As a result, from one to one and a half million people were destroyed.
Unfortunately, this was not the first and far from the last case of genocide in recent history. In the twentieth century, humanity seemed to have decided to return to the darkest times. In enlightened, civilized countries, medieval savagery and fanaticism suddenly revived - torture, reprisals against the relatives of convicts, forcible deportation and the total murder of entire peoples or social groups.
But even against this gloomy background, two of the most monstrous atrocities stand out - the methodical extermination of Jews by the Nazis, called the Holocaust, in 1943-45 and the Armenian genocide, staged in 1915.
In that year, the Ottoman Empire was effectively ruled by the Young Turks, a group of officers who overthrew the Sultan and introduced liberal reforms in the country. With the outbreak of the First World War, all power was concentrated in their hands by the triumvirate - Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha and Jemal Pasha. It was they who staged the act of genocide. But they did not do this because of sadism or innate ferocity. There were reasons and prerequisites for the crime.
Armenians have lived in Ottoman territory for centuries. On the one hand, they were subjected to certain religious discrimination, as Christians. On the other hand, for the most part, they were distinguished by wealth, or at least prosperity, because they were engaged in trade and finance. That is, they played approximately the same role as the Jews in Western Europe, without whom the economy could not function, but who at the same time regularly fell under pogroms and deportations.
The fragile balance was disturbed in the 80s-90s of the 19th century, when underground political organizations of a nationalist and revolutionary nature were formed in the Armenian environment. The most radical was the Dashnaktsutyun party - the local analogue of the Russian Social Revolutionaries, moreover, the Socialist-Revolutionaries of the very left wing.
They set as their goal the creation of an independent state on the territory of Ottoman Turkey, and the methods for achieving this goal were simple and effective: the seizure of banks, the murder of officials, explosions and similar terrorist attacks.
It is clear how the government reacted to such actions. But the situation was aggravated by the national factor, and the entire Armenian population had to answer for the actions of the Dashnak militants - they called themselves fedayins. In different parts of the Ottoman Empire, unrest broke out every now and then, which ended in pogroms and massacres of Armenians.
The situation escalated even more in 1914, when Turkey became an ally of Germany and declared war on Russia, which the local Armenians naturally sympathized with. The government of the Young Turks declared them a "fifth column", and therefore it was decided to deport them all to hard-to-reach mountainous areas.
One can imagine what the mass resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, the elderly and children, is like, since the men were drafted into the army. Many died from deprivation, others were killed, there was an outright massacre, mass executions were carried out.
After the end of the First World War, a special commission from Great Britain and the United States was engaged in the investigation of the Armenian genocide. Here is just one brief episode from the testimony of eyewitnesses of the tragedy who miraculously survived:
“Approximately two thousand Armenians were gathered and surrounded by the Turks, they were doused with gasoline and set on fire. I, myself, was in another church that they tried to set on fire, and my father thought it was the end of his family.
He gathered us around... and said something I will never forget: don't be afraid, my children, because soon we will all be in heaven together. But, fortunately, someone discovered the secret tunnels ... through which we escaped.
The exact number of victims was never officially counted, but at least a million people died. More than 300 thousand Armenians took refuge in the territory of the Russian Empire, as Nicholas II ordered the borders to be opened.
Even if the killings were not officially sanctioned by the ruling triumvirate, they are still responsible for these crimes. In 1919, all three were sentenced to death in absentia, as they managed to escape, but then they were killed one by one by avenging militants from radical Armenian organizations.
Enver Pasha and his comrades were convicted of war crimes by the Allies from the Entente with the full consent of the government of the new Turkey, which was headed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He began to build a secular authoritarian state, the ideology of which was radically different from the ideas of the Young Turks, but many organizers and perpetrators of the massacre came to his service. And the territory of the Turkish Republic by that time was almost completely cleared of Armenians.
Therefore, Ataturk, although he personally had nothing to do with the "final solution of the Armenian question", categorically refused to acknowledge the accusations of genocide. In Turkey, the precepts of the Father of the Nation are sacredly honored - this is the translation of the surname that the first president took for himself - and they still firmly stand on the same positions. The Armenian Genocide is not only denied, but a Turkish citizen can get a prison term for its public recognition. What happened recently, for example, with the world-famous writer, Nobel Prize winner in literature Orhan Pamuk, who was released from the dungeons only under pressure from the international community.
At the same time, some European countries provide for criminal punishment for the denial of the Armenian genocide. However, only 18 countries, including Russia, officially recognized and condemned this crime of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkish diplomacy reacts to this in different ways. Since Ankara dreams of joining the EU, they pretend that they do not notice the "anti-genocide" resolutions of the states from the European Union. Türkiye does not want to spoil relations with Russia because of this. However, any attempt to introduce the issue of recognition of the genocide by the US Congress is immediately rebuffed.
It is difficult to say why the government of modern Turkey stubbornly refuses to recognize the crimes of 95 years ago, committed by the leaders of the perishing Ottoman monarchy. Armenian political scientists believe that Ankara is afraid of subsequent demands for material, and even territorial compensation. In any case, if Turkey really wants to become a full part of Europe, these old crimes will have to be recognized.
