Armenian massacre: The First genocide of the 20th century
Research paper supervisor:Dr.Seku Conde
Minzu University of China
2007-2008 Academic Year
[Abstract] The Armenian genocide was one of the most massive "root-and-branch" exterminations ever carried out against a defenseless people. In 1915, as World War I raged, the Turkish government decided upon the systematic extermination of most of the male Armenian population, and the forced deportation of the remainder, mostly women, children, and the elderly. The deportation became a death march, with extreme violence and deprivation leading to the death of most of the survivors of the initial gendercide --- as was intended, up to three-quarters of the entire Ottoman Armenian population had been exterminated. Up to now, the Republic of Turkey denials the genocide.
[Key wards] Armenian ; genocide ; Turkish
* The background
1、The general introduction of Armenian
Armenians are one of the most ancient peoples of the Near East, having lived in the southern Caucasus region for as long as 3,000 years. Christianized early in the first millennium, they formed by the 19th century the largest non-Muslim population in the Ottoman Empire. The majority of the Armenian population was concentrated in the east of the Ottoman Empire. Peaceful relations between Armenians and Ottoman Muslims had long been the norm: despite acts of discrimination, Armenians were referred to as "the loyal millet." The Armenians who were ousted from one place to the other, pushed into wars, and treated as third rate citizens throughout the history by the Romans, Persians and Byzantines.
2、The term of Genocide
Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term `genocide' in 1944, described the crime as `the systematic destruction of whole national, racial or religious groups. The sort of thing Hitler did to the Jews and the Turks did to the Armenians'. Raphael Lemkin was the earliest proponent of the Genocide Convention, invoked the Armenian case as a definitive example of genocide in the 20th century.
According to the United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide means to destroy with intent, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group in any one of the following ways:
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 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.
3、The genocides in the 20th century
Name
Time
Death number
The Armenian Genocide
1915-1923
1.5million
The Jewish Holocaust
1933-1945
6million
The Cambodia genocide
1975
1milli
The Rwandan genocide
1994
1million
* The process of Armenian genocide
In 1908, a group of modernization-minded officers --- "the Young Turks" --- toppled the Ottoman Sultan. the "Young Turk" movement was rapidly taken over by a small group of fanatical nationalists, headed by the triumvirate of Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, and Talat Pasha. The trio began to plot the extermination of the Armenian population.
The events of World War I gave these architects of genocide the opportunity they sought to implement their plan. One of the movement's leading ideologues, Dr. Nazim, told a closed session of the CUP Central Committee in February 1915 that "if this purge is not general and final, it will inevitably lead to problems. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so that there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished. We are now at war. We shall never have a more suitable opportunity than this."[①]
The Armenian massacre was carried out by the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 (with subsidiaries to 1922-23) in a systematic fashion. First the Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed. Then the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were rounded up on April 24, 1915, and then killed. Finally, the remaining Armenians were called from their homes, told they would be relocated, and then marched off to concentration camps in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor where they would starve and thirst to death in the burning sun.
1、The gendercide against Armenian men
The gendercidal strategies followed at the outset were 1) the mobilization of "battle-age" Armenian men for service in the Turkish army, followed by the execution or death through overwork of some hundreds of thousands of them; and 2) the concomitant rounding-up and mass slaughter of remaining community males.
In the early part of 1915, the Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were reduced to a new status, they were all stripped of their arms and transformed into workmen, such as road labourers and pack animals. Like the opening "elitocide," this strategy was designed to strip the Armenian community of those who might effectively mobilize and defend it. A prominent modern scholar of the genocide, Vahakn Dadrian, concurs: "Though [the] mobilization had many other objectives, it served a major purpose for the swift execution of the plan of genocide. By removing all able-bodied Armenian males from their cities, villages, hamlets, and by isolating them in conditions in which they virtually became trapped, the Armenian community was reduced to a condition of near-total helplessness, thus an easy prey for destruction. It was a masterful stroke as it attained with one blow the three objectives of the operation of traping the victim population: a) dislocation through forcible removal; b) isolation; c) concentration for easy targeting."[②]
With this "conscription-as-gendercide" thus accomplished, the Turkish authorities turned their attention to the remaining male population. The authorities were now free to turn to the destruction of the remainder of the Armenian population. Armenians were told they were to be deported to "safe havens" in third countries. The deportation process, was seen as simply another tool of genocide, as Morgenthau notes: "The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; it really represented a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attem pt to conceal the fact." [③]
The systematic extermination of the men continued; such males as the persecutions which I have already described had left were now violently dealt with. Before the caravans were started, it became the regular practice to separate the young men from the families, tie them together in groups of four, lead them to the outskirts, and shoot them. Public hangings without trial --- the only offense being that the victims were [male] Armenians --- were taking place constantly.
2、The gendercide against Armenian women and children
The forced deportation of the women, childerly, and elderly left alive after the gendercide against Armenian men gave rise to some of the most hellish scenes in recorded history. Some Armenian women and children were offered the alternative of conversion to Islam and subsequent slavery in Turkish homes, but it is generally held that only a thousand or so accepted. The rest were driven from their homeland at bayonet-point, and forced to run a vicious gauntlet of soldiers and marauding tribespeople. "Women who lagged behind were bayoneted on the road, or pushd over precipices, or over bridges," [④]
The whole course of the journey became a perpetual struggle with the Moslem inhabitants.The Government even opened the prisons and set free the convicts, on the understanding that they should behave like good Moslems to the approaching Armenians. Thus every caravan had a continuous battle for existence with several classes of enemies.
The Armenians began to die by hundreds from hunger and thirst. Even when they came to rivers, the gendarmes, merely to torment them, would sometimes not let them drink. Thus, in a few days, what had been a procession of normal human beings became a stumbling horde of dust-covered skeletons, ravenously looking for scraps of food, eating any offal that came their way, crazed by the hideous sights that filled every hour of their existence, sick with all the diseases that accompany such hardships and privations, but still prodded on and on by the whips and clubs and bayonets of their executioners.
The end result of these torments was standardly near-total extermination. Morgenthau describes a typical convoy consisting of "18,000 souls," of whom "just 150 women and children reached their destination.Their suffering was not over: many who had survived the earlier rampage starved to death or died of disease in the squalid camps established in Syria and Mesopotomia (Iraq).
* The reasons of Armenian genocide
1、Religious minorities and the higher levels of education and wealth
The Armenians' status as a religious minority, and their reputation for higher levels of education and wealth than many other groups in the Ottoman Empire, made them the target of popular hatred and envy. As the Knights of Vartan Armenian Research Center has pointed out, there are in fact profound similarities between the Armenian and Jewish genocides. "Both people adhere to an ancient religion. Both were religious minorities of their respective states. Both have a history of persecution. ... Both are talented and creative minorities who have been persecuted out of envy and obscurantism."[⑤]
2、out of fear that they would collaborate with the Russians
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered [...]
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