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In 1915, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkeys Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country. Today, most historians call this event a genocide--a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people. However, the Turkish government does not acknowledge the enormity or scope of these events. Despite pressure from Armenians and social justice advocates throughout the world, it is still illegal in Turkey to talk about what happened to Armenians during this era.
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Contents
The Roots of Genocide: The Ottoman Empire The First Armenian Massacre The Rise of the Young Turks World War I Genocide Begins The Armenian Genocide Today

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The Roots of Genocide: The Ottoman Empire The Armenian people have made their home in the Cau casu s region of Eu rasia for some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an independent entity--at the beginning of the 4th centu ry AD, for instance, it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion--but for the most part, control of the region shifted from one empire to another. Du ring the 15th centu ry, Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman ru lers, like most of their su bjects, were Mu slim. They permitted religiou s minorities like the Armenians to maintain some au tonomy, bu t they also su bjected Armenians, who they viewed as infidels, to

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World War I From 1914 to 1918, the Central Powers faced off against the Allied Powers in a devastating international conflict that later become known as World War I. The Holocaust From 1941 to 1945, Adolf Hitler's totalitarian Nazi regime mu rdered some six million Eu ropean Jews du ring World War II. Email Updates Keep u p with the latest History shows, online featu res, special offers and more.

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unequ al and u nju st treatment. Christians had to pay higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and they had very few political and legal rights. In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian commu nity thrived u nder Ottoman ru le. They tended to be better edu cated and wealthier than their Tu rkish neighbors, who in turn tended to resent their su ccess. This resentment was compounded by su spicions that the Christian Armenians wou ld be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the Ru ssians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Tu rkey) than they were to the Ottoman caliphate. These su spicions grew more acu te as the Ottoman Empire cru mbled. At the end of the 19th centu ry, the despotic Tu rkish Su ltan Abdu l Hamid II--obsessed with loyalty above all, and infu riated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights--declared that he wou ld solve the Armenian qu estion once and for all. I will soon settle those Armenians, he told a reporter in 1890. I will give them a box on the ear which will make them relinqu ish their revolu tionary ambitions.

The Rwandan Genocide Over three months in 1994, members of the Hu tu ethnic majority in Rwanda mu rdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly minority Tu tsis, in one of the worst genocides in modern history. What Is Genocide? The term genocide, defined as violence against a national, ethnic, racial or religiou s grou p with the intent to destroy it, entered common u sage after World War II.

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The First Armenian Massacre Between 1894 and 1896, this box on the ear took the form of a state-sanctioned pogrom. In response to large scale protests by Armenians, Tu rkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. Hu ndreds of thou sands of Armenians were murdered.

American news outlets have also been reluctant to use the word genocide to describe Turkeys crimes. The phrase Armenian genocide did not appear in the New York Times until 2004.

The Rise of the Young Turks In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A grou p of reformers who called themselves the You ng Tu rks overthrew Su ltan Abdu l Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government. At first, the Armenians were hopefu l that they wou ld have an equ al place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic You ng Tu rks wanted most of all was to Tu rkify the empire. According to this way of thinking, non-Tu rks--and especially Christian non-Tu rks--were a grave threat to the new state World War I In 1914, the Tu rks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Au stro-Hu ngarian Empire. (At the same time, Ottoman religious au thorities declared jihad, or holy war, against all Christians except their allies.) Military leaders began to argu e that the Armenians were traitors: If they thou ght they cou ld win independence if the Allies were victoriou s, this argu ment went, the Armenians wou ld be eager to fight for the enemy. As the war intensified, Armenians organized volu nteer battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Tu rks in the Cau casu s region. These events, and general Tu rkish su spicion of the Armenian people, led the Turkish government to pu sh for the removal of the Armenians from the war zones along the Eastern Front. Genocide Begins On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Tu rkish government arrested and execu ted several hu ndred Armenian intellectu als. After that, ordinary Armenians were tu rned ou t of their homes and sent on death marches throu gh the Mesopotamian desert withou t food or water. Frequ ently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk u nder the scorching su nu ntil they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot. At the same time, the You ng Tu rks created a Special Organization, which in turn organized killing squ ads or bu tcher battalions to carry ou t, as one officer pu t it, the liqu idation of the Christian elements. These killing squ ads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, cru cified them and bu rned them alive. In short order, the Tu rkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses. Records show that du ring this Tu rkificationcampaign government squ ads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and gave them to Tu rkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them to join Tu rkish harems or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property. In 1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian Genocide Today After the Ottomans surrendered in 1918, the leaders of the You ng Tu rks fled to Germany, which promised not to prosecu te them for the genocide. (However, a grou p of Armenian nationalists devised a plan, known as Operation Nemesis, to track down and assassinate the leaders of the genocide.) Ever since then, the Tu rkish government has denied that a genocide took place. The Armenians were an enemy force, they argue, and their slau ghter was a necessary war measu re. Today, Tu rkey is an important ally of the U.S. and other Western nations, and so their governments have likewise been relu ctant to condemn the long-ago killings. In March 2010, a U.S. Congressional panel at last voted to recognize the genocide.
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