2023-04-24 03:59:47
This April 24 marks the 108th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. a systematic elimination plan carried out by the ottoman empire between the years 1915 and 1923, which he left as balance more than 1,500,000 Armenians massacred and which continues to be unrecognized by Türkiye.
Adolf Hitler took into account the zero punishment for those responsible for the Armenian genocide: on August 22, 1939, a few days before invade Poland and start the Second World War the Nazi leader declaimed “Who, after all, today remembers the extermination of the armenians?”. It was the justification to start what would be the Jewish Holocaust and the gypsy genocide.
What does genocide mean?
The term genocide was created by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin. Is formed the words, “geno” which in Greek means tribe/race and “cidio”, from the Latin “cide”: murder. According to the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide signed by the HIM in 1948, “Genocide is understood as any act with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group as such”.
Why is commemorated on April 24?
He april 24 1915 was the date on which hundreds of Armenian leaders and intellectuals were arrested, deported and later shot by the Ottoman Empire. It was part of the first phase of a systematic extermination plan.
After the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) and the Adana massacre (1909), in which more than 330,000 Armenians were killedin 1915 begins a systematized plan to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.
Beginning of the Armenian Genocide
In 1908 a group of Ottoman Army officers known as los young turks rebelled against Sultan Abdul Hamid II and forced him to restore the 1876 Constitution. The new one constitutional monarchy respected individual liberties and ethnic-national rights. The Armenian minorities viewed the revolution very favorably, as it would be accompanied by much more enjoyable policies for them. The Armenian political party Tashnaksutiun supported the rebellion and took up arms.
But very soon the Young Turks and their Committee for Union and Progress party imposed their nationalism of exclusion and they continued with the segregation of minorities. His goal was to create a homogeneous modern Turkish state, non-religious like that of the sultan, for which the cultural heterogeneity of the Empire was an impediment. In 1909, almost simultaneously with the suppressed counter-revolution of Abdul Hamid II, the Adana massacrewhere 30,000 Armenians were brutally murdered.
“The democratizing discourse made it possible to unite supporters to get rid of the old Ottoman power,” he maintains. Daniel Feiersteinformer president of the International Association of Genocide Researchers and who has written books like “Introduction to Genocide Studies” y “Genocide as a social practice”, among others. In any case, with respect to the contrast between what they initially proclaimed and what the young turkswarns that “it is difficult to maintain that those promises were part of the extermination plan”.
In the conferences of the Union and Progress party during 1910 the decision was made to carry out the genocide. The dismemberment of the Empire begun in the 19th century did not stop. Meanwhile, in 1911 Italia annexation tripoli. Serbia, Bulgaria and Greecenext to Montenegro y Macedonia begin in 1912 the first balkan wars against the Ottoman Empire, which was worn out by the conflict with Italy renounces Albania and Macedonia. in 1913 ceded the island of Crete to Greece. By then, the Ottomans had practically lost all their territories in Europeand the Armenians were among the few Christians left within the Empire.
Pan-Turkish nationalism
These territorial losses are vital in explaining the Armenian genocide. The Empire suffered from a collapse paranoia that increased with the passing of the years. The State supported and made non-Turkish minorities, especially Muslims, a key player in the genocide. These ethnic groups had been expelled from the territories where the different Christian states had declared their independence and they brought with them enormous hatred that the Ottomans stoked.
“Panturk nationalism allowed a project of national homogenization on the basis of the ‘danger of minorities’ that implied an articulation of a militaristic discourse with forms of political use of hate”, define celebration stone.
Tatars, Circassians and Kurds, accomplices and material authors of the genocide
Tatars, Circassians and Kurds also participated in the massacres. The government not only made them believe that the Armenians were traitors who put the Empire at risk and a threat to their ethnic groups, but also promised them to keep the lands of those they killed in order to create their own autonomous state. They even broke free they armed prisoners on the condition that they join the hunt for Armenians.
In 1913 the officers Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver and Ahmed Djemal seized power under the slogan “Turkey for the Turks”. Gone are the initial promises of respect for diversity. “The idea of the Young Turks was to eliminate the imperial system and one of their plans was to homogenize the state. They already brought that extermination plan from the beginning“, maintains the doctor in Anthropology Carlos Antaraman, descendant of Armenians and author of several texts related to the genocide, in dialogue with Page|12.
The Armenians, like so many other minorities, lived in closed neighborhoods and maintained their own religion and culture and even a certain political autonomy —always answering to the sultan in the last instance—, although they were considered second-class citizens and did not have the same rights as Muslims: they could not marry a Muslim, testify in court against a Muslim or have a horse or weapons, among other impediments. The Young Turks wanted a centralized state without any other minority organization having to interfere.
The triumvirate sought to unite all the Turkish peoples in a new and modern homogeneous nation, for which an enormous territorial expansion and a deep ethnic cleansing would be necessary. It was the replacement of Ottomanism by Pan-Turkism. “The Young Turks were not religious, but to homogenize Turkey they knew they had to appeal to religion, because a large part of the population was radically Muslim,” explains Antaramian.
At the beginning of August 1914, the First World War, which was seen by the Young Turks as an opportunity to carry out their plan without worrying about pressure from Western powers. In the middle of 1915 and with the excuse of the War, the Young Turks dissolved Congress.
The 10 points of the Armenian extermination plan devised by the Ottoman Empire
The extermination plan was devised and drafted in a document known as “The ten commandments of the Union and Progress Committee”, which consisted of 10 articles and whose date is between the end of 1914 and the beginning of 1915.
In this document, which was made public after it was forwarded to the British Foreign Office by the British High Commissioner in Constantinople in early 1919, the extermination plan was explained step by step.
The 10 articles of the Armenian genocide
- Art 1: All associations of Armenians must be closed based on articles 3 and 4 of the Associations Law: arrest to the executive members who oppose the CUP government, deport them to certain provinces such as Mosul and Baghdad and kill them during the deportation route or once they arrive at the final destination.
- Art 2: Collect all weapons owned by the Armenians.
- Art 3: Muslim public opinion must be prepared through the appropriate means, for which reason some planned incidents -as Russia did in Baku- in cities like Van, Erzurum and Adana, where the Armenians by their own actions have earned the hatred of the Muslims.
- Art 4: Leave the full implementation of the actions to the general population in provinces such as Erzurum, Van, Mamuret-ul aziz and Bitlis, and use the troops and military forces in places such as Adana, Sivas, Bursa, Izmit and Izmir.
- Art 5: Apply (measures) of annihilation to school teachers and especially to men under 50 years of age. (Leave women and children alive to be converted to Islam).
- Art 6: Organize the families of those members who have escaped and take measures to completely cut the ties that unite them with their homes.
- Art 7: Discharge all Armenian officials from government posts and other fields under the accusation of espionage.
- Art 8: Annihilate serving men in the army in a proper way.
- Art 9: Start all measurements at the same time so as not to give them the opportunity to prepare means for their defense.
- Art 10: Keep this Letter of Instruction in the most complete privacy.
The stages of the Armenian genocide
The first stage of the genocide was the kidnapping, deportation and murder of political, ecclesiastical and intellectual leaders on April 24, 1915. What was sought was to leave the Armenians without representation. Strong propaganda was launched to make the Armenians look like traitors and conspirators, since the support of the Muslim population was vital to the plan.
The second stage was the elimination of men fit to fight, that is, those between 18 and 40 years of age. More than 60,000 Armenian men were conscripted into the Ottoman army and later killed.. They were made to dig their graves before being shot. Some imprisonments and the formation of concentration camps had also taken place at the beginning of that year.
The third stage was the beginning of the massive deportations of Armenians to the Syrian deserts, such as Deir ez-Zor, and Mesopotamia. The majority were women, old people and children, subjected to extreme torture. Women were kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted to Islam, in some cases to be the wives of Muslims. Those who did not die on the tortuous road were executed upon reaching their destination..
The deportations and massacres were organized from the central government, more specifically from the Ministry of the Interior. From there, the governors, the provincial police and the armed parastatal groups were instructed. Officials who did not comply with government orders were removed and even killed..
What the powers did, the murdered Armenians and the Turkish-Azerbaijani denialism
In May 1915, France, Great Britain, and Russia issued a joint communiqué warning of these massacres and using the term for the first time. “crimes against humanity”. The United States Senate demonstrated in February 1916.
Of the 2,100,000 Armenians who inhabited the Ottoman Empire, more than 1,500,000 were massacred. Some managed to escape to other areas of the Empire or outside of it, even with the help of Turks and/or Muslims who did not share the massacres. In his plan to form a homogeneous Turkish state, the Empire also murdered more than 250,000 Greeks – there are sources that triple that number – and a similar number of Assyrians.
Until today is that Turkey maintains an iron denialism, despite the enormous documentation that supports the definition of the events as genocide. The heads of the genocide are still remembered as heroesunder the justification that everything happened in a context of war and famine, and the Turkish State finances and supports economically and militarily Azerbaijan so that it continues with what began at the beginning of the 20th century.
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