"the Armenian Massacres — was the forcible deportation and massacre[1] of hundreds of thousands to over 1.5 million Armenians during the government of the Young Turks from 1915 to 1917 in the Ottoman Empire.[2]

It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern, systematic genocides,[3][4] as many Western sources point to the sheer scale of the death toll as evidence for a systematic, organized plan to eliminate the Armenians.[5] The event is also said to be the second-most studied case of genocide after the Nazi Holocaust.[6] To date twenty-two countries have officially recognized it as genocide. The government of the Republic of Turkey rejects the characterization of the events as genocide.[7]"

Sultan Abdul Hamid II suspended the constitution early in his reign, assuming dictatorial powers. As the Ottoman Empire declined, Armenian political resistance stiffened, resulting in several massacres of Armenians throughout Abdul Hamid's reign.[13][14] By the last years of the 19th century, after a series of massacres in 1894 and 1895, the New York Times noted an apparent "policy of extermination directed against the Christians of Asia Minor".[15]

In 1908, the Ottoman Empire came under the control of the Young Turks, a secular movement aiming to restore constitutional and parliamentary rule.[16] The movement was welcomed by religious minorities throughout the Empire. In 1909, as the authority of the nascent Young Turk government splintered, Abdul Hamid II briefly regained his sultanate with a populist appeal to Islamism. 30,000 Armenians perished in the subsequent Adana Massacre.[14] When two U.S.-born missionaries were killed in the 1909 massacres, Ottoman authorities attributed the killings to "Armenians" who killed them as they "were helping to put out a fire in the house of a Turkish widow."[17] This report was later contradicted by an American priest who witnessed the killings, who suggested that the missionaries were killed by "Moslems".[18]


Young Turk leadership
For more details on this topic, see Young Turk Revolution, Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
The Young Turk leadership recovered from the Sultan's 1909 countercoup. By this time, however, the Young Turk revolutionaries were already hardened in their distrust and resentment of Ottoman Christians. According to Erik Jan Zürcher of the University of Leiden,

Living in the urban centers of the southern Balkans made this generation acutely aware of the increasing gap between the Christian bourgeoisie on the one hand and the Muslim middle class on the other. This gap was evident in education, with superior schools being established both by the non-Muslim communities themselves and by European missionary organizations… The gap was also increasingly evident in the economy… The sons of the Muslim middle class… increasingly found their place in the state bureaucracy (which grew thirtyfold in the Nineteenth Century) and the officer corps of the armed forces. As such, they were in a paradoxical situation: they represented the authority and prestige of the state, but at the same time they lived in relative poverty, wages often being in arrears for months if not years…

Young Turk memoirs show us very clearly how aware they were of the growing gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. Born in the traditional Muslim quarters they gazed in awe at the villas the Greek and Armenian industrialists built along newly laid-out avenues with tramways and streetlights. The contrast defined their loyalties… The Young Turks developed a fierce Ottoman-Muslim nationalism, which defined the "other" very much in religious terms… [T]he Muslim – Non-Muslim divide would completely dominate politics and lead to the tragedies of the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans and Greek-Orthodox from Anatolia, as well as to the wholesale slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians.[16]


Implementation of the Genocide

Ethnic Armenian town in ruins.
Planning
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. Ýsmail Enver, Minister of War, launched an unsuccessful military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus in hopes of capturing the city of Baku. His forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and many more of his men froze to death in the retreat.

Returning to Istanbul, Enver largely blamed the Armenians living in the region for actively siding with the Russians.[19] By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the country's security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening the straits [of the Dardanelles]."[20]

On the night of 24 April 1915, the Ottoman government rounded up and imprisoned an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals.[21]


Armenian intellectuals were arrested and later executed en masse by Ottoman authorities on the night of April 24, 1915.
Legislation, May 29
Further information: Tehcir Law
In May 1915, Mehmed Talat Pasha requested that the cabinet and grand vizier legalize the deportations of the Armenians of Anatolia. On 29 May 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation (Tehcir Law), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security.[22] Several months later, the Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation was passed, stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities. Ottoman parliamentary representative Ahmed Riza protested the legislation:

It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as "abandoned goods" for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its efforts is selling their goods… If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can't do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it.[23]

The confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter of Armenians that ensued upon the law's enactment outraged much of the western world. While the Ottoman Empire's wartime allies offered little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has since come to attest to the witnesses' horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians.[24][25][26] In the United States, The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as "systematic", "authorized" and "organized by the government." Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as "the greatest crime of the war."[27]


Labor battalions
With the passage of Tehcir Law, Enver ordered that all Armenians in the Ottoman forces be disarmed, demobilized and assigned to labor battalions (Turkish: amele taburlari). Many of the Armenian recruits were executed by Ottoman squads known as chetes.[28] Some of the Armenian recruits were utilized as laborers (hamals), though they too would ultimately be executed.[29]


The Special Organization (Teþkilat-ý Mahsusa)
Main articles: Teskilati Mahsusa and Special Organization (Ottoman Empire)
While there was an official 'special organization' founded in December 1911 by the Ottoman government, a second organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was founded by the lttihad ve Terraki.[30] This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit.[31]

Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization.[32] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison.[citation needed] Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.[33] Vehib, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the "butchers of the human species." [34]


Process and camps of deportation
See also: Armenian casualties of deportations

The remaining bones of the Armenians of Erzinjan.The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. A good deal of evidence suggests that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to sustain the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived.[35] By August 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people."[36]

Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves.[35] Deprived of their belongings and marched into the desert, hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished.

" Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of slave drivers. With few exceptions no shelter of any kind is provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.[35] "

Major concentration campsIt is believed that 25 major concentration camps existed, under the command of Þükrü Kaya, one of the right hands of Talat Pasha.[37] The majority of the camps were situated near modern Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, and some were only temporary transit camps.[37] Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for mass graves; these sites were vacated by Fall 1915.[37] Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.[37]

Though nearly all the camps, including the primary sites, were open air, the remainder of the mass killing in minor camps was not limited to direct killings, but also to mass burning,[38] poisoning[39] and drowning.[40]


Foreign corroboration and reaction
Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire's own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government officials who claimed they were "retaliating against a pro-Russian fifth column."[41] On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres."[42]

The American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE, or "Near East Relief") was a charitable organization established to relieve the suffering of the peoples of the Near East.[43] The organization was championed by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau's eyewitness accounts of the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized much support for ACRNE.[44]

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