The Armenian Genocide: A Retelling of the Sophistically Masterminded Savagery

Exposed to the air, the bones became soft and claylike and flaked away in our hands, the last mortal remains of an entire race of people disappearing as swiftly as their Turkish oppressors would have wished us to forget them. As many as 50,000 Armenians were murdered in this little killing field, and it took a minute or two before Ellsen and I fully comprehended that we were standing in a mass grave. For Margada and the Syrian desert around it - like thousands of villages in what was Turkish Armenia – are Auschwitz of the Armenian people the place of the world’s first, forgotten, Holocaust.

Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation

As the solemn date of April 24 approaches, Armenians around the world prepare to honor the memory of those who perished in the Armenian Genocide, an atrocity that still haunts humanity over a century later. An atrocity, under-recognized, unspeakable, and undeniable the Armenian Genocide stands as a testament to the horrors of the 20th century. As we approach the day of remembrance for the victims of this heinous crime, we shall not let ourselves forget the imperative of fighting against denial and working toward justice for the Armenian people.

Red Sultan’s dream coming true

The plan to exterminate the Armenians was not a new concept for the Young Turks. In fact, it was a continuation of the Abdul Hamid Plan. Following the coup d'état, the “Committee of Union and Progress” (CUP) officially approved the plan during secret meetings in Thessaloniki between 1910 and 1911. The plan was not limited to the Armenians but also aimed to destroy the Greeks and Assyrians while Turkifying non-Turkish Muslims. The Turkish ruling forces had already developed and prepared the program of exterminating Western Armenians before Turkey entered the First World War. The war merely presented a prime opportunity to execute the plan.

It had started long before 1915

Since the dawn of the Ottoman Empire, deportations were a key aspect of their policies, allowing them to replace unwanted groups with more controllable populations. To maintain a stable tax base, it was crucial to keep the bureaucracy and the army running smoothly. The Greeks and Armenians were vital components of the Ottoman economy, but despite their contributions, non-Muslims were subjected to discriminatory taxation and lower legal status.

After suffering a defeat by Russia, the Sublime Porte was forced to accept territorial losses and reforms, including some improvements for Ottoman Armenians. However, the Ottoman authorities continued to raise taxes while local elites continued to levy their own duties, causing tensions to rise.

The Sublime Porte settled Muslim immigrants in the Armenian highlands to strengthen control over areas that were perceived as being threatened by foreign occupation or national movements. Many of these immigrants had survived ethnic cleansing in other regions such as the Balkans, Caucasus, and the Aegean.

In the Armenian highlands, Kurdish leaders joined in the competition for land, registering Armenian land in their names with the support of the authorities. Kurdish tribes used Armenian fields as pastures and demanded shelter for the winter, often resorting to violence such as killing the owners and abducting women and children to take possession of the land.

Uprooting

The Ottoman Empire had a long history of deportations as a means of replacing unwanted groups with controllable populations, and this policy was crucial for maintaining a solid tax base to fund the bureaucracy and army.

The “Armenian Question” became a topic of European diplomacy when Armenians, facing government indifference to their protests, appealed to the Berlin Congress. In 1890, the Ottoman government created the Kurdish “Hamidieh” cavalry, which was used against Armenian organizations and rewarded with tax relief. In 1894, Ottoman troops and Kurds slaughtered Armenian mountain dwellers in Sasoun who opposed double taxation, starting a series of massacres.

The Ottoman government organized the massacre of thousands of Armenians in Constantinople in 1896 in the absence of foreign intervention. In 1908, a severe economic crisis intensified social discontent, and an army mutiny forced the weakened government to accept the parliamentary rule.

In Cilicia, religious fervor, dire economic conditions, inflation, and competition for land and jobs led to the slaughter of 25,000 to 30,000 Armenians by reactionaries. British ambassador Gerard Lowther concluded that the massacres of the 1890s were “succeeded by fifteen years of draconian methods spelling even a worse extensive ‘elimination’ of the Armenian element.” The CUP gained new political leverage with a secret military alliance with Germany, and in October 1914.

Final Solution to the Primary Question

In 1914, the Ottoman Empire began to carry out secret cross-border operations into Russian territory in an attempt to soften Russian border defenses and spark a rebellion among the Muslim population. However, the Ottoman Empire's naval attack on Russian Black Sea ports in October 1914 resulted in France, Britain, and Russia declaring war on the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire declaring a "Holy War" in response.

The Ottoman Third Army launched an unsuccessful offensive in December 1914 and was almost annihilated, leading irregular units and fleeing Muslim civilians to begin plundering and massacring Armenian villages in retaliation. By spring 1915, the Ottoman army had suffered further defeats on the Sinai, Mesopotamian, and Iranian fronts, and an allied fleet almost forced the Dardanelles.

In response to these setbacks, Ottoman troops turned the region before the advancing enemy into a wasteland and annihilated the local Armenian population. The main target of this campaign was the Armenian community in Van, the political center of the eastern provinces.

As a result, the Ottoman civilian and military authorities prioritized the elimination of this "internal foe" over combating the Russians. They attacked Van in April 1915 and massacred surrounding Armenian villages, although the government forces were ultimately defeated by Armenian defenders in the city. Upon hearing about the defense of Van and expecting an imminent attack on the Dardanelles, Talaat ordered the arrest of Armenian community leaders across the empire on April 24, 1915.

The police in Constantinople rounded up Armenian journalists, clerics, politicians, and teachers, among others, and sent them to the interior where the majority were killed. The same fate befell Armenian elites in the provinces.

Get them lost

While Armenians from Zeitun were redirected to Der Zor, it was not until May 2, 1915, that the Ministry of War proposed the deportation of all Armenians from the eastern border regions to the Russian lines or interior provinces. Deportations extended to historic Cilicia and border areas of Mosul province on May 23, 1915, making the situation even direr for the Armenian people. Armenians were forced to leave their homes and were subjected to grueling marches through harsh conditions, with many perishing along the way due to starvation, dehydration, disease, and violence.

Despite the arrests of Armenians in April of 1915, it was not until May 2nd that the Ministry of War suggested the deportation of all Armenians from eastern border regions to the Russian lines or interior provinces. In a matter of days, governors from Erzerum, Bitlis, and Van provinces were instructed to work with the army to deport Armenians toward the Syrian Desert and Mosul. By May 23rd, the deportation order had extended to historic Cilicia and border areas of Mosul province.

On May 24th, the Entente powers declared that they would hold all Ottoman citizens and officials responsible for their role in the persecution of Armenians. A few weeks later, on June 19th, the Third Army ordered the extension of deportations and the removal of all Armenians from several provinces.

While most Armenian men had been drafted into the army, many older men, teenagers, deserters, and those who had paid the military exemption tax were among the deportees. Government escorts, mostly consisting of gendarmes or local militia, would separate most of the men from the caravans during the first days of deportation, before taking them away and killing them. This unfolding human disaster would soon reach catastrophic proportions.

After the killings of Armenians, the groups responsible for the murders would search through the bodies to find any valuable documents that could benefit the state, such as life insurance policies or financial papers. The massacres were carried out by different groups, including local militiamen, gendarmes, Kurdish tribal groups, or hired cut-throats.

Girls, in particular, were often taken as brides within the family. After the initial phase of the deportations, in which most of the men and older boys were murdered, women and children became the primary targets of random and systematic rape. The violence was aimed at inflicting lasting psychological damage and destroying the self-perception of the Armenian individuals and community. Rape represented a transgenerational loss of honor for Armenians, even for those who managed to escape the reach of the Ottoman government.

Kill them all

Those who survived the death march and made it to the Syrian Desert were forced into camps, notorious for their inhumane conditions, with the Ottoman authorities exposing the Armenians to contagious diseases like typhus and refusing to provide adequate food and water. By January 1916, the route along the Euphrates was strewn with corpses, a grim testament to the ongoing killing and the exhaustion, famine, and disease that plagued the Armenians.

In July 1916, Ottoman leader Talaat ordered the dissolution of Armenian camps near military supply lines along the Euphrates, claiming that Armenians were a military threat and must be moved to appropriate locations. Thousands of Armenians were slaughtered under government supervision by Chechen killing squads, with few perpetrators killing huge numbers of victims within a relatively short time, while the authorities secured their remaining valuables. Near Der Zor, the governor burned alive approximately one thousand Armenian children.

In August 1915, the third wave of deportations began as the government extended the displacement to central and western provinces. Despite the government’s assurance that the Armenian Question had been solved by the end of August, the large number of deportees in western provinces created considerable problems for the railways and increased the chaos in and around Aleppo, which was the crossroads of the deportation. As a result, a special envoy named Shukru Bey was dispatched to northern Syria and the railways to streamline the transfer of deportees and record-keeping. By September 18, 1915, many districts had already been entirely emptied.

Too late, too feeble

In the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, efforts were made by the victorious allies, Armenian survivors, and Ottoman opposition to hold the leaders of the CUP accountable for their crimes. However, many of the key figures, including Talaat, had fled, and others were protected by post-war Ottoman administrations. The government, seeking to shift the blame away from the state, attempted to place responsibility on the Kurds. Despite this, even halfheartedly undertaken investigations revealed evidence of the organization behind the massacres.

Within a few months, the CUP reorganized under a new name, the National Movement, and began a successful campaign against Armenian survivors, Greeks, and Western powers. Ultimately, the international community accepted the realities created by the CUP during the Armenian Genocide and furthered the ethnic homogenization of Anatolia through the sanctioning of the Greco-Turkish "population exchange" in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Calling a spade, a spade

The Armenian genocide was a systematic and deliberate campaign of extermination carried out by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The aim was to eliminate the Armenian population from the empire's core provinces through mass deportations, death marches, and massacres.

Armenians who survived the death marches and reached the Syrian Desert found themselves trapped in a system of camps that stretched along the Euphrates to Der Zor. In these camps, the Ottoman authorities exposed them to contagious diseases like typhus and refused to provide them with food and water, which increased the already high mortality rate.

The American ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, shocked and appaled, described what happened next in a telegram to the U.S. State Department:

“Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian population and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.”

In January 1916, the route along the Euphrates was littered with human corpses and bones, bearing testimony to the ongoing killing of deportees and death by exhaustion, famine, and disease. By July the Ottoman authorities declared that Armenians were a military threat and ordered their dissolution. Large-scale massacres were organized, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Armenians.

The annihilation of the Armenians provided the Ottoman government with a material basis for a restructuring of the Ottoman demographic map. Armenian real estate in western and central provinces was used for the settlement of Kurdish tribal confederations.

The Armenian deportations were not a security measure against rebellions but were carried out when no danger of outside interference existed. The deportations allowed the CUP to acquire the Armenian communities’ assets and finance an ambitious demographic engineering program, the Turkification of the empire’s core provinces.

Armenian children and women were assimilated, with the state intending the Turkification of Armenian children and young women. Local competition for Armenian property was another field where the Turkification program encountered sustained competition from local circles. The loss of life caused by death marching, famine, diseases, and systematic massacres along the routes was part of the government’s program.

From the Unthinkable to the Preventable

Robert Fisk, dearly remembered and cherished, was a brave warrior of truth and facts, often standing alone in the field against hordes of deniers. He passed away in October 2020, leaving behind a legacy of fearless journalism and a commitment to shining a light on difficult truths. In his “The First Holocaust (a chapter in his brilliant book “The Great War for Civilisation”) argues, among other important things, that the Armenian Genocide should be remembered and acknowledged as a Holocaust with a capital H, just like the Jewish Holocaust. Fisk fiercely insists that the Armenian Genocide was as terrifying and systematic as the Jewish Holocaust, and yet it has been downplayed and denied for decades.

The first writer to call the Armenian genocide a holocaust was Winston Churchill, including in a list of Turkish wartime atrocities the “massacre [of] uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women and children together, all districts blotted out in one administrative Holocaust … beyond human redress.” for Churchill:

“[t]he clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be … There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions, cherishing national ambitions that would be satisfied only at the expense of Turkey, and planting geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems.”

One of the ways in which the Armenian Genocide is marginalized, Fisk points out, is by using the undeniable reality of the Jewish Holocaust as a way to deny the truth of the Armenian one. By insisting that the Jewish Holocaust is beyond dispute and using that as a standard to measure the "intense debate" surrounding the Armenian Genocide, some people try to imply that the latter is not as clear-cut or well-established as the former.

However, Fisk argues that this is a false dichotomy. Just because the Armenian Genocide is not as widely recognized or commemorated as the Jewish Holocaust, it doesn't mean it was any less horrific or tragic. The Armenian Genocide was a deliberate and systematic campaign to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, carried out by the government and military authorities. It involved mass deportations, forced labor, starvation, rape, and massacres, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

Fisk's insistence on calling the Armenian Genocide a Holocaust with a capital "H" is not just a matter of semantics, but of historical accuracy and justice. By recognizing the Armenian Genocide as a Holocaust, we acknowledge the suffering and loss of the Armenian people, and we honor their memory by confronting the past and learning from it. As Fisk writes, "The truth about the Armenian Holocaust is as undeniable as the truth about the Jewish Holocaust. And it is time to remember it."

It is uncertain how much Hitler knew about the Armenian Genocide, but he was undoubtedly aware of its gruesome details. He mentioned the genocide for the first time in 1924, describing Armenians as the victims of cowardice. Later, in August 1939, he famously asked his generals a rhetorical question about the destruction of the Armenians, saying, "Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” This demonstrates Hitler’s belief that the world had forgotten about the atrocities committed against the Armenians and that he could similarly carry out his own genocide without facing consequences. Was he right after all?

Biz Bitti Demeden Bu Dava Bitmez (It’s not over until we say so)

Despite the Ottoman Empire’s genocidal intentions, the Armenian people survived and continue to thrive. The resilience of the Armenian people and their culture is a testament to their strength and determination to persevere. Today, the Armenian Republic stands as a sovereign state, and the Armenian people have established a place and role for themselves in the international community.

The failure of the Turkish plan to wipe out Armenians completely is a testament to the power of the human spirit and serves as a reminder that even in the face of the darkest atrocities, hope and resilience can and shall prevail. The ultimate failure of the Genocide plan and the continued presence and prosperity of the Armenian people is a powerful reminder that hate, and discrimination can never truly triumph. As history has shown time and time again, the punishment for such atrocities will inevitably find the culprits, and justice will be served.