Armenian genocide

The ruling Committee of Union and Progress, with the interior minister Talat Pasha, accused the Armenians of siding with Russia, especially after the defeat at Sarıkamış. Deportations began in the spring of 1915, and on 24 April several hundred Armenian leaders and intellectuals were arrested in Constantinople; most were later murdered. From late May the removals spread across almost all of Anatolia. Men were often killed on the spot, while women, children and the elderly were driven on death marches into the deserts, where they died of hunger, thirst and disease. Assyrians and other Christians were also victims.

The death toll is disputed: historians give from about 600,000 to over a million, the Armenian side 1.5 million. As early as 24 May 1915 France, Britain and Russia called the massacres crimes against humanity. These events later led the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to coin the term genocide. Turkey rejects that classification; the Polish Sejm recognised the crime as genocide in 2005.