The Armenian genocide

During the First World War the authorities of the Ottoman Empire destroyed the Armenians living within it. From the spring of 1915 the ruling Committee of Union and Progress arrested and murdered Armenian leaders and deported whole communities from Anatolia to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. People died at the hands of escorts and bandits, and of hunger, thirst and disease. According to most historians’ estimates between about 600,000 and over a million Armenians died in 1915–1916, while the Armenian side speaks of 1.5 million. The crime is now called the Armenian genocide. Turkey rejects that classification.

The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire

The Armenians were one of many peoples in the sultans’ multinational state. As Christians they formed a separate religious community, represented before the authorities by the patriarchate in Constantinople. Most of them lived in eastern Anatolia, along the borders with Russia and Persia, but also in Cilicia and in the towns of the west of the country. For decades they had been victims of violence. In 1894–1896, under Sultan Abdülhamid II, massacres killed, by various estimates, from several tens of thousands to several hundred thousand of them. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum writes of at least 80,000 dead.

The Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 restored the constitution and promised equal rights to all citizens regardless of nationality and religion. The Armenians welcomed it with hope, but as early as April 1909 between about 20,000 and 25,000 of them were massacred in and around Adana. The Armenian elite concluded that the ruling committee bore responsibility for the massacre, and trust between the two sides broke down. In January 1913 the Committee of Union and Progress seized full power in a coup. Its leaders increasingly saw the empire as a state of Turks and Muslims, and the compact Armenian settlements of eastern Anatolia as an obstacle. From then on the state was ruled by a triumvirate: the war minister Enver Pasha, the navy minister Djemal Pasha and the interior minister Mehmed Talat, later known as Talat Pasha.

War and the first decisions

On 2 August 1914 the committee’s leaders concluded a secret alliance with Germany, and by early November the empire was at war with Russia. In August the committee’s leadership also set up the Special Organisation (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa), a secret paramilitary force to fight “internal enemies”, which also recruited prisoners. On the Caucasus frontier Armenians fought on both sides. Thousands served in the sultan’s army, while on the Russian side volunteer units fought, partly made up of refugees from Turkey. The Ottoman authorities presented this as proof of the treason of the whole nation.

In the winter of 1914/1915 Enver led the 3rd Army through snowbound mountains to Sarikamish, where frost, typhus and a Russian counter-attack destroyed his army. The authorities quickly shifted part of the blame for the defeat onto the Armenians, accusing them of treason, desertion and helping the enemy. The French historian Raymond Kévorkian believes the defeat pushed the committee towards a harsher policy towards the Armenians. That same winter Ottoman troops entered Persian Azerbaijan and took Urmia, where Armenians and Assyrians fell victim to violence. After the defeat at Dilman Halil Bey blamed it on the Armenians and Assyrians, and according to German witnesses several hundred soldiers of those nationalities serving in his units were disarmed and killed.

On 25 February 1915 Enver signed the order disarming Armenian soldiers. They were sent to labour battalions, in which many were later murdered. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan regards this as the first phase of the crime. In March Armenian men from Dörtyol on the Gulf of Alexandretta were arrested and likewise sent to labour battalions.

Historians still disagree about when the decision to exterminate was taken. Kévorkian and the Turkish historian Taner Akçam link it to meetings of the central committee in the second half of March 1915, when one of the leaders of the Special Organisation, Dr Bahaeddin Şakir, returned to Constantinople from the Caucasus front. Others, such as Ronald Suny, see rather a gradual radicalisation, accelerated in April and May by the Allied landing at Gallipoli and the fighting at Van. No formal document recording a decision to exterminate has been found. Kévorkian stresses that the intent was shown by the state’s actions on the ground, which convinced consuls and the American and German ambassadors that the crime had been planned.

1915: arrests and deportations

The first deportations struck Cilicia. On 8 April 1915, according to the most commonly given date, the first convoy of deportees left Zeytun, a mountain town in the Taurus. After clashes between deserters and gendarmes the authorities treated the events as a revolt of the whole town. The historian Raymond Kévorkian writes of about 18,000 people deported from Zeytun and its surroundings; other estimates speak of 20,000–25,000. The first were sent towards Konya, later ones south to Aleppo and on to the Euphrates.

On the evening of 24 April, on Talat’s orders, between about 240 and 270 Armenian political leaders, writers, journalists, doctors, clergymen and merchants were arrested in Constantinople in the first wave. More were detained in the following days. The museum in Yerevan states that 800 Armenians were arrested at that time. They were taken into the interior of Anatolia, and most were murdered in the following months. In the summer the Armenian deputies Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes Serengülian, once Talat’s political allies, were also killed. Armenians around the world commemorate the genocide on 24 April.

A few days earlier, on 20 April, fighting had broken out in Van. The governor, Cevdet Bey, Enver’s brother-in-law, had the Armenian leader Ishkhan killed and the deputy Arshak Vramian arrested, while irregular units raided the surrounding villages. The Armenians of the town, fearing a massacre, took up armed self-defence and for almost four weeks defended themselves in their quarters, until in May the Russians entered. The Ottoman authorities presented the fighting as an Armenian uprising behind the front, prepared in concert with the Russians, and made it one of the main justifications for the deportations. Most historians, however, describe it as the self-defence of the population. Cevdet’s predecessor, Hasan Tahsin, wrote that there had been no rebellion in Van and that there could not have been one. When in the summer the Russians abandoned Van, tens of thousands of Armenians fled with them to the Caucasus.

On 24 May 1915 France, Britain and Russia issued a joint declaration calling the massacres of the Armenians crimes of Turkey “against humanity and civilisation” and announcing that they would hold members of the Ottoman government personally responsible. The initiative came from the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov. On 27 May the press in the capital announced the temporary deportation law, which gave a semblance of legality to removals that had been under way for several weeks. By the summer they covered almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia, including provinces far from the front. The government in Constantinople required detailed reports on the number of deportees and on the property they left behind, which the state took over. Only the Armenians of Constantinople and Smyrna were for the most part spared mass deportation.

The pattern was almost everywhere the same. Men were often murdered on the spot or just outside town, while women, children and the elderly were driven in columns into the Syrian desert. On the way the convoys were attacked by units of the Special Organisation, Kurds and local bandits, who robbed, raped, abducted women and girls and killed. According to Kévorkian the largest killing sites were the gorges of Kemah on the Euphrates and of Kahta south of Malatya. Tens of thousands of Armenian children were taken from their families and converted to Islam. Officials who refused to take part in the crime were dismissed and sometimes killed. Assyrians and other Christians of eastern Anatolia also fell victim to the deportations and massacres.

Resistance was rare. Armenians fleeing the deportations held out on Musa Dagh by the Mediterranean until in mid-September French warships, among them the cruiser Amiral Charner, evacuated more than 4,000 people from there. The crime took place before the eyes of foreigners. The American ambassador Henry Morgenthau recorded that in August 1915 Talat told him that the policy towards the Armenians was settled and that there would be none of them anywhere in Anatolia. The reactions of the German allies varied. Otto Liman von Sanders stopped the deportations in Smyrna, and Colmar von der Goltz threatened in December 1915 to resign unless the deportations were halted. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, however, noted in the same month that Germany’s only aim was to keep Turkey on its side until the end of the war, whether or not Armenians died as a result.

Death marches and the camps in Syria

The columns walked hundreds of kilometres towards Aleppo, the Euphrates valley and Deir ez-Zor, without proper clothing, food or water, in the heat by day and the cold by night. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hundreds of thousands of Armenians died before they reached the designated camps. Some were killed or abducted, others took their own lives, and very many died on the way of hunger, thirst, exhaustion and disease. The American consul general in Beirut predicted as early as June that without help most of the deportees from Zeytun would die.

From October 1915 about twenty-five concentration camps operated in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, under the interior ministry. According to Kévorkian about 800,000 deportees passed through them, moved again and again from camp to camp. Regulations allowed Armenians to make up no more than 10 per cent of the population of a given area, so local officials drove them back and forth across the desert until their numbers fell to the required level. Missionaries in Aleppo, supported by American and German consuls, secretly rescued some of them.

At the turn of February and March 1916, Kévorkian writes, the committee decided to destroy the survivors, of whom about 500,000 were still alive in Syria and Mesopotamia. According to documents read out in court after the war, on 22 February Talat ordered the liquidation of the deportees in the camps along the Euphrates and at Deir ez-Zor. From April to December 1916 Ras al-Ayn in the north and Deir ez-Zor in the south became sites of systematic massacre. In July the local mutasarrif, Ali Suad, was dismissed, and his successor Salih Zeki had 192,750 deportees murdered within five months. That figure was given by the Ottoman authorities themselves in a document published in 1919. Many of the dead were thrown into the Euphrates, and thousands of orphans were murdered. The organisers of the centenary commemorations in Poland in 2015 called the desert near Deir ez-Zor the largest graveyard of the Armenians, where several hundred thousand people died.

Some of the deportees survived. After the war several thousand women and children abducted by nomadic tribes were recovered, and in Palestine and Syria in 1917–1918 the British came upon more than 100,000 deportees whom the authorities had put to work for the army along the road from Aleppo through Damascus towards Sinai. At Tafileh, according to Lawrence’s notes, about a thousand survivors were living. The Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, called on the tribes to take in and protect the refugees. Most of the aid came from the United States. When in 1917 the empire broke off relations with Washington, American money was funding above all relief for the survivors.

The numbers

The exact number of victims cannot be established, and estimates depend on how many Armenians lived in the empire before the war. Ottoman censuses gave about 1.2–1.3 million, the Armenian patriarchate more than 2 million. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum takes about 1.5 million. Deportees must also be distinguished from the dead. According to the Armenian National Institute in Washington well over a million Armenians were deported in 1915, but some of them survived. Contemporaries already spoke of the enormous scale of the crime. In January 1917 the Entente, in its reply to Wilson’s note, wrote of “the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenians”, and the Russian general Yevgeny Maslovsky wrote that about a million people died in the removal of the Armenians from the frontline areas.

According to most historians’ estimates between about 600,000 and over a million Armenians died in 1915–1916. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives from at least 664,000 to 1.2 million killed in massacres or dead of exhaustion and starvation. Kévorkian, comparing the number of Armenians before the war with the number of survivors, puts the losses of the empire’s Armenians at about 1,300,000, and together with the victims of massacres in Persia and the Caucasus, such as the massacre in Baku in September 1918, at nearly 1.5 million. That figure is used by Armenia and Armenian organisations. Official Turkish historiography for decades spoke of several hundred thousand victims, between 300,000 and 600,000.

At the end of 1919, according to a tally cited by Kévorkian, about 543,600 Armenians were living within the former empire, including 150,000 each in Constantinople and in the province of Adana. Eastern Anatolia, the historic homeland of the Armenians, was emptied. Before the war the Armenian patriarchate counted more than 75,000 Armenians in Muş, and in the summer of 1915 almost all of them were murdered. The Armenian community of Trebizond, estimated at about 30,000 people before the war, was murdered and deported in 1915, and the Armenian inhabitants of Erzurum, as the American missionary Robert Stapleton recounted, were murdered on the road. In 1918 hundreds of thousands of refugees crowded around Yerevan, where the Armenians at Sardarabad stopped the Turkish advance, and on 28 May an independent Armenia came into being.

Responsibility and trials

Historians agree that the chief organiser of the crime was Talat, who as interior minister directed the deportations and in 1917 became grand vizier. They also count among the main perpetrators Enver, who commanded the army and was one of the leaders of the Special Organisation, the organisation’s head Bahaeddin Şakir, and Dr Mehmed Nâzım, who was responsible for the resettlement plans. The role of Djemal, who ruled Syria, is disputed. He opposed indiscriminate massacres, and some deportees survived in the territories under his control, but the Turkish historian Ümit Kurt, like many other scholars, counts him among the perpetrators, because although he preferred forced conversion and assimilation of the Armenians, he sought just as much as Talat and Enver to make them disappear as a nation.

In early October 1918 Talat’s government resigned, and the programme of Ahmed İzzet Pasha’s cabinet referred to the deportations of the Armenians only guardedly, as a matter forced by “the necessities of war”. The Armistice of Mudros obliged Turkey to hand over interned and imprisoned Armenians. Two days after it was signed, on the night of 1–2 November, Talat, Enver and Djemal fled Constantinople on a German warship.

Under pressure from the victors, the authorities in Constantinople set up in November 1918 the commission of inquiry of Hasan Mazhar, which collected from officials the orders for deportation and murder, and in January 1919 an extraordinary court-martial. The court sentenced to death the kaymakam Kemal, the chief culprit of the massacres in the Yozgat district, and in April 1919 he was publicly hanged. The testimony of General Vehip Pasha was read out; he wrote that the massacres and plunder had resulted from decisions of the Central Committee of Union and Progress. In July 1919 the court sentenced Talat, Enver, Djemal and Dr Nâzım to death in absentia.

The trials soon lost momentum. In May 1919 the court released forty-one defendants, and the British took some of the rest to Malta. According to Kévorkian the Istanbul press shows that most of the population did not regard the crimes against the Armenians as deserving punishment. Former leaders of the committee, including men accused of war crimes, joined Mustafa Kemal’s national movement. The sentences on the triumvirs were carried out by Armenian assassins. On 15 March 1921 in Berlin Talat was shot dead by Soghomon Tehlirian, who had lost his family during the deportations. It was the first assassination of Operation Nemesis, and a Berlin court acquitted the assassin. Djemal was killed by Armenian assassins in Tiflis in 1922, and Enver died the same year in Central Asia, fighting the Bolsheviks.

Raphael Lemkin and the concept of genocide

The fate of the Armenians played an important part in the birth of the very word “genocide”. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish origin, born in 1900 near Wołkowysk, was a law student when Talat was shot dead in Berlin on 15 March 1921. The assassin’s trial and acquittal prompted a debate about responsibility for mass crimes committed by governments. According to the dzieje.pl portal Lemkin discussed this with Professor Juliusz Makarewicz (PL), who held that such acts could carry only moral responsibility, because an international tribunal would violate the sovereignty of states.

Lemkin repeatedly stressed that reading press reports of the crimes against the Armenians early in life convinced him that national groups needed legal protection. In 1933, shaken by the massacre of Christians at Simele in Iraq, he proposed to the International Bureau for the Unification of Penal Law that “crimes of barbarity” against nations be prosecuted. He introduced the word “genocide” in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944 and devoted to German crimes. Thanks to his efforts, on 9 December 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In a speech in 1949, quoted by Kévorkian, Lemkin recalled that after the massacre of more than a million Armenians the victors had announced a tribunal for the guilty, “but it did nothing”. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum the origins of the concept of genocide and of its place in international law lie in the mass murder of the Armenians.

Memory and recognition

Armenians call the crime Medz Yeghern, the Great Crime, or Aghet, the Catastrophe, and every year around 24 April they commemorate its victims. The genocide has been recognised by the parliaments and governments of many states. The French parliament did so in 2001, and by 2015, the centenary, the parliaments of more than 30 states had adopted such resolutions. The Polish Sejm adopted a resolution on the matter by acclamation on 19 April 2005. On 24 April 2021 the President of the United States, Joe Biden, called the crime a genocide in a statement for the day of remembrance.

Turkey does not accept this classification. Officially it speaks of “the events of 1915” and presents them as part of the suffering of all the empire’s inhabitants in its last years, Turks, Kurds, Arabs and Armenians. In 2014 the then prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, offered condolences to the grandchildren of the Armenians who died and called the events of the First World War “our shared pain”. Ankara proposes a joint commission of Turkish, Armenian and international historians and stresses that it has opened its archives. According to Kévorkian Turkish law severely penalises calling these events genocide.

Among historians who study the subject there is agreement that the murder of the Armenians meets the definition of genocide. Ottoman, Armenian, American, British, French, German and Austrian documents of the time show that the committee’s leadership deliberately targeted the Armenian population of Anatolia. Taner Akçam, Raymond Kévorkian, Ronald Suny and Talat’s biographer Hans-Lukas Kieser differ on when the decision to exterminate was taken and what role the wartime defeats played in it, but not on the responsibility of the committee’s leaders.