The genocide of the Armenians

A tormented story on Noah’s land

Legend has it that the Armenians descended from Hayk, great-great-grandson of Noah by Japheth. It is generally accepted that they are one of the Thraco-Phrygian tribes who, arriving from the Balkans in Asia Minor around 1200 BC, conquered the ancient kingdom of Urartu and imposed their Indo-European language. Their presence is attested as early as VI^ecentury BC by Persian and Greek sources.

"Exchanging grandiose history for better geographical location": the history of this mountainous bastion located at a strategic crossroads between Europe and Asia, on trade and invasion routes, is indeed a succession of phases of independence and submission, unification and fragmentation, golden ages and dark pages.

The early adoption of Christianity (IV^e century), a national Church and the creation of an alphabet (V^e century) forged a strong identity, which survived even in the absence of a state. The last, the kingdom of Cilicia, disappeared in 1375. Armenia was soon divided between the Ottoman and Persian empires.

THE UNATTAINABLE EQUALITY OF RIGHTS

At the dawn of the 19th^e century, the few 3,000,000 Armenians of the Ottoman Empire still remain strongly implanted in their ancestral territory. As non-Muslims, they are subject to the discriminatory status of dhimmi, "protected" as people of the Book, but second-rate subjects. If they enjoy relative religious and cultural freedom, they cannot bear arms or ride a horse, they are subject to specific taxes and, among other things, to distinctive dress codes applied more or less strictly according to the times and places.

Faced with the expansion of rival Russian power in the Balkans and the Caucasus, and international pressure, the Ottoman Empire attempted to halt its decline through institutional, fiscal, and military reforms. The first charters aimed at establishing equal rights for all subjects, such as the Imperial Christian and Jewish Rescript Millet, guarantee their cultural and religious autonomy. Hatt-i Humayoun, were adopted on the eve of 30 March 1856. He put an end to the war between the Russian Empire and a coalition formed by France, England and the Kingdom of Sardinia, which came to the aid of the Ottoman Empire, whose sovereignty and integrity were henceforth internationally guaranteed. The new regulations of ethno-confessional "nations".

But the cost of reforms impoverishes the rural population, while increasing land pressure and insecurity in the eastern provinces due to Kurdish tribes and the massive arrival of Muslim refugees driven out by the Russian conquest. On 13 June-13 July 1878, by stating the need for reforms to improve the lot of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which Russia had just beaten in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the Berlin congress internationalized the Armenian question. Congress of Berlin, the Armenian Question enters the international scene as part of the Chronicle, from 1774 to 1923, of the decline of the Ottoman Empire until its breakup, due to its mode of governance and its inability to reform itself, and because of the military intervention, economic, cultural, humanitarian – European powers in rivalry for the sharing of remains.

THE SULTAN’S POLICY: THE TIME OF MASSACRES

Haunted by revolutionary danger and the rise of separatism from the Balkans to the Arab provinces, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and caliph of the Muslims, from the deposition of his brother Murad V on 31 August 1876 to his own removal by the Young-Turks on April 27, 1909. Abdülhamid II suspects a possible independence temptation of the Armenians that would have the support of the Russian enemy and the European powers. He suspended the barely promulgated 1876 constitution, opts for a police regime and a pan-Islamist policy.

Created on the model of the Cossacks, the Hamidiye tribal cavalry regiments reign terror. Disappointed by the promises of unimplemented reforms, Armenians began to organize themselves around political parties that advocated social and national emancipation as well as self-defense.

The sultan responded with mass killings: more than 200,000 dead, thousands of orphans, forced conversions, exodus to the Russian Caucasus, Persia or the United States. European public opinion is outraged and a large Armenophile movement mobilizes personalities from all political currents. The sultan again promises reforms, while casting opprobrium on the victims, relayed by a purchased press and some "friendly" intellectuals.

THE DISAPPOINTED HOPES OF THE YOUNG TURKISH CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION

Other Ottomans also rebelled against the sultan’s policy. Members of the Young-Turkish movement, which emerged in 1889, came closer to the Armenian parties in exile. While the Empire continued to disintegrate, the re-establishment of the Constitution in July 1908 by officers of the Macedonian army aroused enthusiasm. The population fraternizes. Equal rights are reaffirmed. Non-Muslims enter Parliament.

But as early as April 1909, the massacres at Adana, attributed to rearguard fighting by supporters of Abdul Hamid II, created doubt. The most radical nationalist wing of the Young Turks soon imposed its dictatorship through terror. The loss of Balkan territories and the influx of new Muslim refugees sanctuarize Anatolia as the ultimate imperial space to be preserved.

The Union and Progress Committee (CUP), created in 1907, opts for the Turkification of space, people and economy, and for the Alliance of Turkic peoples from the Balkans to Central Asia.

Already in the spring of 1914, the persecution of the Greeks from the islands of the eastern Aegean and the coastal areas, and their deportation to central Anatolia under the guise of security, was a bad omen.

WAR AND GENOCIDE

The First World War inaugurated new practices of violence against civilian populations, mass massacres legitimized in the name of higher ideals. The war has established itself as a propitious framework. The emblematic case of the Armenians, aimed at the own subjects of a state declared "internal enemies" by the state of which they are citizens, inaugurated the genocidal "modernity" of the ^twentieth century.

As a single party, controlling all administrative and military mechanisms, the Union and Progress Committee (CUP) entered the war in November 1914 on Germany’s side with the clear awareness that it was thus creating an opportunity to carry out its project of building a state-Turkish nation, by eradicating all groups likely to hinder it.

On 3 August 1914, a decree of general mobilization, including the Armenians, was promulgated. The CUP Central Committee also decided to form a special organization (SO), the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, a paramilitary group in charge of fighting against "internal tumors". The entry into the war also makes it possible to legitimize military requisitions, resembling looting, aimed at Armenian and Greek entrepreneurs.

TOWARDS A PROJECT FOR THE TOTAL ERADICATION OF ARMENIANS

The terminology of the Unionists, describing the Armenians as "internal tumors", bears the imprint of their ideology of political doctrine inspired by Darwin’s theory on the evolution of species through natural selection and applied to man and social relations.  With the help of the war, the project to turcize the Anatolian area turned into an enterprise of extermination of the Armenians, extended to other communities of Eastern Christians, including the Syriacs. The CUP manages to mobilize around him provincial notables, tribal leaders and executives of the administration and the army, almost all members of the party.

The military disaster of Sarıkamış on the front of the Caucasus in the face of the Russians, on 2 and 3 January 1915, certainly decided the Young-Turkish Central Committee to compensate for these bitter setbacks by an even more radical domestic policy towards the Armenians, with the support of the OS.

The Ottoman offensive on the Caucasian front was already accompanied by localized massacres along the border with Russia and Persia. The Armenian population of about twenty villages was massacred, including in Persian Azerbaijan, where Kurdish tribal chiefs joined contingents of the Ottoman army.

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DESTRUCTION OF ARMENIANS

By order of the Minister of War (1881-1922), he was one of the leaders of the Young Turk movement and of the constitutional revolution of 1908. Actor of the ultra-nationalist and dictatorial radicalization of the regime, he is Minister of War of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, which he will choose to lead on the side of Germany.

Enver Pasha, on February 28, 1915, the tens of thousands of Armenian conscripts serving in the III^e Army were disarmed and placed in work battalions or executed. From May, it was the turn of men aged 16 to 60. April 24, by order of the Minister of the Interior (1874-1921). First a telegraphist in Salonika, he joined the Young Turk movement and became, after the revolution of 1908, Minister of Posts, then Minister of the Interior and Grand Vizier. He is one of the main architects of the genocide of the Armenians.

Talaat Pasha, the Armenian elites of Constantinople were arrested and eliminated a few weeks later.

The elimination of the Armenians from the six administrative subdivisions equivalent to an eastern province, their historical territory, appears as a priority. The convoys of deportees – women, children, old people – are methodically removed along the way. Few of them reach the "relegation sites". On the other hand, a greater number of those from western Anatolia or Thrace, sent to Syria from July to September 1915, often by train, reach at least Cilicia.

The final stage of the destruction process takes place in the twenty-five concentration camps in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, which were set up from October 1915 onwards and house about 800,000 deportees. From April to December 1916, some 500,000 Armenians who survived there were systematically massacred, especially at the sites of Ras ul-Ayn and Deir es-Zor.

THE END OF A WORLD

In the aftermath of the Moudros armistice, there were some 300,000 survivors, mainly women and children, who could return to their homes or be taken into shelters and orphanages run by Armenian or foreign charities. including the American Near East Relief.

Balance

About 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1914.

Victims

About 1.3 million deaths:

• 120,000 Armenian soldiers mobilized in the III^e Army (covering the six vilayet orientals), killed in small groups between January and February 1915, or transferred to work battalions.
• Several hundred representatives of the Armenian elite were arrested on 24 April 1915, in Constantinople as well as in provincial towns, interned and then murdered.
• Tens of thousands of men, aged 40 to 60, massacred between April and August 1915, mainly in the six Armenian vilayets.
• 1,040,782 Armenians, mostly women, children and the elderly, deported between April and early autumn 1915 in 306 convoys.
• Nearly 400,000 deaths in the concentration camps from October 1915 to June 1916.
• Nearly 300,000 other internees from the camps massacred between July and November 1916.

Survivors

About 700,000 Ottoman Armenians:

• Several tens of thousands, outside the eastern provinces, were not deported (80,000 to Constantinople, 10,000 to Smyrna).
• Several tens of thousands fled to the Russian Caucasus.
• Thousands of craftsmen and their families converted and maintained on site.
• About 100,000 survivors of camps or relegation sites found in Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Jordan, and Sinai.

EXCLUDE FROM TERRITORY

Vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire et les mesures gouvernementales, a document published in Constantinople in 1916, as the extermination of the Armenians from the Ottoman Empire was completed, laid the foundation stone for the negationist edifice.

With the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, evidence of the extermination program administered during the trials by Turkish courts, in the aftermath of the war, of the main perpetrators of the genocide of Armenians, and sentenced to death in absentia (1919-1920). the Constantinople trial was erased, and the survivors returned to their homes again driven out.

The first census of Republican Turkey in 1927 only counts 65,000 Armenians. In the official history of Turkey, written in the 1930s, Armenia is not mentioned, as if the Armenians had existed only as rebels and traitors to the homeland. The assassins of memory take over from the killers.

ERASE FROM HISTORY

The emergence in 1948 of the word "genocide" as an offence under international criminal law inspired the claims of Armenians, both in the diaspora and in the Soviet Union.

From 1965, they claim, among other things, the recognition of the genocide perpetrated in 1915-1916. Turkey then sets up a state negationism centered on the challenge of criminal intent, the reduction of the number of victims, or even, in an extreme form, the reversal of the accusation: it is the Armenians who perpetrated a genocide against the Turks!

To any recognition of the genocide by a state, a parliament, or a city, the Turkish government responds with diplomatic, economic (and legal measures against its citizens).

While scientific research conducted by historians and jurists confirms the reality of a genocide, the obstinacy of successive Turkish governments in denying this evidence is increasingly denounced by a Turkish civil society aware that the restoration of historical truth is a guarantee of democracy.

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