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THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN HISTORY
Intelligence Report
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/ article.jsp?sid=430
June 3 2008
AL
Photo: Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire during World War I, bore witness to the organized slaughter
of Armenian men, women and children.
For decades before they were the victims of genocide, Armenians living
as a Christian minority in the Muslim-dominated Ottoman Empire were
accorded second-class citizenship. It was against the law for them to
carry weapons or ride horses. Their houses could not overlook those
of Muslims. Testimony from Armenians was not admissible in courts of
law -- just as slaves and even freedmen in the 19th-century American
South were barred from testifying against whites.
This official state discrimination opened the door to massive violence
preceding the ultimate genocide. Between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians
were massacred in 1895. Another 15,000 to 30,000 were killed on
a single day in 1909. When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I
in 1914 on the side of Central Powers, its military and political
leaders feared the oppressed Armenians would form a fifth column and
collaborate with the Russians, who were pressing hard at the collapsing
empire's eastern edges. There is strong evidence that some Armenian
men of fighting age did in fact take up arms against Turkish troops,
fighting as pro-Russian guerrillas.
Armenian men enlisted in the Turkish army were disarmed and
reassigned to labor battalions, and widespread propaganda began
depicting Armenians as a collective threat to national security. On
April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government imprisoned around 250 Armenian
intellectuals and leaders. This marked the beginning of the genocide,
which eventually resulted in the deaths of between 1 million and 1.5
million people. During the next six months, by government order,
more than a million Armenians were forcibly deported and marched
through the desert into Syria with little or no food, water or
shelter. Others were herded into concentration camps and drowned,
poisoned, burned to death or shot.
The documentary evidence of the genocide includes a 1915 telegram
to a Turkish provincial official from Behaeddin Shakir, one of
the leaders of the secret organization created to plan and carry
out the genocide, which included death squads staffed by criminals
released from prison for that purpose. "Are the Armenians, who are
being dispatched from there, being liquidated?" Shakir wrote. "Are
those harmful persons being exterminated, or are they merely being
dispatched and exiled? Answer explicitly."
Eyewitnesses to the genocide included Henry Morgenthau, the American
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time. "When the Turkish
authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were simply
giving the death warrant to a whole race," he said. "They understood
this well, and in their conversations they made no particular attempt
to conceal the fact."
Intelligence Report
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/ article.jsp?sid=430
June 3 2008
AL
Photo: Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire during World War I, bore witness to the organized slaughter
of Armenian men, women and children.
For decades before they were the victims of genocide, Armenians living
as a Christian minority in the Muslim-dominated Ottoman Empire were
accorded second-class citizenship. It was against the law for them to
carry weapons or ride horses. Their houses could not overlook those
of Muslims. Testimony from Armenians was not admissible in courts of
law -- just as slaves and even freedmen in the 19th-century American
South were barred from testifying against whites.
This official state discrimination opened the door to massive violence
preceding the ultimate genocide. Between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians
were massacred in 1895. Another 15,000 to 30,000 were killed on
a single day in 1909. When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I
in 1914 on the side of Central Powers, its military and political
leaders feared the oppressed Armenians would form a fifth column and
collaborate with the Russians, who were pressing hard at the collapsing
empire's eastern edges. There is strong evidence that some Armenian
men of fighting age did in fact take up arms against Turkish troops,
fighting as pro-Russian guerrillas.
Armenian men enlisted in the Turkish army were disarmed and
reassigned to labor battalions, and widespread propaganda began
depicting Armenians as a collective threat to national security. On
April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government imprisoned around 250 Armenian
intellectuals and leaders. This marked the beginning of the genocide,
which eventually resulted in the deaths of between 1 million and 1.5
million people. During the next six months, by government order,
more than a million Armenians were forcibly deported and marched
through the desert into Syria with little or no food, water or
shelter. Others were herded into concentration camps and drowned,
poisoned, burned to death or shot.
The documentary evidence of the genocide includes a 1915 telegram
to a Turkish provincial official from Behaeddin Shakir, one of
the leaders of the secret organization created to plan and carry
out the genocide, which included death squads staffed by criminals
released from prison for that purpose. "Are the Armenians, who are
being dispatched from there, being liquidated?" Shakir wrote. "Are
those harmful persons being exterminated, or are they merely being
dispatched and exiled? Answer explicitly."
Eyewitnesses to the genocide included Henry Morgenthau, the American
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time. "When the Turkish
authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were simply
giving the death warrant to a whole race," he said. "They understood
this well, and in their conversations they made no particular attempt
to conceal the fact."