Armenian genocide

The Armenian genocide was the deliberate, organised extermination of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian people, carried out mainly in 1915 and 1916, during the First World War, by the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Through mass killings and deportations on foot into the Syrian desert, the great majority of Ottoman Armenians were killed or driven from their homeland. Estimates of the dead range from about 600,000 to 1.5 million, with many historians giving a figure of around one million.

Armenians had lived in eastern Anatolia and the Armenian highlands for millennia. In 1914 perhaps two million lived in the Ottoman Empire, as a Christian minority with a distinct church, many of them farmers in the east and many others merchants and craftsmen in the cities. Their position had worsened in the late nineteenth century. In the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896 at least 100,000 Armenians were killed, and in 1909 some 20,000 or more people, mostly Armenians, died in the Adana massacre.

The CUP, often called the Young Turks, had dominated the government since 1913, led by a triumvirate of Talaat, Enver and Djemal Pasha. The empire entered World War I on the side of Germany in late 1914. After a disastrous defeat by Russia at Sarıkamış that winter, Armenians were blamed as a supposed internal enemy, and Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were disarmed and many were killed. On the night of 23–24 April 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested in Constantinople and later deported, and most of them were killed. Armenians mark 24 April as the day of remembrance.

From the spring of 1915, Armenians across Anatolia were ordered to leave their homes. In many places men were separated and shot, while women, children and the elderly were marched in convoys towards the Syrian desert. Many died along the way from hunger, thirst, exhaustion and attacks by irregulars, including units of the paramilitary Special Organisation. Survivors were held in camps near Aleppo and along the Euphrates, and in 1916 a further wave of massacres was carried out around Deir ez-Zor. Tens of thousands of women and children were forcibly converted and absorbed into Muslim households. Armenian property was confiscated. Foreign diplomats, missionaries and German officers reported on the events, and the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau protested to the government.

After the Ottoman defeat, courts-martial in Constantinople in 1919–1920 condemned several leaders, including Talaat, to death in absentia, though few sentences were carried out. Talaat was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian survivor. The short-lived Armenian republic in the Caucasus was divided between Turkish and Soviet rule in 1920, and the nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Surviving Armenians formed a worldwide diaspora, in the Middle East, France, the United States and elsewhere.

The lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in 1944, cited the fate of the Armenians as one of the cases that led him to the concept. The Armenian genocide is accepted as a historical fact by the great majority of historians and genocide scholars, and it has been formally recognised by a growing number of states, more than thirty by the 2020s, including France, Germany and the United States. The government of Turkey rejects the term genocide, arguing that the deaths resulted from wartime relocation, disease and intercommunal fighting, and it opposes recognition. The issue remains central to relations between Turkey and Armenia.

Our 1914 map shows the Ottoman Empire with its Armenian provinces in eastern Anatolia, and our 1920 map shows the region after the empire's defeat.