The Unspeakable Things That Happened In The Armenian Genocide

The 20th century had no shortage of terrible events that cast a shadow over people today. The deaths of over a million Armenians is one such tragedy. Few tragedies have faced such bitter political discussion after the fact as the Armenian Genocide. While many people recognize the events as a genocide, others deny it ever happened, insist it was an accident, or that it was a justified response to a political threat. In this video, we look at the unspeakable things that happened in the Armenian Genocide and how its complicated legacy is still hotly debated today.

 

Nestled in the Caucasus Mountains on the border between Europe and Asia, Armenia’s long history has seen it caught between countless empires. By the late 19th century, Western Armenia was firmly under the control of the Ottoman Empire, while a smaller Eastern portion was controlled by the Russians. The Armenians of the Ottoman Empire faced many obstacles as a Christian minority in a Muslim-majority empire. They were subject to legal discrimination and higher taxes. Over time, racial ideologies that privileged ethnic Turks opened new opportunities for anti-Armenian discrimination.

 

Another significant obstacle was their role as a middleman minority. A middleman minority is an ethnic group that is over-represented in occupations like bankers, merchants, and bureaucrats relative to their small overall population. Other middleman minorities around the world included the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Gujaratis in India, and most famously, the Jews in Europe and the United States. Although only a small percentage of Armenians worked in these lucrative jobs, all Armenians were subject to discrimination that described them as parasites, thieves, and leeches who were stealing the wealth of the rest of the population.

 

This caused outbreaks of violence and persecution throughout the late 19th century. The Ottoman government regularly seized Armenian land to redistribute to Muslim and Kurdish settlers, and the Kurdish Hamidiye regiments were given free reign to raid Armenian villages as part of their resettlement. Despite attempts to muster international support, the Armenians were left to defend themselves and formed a number of impromptu militia groups to defend their towns, but the Ottoman authorities interpreted this as a sign of rebellion and cracked down hard in the 1890s.

 

In 1894, thousands of Armenians were massacred in the town of Sassoun following a dispute over taxes. International condemnation of the massacre only seemed to anger the Ottoman authorities and the general population. A surge of violence in 1895 and 1896, known as the Hamidian massacres, killed up to 300,000 Armenians. Episodes of violence continued into the 1900s, such as the Adana massacre in 1909, which took over 20,000 Armenian lives. These massacres are not considered part of the main Armenian Genocide, but they show that the genocide wasn’t an isolated incident. Armenians were being murdered for decades beforehand, and the true genocide was merely an evolution of what was already happening.

Two changes turned this irregular persecution into a full-blown genocide. The first was the rise of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The CUP was a radical party that wanted to end absolute monarchy in the empire. It also had a strong ethno-nationalist agenda calling for the “Turkification” of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP took power in 1913 under the leadership of Mehmed Talaat, also known as Talaat Pasha, who effectively ran a one-party dictatorship. Sultan Abdul Hamid remained an important figurehead, but it was the CUP who steered the country’s course. The CUP was avidly pro-Muslim and turned a blind eye to the mob violence against Christians, including the Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrian minorities of the empire.

The other factor was the First World War. In November 1914, the Ottomans joined Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Entente powers of Britain, France, and especially Russia. Russia was particularly problematic because it bordered Ottoman territory and controlled parts of Armenia. Russia was also Orthodox Christian and had a strong kinship with the Armenians. The CUP used the war as a pretext to clamp down on numerous minorities in the empire. For example, in November 1914, they seized land and guns from Jewish settlers in Palestine and redistributed their territory to Muslim settlers. Syriac Orthodox Christians and historians also found themselves in the government’s crosshairs, but naturally, it was the Armenians who suffered the most.

The Russian army quickly poured into Armenia, inflicting a series of defeats on the Ottoman forces. After years of persecution, many Armenians welcomed the Russians as brothers and liberators. As Ottoman forces retreated from the frontier, however, they began attacking and looting Armenian villages, even if they had done nothing to support the Russians. To the Ottomans, all of the Armenians were now potential traitors.

The tipping point came in the Armenian-dominated city of Van in Eastern Anatolia. With the Russians closing in, the Ottomans feared that it would become the center of an Armenian rebellion. In early 1915, Ottoman forces under the command of regional governor Djevdet Bey began the systematic extermination of dozens of Armenian villages in the area. As many as 55,000 Armenians were killed around Van. In April 1915, after Bey had executed many Armenian leaders and begun planning the extermination of all fighting-age Armenian males inside the city itself, the Armenian population finally took up arms in earnest. The Armenian rebels managed to withstand Ottoman attacks on the city for weeks until an approaching Russian army forced the Ottomans into retreat. For the Armenians of Van, it was a victory, but Armenians elsewhere in the empire would not be so lucky.

The fighting at Van terrified Talaat Pasha. Afterward, reach him of Armenian resistance. Talaat struck decisively to destroy any potential leadership for an Armenian rebellion. On the 24th of April, hundreds of influential Armenians, including priests, politicians, journalists, and academics, were arrested. They were detained, deported, and most would be killed. Similar orders came down across the empire; any potential Armenian leadership was completely decapitated. To this day, the 24th of April is widely marked as the start of the Armenian Genocide.

At the core of the genocide was the Tehcir Law, or the Temporary Law of Deportation, passed in May 1915. This ordered the mass resettlement of Armenians away from vulnerable regions and into more easily controlled areas of the empire. The aim was to break up Armenian communities and prevent any organized Armenian resistance from forming. These new settlements also had strict conditions: they had to be more than 25 kilometers from a railway line, there could be no more than 50 households in one settlement, and the total Armenian population couldn’t exceed 10 percent of the local Muslim population.

Starting in June 1915, the government started liquidating and redistributing Armenian property as part of the displacement process. Ottoman authorities reallocated land to Muslims and seized everything from family heirlooms to livestock, while Armenian businesses were shut down or given to Muslim owners. There was no legal route for the Armenians to oppose any of this. Talaat openly declared that he wanted an economy controlled entirely by Muslims; there was no place for Armenians in his vision of the future.

Where Armenians weren’t deported, many were simply massacred. In one such massacre in Diyarbakir, the regional governor had 700 Christians, most of them Armenians, rounded up in the middle of the night and, in the words of a German diplomatic observer, “had them slaughtered like sheep.” Talaat himself wrote to the governor to complain; he was only supposed to be killing Armenians, not all Christians, and in the future, he had to be more specific in his murder.

But the vast majority of the death came from the now-infamous death marches. Lacking sufficient transport or railroad infrastructure, the deportation of Armenians occurred mostly on foot. Whole villages and towns were forced to march hundreds of miles from their homes to the new designated settlement sites. These marches forced their victims through harsh deserts with little food, water, or shelter. With the army occupied by the war, so-called specialist groups oversaw these marches. These unofficial militias gave the government plausible deniability, which the Turkish government has relied upon ever since, and put the victims in the hands of thousands of undisciplined and unaccountable men.

The death marches earned their name from the outset. The pretext for the deportations was potential rebellion, and it is always men who are more likely to fight. Fighting-age men and boys were singled out, separated from the women and children, and tens of thousands of men and boys died in this way, leaving behind traumatized and vulnerable families of women and children who were easily preyed upon by the guards overseeing marches.

Starvation and exhaustion killed hundreds every day. The Armenians were barely given enough food to survive. In some cases, elderly Armenians starved themselves so that the children could have their rations instead. The marches didn’t stop for the dead, leaving the roots littered with the corpses of those who had been left behind.

Massacres were commonplace along the death marches. Guards would stop the Armenians at specific sites and select a portion to be killed off, either to make things easier to handle or simply for sadistic pleasure. Sometimes the guards bargained with the victims, offering to spare them if they gave up any last possessions they were holding. Some sites saw multiple massacres as new waves of deported Armenians were marched by and killed. The shores of Lake Hazar near Harput, the valley south of Firinjilar near Malatya, and the Kemah Gorge near Erzincan were just some of the places that saw multiple massacres spread out over the genocide.

Locations like these were chosen because they weren’t too far from major roads but were out of sight enough that people wouldn’t easily find the corpses. At Kemah Gorge, victims were thrown from the cliffs and into the river below so their bodies would be carried away. Sometimes the killers searched the bodies for trinkets or legal documents that they could present to the government and claim to be the legal heirs of what little property or wealth the victim still had.

Death and starvation were not the only crimes victims faced. Since most men were killed in the early phases of the deportations, the death marches were predominantly for women and children. Inevitably, sexual violence was widespread. The guards regularly committed such acts on marches, sometimes in exchange for sparing their lives or those of their children, although these promises weren’t always honored. A number of Armenian women found themselves thrown into sexual slavery instead. One chief of police reported that the governor regularly gave him young Armenian girls as sex slaves as a reward for his services. In a disturbing report from one foreign aid worker in 1916, she claimed that of the thousands of survivors that she had spoken to, only one had not been sexually abused.

A handful of Armenians escaped these fates. Armenians with essential work skills, particularly for the war effort, could be exempted from deportation. Catholic and Protestant Armenians also had a higher chance to evade persecution since the empire’s German and Austro-Hungarian allies might be angry if the government targeted them too. However, from November 1915, there was immense social and political pressure for these Armenians to convert to Islam to avoid future deportation.

By 1916, almost all Armenians in the interior and Eastern provinces had been deported. Entire districts had been completely emptied of Armenians. Their primary destination was a network of camps along the lower Euphrates River. In these camps, the desperate and traumatized survivors of the death marches faced continued violence, starvation, dehydration, and disease. They were prohibited from most forms of employment, denying them what little chances they had to earn an income to improve their condition. Some would survive to be resettled into new artificial villages. However, the camps and settlements quickly became overcrowded as the empire’s disparate Armenian population was shoved into a tiny corner of the empire.

Worse, the strict limits on Armenian populations relative to the Muslim majority were still enforced. When Talaat ordered a count of the Armenian population in 1916, the governor of nearby Deir ez-Zor massacred thousands of people to lower his share. Firing squads executed people and dumped their bodies in the river, with some reports suggesting that 1,000 children were burned.

The deportations had also created another problem: orphans. Many parents sacrificed themselves to protect and provide for their children, which left an epidemic of orphaned Armenians in the camps and strung out along the routes of the death marches. Many ended up in virtual slavery, and many more were taken to government orphanages or sent to Muslim families. Here, they would be stripped of their own language, culture, and faith and assimilated into the wider Muslim and Turkish culture.

By 1917, it seemed that the grim policies had succeeded. The Armenian population was decimated, and the survivors were contained in specific areas or dispersed and assimilated among the general population. Although suffering and killing continued, most of the genocide’s victims had already been claimed. The end of the war brought the end of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the genocide. Armenian survivors and international observers began the difficult process of recovery and justice. Around 1.1 million Armenians were killed between 1914 and 1918. No more than 300,000 Armenians could be accounted for in imperial territory by the end of the genocide, although a few tens of thousands had escaped into Russia. With so many dead, especially among men and the elderly, the social order and communities of the Armenians were destroyed. It would take decades to begin to rebuild, and the scars are still present today.

Efforts to hold people accountable were disappointing. The post-war government quickly blamed the CUP, but most of its leaders, including Talaat Pasha, fled. The legal framework necessary to charge people with crimes against humanity simply didn’t exist at the time, and as a result, most escaped any legal consequences. This was especially the case into the 1920s when Turkish nationalist movements emerged, which eagerly defended the CUP and either denied or celebrated the genocide as necessary to the emergence of the Turkish nation.

But not all consequences have to be legal. A small network of Armenians began Operation Nemesis, a covert plan to enact vigilante justice on the genocide’s perpetrators. Several leading figures were assassinated in the years following the genocide. Talaat Pasha himself was shot dead in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, whose entire family had been wiped out in the genocide. After a two-day trial where Tehlirian openly admitted to killing Talaat, he was found not guilty by a German court and walked free.

The Armenian Genocide is a topic fraught with controversy today. The Turkish government officially denies that it happened. It blames the deaths on uncontrollable circumstances and justified suppression of a supposed Armenian rebellion. Denial or downplaying of the Armenian Genocide has become wrapped up in Turkish nationalism, and discussion of the topic is met with suppression and censorship inside Turkey.

Most historians disagree and see it as a clear genocide. They point out the obvious links between government policy and the deaths, as well as the many examples of state-ordered or state-endorsed massacres to oppose the government’s claims. While starvation, disease, and exhaustion did kill many of the victims, these were not accidental or unexpected, but obvious and probably intentional results of the policy. Historians argued that the areas the Armenians were sent to could never have supported the Armenian population sent to them. The deaths of hundreds of thousands on the death marches or in the camps was tacitly expected by the Ottomans and helped along by massacres.

Furthermore, the argument that it was a justified military response to rebellion is debunked by the fact that the vast majority of victims were never rebels or from rebel communities, and women and children were killed and deported anyway. Nor can fears of them joining the Russians be justified since most deported Armenians came from areas that were nowhere near the front lines. Even if Talaat and his government never set out a coherent plan to kill Armenians, their policies consistently and knowingly killed over a million Armenians, and they willfully refused to alter those policies at any point despite seeing their consequences.

Outside of Turkey, the genocide is still controversial. Many nations, including the United States, Germany, and Russia, recognize the event as a genocide. Organizations like the Catholic Church and United Nations have similarly agreed. However, for a number of reasons, most countries have not. Israel has attracted special criticism for not recognizing the genocide, and it’s widely believed that Israel’s silence is to avoid alienating Turkey as a potential ally. Similar concerns are probably behind China’s avoidance of the issue, although Chinese officials have been known to participate in recognition events of the genocide. Overall, just 34 governments officially recognize the event as a genocide, but the populations of many non-recognizing countries, like the United Kingdom, overwhelmingly support such recognition.

Today, relations between Armenia and Turkey are delicate and hostile because of their tragic history together. Turkey furiously denies that it did anything wrong, but this denial rings hollow in the eyes of the Armenian people who still carry the legacy of the crimes inflicted upon their predecessors.