SERVICES OF COMMEMORATION TO MARK THE END OF WORLD WAR I
Aysor
Nov 11 2009
Armenia
Today marks the 91 anniversary of signed Armistice that ended the
First World War.
The First World War involved 38 of 59 existing that times independent
states, for about 73.5 million people were mobilized. The First World
War left for about 20 million people dead and 20 million wounded and
3.5 million injured.
The German Empire lost its colonial possessions and was saddled with
accepting blame for the war. Austria-Hungary was also partitioned,
largely along ethnic lines, into several successor states including
Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as adding
Transylvania to the Greater Romania who was allied with the victors.
The Russian Empire, which had withdrawn from the war in 1917 after
the October Revolution, lost much of its western frontier as the
newly independent nations of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania,
and Poland were carved from it. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated
and was to be partitioned by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. However,
Treaty of Sèvres still isn’t ratified.
This brought big crash for Armenians since Turkey took advantage
of war and started killing Armenians. The Armenian Genocide was
centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against
the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried
out during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918. The Armenian
people were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction,
torture, massacre, and starvation. It is estimated that one and a
half million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923. There were an
estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the
eve of W.W.I. Well over a million were deported in 1915. Hundreds of
thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation,
exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps. Among
the Armenians living along the periphery of the Ottoman Empire many
at first escaped the fate of their countrymen in the central provinces
of Turkey. Tens of thousands in the east fled to the Russian border to
lead a precarious existence as refugees. The majority of the Armenians
in Constantinople, the capital city, were spared deportation. By 1923
the entire landmass of Asia Minor and historic West Armenia had been
expunged of its Armenian population. The destruction of the Armenian
communities in this part of the world was total.
As Big Ben chimes 11 a.m. in London marking eleven o’clock on eleventh
day of eleventh month people remember that war which left 20 million
dead is over.