Peninsula Online, Qatar
April 19 2015

Key facts on the disputed Armenian ‘genocide’

April 19, 2015 – 12:37:39 pm

Yerevan–Armenians around the world prepare to mark the centenary of
the World War I-era mass killings of their kin by Ottoman Turks in
what they insist was a genocide — a term fiercely rejected by Turkey.

Here are the key facts and background on the 1915-1917 massacres and
deportations, the focus of the longstanding Turkish-Armenian
diplomatic standoff:

– Historical background –

Following centuries of Persian and Byzantine rule, Armenians by the
mid-19th century lived across the Russian and Ottoman empires. Between
1.7 and 2.3 million were living in eastern provinces of the Ottoman
Empire by 1915, according to estimates of Western scholars.

Ottoman authorities had been suspicious about the loyalty of Armenian
subjects since the late 19th century when a nationalist movement
gained momentum, seeking autonomy from Ottoman rule.

An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians are thought to have been
killed in 1895-1896 in the so-called Hamidian massacres under sultan
Abdul Hamid II. In 1905 he narrowly escaped an Armenian attempt to
assassinate him with a bomb.

In 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany
and Austria-Hungary. As major battles affected Armenian provinces, the
Ottoman authorities unleashed a propaganda campaign portraying
Armenians as an “enemy within”.

On April 24, 1915, hundreds of Armenian community leaders and
intellectuals suspected of being hostile to the Ottoman government
were rounded up in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Most of them
were later executed or deported.

April 24 is commemorated by Armenians as Genocide Remembrance Day.

– Chain of events –

Following two laws authorising deportation of Armenians and
confiscation of their property, hundreds of thousands were marched
into a desert in present-day Syria. Those who survived were put into
25 concentration camps.

The brutal methods used in wholesale killings of the Armenian
population included mass burnings, drowning, poisoning, and typhoid
inoculation, according to the accounts by foreign diplomats and
intelligence agents of the time.

On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire surrendered to the Allied
powers (Britain, Russia, and France). The armistice agreement provided
for the return of Armenian deportees to their homes.

In February 1919, a court-martial in Constantinople found a number of
top Ottoman officials guilty of war crimes, including against
Armenians, and sentenced them to death though failed to prosecute
those who fled the country.

– Conflicting versions –

Armenians say up to 1.5 million people were killed between 1915 and
1917. Through diplomacy and its widespread diaspora, Armenia has long
pushed for international recognition of the killings as genocide.

The recognition is one of the main goals of Armenia’s foreign policy
and, according to some analysts, part of a grand strategy to justify
possible Armenian territorial and reparations claims to Turkey.

Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, accepts that
massacres and deportations were carried out but describes the
bloodshed as internecine conflict.

Ankara argues that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and at least as many
Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their
Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

In April 2014, Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for
the first time offered his condolences over the massacres, calling
them “our shared pain”. Yerevan dismissed the statement.

– Historical evidence –

The massacres were abundantly documented in numerous official records
and accounts of eyewitnesses, including by foreign diplomats.

Describing the bloodshed in a July 1915 cable to the Department of
State, the US ambassador Henry Morgenthau said: “A campaign of race
extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against
rebellion.”

Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who in the 1940s coined the word
genocide, cited the massacres as a defining example of the term’s
meaning.

In 2000, 126 scholars — including Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel,
historian Yehuda Bauer, and sociologist Irving Horowitz — published a
statement in The New York Times, affirming that “the World War I
Armenian genocide is an incontestable historical fact”.

In a 2005 open letter to Erdogan, the International Association of
Genocide Scholars wrote that scholarly evidence proves the Ottoman
government has carried out “a systematic genocide of its Armenian
citizens”.

– International context –

The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines the crime as acts “committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group”.

Yerevan says that the Armenian massacres are today recognised as
genocide by 22 countries, including France and Russia, as well as the
European Parliament and the Council of Europe.

US President Barack Obama had pledged in his campaign that he “will
recognise the Armenian genocide” if elected, but has thus far avoided
using the politically charged term, stressing however that his “view
of that history has not changed”.