ANATOMY OF A MASSACRE: HOW THE GENOCIDE UNFOLDED
Simon Usborne
The Independent – United Kingdom
Published: Aug 28, 2007
This graphic, with its network of lines and blobs, reveals the scale
of what some historians have called the "first holocaust of the 20th
century". An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and
1917, either at the hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact
figures are unknown, but each larger blob – at the site of a
concentration camp or massacre – potentially represents the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of people.
The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened,
stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First
World War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the
beleaguered Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition
by siding with Russia.
On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of
Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were
marched from their homes – the majority towards Syria and modern-day
Iraq – via an estimated 25 concentration camps.
In 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates
are strewn with corpses of exiles… It is a plan to exterminate the
whole Armenian people." Winston Churchill would later call the forced
exodus an "administrative holocaust".
Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes
the 1.5 million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not
constitute what is now termed genocide – defined by the UN as a
state-sponsored attempt to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial or religious group". Instead, Ankara claims the deaths
were part of the wider war, and that massacres were committed by
both sides.
Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the
Armenians (and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it
remains illegal in Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last
year, the Turkish foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as
"unfounded".
One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian
genocide was Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered
the killing, "mercilessly and without compassion", of Polish men,
women and children, he concluded: "Who, after all, speaks today of
the annihilation of the Armenians?"