Nadim 9aa

On the orders of the government in 1915, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were demobilised and transferred to “labour battalions”, where some were executed or died.

The Armenian genocide is a period in time where the leader of the ottoman empire decided that he did not want Armenians living in the empire’s borders, hence massacring them. it was said that around 2 million Armenians lived within the borders of the ottoman empire, but by the 1920’s when most of the massacres took place, it was said that around 1.5 million Armenians were massacred, deported or removed from the borders by force. 

why did the Armenian genocide take place?

Armenia resided in an area next to Turkey and was its own empire, they were the first country to name christianity as their major religion, but because of the rise of the Ottoman empire they were conquered by them. The Ottoman empire was mainly muslim and was bias towards muslims, Muslims had more legal rights, they had equality, and paid less taxes. The Ottomans viewed the Christians as Infidels and did not agree with their religious beliefs and wanted to remove the faith from their empire. Though the Ottomans took away many of their rights, the Armenian society thrived under Ottoman rule, usually being the most educated and wealthy out of all of the ottoman population even with the restrictions imposed by the empire, resulting in resentment from their neighbor country, Turkey. Turkey was suspicious that the Armenian people would much rather be ruled by a christian government, thus causing suspicion that they may betray them. During the last legs of the ottoman empire, the Armenians protested for equal rights and better treatment, but the ruler of the empire said to a news outlet that he would settle the ‘Armenian Question’ and said “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.” 

How did the Ottomans conduct the Genocide?

During the first stages of the Genocide, all Armenian people were sanctioned and Armenian cities and villages were sacked by soldiers, troops and ordinary people as well as killing the citizens. This left hundreds of thousands dead. In the beginning of the genocide the Turkish arrested hundreds of intellectuals and executed them, and they took the Armenian people out of their homes and forced them to go on death marches, usually stripped naked without food or water, marching through the Mesopotamian desert until they died because of dehydration or starvation, anyone who stopped to rest would be shot. Another method of their killing would be the ‘Death Squads’ which drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive, leaving all the countrysides littered with corpses. The Ottomans also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and sold them to Turkish families, women were stolen, raped then served as slaves for the rest of their lives and they ransacked houses of the deported Armenians were seized by the Turkish and given to Turkish families. At the end of the Genocide there were 388,000 Armenians left in the Ottoman empire borders from the original 2 million. 

What were the consequences of the Genocide?