The Armenian genocide was one of the most massive "root-and-branch" exterminations ever carried out against a defenseless people. In 1915, as World War I raged, the Turkish government (ruler of the Ottoman Empire) decided upon the systematic extermination of most of the male Armenian population, and the forced deportation of the remainder, mostly women, children, and the elderly. The deportation became a death march, with extreme violence and deprivation leading to the death of most of the survivors of the initial gendercide -- as was intended. By the time the exhausted and traumatized survivors reached refuge in neighbouring countries, up to three-quarters of the entire Ottoman Armenian population had been exterminated.
If you are not familiar with the Armenian Genocide, you can watch:
- Genocide Commemoration in Yerevan, Armenia NEW*
- The abc documentary on the Armenian Genocide
- Summary of the Armenian Genocide from 20voices
- Hear some survivors tell their stories
- The Genocide in me
Tiruhi Khorozyan
Zarmandukht Khachatryan
Aharon Manukyan
Mariam
Tigranuhi Asatryan
Mary Davtyan
2 minute video: System rally outside speaker Dennis Hastert's office Watch it here
The Armenian Genocide and Turkey's Attempt to Deny It
The following is an excerpt from an article by Roger W. Smith (College of William and Mary Williamsburg, Virginia), Eric Markusen (Southwest State University Marshall, Minnesota), and Robert Jay Lifton (The City University of New York) titled Professional Ethics and Denial of the Armenian Genocide.
From 1915 to 1917 the Young Turk regime in the Ottoman Empire carried out a systematic, premeditated, centrally planned genocide against the Armenian people. One of the documents authenticated by Turkish authorities in 1919 is a telegram sent in June 1915 by Dr. Sakir, one of the leaders of the secret organization that carried out the planning and implementation of the Genocide. He asks the provincial party official who is responsible for carrying out the deportations and massacres of Armenians within his district: "Are the Armenians, who are being dispatched from there, being liquidated? Are those harmful persons whom you inform us you are exiling and banishing, being exterminated, or are they being merely dispatched and exiled? Answer explicitly...."
The evidence of intent is backed also by the outcome of the actions against the Armenians: it is inconceivable that over a million persons could have died due to even a badly flawed effort at resettlement. Moreover, the pattern of destruction was repeated over and over in different parts of Turkey, many of them far from any war zone; such repetition could only have come from a central design. Further, the reward structure was geared toward destruction of the Christian minority: provincial governors and officials who refused to carry out orders to annihilate the Armenians were summarily replaced.
[Section omitted: A summary of key events of the Armenian Genocide.]
More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000.
Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.
The basic argument of denial has remained the same, it never happened, Turkey is not responsible, the term "genocide" does not apply. The tactics of denial, however, have shifted over the years. In the period immediately after World War I the tactic was to find scapegoats to blame for what was said to be only a security measure that had gone awry due to unscrupulous officials, Kurds, and common criminals. This was followed by an attempt to avoid the whole issue, with silence, diplomatic efforts, and political pressure used where possible. In the 1930s, for example, Turkey pressured the U.S. State Department into preventing MGM Studios from producing a film based on Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book that depicted aspects of the Genocide in a district located west of Antioch on the Mediterranean Sea, far from the Russian front.
In the 1960s, prompted by the worldwide commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Genocide, efforts were made to influence journalists, teachers, and public officials by telling "the other side of the story." Foreign scholars were encouraged to revise the record of genocide, presenting an account largely blaming the Armenians or, in another version, wartime conditions which claimed the lives of more Turks than Armenians. Thereafter, Turkey tried to prohibit any mention of the Genocide in a United Nations report and was successful in its pressure on the Reagan and Bush administrations in defeating Congressional resolutions that would have designated April 24 as a national day of remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish government has also attempted to exclude any mention of the Genocide from American textbooks. Stronger efforts still have been made to prevent any discussion of the 1915 genocide being formally included in the social studies curriculum as part of Holocaust and genocide studies.
There have also been attempts by the Turkish government to disrupt academic conferences and public discussions of the Genocide. A notable example was the attempt by Turkish officials to force cancellation of a conference in Tel Aviv in 1982 if the Armenian Genocide were to be discussed, demands backed up with threats to the safety of Jews in Turkey. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council reported similar threats over plans to include references to the Armenian Genocide within the interpretive framework of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. At the same time, Turkey has sought to make an absolute distinction between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, defining the latter as "alleged" or "so-called." The documents we have, however, show that, in private, such labeling drops off.
Finally, in the 1980s the Turkish government supported the establishment of "institutes", whose apparent purpose was to further research on Turkish history and culture. At least one also was used to further denial of Turkish genocide and otherwise improve Turkey's image in the West.
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In addition to continuing the denial efforts described in the article above, presently the Turkish government has hired former Congressmen to lobby on its behalf. Former Reps. Bob Livingston (R-LA) and Gerald Solomon (R-NY), who are each paid $700,000 as well as former Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-NY) who is paid $400,000, are aggressively attempting to rally Republican and Democratic opposition against official U.S. recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
95-year-old Varazdat Harutyunyan holds his 1914 photo while telling to the Associated Press about the the "Great Slaughter" at home in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Violence against Armenian centers in eastern regions of the dying Ottoman Empire spiked over the summer 1915. Harutyunyan, who was forced from his family's home in the eastern city of Van and lived for weeks in Echmiadzin, remembers an endless procession of burials as thousands died of typhoid, cholera and hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians deemed subversive to the empire, as many as 1.5 million, by many accounts, died in what is today eastern Turkey.
HENRY I MORGENTHAU
American Ambassador at Constantinople from 1913 to 1916
 
Originally published in 1918, "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" is one of the most insightful and compelling accounts of what became a recurring horror during the 20th century: ethnic cleansing and genocide. While he served as the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau witnessed the rise of a new nationalism in Turkey, one that declared "Turkey for the Turks." He grew alarmed as he received reports from missionaries and consuls in the interior of Turkey that described deportation and massacre of the Armenians. The ambassador beseeched the U.S. government to intervene, but it refrained, leaving Morgenthau without official leverage. His recourse was to appeal personally to the consciences of Ottoman rulers and their German allies; when that failed, he drew international media attention to the genocide and spearheaded private relief efforts.
Ambassador Morgenthaus Story Online
By Now
Written for the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide:
By now we should have finished grieving.
By now we should have found some peace.
By now there should have been atonement and the pain slightly eased.
By now witnesses are almost gone.
And the lies about our bones believed.
By now they thought we would be forgotten.
and our blood dried to dust and blown.
By now they thought the smoke and fire
would be either greened or stone.
By now they thought our stolen children would have all turned into Turks.
By now they thought the aid money
sent back to America would do its work
in changing truth to lies:
that we were never here alive.
By now they thought the last survivors
and their children would be in graves.
They didn't count on our children's children even angrier, and more outraged.
Diana Der-Hovanessian
US Media Coverage of the Armenian Genocide
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS
President
-Israel Charny (Israel)
First Vice-President
-Gregory H. Stanton (USA)
Second Vice-President
-Linda Melvern (UK)
Secretary-Treasurer
-Steven Jacobs (USA)
June 13, 2005
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
TC Easbakanlik
Bakanlikir
Ankara, Turkey
FAX: 90 312 417 0476
Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:
We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an impartial study by historians concerning the fate of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:
On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkeys wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.
The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:
1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.
2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the worlds foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.
4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.
5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.
6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabass Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.
We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocidehow and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.
We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are not impartial. Such so-called scholars work to serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide. In preventing a conference on the Armenian Genocide from taking place at Bogacizi University in Istanbul on May 25, your government revealed its aversion to academic and intellectual freedoma fundamental condition of democratic society.
We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participants in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.
Approved Unanimously at the Sixth biennial meeting of
THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS (IAGS)
June 7, 2005, Boca Raton, Florida
Contacts: Israel Charny, IAGS President; Executive Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide, 972-2-672-0424; encygeno@mail.com
Gregory H. Stanton, IAGS Vice President; President, Genocide Watch, James Farmer Visiting Professor of Human Rights, University of Mary Washington; 703-448-0222; genocidewatch@aol.com
Genocide Watch
Monument of Genocide in Yerevan, Armenia
The Memorial Monument dedicated to the 1.5 million innocent victims of the 1915 Armenian Genocide stands on a high hilltop of Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan, Capital of Republic of Armenia. Every year, on April 24, thousands of Armenians come here to commemorate the Armenian Genocide and its victims.
Its shape of twelve kneeling columns next to a high cone shaped peek are symbolic to Western Armenia and the lost "ashkharhs" of Greater Armenia with their native population, each with its unique ways, unique dialects and unique customs which stretched back to the ancient Armenian confederations and unions (confederations such as Haiasa-Azzi, Arme-Shubria, Diauekhi-Tayk, Mana etc.).
The population of Soviet Armenia demanded that a memorial monument be constructed, when in 1965 Armenians in other countries commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Genocide. Completed in 1967 by architects S. Kalashian and L. Mkrtchian, the Genocide Monument has become a pilgrimage site and an integral part of Yerevan's architecture. High on a hill, dominating the landscape, it is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Its austere outlines convey the spirit of the nation that survived a ruthless campaign of extermination.
Before reaching the central part of the monument, the visitor sees on his left a 100-meter long basalt memorial wall (unfinished) with names engraved in stone of all the Armenian villages and towns, where the Armenian population was massacred by Turks. From 1988-1990 Khachkars (cross-stones) were mounted in the vicinity of the Genocide Monument to commemorate Armenians massacred in the 1980's in the Azerbaijani cities of Sumgait, Kirovabad (Gandzak) and Baku.
As part of the monument, an arrow-shaped stele of granite, 44 meters high, reaches to the sky, symbolizing the survival and spiritual rebirth of the Armenian people. Partly split vertically by a deep crevice, this tower symbolizes the tragic and violent dispersion of the Armenian people, and at the same time, expresses the unity of the Armenian people.
At the center of the Monument stands the circular Temple of Commemoration. Its unroofed walls consist of twelve, tall, inward leaning basalt slabs forming a circle. The shape of these walls simulate traditional Armenian Khachkars, which are stone slabs with large carved crosses at the center. These slabs also suggest figures in mourning. The level of the floor of the Genocide Monument is set at one and a half-meters lower than the walkway.
At its center, there is an eternal flame which memorializes all the victims of the Genocide. The steps leading down to the eternal flame are steep, thus requiring visitors to bow their heads reverently as they descend. The complex makes a powerful, solemn and lasting impression. Each year, on April 24, many hundreds of thousands visit the monument and lay thousands of flowers on the pavement.
The Armenian Genocide in the Memoirs and Turkish-Language Songs of the Eye-Witness Survivors
A great number of scientific investigations books and collections of official papers concerning the Armenian Genocide have been published in different languages, the great majority of which are based upon true historic documents. On the other hand, the memoirs and especially the popular songs (in particular, the Turkish language songs) of the eye witnesses rescued from the Genocide include, besides their poetic character, exact historical testimonies about those monstrous events; in spite of that, however, they have been almost condemned to inattention up to the present time. They are exact, because they have been created and narrated by ill treated eye witnesses, who have directly felt upon their own skin the horror of the massacres; they are, at the same time, vivid and emotional, since they reproduce the real experiences of the afflictions caused by the Genocide. In this respect, these specimens of oral tradition represent the historic reality in a deeper, more effectual and more impressive manner than the mere dull statistical facts and data of the official archival documents.
Read it online
Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, 1919:
"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."
Adolf Hitler, August 22, 1939:
"Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter - with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad - that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness - for the present only in the East - with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Count Wolff-Metternich, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire July 10, 1916, cable to the German Chancellor:
"In its attempt to carry out its purpose to resolve the Armenian question by the destruction of the Armenian race, the Turkish government has refused to be deterred neither by our representations, nor by those of the American Embassy, nor by the delegate of the Pope, nor by the threats of the Allied Powers, nor in deference to the public opinion of the West representing one-half of the world."
Theodore Roosevelt, May 11, 1918, letter to Cleveland Hoadley Dodge:
"the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense."
Jimmy Carter, May 16, 1978, White House ceremony:
"It is generally not known in the world that, in the years preceding 1916, there was a concerted effort made to eliminate all the Armenian people, probably one of the greatest tragedies that ever befell any group. And there weren't any Nuremberg trials."
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