Memory in the desert
On the centenary of the Turkish Armenian Genocide
The January terrorist attacks in Paris diverted media attention from the slaughter in Syria and Iraq, where radical Sunni groups fueled by money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar continue to expand the territory they control . In occupied settlements, Christians are destroyed without exception - all without exception. They are knocked out at the root of the Yazidis, Mandeans, and other “heretics”, among whom Shia and moderate Sunnis fall among the Salafi fanatics. Western politicians diligently “ignore” the fact that the genocide of minorities is taking place in the very same districts where it has already passed a century ago. Unless then mostly Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks were killed, and this was primarily the Turks, who nowadays play a supporting role.
Any parallels of what is happening in the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Porte with the genocide of Armenians a hundred years ago in Ankara are perceived with demonstrative indignation. Obviously, no lessons from stories no one made, the more sense to remember the tragedy of a century ago.
The peculiarity of the Armenian genocide at the junction of the past and the last century was mass character and absolute impunity - firstly. What he passed in front of the "enlightened" community, which stubbornly did not notice the destruction of the civilian population by the Turks, is the second. The bigotry of bigotry, as a result of which the very fact of the Armenian Genocide is still recognized only by individual countries and international organizations, - thirdly. Finally, it was the first massacre on a national basis, committed in a country that claimed to belong to modern civilization. What exactly characterizes this civilization and determines its price.
Whose side is the “global community”
The Armenian Genocide is reminiscent of a Holocaust organized several decades later by the Nazis. The same discrepancies in the number of victims (and in the number of those who lived in this territory). The same level of atrocities and the same fragments of mercy with amendments to local specifics: thousand-kilometer marches through the deserts to the last survivor and the salvation of a certain number of children in Turkish families (with the obligatory conversion of these children to Islam). The indifference of the world establishment and the negligible number of those who tried to preserve evidence of crime.
On the other hand, the Holocaust was recognized by the world. At least most of it. What price, how much time later - another question. The Armenian Genocide ... here, by and large, nothing comforting happens. The advances that can be observed, especially in recent decades, are insignificant and few can satisfy. Moreover, the relatives of the victims who make up the majority of Armenians in the modern world. The secret is simple: this is the difference between post-war Germany and Turkey.
In Germany, the victorious powers were denazification. The extermination of the Jews was one of the markers that marked the Nazi ideology, and at the official level it was impossible to approve it or remember it differently than with condemnation. In Turkey, all without exception the political elite consisted of and consists of those whose biography included participation in the genocide of Armenians or their direct heirs. The transformation of Turkey Atatürk to Turkey Erdogan did not change the situation - the Islamists no less violently deny the crimes of their predecessors than the Kemalists.
Again, Armenia was part of the Soviet Union before 1991, while Turkey was and remains a member of NATO and an associate member of the EU. The question is: on which side was the “world community” supposed to be? Which, due to such decisions, the author perceives exclusively as a mafia without shame and conscience. Because political pragmatism does not imply one or the other.
For the information of readers: the genocide is usually referred to as the extermination of Armenians, which began in 1915 year (and according to a number of sources, lasted until 1923) in the territories controlled by the authorities of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out in several stages: the disarmament of Armenian soldiers, electoral deportation from border areas, the adoption of a law on expulsion, and finally, mass deportation and murder. A number of historians include the massacres of Armenians in 1890, the massacre in the city of Smyrna, and the actions of the Turkish troops in Transcaucasia in 1918.
The main organizers of the genocide are the leaders of the Young Turks Talaat, Jemal and Enver, as well as the head of the “Special Organization” Behaeddin Shakir. In the Declaration of 24 of May 1915, the UK, France and Russia for the first time in history recognized the mass killings of Armenians as a crime against humanity.
Massacre by law
The number of Armenians killed during the collapse of the Ottoman Ports and the emergence of modern Turkey in its place is as controversial as the initial number of people living in this territory. The authorities of the country prevent any attempts to objectively consider this using archives, much of which has been destroyed.
It is known that in the middle of the XIX century in the Ottoman Empire non-Muslims accounted for about 56 percent of the population. 1844’s first Turkish census showed about two million Armenians in Asian Turkey. At 1867, at the World Exhibition in Paris, the leadership of the empire announced two million Armenians in Asia Minor and 400 thousands in European Turkey. According to the Armenian Patriarchate in 1878, there were three million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: 400 thousands in European Turkey, 600 thousands in western Asia Minor, 670 thousands in the Sivas, Trapezund, Kayseri and Diarbakir districts, 1 330 000 in the Armenian Highlands.
The mass extermination of Armenians in 1894 – 1896, which killed up to 100 thousands of people, consisted of three main episodes: the Sasun massacre, the killings throughout the empire in the autumn and winter of 1895, and the massacre in Istanbul and in the Van district. Before 300, thousands were converted to Islam. According to German missionary I. Lepsius, about 600 thousands of people were ravaged, 2493 cities and villages were looted, 649 churches and monasteries were desecrated, 328 churches were turned into mosques.
In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Turkey estimated the number of Armenians in the country in 1 845 450 people. The Armenian population decreased by more than a million due to the massacre in 1894 – 1896, the flight of Armenians from Turkey and the forced conversion to Islam.
By the end of the year, from 1923 to 1,5, millions of Armenians were destroyed by 2 (Turkish researchers talk about 200 thousands, claiming that their death was the result of hostilities). According to the well-known scientist R. Rummel, the 1915 – 1923 genocide took the lives of 2102 thousands of Armenians (258 thousands - outside the Ottoman Empire: in Iran and Russian Armenia).
The Turkish hostility to Armenians in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire was aggravated by the problem of Muhajirs: Muslim refugees, whose influx into the ports of the Caucasus after the Caucasus and Russian-Turkish (1877 – 1878) wars, as well as from the Balkan states, complicated the country's social problems. The overthrow of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II in 1907 provoked the massacre of Armenians in Adana, where more than 2000 people were killed. The pogroms, supported by the army, took place throughout Cilicia.
After the 1908 revolution of the year, which in the Soviet school history books was called bourgeois, the Young Turks began a campaign of forcibly otruchivaniya population, banning non-Turkish organizations. 400 thousands of Muhajirs were stationed in Anatolia. In February, Russia 1914 had achieved from Turkey the creation of two zones from six Armenian regions and the city of Trabzon, which were to be managed by representatives of the European powers agreed with Porto, but this plan was never implemented.
2 August 1914 Turkey signed a treaty with Germany, implying a change in the eastern borders of the Ottoman Empire to create a corridor leading to the Muslim peoples of Russia, which meant the eradication of Armenians in these territories. The appeal, voiced by the Turkish government after 30’s October 1914 was entered into the war, claimed that there was a “natural” union of all members of the Turkish race.
In November, 1914, Turkey declared Jihad, which sharply increased the intensity of religious fanaticism, but until the end of March, the 1915 of the Armenian massacre was, as stated by the authorities, precautionary, which distinguishes it from later deportations and murders. In all, between November 1914 and April 1915, 27 of thousands of Armenians and many Assyrians were killed. However, the real genocide was ahead.
The first phase of the deportation of the Armenian population of the country began with the expulsion of the Armenians Zeytun and Dertyel in early April of 1915. 24 April of the same year, the Armenian elite of Istanbul (most of the 6000 people in question were killed), as well as Armenians Alexandretti and Adana, were arrested and deported. This date is celebrated by Armenians of the whole world as a day of remembrance and grief.
9 May was decided to expel the Armenians of eastern Anatolia. After the uprising in Van, the only region of the empire in which Armenians constituted the majority of the population, during the suppression of which 75 thousands of people died, the fourth phase of the deportation began, suggesting the expulsion of Armenians from border areas and Cilicia.
30 May 1915, the Majlis approved the Deportation Act. 21 June 1915, during the final deportation act, its main instigator Talaat ordered to send "all Armenians without exception" from ten provinces of the eastern region of the Ottoman Empire. Exceptions were made for those who were “recognized as useful to the state.” By the way, part of the Armenians of Istanbul and Edirne were not sent to reduce the number of foreign witnesses.
Some influential Turkish officials opposed the deportation of Armenians. The head of Aleppo, Mehmed Jelal-Bey, declaring that Armenians are protected and the right to live is natural for any person, has banned repression. The governors of Smyrna Rahmi-bey and Adrianople Haji Adil-bey were in solidarity with him. As a result, Jelal Bey in June 1915 was removed from Aleppo management. Similarly, the head of the concentration camp in the Der-Zor desert - Ali Sued Bey, who was trying to alleviate the fate of the Armenians, was removed from his post, and Zeki Bey, who was distinguished by his particular cruelty, was replaced.
The decision to deport Armenians from the western provinces (Ankara, Eskisehir and others), Kirkuk, Mosul, the Euphrates valley and other regions was taken on July 5 1915. 13 July Talaat Pasha said that the deportation is carried out for the "final solution of the Armenian question," a wording later copied verbatim by the Germans against the Jews.
However, the similarities between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust are not only in the formulations, but also in the methods. Thus, the medical experiments that Nazi doctors conducted on Jews and Gypsies had parallels in the practice of Turkish military doctors. Biological justification was used as one of the justifications for the destruction of the Armenians. The main promoter of this policy was Dr. Mehmet Reshid, governor of Diarbekir.
By order of the doctor of the Third Army Tevfik Salim, in order to develop a vaccine against typhus in the central hospital of Erdzincan, experiments were conducted on Armenian soldiers and cadets, most of whom died. They were conducted by Hamdi Suat, a medical school professor, to whom, as the founder of Turkish bacteriology, a museum house in Istanbul is dedicated. The experiments were approved by the Chief Sanitary Inspector of the Ottoman Armed Forces, Suleiman Numan.
The head of the sanitary and hygienic services and the health department of the city of Trabzon, Ali Saib, experimented by injecting lethal doses of morphine or toxic substances to children and women, including pregnant women. He also used mobile steam baths, where children were killed with superheated steam.
The Special Organization, Teshkilat-i Makhsusa, which was located in Erzerum and had up to 34 thousands of members, among whom there were many chettes criminals released from prisons, played a significant role in the extermination of Armenians. In Erzerum itself, its members left alive around 100 Armenians who worked at important military sites. Most of the 65 thousands of Armenians of this city were killed, some deported to Mosul and Aleppo (some were able to survive in these cities).
A martyrology genocide is standard. Dates, names, methods of murder and the number of the dead are different. Always bullying, torture, robbery, rape, including minors. Methods of destruction - shooting, murder with the use of cold weaponsdrowning in the sea or rivers. Death from disease, hunger or thirst, cold or heat is not less common.
Details are also standard. Khynys - 19 thousands of dead. Bitlis - 15 thousand. There, the Armenians were killed by "butcher battalions" led by Dzhevdet. Harput - 13 killed thousands of Armenian soldiers, as well as students and teachers of the American Euphrates College. Erzincan, Bayburt, Ordu, Ankara, Merzifon - hundreds and thousands of settlements.
Urfa, Mush and Sasun stand out against the general background - there the Armenians tried to fight back from the Turks. The Armenians who lived in the area of Mount Musa-Dag, near Antioch, repulsed the attacks of Ottoman troops for seven weeks. In the end, about four thousand people were saved and were taken on a French warship to Port Said.
Deported death awaited in 100 percent of cases. To the final destination in the desert reached no more than one-fifth of those who were sent there. Their subsequent destruction engaged the local population: the Circassians, Chechens, Kurds, Arabs. They killed 150 thousands of Armenians in the camps around the Der-Zor desert.
The territory of Russian Armenia, occupied by the Turks after the collapse of the Russian Empire, was completely looted by them. In the winter of 1918 – 1919, hunger, frost and typhus destroyed almost 200 thousands of people there - 20 percent of its population. The process of expelling and destroying Turkish Armenians ended with a series of military campaigns in 1920 against refugees returning to Cilicia and during the massacre in Smyrna, where the army commanded by Mustafa Kemal cut out the Armenian quarter, under pressure from the Western powers, allowing the survivors to be evacuated.
According to official statistics, 1927 77 Armenians lived in Turkey in 400 year. According to the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey pledged to provide guarantees of security, free development and certain privileges to Armenians, among other national minorities. However, the provisions of this treaty were not enforced. On the contrary, 21 June 1934 was passed a law on surnames, demanding that Greeks, Jews and Armenians abandon traditional surnames and adopt Turkish ones. During World War II, an electoral property tax was imposed in Turkey, which ruined Greek, Armenian and Jewish merchants.
A glance through the ages
The extermination of the Armenians was accompanied by a campaign to destroy their cultural heritage. Armenian monuments and churches exploded, cemeteries were opened under fields, Armenian neighborhoods of cities were destroyed or occupied by the Turkish and Kurdish population and renamed. In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople included 2549 parishes, including more than 200 monasteries and at least 1600 churches. In 1974, scientists identified 913 buildings of Armenian churches and monasteries in Turkey. More than half of these monuments have not survived. Of the remaining 252 were destroyed and only 197 are in relatively normal condition.
As for the international reaction to the Armenian genocide, it has been and remains more than modest. In the UK, after the official investigation, a book of documents entitled “Attitudes towards Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” was published. In Europe and the USA, there was a fundraising for refugees according to a well-established principle: you can’t save - get a letter to clear your conscience.
As a result, at 1919, at the 9th congress of the Dashnaktsutyun party in Boston, it was decided to destroy the leaders of the Young Turks who participated in the killing of Armenians. As part of the operation, called Nemesis, in March 1921 was killed in Berlin, the Minister of the Interior of the Empire and one of the members of the Ottoman triumvirate Talaat Pasha.
In modern Turkey, scholars, intellectuals, and the press are discussing the Armenian issue, despite opposition from nationalists and the government. The editor of the Armenian newspaper Hrant Dink, the writers Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, the publisher Ragip Zarakolu were accused of insulting "Turkishness." In the end, Dink and Zarakola were convicted, and in 2007, Hrant Dink was killed.
Such international organizations as the Zoroyan Institute and the Armenian National Institute are fighting for international recognition of the Armenian genocide. In 1984, the Standing Tribunal of Peoples recognized the actions of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. The same conclusion was reached in 1997 by the International Association of Genocide Researchers. In 2000, a statement by 126 Holocaust researchers confirmed the indisputability of the Armenian genocide in the First World War.
The Armenian Genocide was recognized and condemned by the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Of the states, Uruguay was the first in 1965. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Lebanon, Lithuania, Greece, Slovakia, Cyprus, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Canada, Vatican, Bolivia, Switzerland (lower house of parliament), 43 of the US state and Columbia followed. .
The first monument dedicated to the massacres of Armenians was erected in the 50s on the territory of the Armenian Catholicos in Lebanon Antelias. In 1965, a monument to the victims of the genocide was erected on the territory of the Catholicosate in Echmiadzin. In 1967, the construction of a memorial complex was completed on the Tsitsernakaberd (Swallow fortress) hill in Yerevan. In 1990, the chapel was built in the Syrian desert Der Zor. Whether in the midst of the civil war, which the Islamist fanatics are waging against the Syrian government, survived, this is the only one that was set not just as a sign of genocide, but a monument on the site of the death of Armenians, today nobody knows ...
The January terrorist attacks in Paris diverted media attention from the slaughter in Syria and Iraq, where radical Sunni groups fueled by money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar continue to expand the territory they control . In occupied settlements, Christians are destroyed without exception - all without exception. They are knocked out at the root of the Yazidis, Mandeans, and other “heretics”, among whom Shia and moderate Sunnis fall among the Salafi fanatics. Western politicians diligently “ignore” the fact that the genocide of minorities is taking place in the very same districts where it has already passed a century ago. Unless then mostly Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks were killed, and this was primarily the Turks, who nowadays play a supporting role.
Any parallels of what is happening in the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Porte with the genocide of Armenians a hundred years ago in Ankara are perceived with demonstrative indignation. Obviously, no lessons from stories no one made, the more sense to remember the tragedy of a century ago.
The peculiarity of the Armenian genocide at the junction of the past and the last century was mass character and absolute impunity - firstly. What he passed in front of the "enlightened" community, which stubbornly did not notice the destruction of the civilian population by the Turks, is the second. The bigotry of bigotry, as a result of which the very fact of the Armenian Genocide is still recognized only by individual countries and international organizations, - thirdly. Finally, it was the first massacre on a national basis, committed in a country that claimed to belong to modern civilization. What exactly characterizes this civilization and determines its price.
Whose side is the “global community”
The Armenian Genocide is reminiscent of a Holocaust organized several decades later by the Nazis. The same discrepancies in the number of victims (and in the number of those who lived in this territory). The same level of atrocities and the same fragments of mercy with amendments to local specifics: thousand-kilometer marches through the deserts to the last survivor and the salvation of a certain number of children in Turkish families (with the obligatory conversion of these children to Islam). The indifference of the world establishment and the negligible number of those who tried to preserve evidence of crime.
On the other hand, the Holocaust was recognized by the world. At least most of it. What price, how much time later - another question. The Armenian Genocide ... here, by and large, nothing comforting happens. The advances that can be observed, especially in recent decades, are insignificant and few can satisfy. Moreover, the relatives of the victims who make up the majority of Armenians in the modern world. The secret is simple: this is the difference between post-war Germany and Turkey.
In Germany, the victorious powers were denazification. The extermination of the Jews was one of the markers that marked the Nazi ideology, and at the official level it was impossible to approve it or remember it differently than with condemnation. In Turkey, all without exception the political elite consisted of and consists of those whose biography included participation in the genocide of Armenians or their direct heirs. The transformation of Turkey Atatürk to Turkey Erdogan did not change the situation - the Islamists no less violently deny the crimes of their predecessors than the Kemalists.
Again, Armenia was part of the Soviet Union before 1991, while Turkey was and remains a member of NATO and an associate member of the EU. The question is: on which side was the “world community” supposed to be? Which, due to such decisions, the author perceives exclusively as a mafia without shame and conscience. Because political pragmatism does not imply one or the other.
For the information of readers: the genocide is usually referred to as the extermination of Armenians, which began in 1915 year (and according to a number of sources, lasted until 1923) in the territories controlled by the authorities of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out in several stages: the disarmament of Armenian soldiers, electoral deportation from border areas, the adoption of a law on expulsion, and finally, mass deportation and murder. A number of historians include the massacres of Armenians in 1890, the massacre in the city of Smyrna, and the actions of the Turkish troops in Transcaucasia in 1918.
The main organizers of the genocide are the leaders of the Young Turks Talaat, Jemal and Enver, as well as the head of the “Special Organization” Behaeddin Shakir. In the Declaration of 24 of May 1915, the UK, France and Russia for the first time in history recognized the mass killings of Armenians as a crime against humanity.
Massacre by law
The number of Armenians killed during the collapse of the Ottoman Ports and the emergence of modern Turkey in its place is as controversial as the initial number of people living in this territory. The authorities of the country prevent any attempts to objectively consider this using archives, much of which has been destroyed.
It is known that in the middle of the XIX century in the Ottoman Empire non-Muslims accounted for about 56 percent of the population. 1844’s first Turkish census showed about two million Armenians in Asian Turkey. At 1867, at the World Exhibition in Paris, the leadership of the empire announced two million Armenians in Asia Minor and 400 thousands in European Turkey. According to the Armenian Patriarchate in 1878, there were three million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: 400 thousands in European Turkey, 600 thousands in western Asia Minor, 670 thousands in the Sivas, Trapezund, Kayseri and Diarbakir districts, 1 330 000 in the Armenian Highlands.
The mass extermination of Armenians in 1894 – 1896, which killed up to 100 thousands of people, consisted of three main episodes: the Sasun massacre, the killings throughout the empire in the autumn and winter of 1895, and the massacre in Istanbul and in the Van district. Before 300, thousands were converted to Islam. According to German missionary I. Lepsius, about 600 thousands of people were ravaged, 2493 cities and villages were looted, 649 churches and monasteries were desecrated, 328 churches were turned into mosques.
In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Turkey estimated the number of Armenians in the country in 1 845 450 people. The Armenian population decreased by more than a million due to the massacre in 1894 – 1896, the flight of Armenians from Turkey and the forced conversion to Islam.
By the end of the year, from 1923 to 1,5, millions of Armenians were destroyed by 2 (Turkish researchers talk about 200 thousands, claiming that their death was the result of hostilities). According to the well-known scientist R. Rummel, the 1915 – 1923 genocide took the lives of 2102 thousands of Armenians (258 thousands - outside the Ottoman Empire: in Iran and Russian Armenia).
The Turkish hostility to Armenians in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire was aggravated by the problem of Muhajirs: Muslim refugees, whose influx into the ports of the Caucasus after the Caucasus and Russian-Turkish (1877 – 1878) wars, as well as from the Balkan states, complicated the country's social problems. The overthrow of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II in 1907 provoked the massacre of Armenians in Adana, where more than 2000 people were killed. The pogroms, supported by the army, took place throughout Cilicia.
After the 1908 revolution of the year, which in the Soviet school history books was called bourgeois, the Young Turks began a campaign of forcibly otruchivaniya population, banning non-Turkish organizations. 400 thousands of Muhajirs were stationed in Anatolia. In February, Russia 1914 had achieved from Turkey the creation of two zones from six Armenian regions and the city of Trabzon, which were to be managed by representatives of the European powers agreed with Porto, but this plan was never implemented.
2 August 1914 Turkey signed a treaty with Germany, implying a change in the eastern borders of the Ottoman Empire to create a corridor leading to the Muslim peoples of Russia, which meant the eradication of Armenians in these territories. The appeal, voiced by the Turkish government after 30’s October 1914 was entered into the war, claimed that there was a “natural” union of all members of the Turkish race.In November, 1914, Turkey declared Jihad, which sharply increased the intensity of religious fanaticism, but until the end of March, the 1915 of the Armenian massacre was, as stated by the authorities, precautionary, which distinguishes it from later deportations and murders. In all, between November 1914 and April 1915, 27 of thousands of Armenians and many Assyrians were killed. However, the real genocide was ahead.
The first phase of the deportation of the Armenian population of the country began with the expulsion of the Armenians Zeytun and Dertyel in early April of 1915. 24 April of the same year, the Armenian elite of Istanbul (most of the 6000 people in question were killed), as well as Armenians Alexandretti and Adana, were arrested and deported. This date is celebrated by Armenians of the whole world as a day of remembrance and grief.
9 May was decided to expel the Armenians of eastern Anatolia. After the uprising in Van, the only region of the empire in which Armenians constituted the majority of the population, during the suppression of which 75 thousands of people died, the fourth phase of the deportation began, suggesting the expulsion of Armenians from border areas and Cilicia.
30 May 1915, the Majlis approved the Deportation Act. 21 June 1915, during the final deportation act, its main instigator Talaat ordered to send "all Armenians without exception" from ten provinces of the eastern region of the Ottoman Empire. Exceptions were made for those who were “recognized as useful to the state.” By the way, part of the Armenians of Istanbul and Edirne were not sent to reduce the number of foreign witnesses.
Some influential Turkish officials opposed the deportation of Armenians. The head of Aleppo, Mehmed Jelal-Bey, declaring that Armenians are protected and the right to live is natural for any person, has banned repression. The governors of Smyrna Rahmi-bey and Adrianople Haji Adil-bey were in solidarity with him. As a result, Jelal Bey in June 1915 was removed from Aleppo management. Similarly, the head of the concentration camp in the Der-Zor desert - Ali Sued Bey, who was trying to alleviate the fate of the Armenians, was removed from his post, and Zeki Bey, who was distinguished by his particular cruelty, was replaced.
The decision to deport Armenians from the western provinces (Ankara, Eskisehir and others), Kirkuk, Mosul, the Euphrates valley and other regions was taken on July 5 1915. 13 July Talaat Pasha said that the deportation is carried out for the "final solution of the Armenian question," a wording later copied verbatim by the Germans against the Jews.
However, the similarities between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust are not only in the formulations, but also in the methods. Thus, the medical experiments that Nazi doctors conducted on Jews and Gypsies had parallels in the practice of Turkish military doctors. Biological justification was used as one of the justifications for the destruction of the Armenians. The main promoter of this policy was Dr. Mehmet Reshid, governor of Diarbekir.
By order of the doctor of the Third Army Tevfik Salim, in order to develop a vaccine against typhus in the central hospital of Erdzincan, experiments were conducted on Armenian soldiers and cadets, most of whom died. They were conducted by Hamdi Suat, a medical school professor, to whom, as the founder of Turkish bacteriology, a museum house in Istanbul is dedicated. The experiments were approved by the Chief Sanitary Inspector of the Ottoman Armed Forces, Suleiman Numan.
The head of the sanitary and hygienic services and the health department of the city of Trabzon, Ali Saib, experimented by injecting lethal doses of morphine or toxic substances to children and women, including pregnant women. He also used mobile steam baths, where children were killed with superheated steam.
The Special Organization, Teshkilat-i Makhsusa, which was located in Erzerum and had up to 34 thousands of members, among whom there were many chettes criminals released from prisons, played a significant role in the extermination of Armenians. In Erzerum itself, its members left alive around 100 Armenians who worked at important military sites. Most of the 65 thousands of Armenians of this city were killed, some deported to Mosul and Aleppo (some were able to survive in these cities).
A martyrology genocide is standard. Dates, names, methods of murder and the number of the dead are different. Always bullying, torture, robbery, rape, including minors. Methods of destruction - shooting, murder with the use of cold weaponsdrowning in the sea or rivers. Death from disease, hunger or thirst, cold or heat is not less common.
Details are also standard. Khynys - 19 thousands of dead. Bitlis - 15 thousand. There, the Armenians were killed by "butcher battalions" led by Dzhevdet. Harput - 13 killed thousands of Armenian soldiers, as well as students and teachers of the American Euphrates College. Erzincan, Bayburt, Ordu, Ankara, Merzifon - hundreds and thousands of settlements.
Urfa, Mush and Sasun stand out against the general background - there the Armenians tried to fight back from the Turks. The Armenians who lived in the area of Mount Musa-Dag, near Antioch, repulsed the attacks of Ottoman troops for seven weeks. In the end, about four thousand people were saved and were taken on a French warship to Port Said.
Deported death awaited in 100 percent of cases. To the final destination in the desert reached no more than one-fifth of those who were sent there. Their subsequent destruction engaged the local population: the Circassians, Chechens, Kurds, Arabs. They killed 150 thousands of Armenians in the camps around the Der-Zor desert.
The territory of Russian Armenia, occupied by the Turks after the collapse of the Russian Empire, was completely looted by them. In the winter of 1918 – 1919, hunger, frost and typhus destroyed almost 200 thousands of people there - 20 percent of its population. The process of expelling and destroying Turkish Armenians ended with a series of military campaigns in 1920 against refugees returning to Cilicia and during the massacre in Smyrna, where the army commanded by Mustafa Kemal cut out the Armenian quarter, under pressure from the Western powers, allowing the survivors to be evacuated.
According to official statistics, 1927 77 Armenians lived in Turkey in 400 year. According to the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey pledged to provide guarantees of security, free development and certain privileges to Armenians, among other national minorities. However, the provisions of this treaty were not enforced. On the contrary, 21 June 1934 was passed a law on surnames, demanding that Greeks, Jews and Armenians abandon traditional surnames and adopt Turkish ones. During World War II, an electoral property tax was imposed in Turkey, which ruined Greek, Armenian and Jewish merchants.
A glance through the ages
The extermination of the Armenians was accompanied by a campaign to destroy their cultural heritage. Armenian monuments and churches exploded, cemeteries were opened under fields, Armenian neighborhoods of cities were destroyed or occupied by the Turkish and Kurdish population and renamed. In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople included 2549 parishes, including more than 200 monasteries and at least 1600 churches. In 1974, scientists identified 913 buildings of Armenian churches and monasteries in Turkey. More than half of these monuments have not survived. Of the remaining 252 were destroyed and only 197 are in relatively normal condition.
As for the international reaction to the Armenian genocide, it has been and remains more than modest. In the UK, after the official investigation, a book of documents entitled “Attitudes towards Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” was published. In Europe and the USA, there was a fundraising for refugees according to a well-established principle: you can’t save - get a letter to clear your conscience.As a result, at 1919, at the 9th congress of the Dashnaktsutyun party in Boston, it was decided to destroy the leaders of the Young Turks who participated in the killing of Armenians. As part of the operation, called Nemesis, in March 1921 was killed in Berlin, the Minister of the Interior of the Empire and one of the members of the Ottoman triumvirate Talaat Pasha.
In modern Turkey, scholars, intellectuals, and the press are discussing the Armenian issue, despite opposition from nationalists and the government. The editor of the Armenian newspaper Hrant Dink, the writers Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, the publisher Ragip Zarakolu were accused of insulting "Turkishness." In the end, Dink and Zarakola were convicted, and in 2007, Hrant Dink was killed.
Such international organizations as the Zoroyan Institute and the Armenian National Institute are fighting for international recognition of the Armenian genocide. In 1984, the Standing Tribunal of Peoples recognized the actions of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. The same conclusion was reached in 1997 by the International Association of Genocide Researchers. In 2000, a statement by 126 Holocaust researchers confirmed the indisputability of the Armenian genocide in the First World War.
The Armenian Genocide was recognized and condemned by the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Of the states, Uruguay was the first in 1965. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Lebanon, Lithuania, Greece, Slovakia, Cyprus, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Canada, Vatican, Bolivia, Switzerland (lower house of parliament), 43 of the US state and Columbia followed. .
The first monument dedicated to the massacres of Armenians was erected in the 50s on the territory of the Armenian Catholicos in Lebanon Antelias. In 1965, a monument to the victims of the genocide was erected on the territory of the Catholicosate in Echmiadzin. In 1967, the construction of a memorial complex was completed on the Tsitsernakaberd (Swallow fortress) hill in Yerevan. In 1990, the chapel was built in the Syrian desert Der Zor. Whether in the midst of the civil war, which the Islamist fanatics are waging against the Syrian government, survived, this is the only one that was set not just as a sign of genocide, but a monument on the site of the death of Armenians, today nobody knows ...
Information