When is Erdogan going to own up the Armenian genocide and stop persecuting the Kurds?
Hitler himself was inspired by the Turkish genocide of the Armenians to commit the Holocaust.
Armenian Genocide
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman soldiers, are marched through Harput (Kharpert), to a prison in the nearby Mezireh (present-day
Elâzığ), April 1915
Location
Ottoman Empire
Date1915
Target
Armenian population
Attack type
Deportation,
mass murder
Deaths1.5 million
Perpetrators
Committee of Union and Progress (
Young Turks)
The
Armenian Genocide (
Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն
Hayots Tseghaspanutyun), also known as the
Armenian Holocaust, the
Armenian Massacres and, traditionally by Armenians, as
Medz Yeghern(Armenian: Մեծ Եղեռն, "Great Crime") was the
Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority
Armenian subjects from their historic homeland within the territory constituting the present-day
Republic of Turkey. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested some
250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in
Constantinople. The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labor, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on
death marches leading to the
Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre.
The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million.
Other
indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the
Assyrians, the
Greeks and other minorities were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy. The majority of
Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.
Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation to coin the word
genocide in 1943 and define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters. The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern
genocides, because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out in order to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the
Holocaust.
Turkey, the
successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate term for the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915. It has in recent years been faced with repeated calls to recognize them as genocide. To date, 23 countries have
officially recognized the mass killings as genocide, a view which is shared by most genocide scholars and historians.