![]() In 1908, the Young Turks wrested control from the Sultan and promised to restore imperial glory. Post the treaty, there were a series of attacks on Armenians by Turkish and Kurdish militias. In the Treaty of Berlin, big powers dictated terms to the Ottomans, including putting pressure on Sultan Abdülhamid II to initiate reforms “in the provinces inhabited by Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds.” The Sultan saw this as a sign of strengthening ties between the Armenians and other rival countries, especially Russia. The resentment started building up after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 in which the Turks lost territories. When the Ottoman Empire was in decline on its fringes by the last quarter of the 19th century, Armenians were seen by the rulers in Constantinople as a fifth column. In a way, the Armenians were victims of the great power contests of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed,” writes historian David Fromkin in Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Most of the deaths occurred during this flight. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported from eastern Anatolia (today’s Turkey) to concentration camps in the Syrian steppe. The Ottoman Turks unleashed Turkish and Kurdish militias upon them, killing and pillaging tens of thousands. Armenians were largely living in the eastern fringes of the Empire. This has led historians to believe that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed during the course of the War. According to a study by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in 1922, four years after the War, the Armenian population in the region was about 387,800. Before the First World War broke out in 1914, there were 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” in 1943, had written that he had been influenced by atrocities against Armenians as well as the Nazi killings of Jews. ![]() Was it a genocide?Īccording to Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide of December 1948, genocide has been described as carrying out acts intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. Congress passed resolutions calling the slaughter a genocide, but the Donald Trump administration stopped short of officially calling it so. Up to 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have been killed in the early stage of the First World War within the territories of the Ottoman Empire. Biden’s announcement on the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day could infuriate Turkey, America’s NATO ally. President Joe Biden on Saturday officially recognised the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915-16 as “an act of genocide”.
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