The massacre in Armenia 1915. Sergey Korchanov
Nikolai Troitsky, political observer for RIA Novosti.
On Saturday, April 24, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire is celebrated. This year marks 95 years since the day that this bloody massacre and terrible crime began - the mass extermination of people on a national basis. As a result, one to one and a half million people were destroyed.
Unfortunately, this was not the first and far from the last case of genocide in recent history. In the twentieth century, humanity seemed to decide to return to the darkest times. In enlightened, civilized countries, medieval savagery and savagery suddenly revived - torture, reprisals against the relatives of the convicts, forced deportation and massacre of entire nations or social groups.
But even against this gloomy background, two of the most monstrous atrocities stand out - the methodical extermination of Jews by the Nazis, called the Holocaust, in 1943-45 and the Armenian genocide, organized in 1915.
That year, the Young Turks virtually ruled the Ottoman Empire - a group of officers who overthrew the Sultan and carried out liberal reforms in the country. With the outbreak of the First World War, all power in their hands was concentrated by the triumvirate - Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha and Jemal Pasha. It was they who staged the act of genocide. But they didn’t do this because of sadism or congenital ferocity. There were reasons and prerequisites for the crime.
Armenians have lived on Ottoman territory for centuries. On the one hand, they were subject to certain religious discrimination, like Christians. On the other hand, most of them stood out for their wealth or at least prosperity, because they were engaged in trade and finance. That is, they played about the same role as the Jews in Western Europe, without whom the economy could not function, but who at the same time regularly fell under pogroms and deportations.
The fragile balance was broken in the 80s - 90s of the XIX century, when clandestine political organizations of a nationalist and revolutionary nature were formed in the Armenian environment. The most radical was the Dashnaktsutyun party - a local analogue of the Russian Social Revolutionaries, moreover, the socialist revolutionaries of the left wing itself.
Their goal was to create an independent state on the territory of Ottoman Turkey, and the methods for achieving this goal were simple and effective: seizing banks, killing officials, bombings, and the like.
It is clear how the government reacted to such actions. But the situation was aggravated by a national factor, and the entire Armenian population had to answer for the actions of the Dashnak militants - they called themselves Fidaines. In different parts of the Ottoman Empire, unrest flared up and over, which ended in pogroms and massacres of Armenians.
The situation worsened further in 1914, when Turkey became an ally of Germany and declared war on Russia, which the local Armenians naturally sympathized with. The government of the Young Turks declared them the "fifth column", and therefore a decision was made on their total deportation to hard-to-reach mountain areas.
One can imagine what a massive relocation of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, old people and children, since men were drafted into the army. Many died from deprivation, others were killed, there was an outright massacre, mass executions were carried out.
After the end of World War I, a special commission from Great Britain and the USA was engaged in the investigation of the Armenian genocide. Here is just one brief episode from the testimony of the miraculously surviving witnesses of the tragedy:
“About two thousand Armenians were gathered and surrounded by Turks, they were doused with gasoline and set on fire. I, myself, was in another church, which they tried to set on fire, and my father thought that this was the end of his family.
He gathered us around ... and said something that I will never forget: do not be afraid, my children, because soon we will all be in heaven together. But, fortunately, someone discovered secret tunnels ... through which we were saved. ”
The exact number of victims was never officially calculated, but no less than a million people died. More than 300 thousand Armenians took refuge in the territory of the Russian Empire, as Nicholas II ordered the borders to be opened.
Even if the killings were not officially sanctioned by the ruling triumvirate, they are still responsible for these crimes. In 1919, all three were sentenced to death in absentia, as they managed to escape, but were then individually killed by the avengers from radical Armenian organizations.
Enver Pasha's comrades were convicted of war crimes by the Allies from the Entente with the full consent of the government of the new Turkey, which was headed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He began to build a secular authoritarian state whose ideology was radically different from the ideas of the Young Turks, but many organizers and executors of the massacre went to his service. And the territory of the Republic of Turkey by that time was almost completely cleared of Armenians.
Therefore, Atatürk, although he was not personally involved in the “final solution of the Armenian issue,” categorically refused to admit accusations of genocide. In Turkey, the covenants of the Father of the nation are sacredly honored - this is the translation of the surname that the first president took for himself - and they have been firmly in the same position until now. The Armenian genocide is not only denied, but a Turkish citizen can receive a prison term for his public recognition. As happened recently, for example, with the world famous writer, Nobel Prize winner in literature Orkhan Pamuk, who was released from prison only under pressure from the international community.
At the same time, some European countries criminalize the denial of the Armenian Genocide. However, only 18 countries, including Russia, officially recognized and condemned this crime of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkish diplomacy reacts differently to this. Since Ankara dreams of joining the EU, they pretend that they do not notice the “anti-genocidal” resolutions of states from the European Union. Turkey does not want to spoil because of this relationship with Russia. However, any attempt to introduce recognition of the genocide by the US Congress is an immediate rebuff.
It is difficult to say why the government of modern Turkey stubbornly does not want to recognize the crimes of 95 years ago committed by the leaders of the dying Ottoman monarchy. Armenian political scientists believe that Ankara is afraid of subsequent demands for material, and even territorial compensation. In any case, if Turkey really wants to become a full part of Europe, these long-standing crimes will have to be recognized.
The Armenian people are one of the oldest. He came from such a distant antiquity, when there were no French, British, Italians, Russians — there were not even Romans and Hellenes. And the Armenians already lived on their land. And only then, much later, it turned out that many of the Armenians live on their land temporarily.
They wanted to solve the Armenian question in the simplest way
It’s a long story to tell how people who lived for more than three thousand years on the Armenian Highlands defended themselves in the struggle against numerous conquerors. How the Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Parthians, Byzantines, Turkmens, Mongols, Seljuks, Turks went to Armenians. More than once, a country with a dark green and brown landscape was stained with the blood of its inhabitants.
Ottoman Turks began the conquest of Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula in the 14th century. In 1453, the Turks took Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, Second Rome, ceased to exist. By the beginning of the 16th century, the whole of Near Asia was already in the hands of the Turks, and, as the poet Valery Bryusov wrote, who devoted much time to studying Armenian history and poetry, “a deep darkness of savagery and ignorance descended upon it. Far less than the Seljuks and the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks were prone to cultural life; their calling was to crush and destroy, and the severity of such oppression had to see all the peoples conquered by them, including the Armenians. ”
And now we are transported immediately to the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1908, young Turks who overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid II came to power in Turkey. Very quickly they showed themselves to be extreme nationalists. And under Abdul Hamid, the Turks slaughtered Armenians: in the 1890s, 300 thousand peaceful defenseless people were killed, these beating led to the fact that the leading powers of the world began to discuss armenian question - The situation of Armenians in Turkey. But the new Turkish rulers decided to act much more decisively than the Sultan did.
The Young Turks, led by Enver Pasha, Talaat Bey, Dzhemal Pasha, were at first obsessed with Pan-Muslim ideas - the whole world is only for Muslims! - and then pan-Turkism: the most fierce nationalism that you can imagine. They imagined Great Turkey, stretching over a significant part of Europe and almost all of Asia. And they wanted to begin the implementation of these plans with the extermination of Christian Armenians. Like Sultan Abdul Hamid, they wanted to solve the Armenian question in the simplest way, having exterminated the entire Armenian people.
The purpose of deportation is robbery and destruction
In early 1915, a secret meeting of the Young Turkish leaders took place. The performances at this gathering that later became famous speak for themselves. One of the leaders of the Young Turk Party (Ittihad ve Teraki Party), Dr. Nazym-Bey, said then: “The Armenian people must be completely destroyed so that not a single Armenian remains on our land (in the Ottoman Empire. - Yu.Ch.) and this name itself was forgotten. Now there is a war (World War I. - Yu.Ch.), such an opportunity will no longer be. The intervention of the great powers and the noisy protests of the world press will go unnoticed, and even if they find out, they will be confronted with a fait accompli, and thus the question will be settled. This time, our actions should take on the character of the total extermination of Armenians; it is necessary to destroy every single one ... I want the Turks on this land and only the Turks to live and reign supreme. May all non-Turkish elements disappear, no matter what nationality or religion they belong to. ”
Other participants in the meeting spoke in the same cannibal spirit. Here a plan was made for the total extermination of the Armenians. The actions were cunning, methodical and merciless.
At first, the government, on the pretext of mobilization in the army, called all young Armenians to the service. But soon they were quickly disarmed, transferred to "labor battalions" and secretly shot by separate groups. On April 24, 1915, several hundred of the most prominent representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia: writers, artists, lawyers, and representatives of the clergy were arrested and treacherously destroyed in Istanbul.
So April 24 entered the history of the Armenian people as a rainy day. Now the Armenians of the whole world every year remember Metz Jägern “The Greatest Atrocity” inflicted on their people. On this day, the Armenian Church (Armenians - Christians) prays for the victims of the genocide.
Having done so with the main active male part of the population, the Young Turks went over to the massacre of women, children and the elderly. Everything went under the motto of the imaginary resettlement of Western Armenians in Mesopotamia (later, the Nazis will use similar tactics to destroy Jews). The Turkish government officially stated that it, for military reasons, temporarily “isolates” the Armenians, deporting them deep into the empire. But that was a lie. And no one believed in it.
Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946), US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1913-1916), he later wrote a book about the Armenian Genocide, the first genocide of the twentieth century: “The true purpose of deportation was robbery and destruction; this is truly a new method of slaughter. When the Turkish authorities ordered these expulsions, they actually pronounced the death sentence of an entire nation, they understood this very well and made no special attempts to hide this fact in conversations with me. ”
Here are a few figures showing what “deportation” meant. Of the 18,000 exiled Erzurum Armenians, only 150 people reached their destination. 19,000 were deported from the cities of Kharberd, Acne, Tokat and Sebastia, of which only 350 remained alive ...
He pushed horse horseshoes to the feet of his victims
Armenians were simply and frankly killed. Moreover, cruel. Having lost their human appearance, the Turks drowned their victims in the sea and rivers, smothered with smoke and burned fire in intentionally locked houses, threw them off the cliffs, and killed after unheard of torture, mockery and atrocities.
Local authorities hired butchers who, for the work of the killer, treating the Armenians as cattle, received 1 pound per day for their work. Women were tied to children and thrown down from a great height. People were thrown into deep wells or pits, buried.
Many foreign observers told in their books - links to them can be found, for example, in the collection “Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire”, published in Yerevan in 1983 - about brutal beating with sticks, torn eyes, nails and hair, sawn and severed noses, arms, legs and other parts of the body, about burning with a hot iron, hanging from the ceiling. It used everything that a sophisticated fantasy of an inveterate killer could imagine.
Henry Morgenthau in the book “The Tragedy of the Armenian People. The story of Ambassador Morgenthau ”recalled 1919:“ I had a conversation with one responsible Turkish official who told me about the torture used. He did not hide the fact that the government approves of them, and, like all Turks from the ruling class, he warmly endorsed such treatment of a nation that he hated. The official said that all these details of torture were discussed at a night meeting at Unity and Progress headquarters. Each new method of inflicting pain was regarded as an excellent discovery, and officials are constantly racking their brains to invent some new torture. He told me that they even turned to the reports of the Spanish Inquisition ... and took over everything they found there. He did not tell me who won the prize in this terrible contest, but the solid reputation that Jevdet Bey won in Armenia, Vali Wang, gives him the right to superiority in unprecedented meanness. Jevdet was known throughout the country as a “horseshoe from Bashkale,” since this expert on torture invented what, of course, was a masterpiece, the best of all known before: it was he who knocked horse horseshoes to the feet of his Armenian victims. ”
After such reprisals, some Turkish governors were in a hurry to wire-report to the center that there were no more Armenians left in the districts they controlled. At the same time, they cut out not only Armenians, but also people of other nationalities, for example, Chaldeans, Aisors, whose whole fault was only that they were not Turks and fell under a hot knife.
French journalist Henri Barbie, who traveled to Western Armenia in 1916, noted in his travel notes: “Whoever travels through the devastated Armenia now cannot but shudder, these endless spells of ruin and death speak so unusually. There is not a single tree, not a single cliff, not a single piece of moss that would not witness the beating of a man who would not be defiled by the streams of spilled blood. There is not a single channel, river or river that would not bring hundreds, thousands of dead bodies to eternal oblivion. There is not a single abyss, not a single gorge that would not be open-air graves, in the depths of which open piles of skeletons would not whiten, since almost nowhere did the killers give themselves neither time nor labor to bury their victims.
In these vast areas, once enlivened by flowering Armenian settlements, ruin and desolation reign today. ”
“Decree on“ Turkish Armenia ””
Obviously, the Young Turks wanted to implement their policy of genocide of the Armenians in Eastern Armenia and Transcaucasia. Fortunately, the defeat of Germany and its allied Turkey in 1918 forced them to leave Transcaucasia alone.
The total number of victims of the Armenian Genocide? Under Sultan Abdul Hamid, 350 thousand people died, with the Young Turks - 1.5 million. 800 thousand Armenian refugees ended up in the Caucasus, the Arab East, Greece and other countries. If in 1870 about 3 million Armenians lived in Western Armenia and Turkey, then in 1918 - only 200 thousand.
Ambassador Henry Morgenthau was right. He wrote in fresh wake: “I am sure that in the whole history of mankind there are not as many terrifying facts as this massacre. The great beatings and persecutions observed in the past seem almost insignificant in comparison with the sufferings of the Armenian nation in 1915. ”
Did the world know about these crimes? Yes, I did. How did you react? Entente Powers, who considered the Armenians their allies in the fight against the Turks, escaped with the publication of a statement (May 24, 1915), where they blamed the Young Turk government for the massacre of Armenians. The United States did not even make such a statement.
Maxim Gorky, Valery Bryusov, Yuri Veselovsky in Russia, Anatole France, Romain Roland - in France, James Bryce - in England, Fridtjof Nansen - in Norway, revolutionary social democrats (“crowded people”) - in Bulgaria (Turks) vehemently protested in print. had a habit of cutting in their possessions both Greeks and Bulgarians, and Serbs and other Slavs), Karl Liebknecht, Johannes Lepsius, Josef Markvart, Armin Wegner - in Germany and many other progressive figures of that time in almost all countries of the world.
The young Soviet government in Russia also supported the Armenians. On December 29, 1917, it adopted the “Decree on“ Turkish Armenia ””. This document was signed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Stepan Shaumyan, Extraordinary Commissioner for Caucasus Affairs, was entrusted with rendering all possible assistance to the refugee Armenians, "forcibly evicted by the Turkish authorities during the war." At the direction of Lenin, then Soviet Russia sheltered tens of thousands of Armenians in the North Caucasus, Crimea and other parts of the country.
More than 20 countries recognized the fact of the Armenian Genocide (the Parliament of the Russian Federation also voted for it). The same list of accusers includes the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the UN sub-commission on the prevention of discrimination and the protection of minorities, the UN Commission on War Crimes, the World Council of Churches and many other authoritative organizations.
In a number of EU countries (Belgium and Switzerland, for example), criminal liability has been introduced for denying the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide. In October 2006, the French parliament passed a bill according to which denial of the Armenian Genocide would become a criminal offense similar to Holocaust denial.
But modern Turkey, after almost a century, has never recognized the fact of genocide, or individual cases of mass killings. The topic of the Armenian Genocide is still actually in taboo in Turkey. Moreover, the Turks are not limited to denying genocide - they would like to erase the very memory of the Armenians in modern Turkey. So, for example, the words “Armenian Highlands” disappeared from Turkish geographical maps, they were replaced by the name “Eastern Anatolia”.
Behind the desire of the Turkish authorities to deny everything and everything is, first of all, fears that the world community may demand from Turkey compensation for material damage or even the return of territories to Armenia. Indeed, according to the UN Convention “On the Inapplicability of the Statute of Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity (November 26, 1968), genocide is a crime for which the term of liability does not expire, no matter how much time has passed since the events occurred.
While together with Serzh Sargsyan and Vladimir Putin at the memorial complex on Mount Tsitsernakaberd (Lastochka Fortress) in Yerevan on April 24 in memory of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, leaders of states that recognized this crime against humanity gathered in Turkey the so-called "world summit."
TURKISH SUMMIT
“Unfortunately, Turkey continues its traditional policy of denial,“ perfecting ”its instrument of distorting history from year to year: the centenary of the Gallipoli battles this year marks the first of April 24, while they began on March 18, 1915 and lasted until the end of January 1916 of the year, ”Armenian leader Serzh Sargsyan noted in his letter to Prime Minister Erdogan in an invitation to the summit in January, pointing out the true goal of Turkey to distract the attention of the world community from the events of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
And in a recent interview with the Turkish newspaper Hurriet, the Armenian president continued the theme of the “world summit”:
“For us, the 100th anniversary of the Genocide is not a matter of competition. If Ankara’s goal is to ensure that as many heads of state as possible participate in their events in order to divert attention from the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, we pursue far more far-reaching and serious goals - to create a platform to prevent such crimes against humanity in the future. Unlike Turkey, we do not blackmail, we do not threaten, we do not force the international community to participate in our events. All those who take part in our events are guided not by political or economic interests, but by the principles of morality and universal values, ”Sargsyan quoted as saying by arminfo.
PROPHECY OF THEODOR ROOSEVELT
In a letter to Cleveland Goodley Dodge on May 11, 1918, the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, made a prophetic prediction less than a year before his death: “... the massacre of Armenians is the greatest crime of this war (World War I - red.), and if we fail to oppose Turkey, then we pander to it ... The failure of a radical fight against Turkish horror means that all talk of a future world in the whole world is nonsense. ”
And it turned out ...
The Holocaust, which was organized by Hitler, is credited with 6 million lives, who is rightly credited with such a phrase regarding a possible condemnation of mass killings: “In the end, who is talking about the destruction of the Armenians today?”
Then there was the US war in Vietnam, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Tutsi massacre in Rwanda, the current extermination of Russian speakers in southeastern Ukraine, the massacre of Syrian civilians - including Armenians, Copts and Kurds ...
THE ORIGINS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN TURKEY
April 24 is a mourning date in history that speaks of the first purposeful large-scale extermination of people according to national and religious principles, which began a century ago. Pope Francis on April 12 in his sermon called the Armenian Genocide one of the three most terrible disasters and crimes of the twentieth century.
However, the genocide of 1915-1923 was preceded by two “preparatory” solutions to the “Armenian issue” in Ottoman Turkey ... How and why did this become possible? Who conceived and carried out massacres?
Armenia, which adopted Christianity as a state religion in 301, suffered for its choice and does not stop suffering to this day. Christianity for the Armenian people has become something more than religion. It became his soul, mentality. Mostly books were published on the hrabar - Church Armenian - until the end of the 19th century. For centuries, schools and universities operated in monasteries and temples. Here poets and philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians worked.
And khachkars - cross stones with a unique stone script around a flowering cross - inspired optimism and faith. That faith that the conquerors could not destroy - neither the Persians, nor the hordes of Tamerlane, nor the Arabs, nor the Seljuk Turks. It was not possible to make Armenians either apostates or assimilate.
Khachkars at the cell of Gregory the Illuminator in the rock monastery Geghard in Armenia, founded by this saint in the 4th century. Photo: K. Markaryan
However, the Armenians were especially hard when Turkic tribes invaded their ancestral lands from the Far East and Central Asia. With the fall of Constantinople (Constantinople), the capital of Byzantium, an ally of Great Armenia, difficult times began. Christian churches turned into mosques: minarets were placed around, and the faces of the saints in the churches were painted over. To the giaurs (infidels): the Ottomans treated the Armenians, Greeks, Slavs, and other peoples as second-class people.
Islamic fundamentalism gained strength and formed in the second half of the 19th century, and flourished during the reign of Sultan Abdul-Hamid. The Armenians who hoped for the help of Christian Russia became especially hated by the Turks.
After the next Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. from the Turkish yoke liberated the Balkan peoples. But the situation of the Armenians has not changed. The Berlin Congress, designed to revise the terms of the San Stefano Peace Treaty, which concluded the Russo-Turkish war, was held under strong pressure from Germany, Britain and Austria-Hungary. Russia would not have pulled a new war against the coalition. Therefore, the improvement of the situation of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey had to be forgotten.
But not to the Turks. In the 18 years after the Berlin Congress, the population of Western Armenia, under Turkish occupation, fell by about 500-600 thousand as a result of systematic pogroms.
The British Prime Minister (1916-1922), Lloyd George, wrote in his collection The Truth About Peace Talks:
“According to the San Stefano Peace (1878), Russian troops had to occupy Armenia until the necessary reforms [by the Turks] were carried out. This decree was annulled by the Berlin Treaty of 1878, which was entirely the result of our menacing pressure and glorified by us as the greatest triumph of England, which brought "an honorable peace." Armenia was sacrificed on the triumphal altar erected by us. The Russians were forced to leave; the unfortunate Armenians were again crushed by the fifth of their old oppressors, pledging to "carry out improvements and reforms in the provinces inhabited by Armenians."
We all know how these obligations were violated for forty years, despite the repeated protests of the country, which was the main culprit of the return of Armenia under the rule of the Turks. The policy of the British government with fatal inevitability led to terrifying slaughter of 1895-1897 and 1909 and to the terrible massacre of 1915. As a result of these atrocities, unprecedented even in the history of Turkish despotism, the number of Armenian population in Turkey has decreased by more than a million. ”
Lloyd George did not take into account that the genocide continued in the early 1920s, killing at least half a million more civilians with whom the regular army of the Ottoman Empire cracked down.
ARMENIANS - INTERFERENCE ON THE WAY TO GREAT TURAN
Both in the Ottoman Empire and in today's Turkey, they never refused to create the so-called Great Turan - a pan-Turkic state, which Transcaucasia, the North Caucasus, Crimea, the Volga Region, Central Asia should go into Altai with a part of Mongolia ...
The implementation of these plans has always been hindered by the Armenians, who, in addition, also sympathized with the Russians. Therefore, it was decided to destroy the Armenians, who, unlike the Georgians themselves, didn’t succumb to repression.
This was done in the most Jesuit way and with a material background. Turkish officials who left the Balkan countries after their liberation from the Ottoman yoke were offered to settle ... in places densely populated by national minorities, primarily in the Armenian neighborhoods of cities and villages. The conflicts that started, the troops were hurrying to suppress them, ended with the physical destruction of the dissent ... and the seizure of their property.
The solution of the “Armenian question” conceived in this way under Sultan Abdul-Hamid at the end of the 19th century was made a banner by the Young Turks who came to power in 1908, headed by Kemal Pasha, who later received the name Ataturk (father of all Turks).
Plans for the destruction of the Armenian population were developed in October 1911 at the congress of the Unity and Progress Party (Ittihad ve Terakki) and were finalized under the veil of the First World War.
In September 1914, at a secret meeting chaired by the Minister of the Interior, Talaat Pasha, a special agency was formed - the Executive Committee of the Three, which included the leaders of the Young Turks Nazim, Bekhaetdin Shakir and Shyukri.
Nazym, realizing the benefits of a clash of world powers among themselves, said at that meeting: “If you are content with a partial massacre, as was the case in Adana and other areas in 1909, it will be harmful instead of benefit, since we risk awakening elements that we are also going to sweep away from the Arabs and Kurds; the danger will triple and the realization of our intention will be difficult. I told you several times at this meeting and now I repeat: if the purge is not universal and final, then harm instead of benefit is inevitable. The Armenian people must be destroyed radically so that not a single Armenian remains on our land and this name itself is forgotten. Now the war is on, there will no longer be such an opportunity. The intervention of the great powers and the noisy protests of the world press will go unnoticed, and if they find out, they will be confronted with a fait accompli, and thus the question will be settled. This time, our actions should take on the character of the total extermination of Armenians; it is necessary to destroy every single one ... Our country must be cleansed of non-Turkish elements. Religion does not matter and make sense to me. My religion is Turan ”(from excerpts from the memoirs of a young Turkish leader Mevlan-zade Rifat - genocide-museum.am).
In February 1915, Minister of War Enver Pasha ordered the destruction of Armenians serving in the Turkish army. At the beginning of the war, about 60 thousand Armenians aged 18 to 45 years were drafted into the army - the most combat-ready part of the male population ...
For the extermination of Armenians, the 10,000th special punitive organization “Teshkilat-i Mahsusa” was created.
Destroying male conscripts, the Turks then began to crack down on the remaining old people, women and children.
On April 24, in 1915, more than 600 representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia were arrested and subsequently destroyed in Constantinople. From this began the countdown of the final solution of the "Armenian issue" by the Turks ...
The lists of people to be destroyed included people of different political views and professions: writers, artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, businessmen, political and religious leaders. The only thing that related them was their nationality and position in society.
And civilians, not allowing people to take either food or belongings, were supposedly deported to new places of residence - in the deserts of Mesopotamia. They robbed, raped, killed, burned alive, ripped pregnant women’s stomachs ...
The name of the desert Der Zor has become a household name - only 200 thousand Armenians were destroyed here. Concentration camps were created where people were systematically cut out. The Germans then put it on stream, using gas chambers and crematoria ...
Germany, Turkey’s main ally, has largely condoned and supported the extermination of Armenians. The true goals of the deportation of Germany were known. For example, the German consul in Trebizond in July 1915 reported on the deportation of Armenians in this province and noted that the Young Turks intend to put an end to the "Armenian issue" in this way.
The German Protestant pastor Fischer narrated daily: “A group of Armenians from Wan’s orphanage was hung on trees and then scalps were cut ... A newborn child was chopped with an ax into pieces, which strangled the child’s mother, putting them in her mouth. The remaining girls of the shelter were dishonored and killed. ”
A well-known Armenian writer Hovhannes Tumanyan wrote about what he saw in Vansky vilayet: “Nails were stuck in the foreheads of children, chopped into parts of the bodies of people, the Turks laid out and made games, the body was placed in a cauldron half and boiled so that the living part could see and feel , with a red-hot metal, they chopped the body into pieces and roasted it on fire, roasted it alive. Before the eyes of parents, children were killed, before the eyes of children - parents. ”
RUSSIA, GENERAL ANDRANIK AND PEOPLE'S Avengers
At the same time, Nicholas II opened the borders of the empire to Armenian refugees. People tried to find housing and work. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were thus saved.
Units of Armenian volunteers who did not have Russian citizenship fought in the tsarist army on the Transcaucasian Front. Under the leadership of commander Andranik Ozanyan, who came from the Ottoman Empire (later - Major General of the Russian Army), the Armenian squad heroically fought. Then a volunteer Armenian corps was formed.
Andranik himself for his personal courage in the battles of 1915-1916. He was awarded the St. George medal of the fourth degree, the St. George crosses of the fourth and third degree, the orders of St. Stanislav of the second degree with swords and St. Vladimir of the fourth degree.
general Andranik
I note that the monuments to the general were erected in many countries that fought with the Turkish yoke. The streets and squares of cities are named after him, films about the hero are made and books are written.
But it all ended with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks and the conclusion of peace with Turkey. This General Andranik did not accept, leaving for emigration ...
In August 1915, Talaat Pasha cynically declared that "the actions against the Armenians were mainly implemented and the" Armenian issue "no longer exists."
But it was not there. In some areas of Western Armenia, Armenian rebels bought rifles from Kurdish tribes, if possible, and began to show stubborn resistance. (In Ottoman Turkey, only Muslims had the right to have weapons.)
The Armenian Fedaines defended Sasun, Mush, Van, Shatakh, Musa-Dag, Shapin, Ajn, Aintap ... As long as they could hold out against a regular army equipped with artillery. Books about the heroic pages of the Armenian resistance have been written and films made by foreign authors ...
But the condemnation of Turkey, the punishment of those responsible for crimes by the international community did not follow. All states sought their preferences in the First World War and in alliance with Turkey. It wasn’t up to the Armenians ...
Bolshevik Russia also helped the Turkish “Red Army comrades” with huge amounts of money, lots of food (and during the famine in the Volga region), and various weapons. Ataturk, for the time being, eagerly played along with Lenin, who was trying to stay in power at all costs. Turkish troops even dressed in budenovki, posing as ardent supporters of communism (cutting out at the same time the "red" quietly in Turkey itself), ready to allegedly "inflate the world fire of revolution."
Genocide has generated a wave of refugees in different countries of Europe and in America. Leaving their native places, people deep in their hearts hid the bitterness of parting with their homeland and the thirst for revenge on the killers.
Not having obtained support from the "civilized world", the Armenians opened their account to the Ottoman barbarians. Retribution overtook them until the 1970s.
The ideologist of genocide Talaat pasha He was shot dead by a student, Soghomon Teylerian, in Berlin on March 16, 1921 (a Berlin court acquitted him).
Enver Pasha He was killed in 1922 in Turkestan by the red commanders Hakob (Yakov) Melkumov and Georgy Agabekov.
Jemal Pasha He was killed on June 25, 1922 in Tiflis: an act of retaliation was carried out by Stepan Tsakhikyan and Petros Ter-Poghosyan.
Said Halim Pasha (ex-prime minister of Turkey) was killed on December 6, 1921 in Rome by Arshavir Shirakyan.
Shakir Bay, the main ideologist of Ittihad, was killed on April 17, 1922 in Rome. He was punished by Aramon Yerkanyan and Arshavir Shirakian.
TURKEY DOESN'T RECOGNIZE GENOCIDE
However, neither acts of retaliation, nor appeals to Turkey by world powers and the recent appeal from European Parliament deputies to recognize the Armenian Genocide have yielded so far no result.
Prime Minister Erdogan only a few times expressed his sympathy for the pain of the Armenian people, but at the same time noted that, they say, the First World War was to blame (remember the words of the ideologist of the Young Turks Nazim that the war will write off everything?) That many Turks died.
It is as if German Chancellor Merkel now did not recognize the Holocaust and would only express her sympathy for the death of the Jews, saying that World War II was to blame for everything, that many Germans had died ...
From just the wording “Armenian genocide,” Ankara is furious and withdraws its ambassadors from countries who recognize this crime against humanity at the state level.
This happened after the recent mass of Pope Francis in Rome on the slain Armenians, when the Turkish ambassador was recalled from the Vatican.
And after the adoption by the Austrian parliament on April 23 of a resolution condemning the genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey also recalled its ambassador. Will this be done with respect to Germany? Indeed, in Berlin on April 24, the day of the 100th anniversary of the genocide, the Bundestag overwhelmingly approved a resolution in which the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians a hundred years ago in the Ottoman Empire was described as genocide, Reuters reports.
I note that Chancellor Angela Merkel also participated in the meeting of the German parliament.
“Germany has its share of guilt in the events of those years,” said the Speaker of the Bundestag, Norbert Lamert, adding that the real world cannot be established without restoring justice for the victims of the Genocide, Tert.am reports.
I wonder if Ankara would dare to recall his ambassador also from Moscow? At least, such a question is even asked by the Turkish Hurriet newspaper, recalling the greeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 22 to participants in the evening of the world without genocide, in which he clearly calls genocide genocide.
And on April 24, Vladimir Putin said the following in the Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex in Yerevan:
“Today we grieve with the Armenian people. In hundreds of Russian cities, I want to emphasize this, dear friends, in hundreds of Russian cities more than 2000 memorial events will be held. They will be attended not only by representatives of the large Armenian community of Russia, numbering about 3 million people, but also tens of thousands of people of other nationalities. Russia's position has been and remains consistent: we have always believed that there is no massacre of people, and there can be no justification, ”NTV quotes the words of the Russian president.
Vladimir Putin speaks at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex. Yerevan, April 24, 2015. Photo by the Presidential Press and Information Office.
Ankara’s reaction was expected.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite all our warnings and appeals, regarded the events of 1915 as genocide. Such statements from the point of view of Turkey are unacceptable, ”the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Looking forward to the next steps. It’s necessary to be consistent then ...
Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II, First Lady of Armenia Rita Sargsyan and Presidents: Armenia - Serzh Sargsyan, Russia - Vladimir Putin, Cyprus - Nikos Anastasiadis, France - Francois Hollande laying flowers at Tsitsernakaberd. Photo by the Presidential Press and Information Office.
Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande, who also arrived in Yerevan, emphasized: “On this day, April 24, paying tribute to the victims of the genocide, I want to tell our Armenian friends: we will never forget this tragedy. I call for resistance to such evil and universal recognition of genocide. "
However, some experts point out that Turkey refuses to acknowledge its savagery a hundred years ago because of the economic background: they do not want, they say, to return the lands taken from the Armenians. And this is a fertile Ararat valley with the biblical Mount Ararat, where the Armenian people have lived for more than one millennium.
However, Armenia has never made territorial claims against Turkey or any other country. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan stated this in an interview with the Turkish Hurriet newspaper.
“There is no such task and it wasn’t on the foreign policy agenda of our country, we are a full member of the international community and follow all international legal standards, however, our Eastern neighbor, ignoring all these norms, keeps our border in blockade, which is the last closed border of Europe,” - quotes arminfo the words of the Armenian president.
The eternal flame of Tsitsernakaberd ... Photo by the Presidential Press and Information Office.
Serzh Sargsyan pointed out that the territorial claims of Yerevan against Ankara are said not in Armenia, but in Turkey: “Why do they do this, you should draw conclusions” ...
Dönme - crypto-Jewish sect brings Ataturk to power
One of the most destructive factors that largely determines the political situation in the Middle East and Transcaucasia for 100 years is the genocide of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, during which, according to various sources, from 664 thousand to 1.5 million people were killed. And given that the genocide of the Pontic Greeks, which began in Izmir, during which from 350 thousand to 1.2 million people were killed, and the Assyrians, who took part in the Kurds, which claimed from 275 to 750 thousand people, was almost simultaneously passed, this factor is already For more than 100 years, the whole region has been kept in suspense, constantly heating up hostility between the peoples inhabiting it. Moreover, as soon as at least a slight rapprochement between neighbors is planned, giving hope for their reconciliation and further peaceful coexistence, an external factor, a third party, immediately intervenes in the situation and a bloody event occurs that further warms mutual hatred.
For an ordinary person who has received a standard education, it is absolutely clear today that the Armenian genocide was and that Turkey was to blame for the genocide. Russia, among more than 30 countries, recognized the fact of the Armenian Genocide, which, however, has little effect on its relations with Turkey. Turkey, in the eyes of the common man, absolutely irrationally and stubbornly continues to deny its responsibility not only for the genocide of Armenians, but also for the genocide of other Christian peoples - Greeks and Assyrians. According to Turkish media reports, in May 2018, Turkey opened all its archives to study the events of 1915. President Recep Erdogan said that after the opening of the Turkish archives, if someone dares to declare “the so-called Armenian genocide”, then let him try to prove it based on facts:
“There was no“ genocide ”against Armenians in Turkish history” - said Erdogan.
No one dares to suspect the inadequacy of the Turkish president. Erdogan - the leader of a great Islamic country, the heiress of one of the greatest empires, by definition, cannot be similar to, say, the president of Ukraine. And the president of any country will not dare to openly and openly lie. Indeed, Erdogan knows something that is unknown to most people in other countries, or is carefully hiding from the international community. And such a factor does exist. It does not concern the very event of genocide, it concerns the one who produced this inhuman cruelty and is really responsible for it.
***
In February 2018, on the portal of the Turkish “electronic government” (www.turkiye.gov.tr ) an online service was launched on which any Turkish citizen could trace his genealogy and find out about his ancestors in a few clicks. Available records were limited to the beginning of the 19th century, the times of the Ottoman Empire. The service almost immediately became so popular that it soon collapsed due to millions of requests. The results shocked a huge number of Turks. It turns out that many people who considered themselves Türks, in reality, the ancestors are of Armenian, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian and even Macedonian and Romanian origin. This fact by default only confirmed that everyone in Turkey knows, but nobody likes to mention, especially with foreigners. Talking about it out loud in Turkey is considered bad form, but it is this factor that now determines all of domestic and foreign policy, all of Erdogan’s struggle for power within the country.
The Ottoman Empire, by the standards of its time, pursued a relatively tolerant policy towards national and religious minorities, preferring, again, by the standards of that time, non-violent methods of assimilation. To some extent, she repeated the methods of the defeated Byzantine Empire. Armenians traditionally led the financial region of the empire. Most of the bankers in Constantinople were Armenians. A lot of finance ministers were Armenians, just remember the brilliant Hakob Kazazyan Pasha, who was considered the best finance minister in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Of course, throughout history there have been inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts, which even led to the shedding of blood. But nothing like the genocide of the Christian population in the 20th century did not occur in the Empire. And suddenly such a tragedy happens. Any sane person will understand that this is not happening out of the blue. So why and who produced these bloody genocides? The answer to this question lies in the history of the Ottoman Empire itself.
***
In Istanbul, in the Asian part of the city, through the Bosphorus, there is an old and secluded Uskudar cemetery. Visitors to the cemetery among traditional Muslims will begin to meet and be surprised at graves that are not like the others and do not fit into Islamic traditions. Many of the tombs are covered with concrete and stone surface, rather than earth, and have photographs of the dead, which does not fit into the tradition. When asked whose graves it is, they will tell you in almost a whisper that representatives of the Donmeh (converts or apostates - Tur.), A large and mysterious part of Turkish society, rest here. The grave of the judge of the Supreme Court is located next to the grave of the ex-leader of the Communist Party, and next to them are the graves of the general and the famous enlightener. Dönme are Muslims, but somehow not quite. Most of the modern Dönmäs are secular people who vote for the secular republic of Atatürk, but in every Dönme community, secret religious rites are still taking place, more similar to Jewish than Islamic ones. Not one denme ever publicly recognizes its identity. The denmen themselves learn about themselves only when they reach the age of 18, when their parents reveal a secret to them. This tradition of zealously preserving dual identity in Muslim society has been handed down for generations.
As I wrote in the article“The Island of Antichrist: A Bridgehead for Armageddon” , Dönme, or Sabbatians are followers and students of the Jewish rabbi Shabbtai Zvi, who in 1665 was proclaimed the Jewish Messiah and introduced the largest schism in Judaism in almost 2 millennia of its official existence. Avoiding execution by the Sultan, together with his many followers Shabbtai Zvi converted to Islam in 1666. Despite this, many Sabbatians are now members of three religions - Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Turkish denme were originally founded in Greek Thessaloniki by Jacob Kerido and his son Berachio (Baruch) Russo (Osman Baba). In the future, denmen spread throughout Turkey, where they were called, according to the direction in Sabbatianism, izmirlars, caracaslars (black-browed) and capanjilars (owners of the scales). The main place of concentration of denme on the Asian part of the Empire was the city of Izmir. The Young Turks movement was largely composed of denme. Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s first president, was a Denme and a member of the Veritas Masonic Lodge, a division of the Great East of France Lodge.
Throughout its history, Denmen have repeatedly appealed to rabbis, representatives of traditional Judaism, with requests to recognize them as Jews, like Karaites who deny the Talmud (oral Torah). However, they were always denied, which in most cases was political in nature, and not religious. Kemalist Turkey has always been an ally of Israel, which was politically unprofitable to admit that this state was actually led by Jews. For the same reasons, Israel categorically refused and still refuses to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Foreign Ministry spokesman Emanuel Nachshon recently said Israel’s official position has not changed.
“We are very sensitive and responsive to the terrible tragedy of the Armenian people during the First World War. The historical debate on how to regard this tragedy is one thing, and the recognition that something terrible has happened to the Armenian people is another, and it is much more important. ”
Originally, the Greek Thessaloniki, then part of the Ottoman Empire, the Dönme community consisted of 200 families. Secretly, they practiced their own form of Judaism, based on the "18 commandments" supposedly abandoned by Shabbtai Zvi, along with a ban on mixed marriages with true Muslims. Dönme never integrated into Muslim society and continued to believe that Shabbtai Zvi would one day return and lead them to atonement.
According to very low estimates of the denmen themselves, now in Turkey their number is 15-20 thousand people. Alternative sources speak of millions of denme in Turkey. The entire officer and general staff of the Turkish army, bankers, financiers, judges, journalists, policemen, lawyers, lawyers, and preachers throughout the 20th century were denmen. But this phenomenon began in 1891 with the creation of the political organization Dönme - the Committee "Unity and Progress", later called the "Young Turks", responsible for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of the Christian peoples of Turkey.
***
In the 19th century, the international Jewish elite planned to create a Jewish state in Palestine, but the problem was that Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, wanted to come to terms with the Ottoman Empire about Palestine, but failed. Therefore, the next logical step was to gain control of the Ottoman Empire itself and its destruction in order to liberate Palestine and create Israel. For this purpose, the Committee "Unity and Progress" was created under the guise of a secular Turkish nationalist movement. The committee held at least two congresses (in 1902 and 1907) in Paris, at which a revolution was planned and prepared. In 1908, the Young Turks began their revolution and forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to submit.
The notorious “evil genius of the Russian revolution” Alexander Parvus was the financial adviser to the Young Turks, and the first Bolshevik government of Russia allocated Ataturk 10 million rubles in gold, 45 thousand rifles and 300 machine guns with ammunition. One of the main, sacred, causes of the Armenian Genocide was the fact that the Jews considered the Armenians Amalekites, descendants of Amalek, Esau’s grandson. Esau himself was the elder twin brother of the founder of Israel, Jacob, who, using the blindness of their father, Isaac, stole the birthright from his older brother. Throughout history, the Amalekites were the main enemies of Israel, which David still fought during the reign of Saul, who was killed by the Amalekite.
The head of the Young Turks was Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), who was a deenme and a direct descendant of the Jewish messiah Shabbtai Zvi. The Jewish writer and rabbi Joachim Prince in his book “The secret Jews” on page 122 confirms this fact:
“The revolt of the Young Turks in 1908 against the authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid began among the intelligentsia of Thessaloniki. It was there that the need for a constitutional regime arose. Among the leaders of the revolution that led to the creation of a more modern government in Turkey were Javid Bey and Mustafa Kemal. Both were ardent denme. Javid Bey became Minister of Finance, Mustafa Kemal became the leader of the new regime and took the name Ataturk. His opponents tried to use his denme affair to discredit him, but without success. Too many of the Young Turks in the newly formed revolutionary cabinet prayed to Allah, but their real prophet was Shabbtai Zvi, the Messiah of Smyrna (Izmir - author's note). ”
October 14, 1922The Literary Digest published an article entitled “The Sort of Mustafa Kemal is,” which said:
“A Spanish-born Jew, a native Muslim Muslim, trained at a German military college, a patriot who studied the campaigns of the great world commanders, including Napoleon, Grant and Lee, are, as they say, just a few outstanding personality traits of the new“ Man on Horseback ”, which appeared in the Middle East. He is a real dictator, correspondents testify, a man of this type who immediately becomes the hope and fear of peoples torn to pieces by unsuccessful wars. Unity and power returned to Turkey largely thanks to the will of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Apparently, no one has yet called him “Napoleon of the Middle East,” but probably some entrepreneurial journalist will do it sooner or later; for Kemal’s path to power, his methods are autocratic and carefully thought out, even his military tactics are said to resemble Napoleon. ”
In an article entitled “When Kemal Ataturk Recited Shema Yisrael,” the Jewish author Hillel Halkin quoted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk:
“I, a descendant of Shabbtai Zvi, is no longer a Jew, but an ardent admirer of this prophet. I believe that every Jew in this country would be nice to join his camp. "
Gershom Scholem wrote in his book “Kabbalah” on pages 330-331:
“Their liturgies were written in a very small format so that they could be easily hidden. All sects so successfully hid their internal affairs from Jews and Turks that for a long time knowledge of them was based only on rumors and reports of outsiders. Dönme manuscripts, revealing the details of their Sabbathian ideas, were presented and studied only after several Dönme families decided to fully assimilate into Turkish society and passed on their documents to Jewish friends from Thessaloniki and Izmir. As long as the Dönme were concentrated in Thessaloniki, the institutional framework of the sects remained intact, although several members of the Dönme were activists of the Young Turks movement that arose in this city. The first administration that came to power after the Young Turks revolution in 1909 included three ministers - Dönme, including Finance Minister Javid Beck, who was a descendant of the Baruch Russo family and was one of the leaders of his sect. One of the allegations, which was usually made by many Jews of Thessaloniki (denied, however, by the Turkish government), was that Kemal Atatürk was of Denme origin. This view was eagerly supported by many Ataturk’s religious opponents in Anatolia. ”
The inspector general of the Turkish army in Armenia and the military governor of the Egyptian Sinai during the First World War, Rafael de Nogales wrote in his book “Four Years Beneath the Crescent” on pages 26-27 that the chief architect of the Armenian Genocide was Osman Talaat Dönme:
“It was a renegade of Hebrew (denme) from Thessaloniki, Talaat, the main organizer of the massacres and deportations, who, while fishing in troubled waters, succeeded in his career as a mail clerk modest rank to the Great Vizier of the Empire. "
In one of Marcel Tinire’s articles in L “Illustration in December 1923, which was translated into English and published as Saloniki, it says:
“Today's denme associated with Free Masonry, trained at Western universities, often professing total atheism, have become leaders in the Young Turks revolution. Talaat Beck, Javid Beck and many other members of the Unity and Progress committee were Denme from Thessaloniki. ”
The London Times on July 11, 1911, in an article entitled “Jews and the Situation in Albania,” wrote:
“It is well known that the Thessaloniki Committee was formed under Masonic patronage with the help of Jews and Dönme, or Turkish crypto-Jews, whose headquarters are in Thessaloniki, and whose organization even under the Sultan Abdul Hamid took the Masonic form. Jews such as Emmanuel Carasso, Salem, Sasun, Farji, Meslach and Dönme, or crypto-Jews such as Javid Beck and the Balji family, have been influential in organizing the Committee and in the work of its central authority in Thessaloniki. These facts, which are known to every government in Europe, are also known throughout Turkey and the Balkans, where the trend is increasingly visible. hold Jews and Dönme responsible for the bloody blunders committed by the Committee».
The same newspaper published a letter on August 9, 1911 to its Constantinople editorial board, in which there were comments on the situation from the chief rabbis. In it, in particular, it was written:
“I just note that, according to the information that I received from genuine Masons, most of the lodges founded under the auspices of the Great East of Turkey since the revolution were from the very beginning the face of the Unity and Progress Committee, and then they were not recognized by the British Masons . The first "Supreme Council" of Turkey, appointed in 1909, contained three Jews - Caronry, Cohen and Fari, and three denme - Djavidaso, Kibarasso and Osman Talaat (the main leader and organizer of the Armenian Genocide - author's note). ”
To be continued…
Alexander Nikishin for
Some historians distinguish two periods in the history of genocide. If at the first stage (1878-1914) the task was to retain the territory of the enslaved people and organize a mass exodus, then in 1915-1922 the destruction of the ethnic and political Armenian clan that impeded the implementation of the Pan-Turkism program was paramount. Before World War I, the destruction of the Armenian national group was carried out in the form of a system of ubiquitous single killings combined with periodic mass slaughter of Armenians in certain areas, where they constituted the absolute majority (massacre in Sasun, massacres throughout the empire in the fall and winter of 1895, massacre in Istanbul in Wang area).
The initial number of people living in this territory is a controversial issue, since a significant part of the archives has been destroyed. It is known that in the middle of the XIX century in the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslims accounted for about 56% of the population.
According to the Armenian Patriarchate, in 1878, three million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Turkey estimated the number of Armenians in the country at 1,845,450 people. The Armenian population has decreased by more than a million due to the massacre in 1894-1896, the flight of Armenians from Turkey and forced conversion to Islam.
The Young Turks who came to power after the 1908 revolution continued their policy of brutally suppressing the national liberation movement. In ideology, the old doctrine of Ottomanism was replaced by no less rigid concepts of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism. A campaign to forcibly terminate the population was launched, and non-Turkish organizations were banned.
In April 1909, the Cilician massacre took place, the massacre of Armenians from the Adan and Allepo vilayets. About 30 thousand people became victims of the massacre, among whom were not only Armenians, but also Greeks, Syrians and Chaldeans. In general, during these years, the Young Turks paved the way for a complete solution to the "Armenian issue".
In February 1915, at a special meeting of the government, the young Turk ideologist Dr. Nazim Bey set out a plan for the complete and widespread destruction of the Armenian people: “It is necessary to completely exterminate the Armenian nation, without leaving a single living Armenian on our land. Even the word“ Armenian ”should be deleted from memory ... "
On April 24, 1915, the day now celebrated as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide, mass arrests of the Armenian intellectual, religious, economic and political elite began in Constantinople, which led to the complete destruction of an entire galaxy of prominent figures of Armenian culture. More than 800 representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia were arrested and subsequently killed, including writers Grigor Zohrab, Daniel Varuzhan, Siamanto, Ruben Sevak. Not having endured the death of friends, the great composer Komitas lost his mind.
In May-June 1915, a massacre and deportation of Armenians in Western Armenia began.
A universal and systematic campaign against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire consisted of expelling Armenians to the desert and subsequent executions, death from gangs of looters or from hunger or thirst. Armenians from almost all the main centers of the empire were deported.
On June 21, 1915, during the final act of deportation, her main inspirer, the Minister of the Interior, Talaat Pasha, ordered the expulsion of “all Armenians without exception” living in ten provinces of the eastern region of the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of those who were found to be useful to the state. In accordance with this new directive, deportation was carried out according to the “ten percent principle”, according to which Armenians should not exceed 10% of Muslims in the region.
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 (modern Izmir) in September 1922, when troops under the command of Mustafa Kemal cut out the Armenian quarter in Smyrna, and then under pressure from the Western powers, they allowed the survivors to be evacuated. With the destruction of the Armenians of Smyrna, the last surviving compact community, the Armenian population of Turkey almost ceased to exist in their historical homeland. The surviving refugees scattered around the world, forming diasporas in several dozen countries.
Current estimates of the number of victims of genocide vary from 200 thousand (some Turkish sources) to more than 2 million Armenians. Most historians estimate the number of victims from 1 to 1.5 million people. Over 800 thousand became refugees.
The exact number of victims and survivors is difficult to determine, since in 1915, fleeing murders and pogroms, many Armenian families changed their faith (according to some sources, from 250 thousand to 300 thousand people).
For many years, Armenians all over the world have been striving for the international community to officially and unconditionally recognize the fact of genocide. The first special decree recognizing and condemning the terrible tragedy of 1915 was adopted by the Parliament of Uruguay (April 20, 1965). Laws, decrees and decisions on the Armenian Genocide were subsequently adopted by the European Parliament, the State Duma of Russia, and parliaments of other countries, in particular Cyprus, Argentina, Canada, Greece, Lebanon, Belgium, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Venezuela, Lithuania, Chile, Bolivia, as well as the Vatican.
More than 40 US states, the Australian state of New South Wales, the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario (the city of Toronto inclusive), the Swiss cantons of Geneva and Vaud, Wales (Great Britain), about 40 Italian communes, dozens of international and national organizations, including tens including World Council of Churches, Human Rights League, Ely Wiesel Humanitarian Foundation, Union of Jewish Communities of America.
On April 14, 1995, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted a statement "On condemning the genocide of the Armenian people in 1915-1922."
The US government destroys 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, but refuses to call it genocide.
The Armenian community of the United States has long passed a Congressional resolution recognizing the genocide of the Armenian people.
Attempts to carry out this legislative initiative have been undertaken in Congress more than once, but they have not been crowned with success.
The issue of recognition of the genocide in the normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey.
Armenia and Turkey have not yet established diplomatic relations, and the Armenian-Turkish border has been closed since 1993 at the initiative of official Ankara.
Turkey traditionally rejects accusations of Armenian genocide, claiming that both Armenians and Turks were victims of the 1915 tragedy, and is extremely sensitive to the process of international recognition of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
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 the memorial complex was completed in Yerevan on Tsitsernakaberd Hill (Lastochkina Fortress). In 1995, the Museum and Institute of the Armenian Genocide was built near the memorial complex.
The motto of the Armenians of the whole world for the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide is the word "Remember and Demand", and the symbol - forget-me-not. This flower in all languages \u200b\u200bhas a symbolic meaning - remember, do not forget and remind. The flower cup graphically depicts the Tsitserkberd memorial with its 12 pylons. This symbol will be actively used throughout 2015.
the series was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
