Genocide In The Armenian Genocide

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“Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, water or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed .” said David Fromkin in The Peace to End All Peace book. Indeed, in the beginning of 1914, the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire was approximately 2,5 million against some fewer than 400.000 by 1922. the debate of whether or not this was a genocide is still going on today, a century later. In the present Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the word genocide means any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Campaigns of deportation and…show more content…
They adopted the policy of pan-turkism with an objective to “turkify” the state. This is when a shift took place from Ottoman nationalism to Turkish nationalism. That being said, they banned all other languages to be spoken. A feeling of resentment grew in the ethnic minorities, the intellectuals rejected the idea and many fled to other countries. Gradually, the Young Turks became more and more militant and they worked on a series of reforms in order to increase centralization in the Empire. Although tensions were already present, an even greater antipathy to the christians evolved with the Ottoman’s defeat in the two Balkan wars consecutively in October 1912 and June 1913. Their defeat marked a huge loss in terms of European territory. The Ottoman government accused Armenians of treachery, thinking they had to do with the loss. Also, hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees came to eastern Anatolia as a result, and the conflict over land between Muslims and Christian Armenians intensified. Moreover, one of the deeper causes go back to muslims’ resentment over the Armenians’ social and political successes, as the traditional social hierarchies of muslims superior to non-muslims in the Ottoman Empire got reversed in this case. These main series of…show more content…
As World War I began in 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Power against the Triple Entente because Russia, their all-time enemy was allied to the other front. Because there were Armenians on both sides of the borders, the tensions increased between the Young Turks and the Dashnaks, who were the political party representing the Armenians. Indeed, the Young Turks got offended when the Dashnaks answered per their request of convincing Armenian Russians to fight along their side that “Armenian Russian and Ottoman subjects would remain loyal to their respective empires. That was seen by powerful Young Turks as an act of treachery.” Consequently, they were blamed for siding up with the Russians as guerrillas and the Young Turks started a campaign to portray the Armenians as a threat to the national security. they formed the “Executive Committee of Three” in 1914, consisting of Talaat, Enver and Jemal. They organized operations such as the implementation of the deportation and massacre of

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