THE GENOCIDE OF THE ARMENIANS (1915-1916) – THE GENOCIDE OF THE ARMENIANS (1915-1916)
From April 1915 to December 1916, between 1,200,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians, citizens of the Ottoman Empire, were assassinated on the orders of the central committee of the Union and Progress party. This crime, preceded by a first wave of pre-genocidal massacres perpetrated in 1895 and 1896 (between 200,000 and 250,000 victims) was carefully planned and executed according to a three-step program:
1 / The elimination of the elites from the capital, Constantinople, on April 24 and 25, 1915 – the Armenian soldiers of the Ottoman army having previously been disarmed.
2 / From May to July 1915, the almost total elimination of the Armenian population in the eastern Anatolian provinces of the empire (where more than half of the Armenians lived and who were the historic center of this people for twenty-seven centuries) . Armenian villages are razed to the ground after the population has been killed. In towns and cities, the notables are killed first, then the other men, near their homes in secluded places; women, children and the elderly are deported on foot along mountain paths. These convoys of deportees are regularly decimated, so that deportation is the main technique of genocide. The victims die of thirst, hunger, disease but are also executed in isolation or in droves. Women and children are abducted and forcibly converted.
3 / From August 1915, the Armenians of the rest of the empire, with the exception of those of Constantinople and Smyrna, are deported in family, by rail, and, from Aleppo – point of Convergence of convoys – headed to Syria where 120,000 survived, or along the Euphrates where all perish, either in concentration camps or in regrouping areas, such as Deir-es-Zor where they are exterminated at the late 1916.
In two years, two-thirds of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were therefore victims of a genocide perpetrated for both ideological and political reasons. A fraction of the political party Union and Progress saw in the Armenians the main obstacle to the unification of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus, and even of Central Asia.
According to historians, its specificities make it the event with the most similarities to the genocide of the Jews: genocidal planning operated by a state; the role of a criminal organization – the Special Organization in the case of the Armenian genocide – in the commission of the murders; a target population because it is considered a mortal danger; the background of a world war that leads to the fall of the regime responsible for the genocide.
Today, as more and more nations recognize this genocide, the genocide of the Armenians continues to be denied by the Turkish authorities who engage in a veritable state denial.
