Armenian+Genocide





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**Theodore Roosevelt**media type="youtube" key="EJedvAEfHeQ" height="344" width="425"
 * May 11, 1918, letter to Cleveland Hoadley Dodge**
 * ..." the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it ... the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.****" **

** --- **** --- **** --- **** --- **** - ** **" ****Mr. Speaker, with mixed emotions we mark the 50th anniversary of the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people. In taking notice of the shocking events in 1915, we observe this anniversary with sorrow in recalling the massacres of Armenians and with pride in saluting those brave patriots who survived to fight on the side of freedom during World War I.****" ** **- Congressional Record, pg. 8890**
 * Gerald Ford **
 * Addressing the US House of Representatives. **



**What was the Armenian Genocide?** The atrocities committed against the Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire during W.W.I are called the Armenian Genocide. This Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from their homes, then sent the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Large numbers of Armenians were methodically massacred throughout the Ottoman Empire.

It was masterminded by the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party (Committee for Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyet, in Turkish]) which was dominated by Mehmed Talât [Pasha], Ismail Enver [Pasha], and Ahmed Djemal [Pasha]. They were a racist group whose ideology was articulated by Zia Gökalp, Dr. Mehmed Nazim, and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir. **Where did the genocide occur?** The Armenian genocide occurred in Armenia; a region located in Southwestern Asia, east of Turkey

 **When?** The Genocide occure during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918, and after only a little more than a year of calm at the end of W.W.I, the atrocities were renewed between 1920 and 1923

**Victims**? Armenians and other ethnic group including Assyrians and Greeks by the "young turks" governemnt. Any common Turks who protected Armenians were also killed.

**How/ Methods of Genocide?** First the Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed.Then the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were rounded up on April 24, 1915, and then killed. Finally, the remaining Armenians were called from their homes, told they would be relocated, and then marched off to concentration camps in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor where they would starve and thirst to death in the burning sun. On the march, often they would be denied food and water, and many were brutalized and killed by their "guards" or by "marauders." The authorities in Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast, did vary this routine: they loaded Armenians on barges and sank them out at sea.











**What were the national and international responses?** In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity. The Turkish government today denies that there was an Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were only removed from the eastern "war zone." The Armenian Genocide, however, occurred all over Anatolia [present-day Turkey], and not just in the so-called "war zone."



