1915
The Armenian Genocide Begins
On the evening of April 24, 1915 agents of the Ottoman Empire conducted a mass arrest of Armenian community members in Constantinople and other Turkish cities. Most of these men, among whom numbered clergy, intellectuals, newspaper editors and businessmen, were eventually murdered in the waves of atrocities that followed. This action is considered the first step by the Young Turks regime in an ethnic cleansing of Asia Minor that resulted in the deaths of over a millions Armenians and other Christian minorities in the empire.
The Ottoman Empire was on its last legs and involved in the First World War on the side of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The government, ostensibly under the rule of Mehmed V, was really in the hands of nationalist officials known as the Three Pashas. For them the non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire were not to be trusted as their loyalties were believed to lie with the Christian Russian Empire, then at war with the Turks. The arrests of April 24 were undertaken to deprive the Armenian community of its natural leaders.
What followed was a series of deportations, forced marches, massacres and artificial famines against the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia and parts of Syria that endured over a period of years until the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918. As many as 1.5 million people were reported to have been killed in this persecution. At the conclusion of the war, trials found the Three Pashas and other officials guilty of ordering the massacres. Two of the three pashas were assassinated by Armenian revenge seekers while the third died in battle.
The Turkish Republic, the successor of the Ottoman state, has acknowledged that many civilians died during relocations but has steadfastly denied that there was an organized plan of racial extermination and strenuously objects to the use of the word “genocide”. Members of the Armenian diaspora have long campaigned for their new homelands to recognize that the actions which began in 1915 were a deliberate attack on a race and religion.