Armenian Genocide

The genocide visited on the Armenian population between 1915 and 1917 living within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire is also known as the “forgotten genocide.” The Ittahad's ruling party of the secular Young Turks perpetrated it. While its survivors commemorated it 50 years later, the international community and the West in general took even longer to admit that what happened in 1915 was a planned, well-organized, and systematic attempt at exterminating the Armenian population. The United Nations and the European Parliament officially acknowledged the genocide in 1985 and 1987; the French Senate passed a resolution into law in 2000, and the United States, although it issued a formal statement in 1990, stopped short of passing a bill that explicitly refers to the 1915 tragedy as genocide.

Most of the Armenian territories located between the Black, Caspian, and Mediterranean seas were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. As a Christian minority in a Muslim-dominated empire, the status of Armenians was second-class citizens or “tolerated infidels.” The genocide was preceded by centuries of political and economic persecution as well as by two massacres, in 1894–1896 and 1909, resulting in the loss of 200,000 lives. Acts passed in 1839 and 1856, a result of the politics of “humanitarian intervention” practiced by Russia vis-à-vis Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire that granted religious minorities equal rights, were never put into practice. Equally powerless in protecting the Armenians was article 62 of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin that placed the Armenians under the protection of the Great Powers.

Turkey's entry into World War I gave the nationalistic regime of the Young Turks an opportunity to solve the Armenian question. The genocide, which was preceded by confiscation and the expropriation of the Armenian properties, was carried out during the [Page 194]1915 deportation with the help of mobilized groups of criminals. It resulted in the death of one million people caused by killings, torture, starvation, and rape. At the time, this tragedy was very well documented in the United States by the media. In 1915 the New York Times, for example, published almost 150 articles on the subject.

Despite Turkey's military defeat in World War I, the Great Powers—England, France, and Russia—did not entirely occupy Turkey. Moreover, they allowed the new government of Mustafa Kemal to prosecute the organizers of the genocide in local Turkish courts. These decisions destroyed the most important provision of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres: international adjudication regarding crimes perpetrated against the Armenians. In consequence, the trials were not successful in punishing any of the war criminals. Many of them fled the country, as was the case with the most important participants—Talat, Enver, Celat, and Nazim—who were either sentenced to death in absentia by court-martial or set free. Vakhan Dadrian explains the failure of these trials as resulting from three factors: the persisting influence of partisans of the Young Turks in the police, the limited powers the courts were provided, and the allies' pursuit of political interest at the expense of justice. Ultimately, the courts-martial were abolished, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, in avoiding the subject of war crimes, made no provisions for the survivors of the genocide. Although the United States did not sign the treaty initially, diplomatic relations with Turkey were established 4 years later. Eventually, in the 1950s, as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey became an important strategic and military partner of the West during the Cold War.

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