Armenian Massacres .

« Some of the Armenian revolutionaries and others hoped that the massacres would provoke the intervention of the European powers (Britain, France, Austria-Hungary,and Germany).

Although the leaders of the European powers publicly condemned the actions of the sultan, they failed to intervene.

Mutual rivalries and suspicions, aswell as the imprecise terms of Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin, helped produce this inaction.

But these bloody episodes soon paved the way for the rise of a newnationalist movement in the Ottoman Empire that would displace Islam as the main rallying force. IV THE YOUNG TURK REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Upset by Abd al-Hamid’s increasingly autocratic rule and alarmed by threats to the empire’s survival, a group of civilian and military revolutionaries known as the YoungTurks, combined their resources and efforts, inside and outside the empire, to overthrow the sultan and his regime.

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and 1909restored the empire’s constitution and parliament and deposed Abd al-Hamid.

By ending the sultan’s 33-year despotic reign, the Young Turks hoped to stop theempire’s decay and disintegration. Although Abd al-Hamid’s brother retained the title of sultan, a group of Young Turks operating under the name Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) dominated thegovernment in one way or another, except for a brief period.

Eager to infuse the empire with a new, progressive spirit, the CUP embraced the ideals of the FrenchRevolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Despite success in enacting certain legal and administrative reforms, however, the CUP’s foreign policies and domesticnationality policies soon drove the empire into an abyss. Lacking leaders experienced in the art of government, the Young Turks continued to conduct themselves as a secret revolutionary organization in the years followingthe revolution.

They became increasingly intolerant of criticism and dissent and resorted to tactics of intimidation and terror.

When rebellions broke out in various partsof the empire, the government responded with repression by military force.

Their greatest blunders related to nationality conflicts, which culminated in the Balkan Warsin 1912 and 1913, conflicts that cost the Ottomans their remaining territory in the Balkans.

The First Balkan War (1912) was especially devastating to the empire.

Thesubstantial territorial and human losses from the war led to a national crisis during which the radical wing of the Young Turk party maneuvered itself into a position ofparty dominance in the spring of 1913.

Thereafter, authoritarian elements of the Young Turk party controlled the central and provincial governments of the empire.

Anew policy of nationalism was adopted, which emphasized Turkism (the culture and traditions of the Turks) as a substitute for multiethnic Ottomanism.

On the one hand it sought to replace Islam as the empire’s unifying force, but on the other it used Islam as an instrument against non-Muslim elements.

Christian minorities especiallywere viewed as an obstacle to Turkification. As the Ottoman Empire crumbled under the pressures of spreading nationalism among its subject nationalities and as a young government took power, several factorsfavored targeting the Armenian community for destruction.

The first factor was renewed pressure from the Great Powers in 1912 and 1913 for Armenian reforms to becarried out under direct European control.

The Ottoman government resented this interference and blamed the Russians in particular for the initiative, but the Ottomangovernment found it more convenient to direct its anger at the vulnerable, essentially powerless Armenians.

A second factor was the relatively dense concentration inthe eastern provinces of Armenians who were clamoring for reforms.

The Armenians were the last major non-Muslim nationality under Ottoman rule still seeking thetypes of reforms that the CUP government understood to mean autonomy and eventual independence.

The Ottoman government subsequently declared the Armeniansa danger to the empire’s security and feared they might aid the Russians, with whom the empire was at war.

A third factor was the 1909 massacre in the town of Adanaand its environs, which had claimed some 23,000 Armenian victims.

Because that massacre had been executed swiftly and without intervention from the Great Powers,whose warships stood idly by, it encouraged the Young Turks to contemplate a more radical and sweeping scheme. V WORLD WAR I AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE Shortly before World War I began in 1914, the Ottoman Empire signed a secret treaty with Germany.

Enver Pasha, a CUP leader who directed Ottoman military efforts,had faith in Germany’s military prowess and ability to win a war against the other Great Powers.

In addition, Germany and the Ottomans shared a long-standing hostilitytoward Russia.

Three months after the outbreak of World War I the empire entered the conflict on the side of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Theircrushing military defeat precipitated the Ottoman Empire’s ultimate demise in 1922.

But the war also provided the pretext for a campaign of extermination against theempire’s Armenian population, which was denounced as a traitorous group. The Armenian Genocide took place under cover of World War I and had four major stages.

In the first stage, all able-bodied Armenian men aged 20 to 45 wereconscripted into the Ottoman army.

They served as soldiers at first, but in early 1915 they were disarmed and reduced to laborers toiling under brutal conditions, evenworking as pack animals.

Many were bound and shot.

In the second stage, Armenian politicians, community leaders, educators, intellectuals, and leading priests werearrested in April 1915 and soon deported and executed.

In the third stage, beginning in May and June of 1915, the remaining Armenian population was deported,supposedly for relocation in the deserts of Mesopotamia, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

Large numbers of the deportees in the eastern and central provinces ofTrabzon, Sivas, Harput, Erzurum, Van, and Bitlis were killed at the outset in mass executions.

Others died on the forced marches due to exposure, starvation,dehydration, or mistreatment.

But contrary to expectations, about 200,000 to 300,000 Armenians—mainly from Turkey’s western, northwestern, and southwesternprovinces—survived the long trek.

These wretched survivors, reduced by starvation to skin and bones, faced another series of massacres in the areas of Dayr az Zawrand Ra’s al ‘Ayn in Syria.

Three primary methods were used in the massacres: blunt instruments; mass drownings in the Black Sea and tributaries of the EuphratesRiver; and incineration in stables, haylofts, and specially dug large pits in the provinces of Bitlis, Harput, and Aleppo. A group of party functionaries, mostly former military officers, were given sweeping authority to organize and supervise the killing of Armenians, including veto powerover provincial governors who might object.

Local party leaders and hardened criminals assisted party functionaries in this task.

The criminals, released from theempire’s several prisons for massacre duty, functioned as an indispensable instrument in carrying out the Armenian Genocide. The main rationale of the perpetrators was that the Armenians were internal enemies of the Ottoman Empire, had engaged in acts of sabotage and espionage, hadrebelled in Van province, and were fighting against the Turks as volunteers in Russia’s Caucasus army.

In April 1915 the Armenians had risen up in Van province in adesperate last-ditch attempt to resist deportation and certain destruction, as they also had resisted in Mussa Dagh (now Musadaði), Shabin Karahisar (now Kara HissarSahib), and Urfa (now Şanl ıurfa).

Successive military setbacks prevented the Young Turks from completing the deportations and massacres in the rest of the country,mainly İstanbul, Smyrna (now İzmir), and Aleppo. Surviving official Ottoman documents as well as documents from the archives of the empire’s wartime allies—Germany and Austria-Hungary—indicate that theextermination of the Ottoman Armenians was premeditated and centrally organized by the Young Turk regime.

As many as 1.2 million Ottoman Armenians perished, outof a prewar Armenian population estimated at 1.8 million.

A postwar Ottoman interior minister revealed in 1919 that 800,000 of the Armenian victims were killedoutright.

Of the survivors, some 250,000 managed to escape to the Caucasus, primarily to what is now Armenia but also to Georgia, and about 100,000 women andchildren were forcibly converted to Islam.

The remaining survivors dispersed in every direction.

Many immigrated to the United States.

Today, about 60,000 Armenianslive in Turkey, most of them in İstanbul. Despite the Allies wartime pledges, at the end of World War I they failed to prosecute and punish the authors of the Armenian Genocide.

A Turkish military court held aseries of courts-martial from 1919 to 1921 that sought to hold the CUP responsible for the massacres.

Although the court convicted a number of officials, includingcabinet ministers, many of those involved escaped punishment or fled the country.

The sentences of the court, mostly rendered in absentia , bore little relationship to. »