The Armenian Genocide was the greatest atrocity of the Great War, as World War I was known at the time. The ongoing repercussions of this Genocide — which Turkey still denies — include a large Diaspora, a threatened Armenian homeland, and geopolitical instability stemming from this unreckoned crime.
The Armenian Genocide was the state-organized WWI-era destruction, deportation, and dispossession of the indigenous Western Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey. It victimized over 1.5 million civilians, and as a result, fewer than 70,000 Armenian Christians reside in the Republic of Turkey today. At the same time, the Genocide led to the formation of prominent Armenian diaspora communities around the world.
For the nationalist regime that ruled the Ottoman Empire, the Genocide was both a strategic effort to create a homogenous Turkic homeland on the ashes of the collapsing empire and a tactical opportunity to resettle Muslim refugees — fleeing the Balkans — in the homes of Armenian Christians, who were collectively mischaracterized as aiding the Russian army.
The active stage of the Genocide began with the mass arrests — and eventual executions — of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and elsewhere on April 24, 1915. Earlier, the majority of Armenian conscripts in the Ottoman army were disarmed and executed en masse due to their ethnoreligious identity.
Soon after the arrests of the intellectuals, all remaining Armenian civilians — primarily women, children, and the elderly — were forced on death marches into the Syrian desert, where most perished by starvation, disease, violence, or massacres of death march survivors.
Briefly after WWI, under European pressure, a transitional Turkish government acknowledged and prosecuted the atrocities against Armenians, but a nationalist narrative of denying the state crime was reinstated upon the Turkish Republic’s founding in 1923.
The Armenian Genocide removed an entire ancient people, and the first Christian nation, from the majority of their historic homeland. A Polish Jewish jurist, Raphael Lemkin, was so outraged by the crime that he embarked on a research journey that culminated in the creation of the word and subsequent international law of “genocide.” Some scholars argue that the ongoing cultural destruction and state-sponsored denial constitute the final stage of the Genocide.
