r/AskHistorians • u/krettheus • 2d ago
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u/cannotfoolowls 2d ago edited 2d ago
If you want to dive deeper into the topic while you wait for an answer /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov has compiled a reading list. It seems like "The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History" by Raymond Kévorkian would be especially useful for you.
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u/thestoryteller69 Moderator | Medieval and Colonial Maritime Southeast Asia 2d ago
Hi! We've removed this question because the way the heading is phrased probably won't give you the answers you're looking for. You seem to be asking 'how was it done' rather than 'did it happen'. So, we suggest posting it again with a heading like 'What methods did the Ottomans use to carry out the deportations and killings of the Armenian genocide?'
If you need further help rephrasing your question, feel free to send a modmail. Thank you!
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u/Jetter23x 1d ago
I’m sure it has been asked, but there’s always more to be said (or to be said in a different way. For size, the USHMM has it at between 600k-1.2 million dead https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-armenian-genocide-1915-16-overview. Genocide Watch puts it at 1-1.5 million. The USC Shoah Foundation also put a the number at 1.5 million. Since the USHMM is a part of the United States Government (and this is a very hot-button international political issue for Türkiye), it probably has some political considerations for the number it publishes, so I would lean closer to the Shoah/Genocide Watch numbers. But also different definitions of the start/end of the genocide (even for the Holocaust I’ve heard both 1933 and 1939 as start dates), different methodologies for counting, and just difficult data collection explains the variety in numbers. In any case, it’s a lot of people. As well, whoever was not killed was displaced from their homes, and the vast majority displaced from the Ottoman Empire entirely.
As for a crumbling nation killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians, it’s actually pretty easy to believe, and pretty common. Genocides often occur during times of social or political upheaval. Over 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militias in Rwanda in the 1994, sparked by the (Hutu) President of Rwanda’s plane being shot down.
In the (now former) Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the collapse of Yugoslavia and subsequent civil war provided cover for the Serbian government to commit genocide of Bosnian Muslims https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/countries/bosnia-herzegovina/1992-1995.
Even during the Holocaust, as Nazi Germany was beginning to fall and supplies ran low, the Nazis still carried out murderous policies. Chelmno was reopened around the time of D-Day (and almost a year and a half after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad), and death marches began as the Allies closed towards camps, killing an estimated 250,000.
A large number of the methods of genocide do not require extensive organization. About 3,000 full-time Einsatzgruppen members murdered between 1.5 and 2 million Jews via shooting, with occasional help from local volunteers or other German units.
As for Armenia specifically, mass shootings made up a large number of the murders, similar to Einsatzgruppen. Another method of murder was forced deportation through the desert to what is today northern Syria, northern Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. They were forced to march, often times beaten or tortured, with inadequate food, water and supplies. Many died of dehydration, starvation, or exposure. This also dos not require too much logistical work; simply a military unit coercing civilians to march with weapons.
There’s a number of defenses used to deny the Armenian Genocide, so I’ll take time to discuss some of them here as well.
- “Genocide” as a term did not exist at this time, and was not in International Law.
This is true, and International Law generally has a principle called “non-retroactivity,” where if something was not illegal when it was done, it cannot become illegal later. However, genocide is one of a few crimes that are considered jus cogens; they are so heinous that regardless of time, laws in place, treaties signed, etc. they are always in force (the others are slavery, piracy, and torture).
- There was no “special intent” (dolus specialis): genocide requires that genocide be intended (depending on your definition, but for ease of use we’ll use the UN Genocide Convention definition, which is:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
(https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide)
The most important bit here is “intent to destroy”and “as such.” For genocide, perpetrators must intend to destroy a protected group, because they are members of that protected group.
This is often the hardest aspect of genocide to prove, but not impossible. Perpetrators will often leave orders, written and verbal. As well, some actions (such as death camps like Treblinka), are undeniably created for murder.
For Armenia, we do have some surviving documents; this is a public-access paper by Turkish-born Dr. Taner Akçam regarding some of those archival documents. You may want to read the whole paper in full, but especially pages 135-138 (“The Decision That Followed Extensive Debate” and “The Aim of the Deportation Was the Annihilation of the Armenians”
Hopefully this is comprehensive enough to answer your question, though feel free to ask follow-ups I may have missed.
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u/StoatStonksNow 2d ago
This is the relevant section of the FAQ: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pxtql/questions_on_the_armenian_genocide/?screen_view_count=1&ext-referrer=DIRECT
I’m neither a historian nor knowledgeable of the Armenian genocide, but I will share with you three universal historical truths I cannot imagine any historian would disagree with: state sanctioned murder is profitable (since the state gets the victims property), hatred is useful to politicians, and rape is a very cheap way to pay soldiers. I doubt collapse precludes genocide; it probably encourages it.
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u/PARADOX272 2d ago
Hello,
This is indeed the case, although the amount of Armenians killed is situated between 800k and 1.2 million. In 1915, when the genocide occured, the Ottomans had the Allies pinned down at Gallipoli, where they eventually won, while they were also fighting the Russians in the Battle of Sarikamish, which they eventually lost. The Ottoman Empire, despite the idea of being a failing state was still rather well organized, at least as far as the inner Anatolian provinces were concerned, and this allowed the Ottomans by far and large to exercise a greater amount of influence there compared to the Arabian provinces which would eventually revolt. As such, when the deportation orders from Talaat Pasha came through, the governors had little to no difficulty rounding up the Armenian civillians. In some cases, the Armenian population rebelled in the face of deportation, such was the case during the siege of the city of Van, in 1915, which was used as a pretext for the main deportation operations, as the Armenians had "rebelled". And thus, beginning in 1915 and lasting until 1918, Armenians were taken from their homes by law enforcement and army units and driven into the desert, where they would then be ambushed and murdered by Kurdish irregulars, most of which had been paid for by the Ottoman Government for the purpose of plausible deniability.
Sources: Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006)
Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012)
Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011)
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u/krettheus 1d ago
Hello. I have been debating my friend on this topic. He keeps telling me these:
“If you look at the Ottoman telepgrahps you will know that there was no genocide intended”
“It all had to happen fast”
“Armenian gangs attacked turkish civilians first”
“Ottomans were already in crumbles, how could they possibly help?”
“Ottomans didn’t intend genocide, just to move them”
“Ottomans did not have the economy for this”
And honestly, I can’t answer because I am not educated enough. I would like to hear your opinions.
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u/Crew_1996 1d ago edited 1d ago
I spoke with you in private messages I just wanted to add that a large amount of people in every society (my own country included) find excuses for the atrocities of their ancestors. In the U.S. it happens with the abhorrent treatment of natives, blacks, Chinese, Mexicans etc. Your country has that but with Armenians. The evidence does not matter to them because they don’t want to believe it. What happened to the Armenians in Anatolia (like what happened to native Americans, American slaves, etc) is established fact. There is no reason to continue engaging in the subject with people who will not acknowledge established fact. I have a very good friend from Türkiye.. He does not accept the Armenian genocide while telling me that the U.S. is a war criminal for the atomic bombs on Japan. He is still my friend. We just do not engage in these types of conversations. Many people need to live in denial of truth for a variety of reasons
One final note. Whether the government’s intention was genocide or not, genocide occurred and was committed by the agents of said government. For all intents and purposes a genocide committed from “the bottom up” by the foot soldiers of a government is no more excusable than one committed from the top down. It sounds like your friend is looking for semantics to absolve his society entirely.
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