The Armenian Genocide: Two Sides of the Same Coin. Armenian Genocide. Causes and consequences The real number of victims of the Armenian genocide in 1915

The Turkish Armenian Genocide of 1915, organized on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, was one of the most terrible events of that era. Members of the ethnic minority were deported, during which hundreds of thousands or even millions of people died (depending on estimates).

This campaign to exterminate Armenians is today recognized as genocide by most countries of the entire world community. Turkey itself does not agree with this wording.

Prerequisites

The massacres and deportations in the Ottoman Empire had different backgrounds and reasons. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 was due to the unequal position of the Armenians themselves and the ethnic Turkish majority of the country. The population was discredited not only by nationality, but also by religion. The Armenians were Christians and had their own independent church. The Turks were Sunnis.

The non-Muslim population had the status of a dhimmi. People who fell under this definition were not allowed to carry weapons and to appear in court as witnesses. They had to pay high taxes. Armenians for the most part lived in poverty. They were mainly engaged in agriculture in their native lands. However, among the Turkish majority, the stereotype of a successful and cunning Armenian businessman was widespread, etc. Such labels only aggravated the hatred of the townsfolk towards this ethnic minority. These complex relationships can be compared to the widespread anti-Semitism in many countries of that time.

In the Caucasian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the situation worsened also due to the fact that these lands, after the wars with Russia, were filled with Muslim refugees, who, due to their everyday disorder, constantly came into conflict with local Armenians. One way or another, but the Turkish society was in an excited state. It was ready to accept the forthcoming Armenian genocide (1915). The reasons for this tragedy were a deep split and hostility between the two peoples. All that was needed was a spark that would ignite a huge fire.

Organization of the deportation of Armenians

The disarmament of the Armenians made it possible to carry out a systematic campaign against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which consisted in the general expulsion of Armenians into the desert, where they were doomed to death from bands of marauders or from hunger and thirst. The deportations were subjected to Armenians from almost all the main centers of the empire, and not only from the border regions affected by hostilities.

At first, the authorities gathered healthy men, declaring that the government, benevolent towards them, based on military necessity, was preparing the resettlement of Armenians in new homes. The collected men were imprisoned, and then taken out of the city to deserted places and destroyed using firearms and cold weapons. Then the old men, women and children gathered and were also informed that they were to be resettled. They were driven in columns under the escort of gendarmes. Those who could not keep going were killed; exceptions were not made even for pregnant women. The gendarmes took as long routes as possible or forced people to walk back along the same route until the last person died of thirst or hunger.

The first phase of the deportation began with the deportation of the Armenians Zeytun and Dörtöl in early April 1915. On April 24, the Armenian elite of Istanbul was arrested and deported, and the Armenian population of Alexandretta and Adana were also deported. On May 9, the government of the Ottoman Empire decided to expel the Armenians of eastern Anatolia from their densely populated areas. Due to fears that the deported Armenians might cooperate with the Russian army, the deportation was to be carried out to the south, but in the chaos of the war, this order was not carried out. After the Van uprising, the fourth phase of deportations began, according to which all Armenians living in the border regions and Cilicia were to be deported.

On May 26, 1915, Talaat introduced the "Deportation Law", dedicated to the fight against those who opposed the government in peacetime. The law was approved by the Majlis on May 30, 1915. Although the Armenians were not mentioned there, it was clear that the law was written about them. On June 21, 1915, during the final act of deportation, Talaat ordered the deportation of "all Armenians without exception" who lived in ten provinces of the eastern region of the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of those who were deemed useful to the state.

The deportation was carried out according to three principles: 1) the "principle of ten percent", according to which Armenians should not exceed 10% of the Muslims in the region, 2) the number of houses of the deportees should not exceed fifty, 3) the deportees were forbidden to change their places of destination. Armenians were forbidden to open their own schools, Armenian villages had to be at least five hours away from each other. Despite the demand to deport all Armenians without exception, a significant part of the Armenian population of Istanbul and Edirne was not expelled for fear that foreign citizens would witness this process.

The Armenian population of Izmir was saved by the governor Rahmi Bey, who believed that the expulsion of Armenians would deal a mortal blow to trade in the city. On July 5, the deportation borders were once again expanded to include the western provinces (Ankara, Eskisehir, etc.), Kirkuk, Mosul, the Euphrates Valley, etc. actually meant the elimination of the problem of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

First deportations

In mid-March 1915, British-French forces attacked the Dardanelles. Preparations have begun in Istanbul for the transfer of the capital to Eskisehir and the evacuation of the local population. Fearing that the Armenians would join the allies, the government of the Ottoman Empire intended to carry out the deportation of the entire Armenian population between Istanbul and Eskisehir. At the same time, several meetings of the Ittihat Central Committee were held, at which the head of the "Special Organization" Behaeddin Shakir presented evidence of the activities of Armenian groups in eastern Anatolia. Shakir, who argued that the "internal enemy" is no less dangerous than the "external enemy", was given expanded powers.

In late March - early April, the "Special Organization" tried to organize the massacre of Armenians in Erzerum and sent the most radical Ittihat emissaries to the provinces for anti-Armenian agitation, including Reshid Bey (tur. Reşit Bey), who used extremely cruel methods, including arrests and torture , searched for weapons in Diyarbakir, and then became one of the most fanatical killers of Armenians. Taner Akcam expressed the version that the decision on the general deportation of Armenians was made in March, but the fact that the deportation from Istanbul was never carried out may mean that at that time the fate of the Armenians still depended on the further course of the war.

Despite the assertions of the Young Turks that the deportations were a response to the disloyalty of the Armenians on the Eastern Front, the first deportations of Armenians were carried out under the leadership of Jemal not in the regions adjacent to the Eastern Front, but from the center of Anatolia to Syria. After the defeat in the Egyptian campaign, he assessed the Armenian population of Zeytun and Dyortyol as potentially dangerous and decided to change the ethnic composition of the territory under his control in case of a possible advance of the allied powers, proposing for the first time the deportation of Armenians.

The deportation of Armenians began on April 8 from the city of Zeytun, whose population enjoyed partial independence for centuries and was in confrontation with the Turkish authorities. As a basis, information was given about the allegedly existing secret agreement between the Armenians of Zeytun and the Russian military headquarters, but the Armenians of Zeytun did not take any hostile actions.

Three thousand Turkish soldiers were brought into the city. Some of the young men of Zeytun, including several deserters who attacked the Turkish soldiers, fled to the Armenian monastery and organized a defense there, killing, according to Armenian sources, 300 soldiers (Turkish indicate a major and eight soldiers) before the monastery was captured. According to the Armenian side, the attack on the soldiers was revenge for the obscene behavior of these soldiers in the Armenian villages. The majority of the Armenian population of Zeytun did not support the rebels, the leaders of the Armenian community urged the rebels to surrender and allowed the government troops to deal with them. However, only a small number of Ottoman officials were ready to recognize the loyalty of the Armenians, most were convinced that the Armenians of Zeytun were collaborating with the enemy.

Minister of the Interior Talaat expressed gratitude for the help of the Armenian population in the capture of deserters to the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, but in later reports he portrayed these events as part of an Armenian uprising in common with foreign powers - a point of view supported by Turkish historiography. Despite the fact that the main Armenian population did not support the resistance of the Ottoman army, they were nonetheless deported to Konya and the Der Zor desert, where later the Armenians were either killed or left to die of starvation and disease. Following Zeytun, the same fate befell the inhabitants of other cities of Cilicia. It should be noted that these deportations took place before the events in Van, which the Ottoman authorities used as a justification for the anti-Armenian campaign. The actions of the Ottoman government were clearly disproportionate, but they did not yet cover the entire territory of the empire.

The deportation of the Armenians of Zeytun clarifies an important issue related to the timing of the organization of the genocide. Some of the Armenians were deported to the city of Konya, which was far from Syria and Iraq - places where later, mainly, Armenians were deported. Dzhemal claimed that he personally chose Konya, not Mesopotamia, so as not to create obstacles for the transport of ammunition. However, after April and outside the jurisdiction of Dzhemal, part of the deported Armenians were sent to Konya, which may mean the existence of a deportation plan as early as April 1915.

Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

Today, Armenians remember those who died during the genocide on April 24, 1915, when several hundred Armenian intellectuals and professionals were arrested and executed, this was the beginning of the genocide.

In 1985, the United States named this day "National Day of Remembrance for Human Inhumanity to Man" in honor of all victims of the genocide, especially the one and a half million people of Armenian descent who were victims of the genocide committed in Turkey.

Today, the recognition of the Armenian genocide is a hot topic as Turkey criticizes scholars for punishing mortality and blaming Turks for the deaths, which the government says was due to starvation and the brutality of the war. In fact, speaking of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, it is punishable by law. As of 2014, 21 countries in total have publicly or legally recognized this ethnic cleansing in Armenia as genocide.

In 2014, on the eve of the 99th anniversary of the genocide, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed condolences to the Armenian people and said:

"The cases of the First World War are our common pain."

However, many believe that the proposals are useless until Turkey recognizes the loss of 1.5 million people as genocide. In response to Erdogan's proposal, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said:

“The refusal to commit a crime is a direct continuation of this very crime. Only recognition and condemnation can prevent the recurrence of such crimes in the future.”

Ultimately, the recognition of this genocide is not only important for the elimination of the affected ethnic groups, but also for the development of Turkey as a democratic state. If the past is denied, genocide is still happening. In 2010, a Resolution of the Swedish Parliament stated that "genocide denial is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, cementing the impunity of the perpetrators of genocide and clearly paving the way for future genocides."

Countries that do not recognize the Armenian Genocide

Countries that recognize the Armenian Genocide are those that officially accept the systematic massacres and forced deportations of Armenians carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923.

Although historical and academic institutions for the study of the Holocaust and the genocide accept the Armenian genocide, many countries refuse to do so in order to preserve their political relations with the Republic of Turkey. Azerbaijan and Turkey are the only countries that refuse to recognize the Armenian Genocide and threaten those who do so with economic and diplomatic consequences.

The Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex was built in 1967 on Tsitsernakaberd Hill in Yerevan. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, opened in 1995, presents facts about the horror of the massacres.

Turkey has been urged to recognize the Armenian Genocide several times, but the sad fact is that the government denies the word "genocide" as an accurate term for the massacres.

In order to clarify the essence of the Armenian issue and the concept of "Armenian genocide", we will cite a number of excerpts from the book of the famous French historian Georges de Maleville "Armenian tragedy of 1915", published in Russian by the Baku publishing house "Elm" in 1990, and will try to comment on it.

In chapter I, Historical Frame of Events, he writes: geographically great Armenia constitutes a territory with indefinite borders, the approximate center of which was Mount Ararat (5.165 m) and which was bounded by three large lakes of the Caucasus: Sevan (Goycha) - from the northeast, Lake Van - from the southwest and Lake Urmia in Iranian Azerbaijan - from the southeast. It is impossible to determine the borders of Armenia in the past more accurately due to the lack of reliable data. As you know, today in the Central Caucasus there is an Armenian core - the Armenian SSR, 90% of the population of which, according to Soviet statistics, are Armenians. But it was not always so. The "six Armenian provinces" of Ottoman Turkey (Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Elaziz and Sivas) were inhabited until 1914 by a large number of Armenians, who, however, were by no means the majority. Today, Armenians no longer live in Anatolia, and it is their disappearance that is blamed on the Turkish state.". However, as Georges de Maleville writes on p. 19, “ since 1632 the border has been changed as a result of the Russian invasion of the Caucasus. It became clear that the political plans of the Russians consisted in the annexation of the Black Sea coast. In 1774, an agreement in Kuchuk-Keynar confirmed the loss of dominance over the Crimea by the Ottomans. On the eastern coast of the Black Sea, according to the 1812 treaty concluded in Bucharest, Abkhazia and Georgia ceded to Russia, annexed, however, since 1801. The war with Persia, which began in 1801, ended in 1828 with the transfer to Russia of all the territories of Persia north of the Araks, namely the Erivan Khanate. Under the Treaty of Turkmenchay, signed in March, Russia had a common border with Turkey, and, pushing back Persia, she gained dominance over part of the territory of Armenia(which has never existed there in history - ed.).

A month later, in April 1828, Loris-Melikov's army, which had come to end the Armenian campaign, occupied Turkish Anatolia as part of the operations of the Fifth Russo-Turkish War and laid siege for the first time in front of the fortress in Karey. It was during these events that for the first time the Armenian population of Turkey came out in support of the Russian army, which consisted of volunteers recruited in Erivan, driven to fanaticism by the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin and called upon to terrorize the Muslim population, raising the Armenian population of Turkey to revolt. The same scenario played out imperturbably for ninety years every time the Russian army made another breakthrough in the same territory, with the only nuance that, over time, Russian propaganda improved its methods, and starting from the moment when the "Armenian question" became object of constant excitement, the Russian army was sure that it could count on Turkish territory and on the rear of the Turkish army, that is, on the assistance of bands of armed rebels who, in anticipation of a breakthrough by the Russian army, would wear down the Turkish army and try to destroy it from the rear. After that there were more Russian-Turkish wars in 1833, 1877. 36 years passed before the next conflict, which began with the declaration of war on November 1, 1914. However, a long period of time was not in any way peaceful for Turkish Anatolia. Beginning in 1880, for the first time in its history, Turkish Armenia experienced riots, banditry and bloody riots that the Ottoman state tried to stop without much success. The riots followed a chronology that was not accidental: there were systematic riots, and the suppression of them, necessary to establish order, evoked enduring hatred in response.

Throughout the territory enclosed between Erzincayim and Erzerum in the north and Diyarbekir and Van in the south, sedition has been carried out for more than twenty years, with all the consequences that may flow from it, in a region remote from the center and difficult to govern.". Here, as Russian sources testify, weapons from Russia flowed like a river.

“On the first of November 1914, Turkey was forced to enter the war,” continues Georges de Maleville. In the spring of 1915, the Turkish government decided to resettle the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia to Syria and the mountainous part of Mesopotamia, which were then Turkish territory. They prove to us that it was allegedly about a beating, about a measure of disguised destruction. We will try to analyze whether this is so or not. But before setting out and studying these events, it is necessary to consider the disposition of forces along the front line during the war. At the beginning of 1915, the Russians, without the knowledge of the Turks, take a maneuver and, bypassing Ararat, descend south along the Persian border. It was then that the rebellion of the Armenians inhabiting Van broke out, which led to the first significant deportation of the Armenian population during the war. This should be considered in more detail.

A telegram from the governor of Van, dated March 20, 1915, reports an armed uprising and specifies: " We believe that there are more than 2000 rebels. We are trying to suppress this uprising.". Efforts were, however, in vain, since on March 23 the same governor reports that the mutiny was spreading to nearby villages. A month later, the situation became desperate. Here is what the Governor telegraphed on April 24: 4,000 rebels gathered in the region. The rebels cut off roads, attack nearby villages and subdue them. Currently, many women and children are left without a hearth and a home. Shouldn't these women and children (Muslims) be transported to the western provinces?» Unfortunately, they couldn’t do it then, and here are the consequences.

« The Caucasian army of Russia begins an offensive in the direction of Van, - tells us the American historian Stanford J. Shaw. (S. J. Shaw, vol. 2, p. 316). — This army includes a large number of Armenian volunteers. Departing from Yerevan on April 28, ... they reached Van on May 14, organized and carried out a massacre of the local Muslim population. Over the next two days, an Armenian state was established in Van under the protection of the Russians, and it seemed that it could hold on after the disappearance of representatives of the Muslim population, killed or put to flight.«.

« The Armenian population of the city of Van before these tragic events was only 33,789 people, i.e., only 42% of the total population". (S. J. Shaw p. 316). The number of Muslims was 46,661 people, of which, apparently, the Armenians killed about 36,000 people, which is an act of genocide (author's note). This gives an idea of ​​the scale of the beatings carried out on the unarmed population (Muslim men were at the front) for the simple purpose of making room. There was nothing accidental or unexpected in these actions. Here is what another historian, Valiy, writes: “ In April 1915, Armenian revolutionaries captured the city of Van and established an Armenian headquarters there under the command of Aram and Varelu.(two leaders of the revolutionary party "Dashnak"). the 6th of May(perhaps according to the old calendar) they opened the city to the Russian army after the cleansing of the area from all Muslims... Among the most famous Armenian leaders (in Van) was the former member of the Turkish parliament Pasdermajian, known as Garro. He led the Armenian volunteers when clashes broke out between Turks and Russians". (Felix Valyi "Revolutions in Islam", Londres, 1925, p. 253).

On May 18, 1915, the tsar, moreover, expressed " gratitude to the Armenian population of Van for their devotion”(Gyuryun, p. 261), and Aram Manukyan was appointed Russian governor. The show continues the description of the events that followed.

« Thousands of Armenian residents of Mush, as well as other important centers of the eastern regions of Turkey, began to flock to the new Armenian state, and among them were columns of fugitive prisoners ... In mid-June, at least 250,000 Armenians were concentrated in the area of ​​​​the city of Van ... However, in early July Ottoman units pushed back the Russian army. The retreating army was accompanied by thousands of Armenians: they were fleeing punishment for the murders that the stillborn state allowed(S. J. Shaw, p. 316).

The Armenian author Khovanesyan, who is violently hostile towards the Turks, writes: “ The panic was indescribable. After a month of resistance to the governor, after the liberation of the city, after the establishment of the Armenian government, everything was lost. More than 200,000 refugees fled with the retreating Russian army in Transcaucasia, losing the brightest thing they had, and falling into endless traps set by the Kurds” (Hovannisian, “Road to independence”, p. 53, cite par Shaue).

We dwelled in such detail on the events in Van because, unfortunately, they are a sad example. First, it is clear to what extent armed uprisings in regions with a significant Armenian minority were widespread and dangerous for the Ottoman troops who fought against the Russians. Here, quite obviously and clearly, we are talking about betrayal in the face of the enemy. By the way, such behavior of the Armenians today is systematically obscured by authors who are supportive of their claims - all this is simply denied: the truth bothers them.

On the other hand, the official telegrams of the Turks confirm the opinion of all objective authors that the Armenian leaders systematically suppressed the Muslim majority of the local population in order to be able to seize the territory (i.e. they simply massacred all the children, women, old people - ed.) . We have already spoken about this and we repeat it again: nowhere in the Ottoman Empire did the Armenian population, which settled voluntarily, even constitute an insignificant majority, which could allow the creation of an autonomous Armenian region. Under these conditions, for the success of their policy, the Armenian revolutionaries had no choice but to turn the minority into a majority by destroying the Muslim population. They resorted to this procedure every time they had a free hand, besides with the support of the Russians themselves, finally, and this is the main element in our evidence, when trying to calculate the number of Armenians allegedly destroyed by the Turks, an honest observer would by no means must equate the number of missing persons with the number of victims; throughout the war, the insane hope of achieving the establishment of an autonomous Armenian state under the auspices of the Russians became an obsession for the Armenian population of Turkey. Khovanesyan, an Armenian author, also tells us about this: “ A reckless armed rebellion in Van brought 200,000 Armenians from all points of eastern Anatolia to him, who then fled from there, overcoming 3,000-meter mountains, to then return to Erzurum and again escape from there with other Armenians, and so on.". It is inevitable that a population that has experienced such severe suffering in the midst of a war will be greatly reduced in numbers. However, justice does not allow the Turks to be blamed for these human losses, which occurred solely as a result of the circumstances of the war and insane propaganda that poisoned the Turkish Armenians for decades and made them believe that they would succeed in creating an independent state through rebellion or murder, while they were everywhere minority". Let's return to the history of battles.

The Turkish breakthrough turned out to be short-lived, and in August the Turks were forced to cede Van again to the Russians. The Eastern Front until the end of 1915 was established along the Van-Agri-Khorasan line. But in February 1916, the Russians launched a powerful offensive in two directions: one - around Lake Van from the south side and further to Bitlis and Mush, the second - from Kars to Erzrum, which was taken on February 16. Here, too, the Russians were accompanied by irregular columns of Armenians, determined to crush everything in their path.

Shaw writes: This was followed by the worst beating of the entire war: more than a million Muslim peasants were forced to flee. Thousands of them were cut to pieces while trying to escape with the Ottoman army retreating to Erzincan."(Show S. Pzh, p. 323).

One can only wonder at the magnitude of this figure: it gives an idea of ​​the reputation for brutality that the Armenian auxiliaries have acquired and maintained through constant terror (the Russian army, of course, has nothing to do with this).

On April 18, Trabzon was taken by the Russians, in July - Erzincan, even Sivas was under threat. However, the Russian offensive in the south around Lake Van was repulsed. In the autumn of 1916, the front was in the form of a semicircle, which included Trabzon and Erzincan in Russian territory and reached Bitlis in the south. This front remains until the spring of 1918.

Of course, the Armenian revolutionary organizations believed that the victory of the Russians was assured, and imagined, " that their dream would come true, especially since the port of Trabzon was part of the newly occupied territories. A huge number of Armenians flocked to the Erzurum region - refugees from Van, as well as emigrants from Russian Armenia. Throughout 1917, the Russian army was paralyzed by the St. Petersburg revolution. On December 18, 1917, the Bolsheviks signed a truce in Erzincan with the Ottoman government, and this was followed by the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, which announced the return of the eastern territories taken from it in 1878 to Turkey. The Russians returned Kara and Ardagan, and "Armenia" was thus reduced to its natural densely populated territory - Russian Armenia, which Armenian gangs created in 1905-1907. as a result of the massacre of Azerbaijanis(However, it should be noted that here, too, the Armenians did not make up the majority at that time, until the end of the forties of the twentieth century - ed.).

But the Armenians did not agree on this. Starting on January 13, 1918, they began to acquire weapons from the Bolsheviks, who recalled their units from the front.(TsGAAR, D-T, No. 13). Then, on February 10, 1918, together with Georgians and Azerbaijanis, they formed a single socialist republic of Transcaucasia with Menshevik tendencies, which rejected in advance the terms of the agreement that were to be accepted in Brest-Litovsk. Finally, taking advantage of the decision of the Russian army, non-combatant Armenian units organized a systematic beating of the Muslim population in Erzinjan and Erzrum, accompanied by indescribable horrors, which were then told by outraged Russian officers". (Khleboc, journal de guerre du 2nd regiment d'artillerie, cite par Durun, p. 272).

The goal was still the same: to make room in order to provide Armenian immigrants with the exclusive right to the territory in the eyes of international public opinion. Shaw states that the Turkish population of the five provinces of Trabzon, Erzincan, Erzrum, Van and Bitlis, which was 3,300,000 in 1914, became 600,000 refugees after the war (ibid., p. 325).

On June 4, 1918, the Caucasian republics signed an agreement with Turkey, which confirmed the terms of the Brest-Litovsk agreement and recognized the borders of 1877, thus allowing Turkish troops to bypass Armenia from the south and recapture Baku from the British, which they did on September 14, 1918. The Mudros Agreement of October 30, 1918 found Turkish troops in Baku. In the subsequent period of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians tried to take advantage of the retreat of the Turkish troops: on April 19, 1919, they again occupied Kars (Georgians - Ardagan). This means that the front line was again pushed to the west almost along the 1878 border. From there, for eighteen months, the Armenians made countless raids on the outskirts of the territories occupied by them, namely in the northwestern direction towards the Black Sea and Trabzon (Gyuryun, 295-318), who refers to the memoirs of General Kazim Karzbekir and two witnesses - Rawlinson (Englishman ) and Robert Dan (American).

And, naturally, they again tried to increase the Armenian population of Kars, and they did it by well-known methods, that is, through total terror and murders. Fate decreed otherwise. Thanks to Mustafa Kemal, Turkey restored its forces, and on September 28, 1920, General Kazim Karabekir launched an offensive against the Armenians. On October 30, he took Kars, and on November 7, Alexandropol (Gyumri). For the third time in 5 years of war, a huge mass of Armenians fled before the onset of the Turkish army, thus expressing in their own way their refusal to submit to the Turkish government.

Thus ends the story of the migration of the Armenian population on the Eastern Front. However, this population could never actually be taken into account in the statistics of the notorious "beatings" committed by the Turks against the Armenians. All that is known about him is that the survivors, their number is very unclear, after terrible trials, reached Soviet Armenia. But how many of these unfortunate people were sent by human and criminally absurd propaganda at the height of the war to the line of fire in order to build a chimerical state there by exterminating the indigenous local population?

However, in order to more clearly imagine what happened in 1915, let us return to the events unfolding around the Armenians in the pre-war period, that is, before the start of the First World War of 1914-1918.

About who worked for the promotion and use of the Armenians for their own purposes, it is quite eloquently stated in the letter of the tsar's governor in the Caucasus, Vorontsov-Dashkov, which we present below.

On October 10, 1912, the governor of Nicholas II in the Caucasus, I.K. Vorontsov-Dashkov, wrote to the emperor of the Russian Empire: “ Your Majesty knows that in the entire history of our relations with Turkey in the Caucasus up to the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, which ended with the annexation of the present Batum and Kars regions to our territory, Russian policy has been constantly based on a benevolent attitude towards the Armenians since Peter the Great, who paid for this to us during the hostilities by actively helping the troops. With the accession to our possessions of the so-called Armenian region, in which Etchmiadzin, the cradle of Armenian Gregorianism, was located. Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich used a lot of effort to create a trustee of the Turkish and Persian Armenians from the Patriarch of Etchmiadzin, rightly believing that he would thereby achieve beneficial influence for Russia among the Christian population of Asia Minor, through which the path of our primordial offensive movement to the southern seas ran. Patronizing the Armenians, we acquired loyal allies who always rendered great services to us ... It was carried out consistently and steadily for almost a century and a half"(" Red Archive ", No. 1 (26). M., pp. 118-120).

So, the policy of using Armenians in the fight against the Turks and Azerbaijanis by Russia began from the time of Peter 1 and has been going on for about 250 years. By the hands of the Armenians, who, as the prosecutor of the Etchmiadzin Synod aptly put it. A.Frenkel, "only superficially touched civilization«, Russia is implementing the precepts of Peter I. « And the infidels of these zealously quietly reduce so that they do not know this". Yes, history, no matter how hushed up or distorted, has preserved the true state of affairs in the Caucasus, the so-called Armenian region, in which Echmiadzin (Uch muAdzin - Three Churches) and Iravan, i.e. Yerevan, are located. By the way, the flag of the Iravan Khanate is in Baku, in the museum.

In 1828, on February 10, according to the Turkmenchay Treaty, the Nakhchivan and Iravan khanates became part of the Russian Empire. The Iravan Khanate offered heroic resistance to the Russian hordes for 23 years. Armenians also fought as part of the Russian troops. In 1825, the population of the Iravan Khanate was made up of Muslim Azerbaijanis (more than 95%) and Kurds. In 1828, Russia, having spent huge material resources, resettled 120 thousand Armenians within the borders of the defeated Iravan Khanate.

And from 1829 to 1918, about 300 thousand more Armenians were settled there, and even after that, the Armenians in the Erivan, Etchmiadzin provinces and in other regions of the so-called Russian Armenia nowhere constituted the majority of the population. Their national composition nowhere exceeded 30-40% of the total local population in 1917. Thus, the table of the population of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, compiled according to the "Caucasian calendar for 1917", shows that in the part of the Erivan province, which is part of Azerbaijan, 129,586 Muslims lived, and 80,530 Armenians, which accounted for 61% and 38% respectively. %. And in the document submitted to the Chairman of the Paris Peace Conference - a note of protest. The Azerbaijani Peace Delegation dated August 16/19, 1919 on the recognition of the independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan (given with abbreviations - author's note) says: “ Being deprived of the opportunity to receive regular and private relations with their capital, the city of Baku, the Azerbaijani peace delegation learned only from the latest half-hearted official reports about the sad fate that the Karskaya region, the Nakhchivan, Sharuro-Daralagezsk, Surmalinsky districts and part of the Erivan district of the Erivan province were subjected to , with the exception of the Ardagan district, to the Kars region forcibly to the territory of the Armenian Republic. All these lands were occupied by Turkish troops, who remained in them until the armistice was signed. After the departure of the latter, the Kars and Batumi regions, together with the Akhaliih and Akhalkalaki districts of the Tiflis province, formed an independent republic of the South-Western Caucasus, headed by a provisional government in the city of Kars.

This provisional government was composed by the then-convened parliament. Despite such a clearly expressed will of the population of the aforementioned regions, the neighboring republics, in violation of the principle of free self-determination of peoples, made a number of attempts and forcibly seized part of the Republic of the South-Western Caucasus and in the end achieved that the Kars parliament and government were dissolved by a decree of General Thomson, and members government arrested and sent to Batumi. At the same time, the dissolution and arrests were motivated by the fact that the Kars parliament and government seemed to be holding a hostile orientation, which, by the way, the Allied Command was incorrectly informed by the parties interested in this region. After that, the Kars region, under the guise of settling refugees, was occupied by Armenian and Georgian troops, and the occupation of the region was accompanied by armed clashes. Deeply sympathizing with the cause of the resettlement of refugees in their places, the Azerbaijani Foreign Minister, in his protest dated April 30 of this year, wrote to the commander of the Allied Forces that this placement should take place with the assistance of the British troops, and not the Armenian military forces, striving not so much to settle refugees to places, how much to the forcible capture and consolidation of this area.

As a simple spectator, the Republic of Azerbaijan cannot and should not be indifferent to such a fate of the Kars region. At the same time, one should not forget that it was in the Kars region, which relatively recently belonged to Turkey (until 1877), that the attitude of Armenians towards Muslims always left much to be desired. During the last war, however, these relations became very aggravated in connection with the events of December 1914, when Turkish troops temporarily occupied the Ardagan district, the city of Ardagan and part of the Kars district; after the retreat of the Turks, Russian troops began to destroy the Muslim population, betraying everything to fire and sword. And in these bloody events that fell on the heads of the innocent Muslim population, the local Armenians expressed a clearly hostile attitude and in places, as was the case, for example, even in the cities of Kars and Ardagan, they not only incited the Cossacks against the Muslims, but they themselves slaughtered the latter mercilessly. All these circumstances cannot, of course, speak of a calm joint life of the Muslims of the Kars region under the control of the Armenian authorities.

Realizing this, the Muslim population of the region itself, through deputations and with the help of written requests, has recently repeatedly addressed the Azerbaijani government with a statement that it cannot and will not be able to submit to the power of the Armenians, and therefore asks for the annexation of the region to the territory of the Azerbaijan Republic. Even less can the Republic of Azerbaijan reconcile with the transfer of control of the counties of Nakhichevan, Sharuro-Daralagez, Surmalin and part of the Erivan county to the government of Armenia ...

She finds that the transfer of control of an integral part of the territory of Azerbaijan allowed a clear violation of the undoubted right of the Azerbaijan Republic to the counties: Nakhichevan, Sharuro-Daralagez, Surmalinsky and part of the Erivan county. This act creates a source of constant misunderstandings and even clashes between the local Muslim population and the Armenian Republic.

These regions are inhabited by Muslim Azerbaijanis, who are one people, one nationality with the indigenous population of Azerbaijan, completely homogeneous not only in faith, but also in ethnic composition, language, customs and way of life.

It is enough to take the ratio of Muslims and Armenians to resolve the issue of the ownership of these lands in favor of Azerbaijan. Thus, there are not only more than half of the Muslim Azerbaijanis, but their significant majority in all districts, especially in the Sharuro-Daralagez district - 72.3%. For the Erivan uyezd, figures are taken that refer to the population of the entire uyezd. But that part of this county, which was transferred to the administration of the Armenian government and which consists of the regions of Vedi-Basar and Millistan, contains about 90% of the Muslim population.

This is precisely the part of the Erivan district that suffered most from the Armenian military units under various names - “Vans”, “Sasunts”, which, like the bands of Andronicus, slaughtered the Muslim population, not sparing the elderly and children, burned entire villages, subjected the villages to shelling from cannons and an armored train, dishonored Muslim women, the bellies of the dead were torn open, their eyes gouged out, and sometimes the corpses were burned, they also robbed the population and generally committed unheard-of atrocities. By the way, an outrageous fact took place in the Vedi-Basar region, when the same Armenian detachments in the villages of Karakhach, Kadyshu, Karabaglar, Agasibekdy, Dehnaz slaughtered all the men, and then took several hundred beautiful married women and girls into captivity, whom they handed over to Armenian "warriors". The latter kept these unfortunate victims of the Armenian atrocities with them for a long time, despite the fact that after the protest of the Azerbaijani government even the Armenian parliament intervened in the matter ”(TsGAOR Az. SSR, f, 894. from 10, d. 104, fol. 1-3) .

The information contained in the note of protest of the Republic of Azerbaijan, which they quote, presented to the Chairman of the Paris Peace Conference, eloquently testifies that Armenians have never had a homeland in Armenia (Russian), since they did not form a majority anywhere. This document testifies that in Batumi, Akhalsalaki, Akhaltsikhe, Kars, Nakhichevan, Echmiadzin, Yerevan, etc., Muslim Azerbaijanis have always lived, moreover, in the majority.

Contrary to common sense, the Armenian Republic was established in 1918 by the will of England in the territories that belonged to Azerbaijanis from time immemorial.

England thus solved a double task: “created a buffer Christian state between Turkey and Russia and cut off Turkey from the entire Turkic world (and in 1922, by the will of the leadership of the USSR, Zangezur was taken from Azerbaijan and transferred to Armenia. Thus, Turkey finally lost direct land access to to the Turkic world, which stretches in a wide strip from the Balkans to the Korean Peninsula. What motivated England and the Entente in deciding to create an Armenian state from scratch? Apparently, anti-Turkism and anti-Islamism! And besides this, the successful development of the brilliant Porte, which stretched from Asia Minor to the middle of Europe and organically combined the interests of both Muslim and Christian peoples subject to it.It is not without reason that for the first time in world practice the Ottoman Empire created the institution of the "Ombudsman" - the defender of human rights, regardless of the religious, national and property affiliation of the subjects of the empire, which effectively protected the entire population from the will of the bureaucratic apparatus of power.

Excerpt from the book GREAT LIE ABOUT "GREAT ARMENIA" Takhira Mobil oglu. Baku "Araz" -2009 pp.58-69

The famous Armenian historian Leo - Arakel Grigoryevich Babakhanyan - was born on April 14, 1860 in the city of Shushi of Nagorno-Karabakh, died on November 14, 1932 in Yerevan. By the beginning of the 20th century, he published many studies on the main problems of the history of Armenia and its culture.

He owns monographs on the history of Armenian book printing, the life and work of the head of the Armenian Church in Russia Joseph Argutinsky, public figures, publicists and critics of the 19th century Stepanos Nazaryan and Grigor Artsruni. In the last years of his life he worked on a multi-volume history of Armenia.

In his book From the Past, addressing the issue of the Armenian Genocide, Leo writes both about the fault of Turkey and about the political weakness and omissions of the Armenian governments.

The documents and assessments he cites reveal the monstrous role of Russia in the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Leo presents a different history from the official, taught and promoted in Armenia.

We present, without comment, an excerpt from the book in which a prominent historian talks about the motives and consequences of the April events of 1915 in Armenia.

“Gradually it became clear what a monstrous deceit the Armenians, who believed in the tsarist government and entrusted themselves to it, fell victim to. In the early spring of 1915, the allies in Western Armenia began to carry out the most monstrous part of the program of Vorontsov-Dashkov (viceroy of the king in the Caucasus) - an uprising.

The beginning was laid in Van. On April 14, Catholicos Gevorg telegraphed Vorontsov-Dashkov that he had received a message from the leader of Tabriz that a widespread massacre of Armenians had begun in Turkey since April 10.

Ten thousand Armenians have taken up arms and bravely fight against the Turks and Kurds. In a telegram, the Catholicos asked the governor to expedite the entry of the Russian troops into Van, which was agreed in advance.

The Armenians of Van fought against the Turkish army for almost a month, until the Russian army reached the city. At the forefront of the Russian army was the Ararat regiment of Armenian volunteers, which was equipped with great honors for the journey under the command of Commander Vardan. It was already a large military unit, consisting of two thousand people.

The regiment, with its staffing and equipment, left a strong impression on the Armenian population from Yerevan to the border, inspiring even ordinary peasants. The inspiration became nationwide especially when on May 6 the Russian army, accompanied by the Ararat regiment, entered Van. The excitement about this in Tiflis was expressed by a demonstration that took place near the Vank church.

The allied commander Aram was appointed governor of Van, who had been operating there for a long time, won the glory of a hero and was called Aram Pasha. This circumstance inspired the Armenians even more: for the first time in 5-6 centuries, Western Armenia received support of such magnitude from the liberator king.

However, before that - bloodless victorious campaigns, inspiration - a very important historical document was edited and legitimized in the circles of the high command of the Caucasus, revealing the true intention of the Russian government, speculating on the Armenian issue.

“On the original it is written: Count Vorontsov-Dashkov. Commander of the Caucasian army. April 5, 1915 No. 1482. Active army.

Currently, due to difficulties in providing food for horses, there is not enough food for horses in the Caucasian army. This is difficult for the detachments that are in the Alashker valley. Bringing food to them is extremely expensive and requires a large number of vehicles. It is absolutely impossible for this purpose to tear the troops away from their affairs, so I would consider it necessary to create separate artels of civilians, whose duties would include the exploitation of the lands left by the Kurds and Turks, and the sale of fodder for horses.

To exploit these lands, the Armenians intend to seize them together with their refugees. I consider this intention unacceptable because it will be difficult to return the lands occupied by the Armenians after the war. Considering it highly desirable to populate the frontier areas with a Russian element, I think that another means can be put into practice that best suits Russian interests.

Your Excellency was pleased to confirm my report on the need to immediately drive out to the borders occupied by the Turks all the Alashkert, Diadin and Bayazet Kurds who resisted us in one way or another, and in the future, if the marked valleys enter the borders of the Russian Empire, populate them with immigrants from Kuban and Don and thus create border Cossacks.

In view of the foregoing, it seems that it is necessary to immediately call in workers' artels from the Don and Kuban, who will collect grass in the marked valleys. Having familiarized themselves with the country even before the end of the war, these artels will act as representatives of the settlers and organize migration, and for our troops they will prepare food for horses.

If Your Excellency considers the program presented by me acceptable, it is desirable that the working artels come with their cattle and horses, so that their feeding does not fall on the already few parts of the army, and for self-defense they would be given weapons.

General Yudenich's signature. Report to the Commander-in-Chief of the Caucasian Army.

Undoubtedly, it is clear what Vorontsov-Dashkov was doing. On the one hand, he threw the Armenian people into the flames of the uprising, promising in return the reconquest of their homeland, and on the other hand, he was going to annex this homeland to Russia and populate it with Cossacks.

The Black Hundred general Yudenich ordered not to give land to the Armenian refugees in the Alashkert region, he was waiting for a large flow of refugees from the Don and Kuban, which was supposed to live in the Eastern Euphrates basin and be called the "Euphrates Cossacks". To provide them with a large territory, it was necessary to reduce the number of Armenians in their own homeland.

Thus, before the will of Lobanov-Rostovsky - Armenia without Armenians - there was one step left. And this was not difficult for Yudenich, since under his programs the viceroy of the tsar and the commander-in-chief of the army, Vorontsov-Dashkov, wrote "I agree."

Undoubtedly, the program of such deception and extermination of Armenians was brought to Tiflis by Nicholas II, a long-time and mortal enemy of the Armenian people.

These words of mine are not conjectures. Since the idea of ​​Yudenich lay down on paper, since April 1915, the attitude of the Russian army towards the Armenian people has deteriorated so much that from now on the leaders of the Armenian volunteer movement - Catholicos Gevorg and the leadership of the National Bureau - send their complaints in writing to "deeply respected Count Illarion Ivanovich" , since this old fox, after the departure of Nicholas, closed the doors in front of his “favorites” (Armenians), citing illness.

Thus, in a letter dated June 4, the Catholicos bitterly complains about General Abatsiev, who literally oppressed the Armenians of the Manazkert region. Here is an excerpt from the letter:

“According to the information that I received from my local representatives, in this part of Turkish Armenia, the Russians do not provide any assistance and do not protect not only Armenians from violence, but completely neglect any issues of protecting the Christian population. This gives the leaders of the Kurds and Circassians a reason to continue robbing defenseless Christians with impunity.”

An Armenian for the tsarist troops was an autonomist. Such was the reality, preparing unspeakable horrors for the Armenian people,” the historian writes.

“...Now let's turn to the second side of the Russian program - to the Russian army. Who was able to save the Armenians from the massacres carried out by the Turks? Nobody but Russian troops. But we saw that they only assumed the role of a spectator, and the Kurdish beys who carried out the massacre were honored guests of the Russian commanders.

This could not happen in the troops of a more or less civilized country, if they had not carried out proper agitation against the Armenians in advance. Let's not forget that the commander of this regiment was Yudenich, and the whole essence of Yudenich is reflected in the document that I cited above.

Let's see how the Armenians assessed the attitude of the Russian troops towards them. In mid-July, Russian troops victoriously kept their way to Bitlis and Mush. The Turkish troops, retreating before the Russian army, took out all their anger on the Armenian population. A terrible massacre of the Armenians of Mush and the valley began:

90 Armenian villages with a total population of one hundred thousand people were destroyed. At this time, Russian troops reached Mount Nemrut, they were less than 400 meters from Mush.

Thus, they would have saved the lives of several tens of thousands of Armenians. But they did not move forward, and the glorious Mush, for its enormous cultural significance from ancient times, was called the "House of Armenians", was completely cleared of Armenians.

This indifference could still be explained by military considerations. However, almost simultaneously, an incomprehensible panic retreat began from Van and Manazkert to the Russian borders.

This movement remained a mystery, no one saw real, true and serious reasons, therefore it was doubtful for everyone, carried out with some kind of ulterior motive.

The retreat was unexpected: in Van it was announced on July 16, the people had only a few hours left. And by its unexpectedness, haste, the movement became disastrous for that part of the Armenian people that was not subjected to massacre in the places occupied by the Russians.

Every unfortunate, able to move, ran after the retreating army, naked and barefoot, hungry and full of horror. No attention on the part of the commanders of the troops to this exhausted multitude of people who have embarked on the path of their torment.

There was no one to help them, they were not even allowed to go around the army. And involuntarily, a smaller retreating Russian army appears in the memory in the summer of 1877 in the Alashkert valley.

Surrounded by enemies almost on three sides, she nevertheless took 5,000 families of Armenian refugees with her, and her elderly commander Ter-Gukasov did not move until he sent the last cart with refugees forward.

Now the time has come for Yudenich. And only 100 thousand refugees entered Igdir. Here, in the country of Ararat, typhus, hunger and hundreds of other enemies began to mow down the ranks of refugees. The Armenians of Turkey were dying.

Almost two weeks after this retreat, the Russian troops suddenly again advanced towards Van and Manazkert, with little or no resistance. So why were these retreats and forward movements necessary?

During the retreat, rumors spread that new Turkish divisions had not appeared anywhere. The Armenians began to get the impression that this whole retreat was deliberate, without a forced reason, carried out in order to put the Armenians in a similar situation.

“In our head,” the noted document said, “such a wild thought does not fit. But instead of it, another one is becoming more and more deeply fixed in us: they don’t think about us at all, they don’t take into account our position, cold-bloodedly and indifferently they sacrifice us to real or fictitious, big or small military-scientific considerations. We are empty space for Russia.

It is time for us to speak loud and open. There is an atmosphere of suspicion and confusion around. We can no longer remain in the dark, live in assumptions and conjectures, move from hope to fear and vice versa. We need the truth.

We, those who have taken the initiative to put the people on their feet, to organize and lead them in a certain direction, face the terrible question at these moments: have we done the right thing? Have they not committed a great crime, capturing the trust of the people, setting them on a path that, perhaps, they should not tread?

The answer to these questions was clear even at the moment they were asked. It was too late to remember. A great crime has been committed. There were no more Armenians in Turkey, and there was no more Armenian question.

Now the Russians were promoting other interests…”

Tags:

Comments 51

The Armenian Genocide is the physical destruction of the Christian ethnic Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which took place between the spring of 1915 and the autumn of 1916. About 1.5 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. During the genocide, at least 664,000 people died. There are suggestions that the death toll could reach 1.2 million people. Armenians call these events "Metz Egern"("The Great Atrocity") or "Aghet"("Catastrophe").

The mass destruction of Armenians gave impetus to the origin of the term "genocide" and its codification in international law. Lawyer Rafael Lemkin, coiner of the term "genocide" and thought leader of the United Nations (UN) program to combat genocide, has repeatedly stated that his youthful impressions of newspaper articles about the crimes of the Ottoman Empire against Armenians formed the basis of his belief in the need for legal protection. national groups. Thanks in part to Lemkin's tireless efforts, in 1948 the United Nations approved the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide".

Most of the killings of 1915-1916 were carried out by the Ottoman authorities with the support of auxiliaries and civilians. The government, controlled by the political party "Unity and Progress" (whose representatives were also called the Young Turks), set itself the goal of strengthening Muslim Turkish rule in Eastern Anatolia by destroying the large Armenian population in the region.

Beginning in 1915-1916, the Ottoman authorities carried out large-scale mass executions; Armenians also died during mass deportations due to hunger, dehydration, lack of shelter and disease. In addition, tens of thousands of Armenian children were forcibly taken from their families and converted to Islam.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Armenian Christians were one of the many significant ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire. In the late 1880s, some Armenians created political organizations that sought greater autonomy, which increased the doubts of the Ottoman authorities about the loyalty of the broad sections of the Armenian population living in the country.

On October 17, 1895, Armenian revolutionaries seized the National Bank in Constantinople, threatening to blow it up along with more than 100 hostages in the bank building if the authorities refused to grant regional autonomy to the Armenian community. Although this incident ended peacefully thanks to French intervention, the Ottoman authorities carried out a series of pogroms.

In total, at least 80 thousand Armenians were killed in 1894-1896.

YOUNG TURKISH REVOLUTION

In July 1908, a faction that called itself the Young Turks seized power in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople. The Young Turks were predominantly officers and officials of Balkan origin who came to power in 1906 in a secret society known as Unity and Progress and transformed it into a political movement.

The Young Turks sought to introduce a liberal constitutional regime, not connected with religion, which would put all nationalities on an equal footing. The Young Turks believed that non-Muslims would integrate into the Turkish nation if they were confident that such a policy would lead to modernization and prosperity.

Initially, it seemed that the new government would be able to eliminate some of the causes of the social discontent of the Armenian community. But in the spring of 1909, Armenian demonstrations demanding autonomy escalated into violence. In the city of Adana and its environs, 20 thousand Armenians were killed by the soldiers of the Ottoman army, irregular troops and civilians; up to 2,000 Muslims perished at the hands of the Armenians.

Between 1909 and 1913, the activists of the Unity and Progress movement became increasingly inclined towards a sharply nationalist vision of the future of the Ottoman Empire. They rejected the idea of ​​a multi-ethnic "Ottoman" state and sought to create a culturally and ethnically homogeneous Turkish society. The large Armenian population of Eastern Anatolia was a demographic barrier to achieving this goal. After several years of political upheaval, on November 23, 1913, as a result of a coup d'état, the leaders of the Unity and Progress party received dictatorial power.

WORLD WAR I

Mass atrocities and genocide are often committed during times of war. The extermination of the Armenians was closely connected with the events of the First World War in the Middle East and the Russian territory of the Caucasus. The Ottoman Empire officially entered the war in November 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), who fought against the Entente countries (Great Britain, France, Russia and Serbia).

On April 24, 1915, fearing the landing of allied troops on the strategically important Gallipoli Peninsula, the Ottoman authorities arrested 240 Armenian leaders in Constantinople and deported to the east. Today Armenians consider this operation to be the beginning of the genocide. The Ottoman authorities claimed that the Armenian revolutionaries had made contact with the enemy and were going to assist in the landing of the French and British troops. When the Entente countries, as well as the United States, which at that time still remained neutral, demanded explanations from the Ottoman Empire in connection with the deportation of Armenians, she called her actions precautionary measures.

Starting in May 1915, the government expanded the scale of deportations, deporting the Armenian civilian population, regardless of the distance of their places of residence from the war zones, to camps located in the desert southern provinces of the empire [in the territory of the north and east of modern Syria, northern Saudi Arabia and Iraq] . Many escorted groups went south from the six provinces of Eastern Anatolia with a high proportion of the Armenian population - from Trabzon, Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, Diyarbakir, Mamuret-ul-Aziz, as well as from the province of Marash. In the future, Armenians were expelled from almost all regions of the empire.

Since the Ottoman Empire was an ally of Germany during the war, many German officers, diplomats and humanitarian workers witnessed the atrocities committed against the Armenian population. Their reactions ranged from horror and official protests to isolated cases of tacit support for the actions of the Ottoman authorities. The generation of Germans who survived the First World War kept these horrific events in mind in the 1930s and 1940s, which influenced their perception of the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

MASS MURDER AND DEPORTATIONS

Obeying the orders of the central government in Constantinople, the regional authorities, with the complicity of the local civilian population, staged mass executions and deportations. Members of the military and security forces, as well as their supporters, massacred the majority of Armenian men of working age, as well as thousands of women and children.

During the escorted passages through the desert, the surviving old men, women and children were subjected to unauthorized attacks by local authorities, gangs of nomads, criminal groups and civilians. These attacks included looting (for example, the victims were stripped naked, their clothes were taken from them and their bodies were searched for valuables), rape, kidnapping of young women and girls, extortion, torture and murder.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died without reaching the designated camp. Many of them were killed or kidnapped, others committed suicide, and a huge number of Armenians died from starvation, dehydration, lack of shelter or disease on the way to their destination. While some residents of the country sought to help the deported Armenians, many more ordinary citizens killed or tortured those escorted.

CENTRALIZED ORDERS

Although the term "genocide" appeared only in 1944, most scholars agree that the massacres of Armenians fit the definition of genocide. The government, controlled by the Unity and Progress Party, used the state of emergency in the country to implement a long-term demographic policy aimed at increasing the proportion of the Turkish Muslim population in Anatolia by reducing the Christian population (primarily Armenians, but also Christian Assyrians). Ottoman, Armenian, American, British, French, German and Austrian documents of that time testify that the leadership of the Unity and Progress party deliberately exterminated the Armenian population of Anatolia.

The Unity and Progress Party issued orders from Constantinople and enforced them through its agents in the Special Organization and local administrative bodies. In addition, the central government required close monitoring and collection of data on the number of deported Armenians, the type and number of housing units they left behind, and the number of deported citizens who entered the camps.

The initiative regarding certain actions came from the highest members of the leadership of the Unity and Progress party, they also coordinated actions. The central figures of this operation were Talaat Pasha (Minister of the Interior), Ismail Enver Pasha (Minister of War), Behaeddin Shakir (Head of the Special Organization) and Mehmet Nazim (Head of the Population Planning Service).

According to government decrees, in certain regions the share of the Armenian population should not exceed 10% (in some regions - no more than 2%), Armenians could live in settlements that included no more than 50 families, as far away from the Baghdad railway as as well as from each other. To fulfill these requirements, the local authorities carried out deportations over and over again. Armenians crossed the desert back and forth without the necessary clothing, food and water, suffering from the scorching sun during the day and freezing from the cold at night. The expelled Armenians were regularly attacked by nomads and their own escorts. As a result, under the influence of natural factors and targeted extermination, the number of deported Armenians significantly decreased and began to meet the established standards.

MOTIVES

The Ottoman regime pursued the goals of strengthening the country's military positions and financing the "turkishization" of Anatolia by confiscating the property of the killed or deported Armenians. The possibility of redistribution of property also stimulated the broad masses of ordinary people to participate in attacks on their neighbors. Many inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire considered Armenians to be wealthy people, but in fact, a significant part of the Armenian population lived in poverty.

In some cases, the Ottoman authorities agreed to grant the Armenians the right to reside in the former territories on the condition that they converted to Islam. While thousands of Armenian children were killed through the fault of the Ottoman authorities, they often tried to convert children to Islam and assimilate them into a Muslim, primarily Turkish, society. As a rule, the Ottoman authorities avoided carrying out mass deportations from Istanbul and Izmir in order to hide their crimes from the eyes of foreigners and to profit economically from the activities of the Armenians living in these cities in order to modernize the empire.

Translation from Armenian

1. The Persian Meshali Haji Ibrahim narrated the following:

“In May 1915, the governor of Tahsin Bey summoned Amvanli Eyyub-ogly Gadyr’s chetebashi to him and, showing him the order received from Constantinople, said: “I entrust the local Armenians to you, bring them unharmed to Kemakh, there they will be attacked by the Kurds and other. You will pretend that you want to protect them, you will even use weapons against the attackers once or twice, but, in the end, you will show that you cannot cope with them, you will leave and return. After a little thought, Gadir said: “You order me to take the sheep and lambs tied hand and foot to the slaughterhouse; this is cruelty not befitting me; I am a soldier, send me against the enemy, let him either hit me with a bullet, and I will fall bravely, or I will hit him and save my country, and I will never agree to stain my hands in the blood of innocents. The governor strongly insisted that he carry out the order, but the generous Gadyr flatly refused. Then the governor summoned Mirza-bek Veranshekherli and made him the above proposal. This one also claimed that there was no need to kill. Already in such conditions, he said, you put the Armenians that they themselves will die on the way, and Mesopotamia is such a hot country that they will not stand it, they will die. But the governor insisted on his own, and Mirza accepted the offer. Mirza fully fulfilled his cruel obligation. Four months later he returned to Erzurum with 360,000 lire; He gave 90 thousand to Tahsin, 90 thousand to the corps commander Mahmud Kamil, 90 thousand to the defterdar, and the rest to the meherdar, Seifulla and accomplices. However, when dividing this booty, a dispute arose between them, and the governor arrested Mirza. And Mirza threatened to make such revelations that the world would be surprised; Then he was released." Eyub-ogly Gadyr and Mirza Veranshekherli personally told this story to the Persian Mashadi Haji Ibrahim.

2. Persian camel driver Kerbalai Ali-Memed told the following: “I was transporting ammunition from Erzinjan to Erzurum. One day in June 1915, when I drove up to the Khotursky bridge, a stunning sight appeared before my eyes. A myriad of human corpses filled the 12 spans of the large bridge, damming the river so that it changed course and ran past the bridge. It was terrible to watch; I stood with my caravan for a long time until these corpses floated by and I was able to cross the bridge. But from the bridge to Ginis, the whole road was littered with the corpses of old men, women and children, which had already decomposed, swollen and stinking. The stench was so terrible that it was impossible to pass along the road; my two cameleers fell ill and died from this stench, and I was forced to change my way. These were the victims and traces of an unheard-of and terrible atrocity. And all these were the corpses of Armenians, unfortunate Armenians.”

3. Alaftar Ibrahim-efendi told the following: “A very tough and urgent order was received on the eviction of Armenians from Constantinople with the following content: to cut without mercy all men from 14 to 65 years of age, do not touch children, the elderly and women, but leave and convert into Mohammedanism."

TsGIA Arm, SSR, f. 57, op. 1, e, 632, f. 17-18.

on "The Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire", edited by M.G. Nersisyan, M.1982, pp.311-313