| Armenian Genocide | |
|---|---|
 Armenian civilians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Ottoman soldiers. Kharpert, Ottoman Empire, April 1915. | |
| Location |  Ottoman Empire |
| Date | 1915 - 1923 |
| Target | Armenian civilians |
| Attack type | Deportation, mass murder, etc. |
| Deaths | 600,000 - 1,500,000 |
| Perpetrator(s) | Ottoman Empire/Young Turk government |
Armenian Genocide
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|---|---|
Background
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The Genocide
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Congress at Erzurum · Red Sunday · Tehcir Law ·Labour battalions
Trials:Deportation: Centres: All the settlements at Western Armenia Camps:Deir ez-Zor · Ra's al-'Ayn Foreign aid and relief:ACRNE · NARC Resistance: Zeitun · Van · Musa Dagh · Urfa · Shabin-Karahisar Responsible parties: Young Turks: Committee of Union and Progress (Talaat ·Enver · Djemal · Behaeddin Shakir) ·Special Organization · (Reshid · Djevdet · Topal Osman) Kurdish Irregulars Courts-Martial · Malta Tribunals · Soghomon Tehlirian | |
Armenian population
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The Armenian Genocide[1][2]—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime[3]—was the systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I.[4] It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees. The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between 1 million and 1.5 million.[5][6][7][8][9] Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians andGreeks, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.[10][11][12]
It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,[13][14]:177[15] as scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians,[16] and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.[17] The word genocide[18] was coined in order to describe these events.[19][20]
The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day when Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.[21][22] Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace.[23] The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events.[24]In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view.[25][26][27][28]
