Armenian Genocide Begins

Setting the scene

The Armenian Genocide began on April 24, 1915, when Ottoman authorities arrested and deported 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. The genocide was the systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Young Turk government, led by the Committee of Union and Progress, feared Armenians would collaborate with Russia, with whom the Ottomans were at war, and sought to create a homogeneous Turkish state in Anatolia.

What happened

Following the arrests, the Ottoman government ordered the deportation of Armenians from eastern provinces to the Syrian desert. The deportations were death marches—Armenians were forced to walk without food, water, or shelter, and were attacked by soldiers, Kurdish bandits, and local populations. Men were massacred outright, women and children died from starvation, disease, and exhaustion, or were kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam. Special Organization units carried out mass killings, drowning Armenians in rivers, burning them alive, and throwing them off cliffs.

Why it still matters

The genocide continued until 1917, with additional massacres in 1918. Approximately 1.5 million Armenians died, and the Armenian population of Anatolia, present for 3,000 years, was virtually eliminated. The Turkish government denies it was genocide, claiming deaths resulted from civil war and famine, a denial that continues today. The Armenian Genocide was the first modern genocide and inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the term 'genocide' in 1944. It was a precursor to the Holocaust—Hitler reportedly said in 1939, 'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' The genocide remains a central trauma in Armenian identity and a test case for international recognition of historical atrocities.

Background

Survivors diasporas memorialized the trauma.