The Turks entered WW1 with the intention of clearing Anatolia of Christians, they didn't react to an Armenian revolt.

The Turks entered WW1 with the intention of clearing Anatolia of Christians, they didn't react to an Armenian revolt. By Kyle W. Orton.

The controversy over the 1915-17 massacres of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire is whether these acts constitute genocide. Those who say they don’t are not the equivalent of Holocaust-deniers in that while some minimize the figures of the slain, they do not deny that the massacres happened; what they deny is that the massacres reach the legal definition of genocide. Their case is based on three interlinked arguments:

Unlike the Nazi Holocaust when a defenceless population was murdered only for its identity, the Armenians were engaged in a massive armed revolt, and this is why the Ottoman government decided to deport them.

The intent of the Ottomans was not massacre but the removal of the Armenians, who had sided with one foreign invading power (Russia) and who were showing signs of collaborating with another (Britain), from the militarily sensitive areas as Turkey suffered a two-front invasion in early 1915.

While terrible massacres, plus starvation and the cold, took maybe a million lives during the deportations, when the Armenians reached their destinations in Syria and Iraq, which were also part of the Ottoman Empire, they were well-treated and allowed to rebuild their lives, which would not have been the case had the Ottomans intended their destruction.

Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility presents evidence to undermine every one of these arguments.

The Armenian genocide is marked on April 24, the day in 1915 several Armenian notables in Istanbul were arrested. This date fits rather well with the Turkish narrative.


This timeline, however, misses several key events which show that the deportations were not a reactive policy but a key strategic intention of the Ottomans in entering the Great War—and Istanbul did deliberately enter the war, despite much myth-making to this day that Turkey was forced into it. 

The CUP sought the restoration of Ottoman glory, a key component of which was the removal of the Christians from Anatolia, and thought this could be had by war.

The cancellation of the Treaty of Yenikoy, signed on February 8, 1914, under Russian pressure, which called for administrative reforms, namely autonomy, for the Ottoman Christians, and called for an international intervention if the reforms were not implemented, was one of the first acts after the Ottoman declaration of war. With the Armenian reform agreement dead, the legal basis for international interference in the Ottoman realm went with it.

Later Istanbul would also cancel the 1878 Berlin Treaty—the other instrument that dealt with the Armenian Question—and also withdrew from the 1856 Paris Treaty, which ended the Crimean War and inducted the Ottoman Empire into the “family of Europe,” the realm where international law applied, and the London Declaration of 1871. The cancellation of these three treaties freed the Ottomans from all international legal restraints on their behaviour and all legal right for other States to intervene in their internal affairs.

The massacres had stopped by the summer of 1917, though the destruction of Armenian property had not.

There is a significant argument over how many Armenians there were in pre-war Turkey—the Armenian Church says 2.1 million; the Turks say 1.3 million. What is known for sure is that 600,000 Armenians were alive after 1918—thus 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were killed, with 150,000-to-200,000 of them having survived the deportations. The number of Armenian women and children taken into servitude or converted within Muslim families is impossible to estimate. Hmmmm.....What is clear is 1. It was carefully & Methodically  planned; 2. It were crimes against Humanity, perpetrated by the Ottomans. Read the full story here.