When the “Young Turks,” a group of military officers led by Kemal Ataturk, came to power in 1908, many Armenians supported them.  As the Ottoman Empire had crumbled, relations between the Christian Armenians and their Moslem neighbors had deteriorated; an 1896 pogrom ordered by Sultan Abdul Hamid II had killed an estimated 200,000 Armenians.  The Committee for Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti) was secularist and had little tolerance for Islamic fundamentalism.  Unfortunately for the Armenians, their core beliefs were strongly racist and xenophobic: as they cemented their hold on power, they came to see the Armenians as a potentially dangerous “fifth column.”  At first fear of reprisals from Christian Europe kept them from acting upon their fears, but as Europe became embroiled in World War I they saw the chance to move against the “foreigners in their midst.”

On April 24, 1915 the Turkish government began rounding up Armenian “insurgents” – primarily writers, journalists, clergymen, and Armenian intellectuals.  The number of intellectuals who were arrested is not clear: estimates range from 200 to 2,500.  What is clear is that these intellectuals were deported from Istanbul and murdered en masse.  To this day the Turkish government claims that these victims were planning to rebel against the Turkish government and set up an Armenian state.  This is not implausible: with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, Greece and much of Eastern Europe had become inflamed with the same nationalist spirit which inspired the Young Turks.  What was to follow, however, went far beyond Turkish self-defense.

The Turkish Army began confiscating weapons from Armenian citizens; soon afterwards, every able-bodied Armenian male was conscripted into labor batallions.  Most of them would later be killed.  Entire Armenian villages were depopulated, and Turks moved in.  Rape and looting was widespread.  Attractive Armenian women were given the choice of converting to Islam and living as slaves to Turkish soldiers, or dying; by all accounts most chose death.  Young Armenian children were taken from their parents and given to Turkish families in a process of “Turkification.” 

Those Armenians who were not killed outright were “deported.”  In most cases, this meant a slow and lingering death by starvation or exposure as opposed to a quick death by bullet or sword.  After their goods and animals were confiscated, the Armenians were sent into the Der-el-Zor … the bleak and inhospitable Syrian desert.  Many of them were brutalized or killed by their “guards” or by “marauders” – most frequently Kurdish tribesmen encouraged by the Turks to kill “infidel” Christians.  By August 1, 1917, the Turkish government officially disbanded the Armenian Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, on the grounds that there were no Armenians remaining in Turkey.  Out of 2.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, it is estimated that 1.5 million were killed between 1915 and 1918, when the Allies occupied the area.

In February 1919 war crimes trials began against some of the leaders who had played a major role in the Armenian massacres.  In April of 1920 the Turkish government announced it would retry those convicted.  Almost all were acquitted:  most who were sentenced were sentenced in absentia, having since escaped.  The newly-founded Republic of Armenia would soon be forcibly absorbed into the Soviet Union: the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, in which Europe recognized the Turkish government, made no mention of Armenians or of the Armenian massacre.  “Who still talks today of the extermination of the Armenians?” Hitler asked mockingly in 1939, after ordering the execution of every Polish man, woman and child. 

Even today the Turkish government denies the Armenian genocide.  When France officially recognized the Armenian killings as genocide in 2000, Turkey recalled its ambassador to France and warned of “serious damage to Turco-French relations.”  That same year, a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide was blocked in Congress, after Turkey threatened to ground U.S. planes using Turkish air bases to patrol Iraq, cancel a $4.5 billion contract to buy 145 US-made attack helicopters, and block a $2.7 billion project to pipe Caspian oil through Turkey to Europe.