Turkey Can't Handle the Truth

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday that Turkey "entirely rejects" the US decision. "We will not take lessons from anyone on our history," he tweeted. [History such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's staging his own coup in order to oppress/persecute his critics/opponents/enemies?]

Joe Biden has become the first US president to issue a statement formally describing the 1915 massacre of Armenians as a genocide. The killings took place in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the forerunner of modern-day Turkey.

Ottoman Turks had accused Christian Armenians of treachery after suffering a heavy defeat at the hands of Russian forces and began deporting them en masse to the Syrian desert and elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were massacred or died from starvation or disease. Atrocities were widely recorded at the time by witnesses including journalists, missionaries and diplomats.

The number of Armenian dead has always been disputed. Armenians say about 1.5 million people died. Turkey estimates the total to be closer to 300,000. According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the death toll was "more than a million".

Although Turkish officials have accepted that atrocities took place, they argue that there was no systematic attempt to destroy the Christian Armenian people [Did they expect that Armenians would thrive in the Syrian desert? I think not. Deliberately rendering much likelier the deaths of a particular nationality is GENOCIDE]. Turkey says many Muslim Turks also died in the turmoil of World War One. [People die in wars, but pointing at a different wrong does not exonerate Turkey.]

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The Armenian Genocide (see other names) was the systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing of around one million ethnic Armenians from Asia Minor and adjoining regions by the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), during World War I.

During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians; massacres turned into genocide following the catastrophic Ottoman defeat in the Battle of Sarikamish (January 1915), a loss blamed on Armenian treachery. Ottoman leaders took isolated indications of Armenian resistance as evidence of a nonexistent widespread conspiracy. The deportations were intended as a "definitive solution to the Armenian Question" and to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence. Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman Army were disarmed pursuant to a February order, and were later killed. On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from Constantinople (now Istanbul).

At the orders of Talat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children, and elderly or infirm people were sent on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre. In the Syrian Desert, they were dispersed into a series of concentration camps; in early 1916 another wave of massacres were ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement during the Turkish War of Independence after World War I.

The Armenian Genocide resulted in the destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Asia Minor. With the destruction and expulsion of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethno-national Turkish state. Prior to World War II, the Armenian Genocide was widely considered the greatest atrocity in history. As of 2021, 30 countries, including France, Germany, Russia and the United States, have recognized the events as genocide. Against the academic consensus, Turkey denies that the deportation of Armenians was a genocide or wrongful act.