HISTORY

The Armenian Genocide was a systematic plan of extermination of the Armenian population conducted by the Turkish Ottoman Empire from 1894, which had its most virulent period between 1915 and 1923 under the government of the “Young Turks”. The goal was to end the Armenian presence within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, then the Turkish state. The result was a million and a half victims.

It is a crime against humanity still unpunished, because the Turkish state refuses to recognize and repair this slaughter, despite the numerous historical evidence that prove it.

In the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of the population was Muslim. There was a minority of Christians, particularly Armenians and Greeks, who were considered second-class citizens; lacked of political rights and excluded from the state apparatus.

In the nineteenth century, in line with the European revolutions, the Armenian minority began to claim certain administrative reforms within the empire. These claims were responded by the first killings between 1894 and 1896, organized by Sultan Abdul Hamid, which cost the lives of 300,000 Armenians. But in the early twentieth century, among the Turks themselves began to emerge movements to democratize the regime. These demonstrations against the sultan were led by young Turkish intellectuals who later formed the party of the “Young Turks” with liberal leanings and aimed to depose the Sultan for a parliamentary government. The Armenian minorities saw in these movements a possibility to achieve the long-awaited administrative reforms they intended to, so they supported their claims.

However, the “Young Turks” had a plan of “pan-Turkism” in the region, with the aim of uniting all “blood brothers” and in this project Armenians constituted an obstacle because of its geographical location. In 1914, with the entry of Turkey in the First World War, they begin to see the final strokes of the realization of the plan to get rid of the Armenians.

On April 24, 1915, the Turkish government ordered arrest of intellectuals, politicians and religious of the Armenian minority, who later were murdered or deported. Then it gives way to the persecution and murder of the Armenian population in the capital and within the Ottoman Empire, carrying out a brutal slaughter and mass murder, remembered as the first genocide of the twentieth century.

As a result of this genocide, the Armenian nation, which had 3 million, was halved, being deported or expelled from their lands survivors, who were settled in different parts of the world, which explains the formation a significant Armenian diaspora all over the world.

PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE

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