Ararat Press Kit
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"Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten."
Between 1894 and 1896, the Turkish government of the Ottoman Empire began committing atrocities against the Armenians, whom they considered "subversive". In these years alone, it is estimated that 200,000 Armenians were massacred. On August 2, 1914, a day after Germany declared war on Russia beginning WWI, a secret treaty of alliance was signed between Turkey and Germany virtually placing the Turkish armed forces under German command. This was the beginning of further atrocities towards the Armenian people. On August 18, of that year, Armenian shops were looted and destroyed. Between 1896 and the beginning of World War I in 1914, tens of thousands of Armenians fled to South America, France, Lebanon and Egypt.
Eventually, many of them made their way to the United States, with a majority settling in California and New York. Those who remained put their trust in the Armenian provincial governments that were organizing to establish rights for themselves. In 1915, behind the screen of war, the Young Turk government, called the Committee of Union and Progress, implemented a plan to exterminate the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey - the largest Christian minority in the country. The genocide was carried out through a sophisticated bureaucratic organization and involved military and technological planning, resulting in the death of well over a million, about two-thirds of the Armenian population. The atrocities were veiled under the guise of deportations, as the Young Turk government ordered the Armenians to leave their ancestral homelands. Massive forced marches to the deserts of what is present-day Syria led to the majority of the deaths, either by starvation, dehydration and disease or by rape, brutality and massacre.
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide describes genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Clearly this definition applies in the case of the atrocities committed against the Armenians. Because the U.N. Convention was adopted in 1948, thirty years after the Armenian Genocide, Armenians worldwide have sought from their respective governments formal acknowledgment of the crimes committed during W.W.I. Countries like France, Argentina, Greece, and Russia, where the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants live, have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. However, as a matter of policy, the present-day Republic of Turkey adamantly denies that genocide was committed against the Armenians during W.W.I.
"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal this fact...I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the suffering of the Armenian race in 1915."
- Former US President Ronald Reagan
- Henry Morgenthau Sr. The US Ambassador To The Ottoman Empire, Writing In 1919