It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body.‡ The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. The tribunal found that the perpetrators and their co-conspirators had executed a top-down, carefully crafted plan, specifically finding: In 1919, albeit under international pressure, the Ottoman authorities established a tribunal that convicted two senior district officials for deporting Armenians and acting “against humanity and civilization”. In a pallid public statement “on the events of 1915,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently extended “ condolences to grandchildren” of the Armenians “who lost their lives in the context of the early twentieth century.” Rubbing salt in the wounds, he trivialized the suffering caused to Armenians at the time by equating them to that of “every other citizen of the Ottoman Empire.”† Considering the scale of the slaughter and the nature of the genocidal effort directed at Armenians, Erdogan’s attempts to equate their suffering to that of “every citizen of the Ottoman Empire” constitutes a form of denial in itself.Īlthough such rhetoric is not new, the culture of denial in some respects has intensified in Turkey over the years. Turkey’s Culture of Denial and its SpoilsĪ hundred years on, despite a mountain of evidence, there remains a culture of official denial in Turkey. It was planned and executed with efficiency, without mercy.Īrmenian refugees approach British front lines after expulsion. Then, from 1918 to 1923, many of the surviving Armenians and others, including Greeks and Assyrians, were driven from their homes, robbed of their remaining possessions, starved, and murdered.* Like other genocides, the mass killing of Armenians was hardly spontaneous. The Ottoman authorities of the day (the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), often referred to as the Young Turks) and their allies carried out the systematic murder of some 1.5 million Armenians between 19, destroying a large percentage of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire at that time. The facts of the Armenian genocide are well known and documented, and any honest debate is not about whether the genocide happened but about the exact number of murdered, the worth of their stolen property and the long-term impact of this crime.
Recent studies have established that such denial not only damages the victims and their destroyed communities, it promises a future based on lies, sowing the seeds of future conflict, repression and suffering.
Perpetrators hide the truth in order to avoid accountability and protect the political and economic advantages they sought to gain by mass killings and theft of the victims’ property, and to cement the new reality by manufacturing an alternative history.
This grim centenary marks not only the crime itself but also a century of its denial by the Turkish state and wide swaths of Turkish society.ĭenial is the final fortress of those who commit genocide and other mass crimes. On that date in 1915, some 250 Armenian political leaders and intellectuals were arrested and subsequently tortured and murdered by Ottoman Turkish authorities, effectively launching the genocide in which approximately 1.5 million Armenians were systematically murdered. On April 24, we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.
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