What Turkey Doesn't Want You to Know

You’d think we could all agree on whether a million people being marched to their deaths counts as genocide.

But a century later, Turkey still refuses to call the actions of the Ottoman Empire anything beyond “wartime chaos.”

In April 1915, Ottoman officials rounded up hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, priests, and political leaders in the middle of the night. Those leaders were either deported or executed. Over the next two years, somewhere close to a million Armenians died — from massacres, starvation, or being marched into the Syrian desert and left there to die.

The United States officially recognized this as a genocide, but not until 2021. The U.K. still hasn’t. And in Turkey? In Turkey, even calling it genocide can be prosecuted under laws against ‘insulting the Turkish nation.’

So … what happened?

When an Empire Starts to Fall Apart

To understand 1915, you have to go back a bit — to when the Ottoman Empire was huge, powerful, and made up of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Armenians were Christians in a Muslim empire. They had their own communities, churches, and schools, but Muslims were the dominant group and non-Muslims had fewer rights.

In the 1800s, the Ottomans started losing wars, land, and confidence. European nations began pushing for “equal rights” for Christian minorities, and those inside the empire didn’t take that meddling well.

The new Young Turks saw the Armenians as traitors, waiting to rise. Scattered local clashes, where Armenians defended themselves from attacks by Ottoman troops and Kurdish bands, were seized on as proof of a giant rebellion.

Turkey argues that it needed to get a “suspect” population out of potential combat zones, both for the safety of the nation and the safety of the Armenians. But during this move, between 50 and 70% of all Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed.

Men, women, and children were taken from their homes by Ottoman authorities and soldiers. Some were shot, others faced death marches for hundreds of miles. People were given barely any food and water, and almost no protection.

“Genocide” is one of those politically charged words that means different things to different people. It’s used to describe the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazi regime, as well as Israel’s actions in Gaza today.

But many people argue that, however you define genocide, it’s clearly what happened to the Armenians. Children were taken from their families and placed with Turkish or Kurdish households. They were converted to Islam. Armenian churches, schools, and cultural centers were destroyed. It doesn’t take much imagination to see these actions as designed to destroy a race of people.

But Turkey says the actions were a result of war, chaos, famine, and rebellion. It was a horrific time, but not a genocide. They point out that there was no signed “kill order,” no documented plan of extermination, and that plenty of Muslims died in the same wartime collapse. Turkey also disputes the number of Armenians who died, saying it was 300,000 to 500,000, rather than more than a million.

Using the word “genocide” means saying the founding generation of modern Turkey was guilty of one of the worst crimes of the 20th century.

Share

Check out my video to learn even more about one of the darkest and least mentioned chapters of human history.

Subscribe now