Recognizing the Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, was the organized killing of Armenians. While there is no clear agreement on how many Armenians lost their lives, there is general agreement among Western scholars that over a million Armenians may have perished between 1914 and 1918. It all happened during the Ottoman Empire, present-day Turkey, where 2 million Armenians lived. The Armenian Genocide is the second-most studied massacre, after the Holocaust. To date Twenty-two countries have officially recognized what happened as genocide, but Turkey to this day rejects the events as genocide. One starts to wonder what could cause such hatred to commit such a heinous crime, and then go to great lengths to deny the fact that it even happened (FACT SHEET).

One of the main causes of the Armenian genocide can be traced to ethnic and religious tensions that had shown up after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians were pretty high up in education within the old Turkish empire. Armenians were also the professionals in society, the businessmen, lawyers, doctors and skilled craftsmen. And they were more open to new ideas from the West (Europe and America).

In the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was ruled by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The Armenian population desired more civil rights during this time period and Sultan Abdul Hamid II was concerned (Ranzer).He was concerned that the desire of rights might grow into an independence movement, so the Sultan encouraged a series of massacres that killed between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians between 1894 and 1896 (Rummel). Soon after, during the Young Turk Revolution, the Sultan was overthrown due to his corrupt leadership (Ranzer).

The Young Turk leaders, later know...

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...ctics (Pallone).

Another big issue with getting people to recognize the Armenian Genocide is the fact that countries don't want to offend Turkey and lose political, strategic and commercial relationships with them. As David Leigh states, “Recognizing the genocide would provide no practical benefit to the UK.” (Leigh)

The Armenian race will never forget what happened to them. The Armenians will never give up and will get the justice they deserve sooner or later. They have been fighting for justice for the past 94 years, what makes them think they will ever give up, let alone forget. Armenians are strong and stick together as a Nation. As William Saroyan, a well known Armenian writer once said, “I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race . . . .For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia” (Jabarian).