BY : ANTON EVSTRATOV
Feature Report : On April 24, the Armenian people and all progressive people commemorate the terrible events of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire – the first genocide of the 20th century. Thousands of people lay flowers at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex in Yerevan, and on the night before this date, a mass torchlight procession takes place in the capital of Armenia where the world mourn the 1.5 million innocent victims, swearing that this crime will never be repeated.
Though, the Armenian people were subjected to pogroms and oppression later – in the late 1980s in the Azerbaijan SSR and in 2023 in Nagorno-Karabakh, which indicates that the world has not become better, more civilized, and fairer.
The massacre of the Armenian people, which began in 1915 and largely ended in 1923 (although outbreaks of violence against Armenians were recorded in Turkey later), was not the first attempt by the Ottoman authorities to resolve the "Armenian question" by force.
In 1894–1896, the "Hamidian massacre" carried out by Sultan Abdul Hamid II swept across the country and took up to 300,000 lives. More local events of this kind had taken place earlier—mainly in the territory of Western Armenia, called Anatolia by the Turks. In addition to the Armenians, other Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire—Assyrians, Greeks—as well as non-Christians—the Yezidis, also suffered from the actions of the Turkish forces.
The reason for the spinning of the flywheel of violence was the capitalist relations, which spread across the territory of the empire with a great delay in comparison with Europe and North America. It was capitalism that began to form such concepts as "nation", "national identity", and "national state" in the Middle East.
However, capitalism in the Ottoman Empire was comprador, dependent on external imperialist forces. In addition, by the second half of the 19th century, it turned out to be mainly commercial, not industrial. Since the Armenians (and, for example, the Greeks) were involved in trade relations, often being intermediaries between the empire and the capitalist nations of Europe, capitalism among them began to develop faster than among the Turks. This led to the acceleration of the formation of a capitalist nation from the Armenian ethnic group and its desire for self-government within the feudal Ottoman state.
On the other hand, the Turks, who were also gradually forming themselves as a capitalist nation, looked extremely negatively at the Armenians' gravitation even towards autonomy, the formation of a secular Armenian language, literature, theater, etc. In addition, part of the Armenian people lived within the Russian Empire. All this formed the image of Armenians as "traitors" and agents of enemy influence in the eyes of the Turkish public.
However, the most fundamental changes in the attitude towards Armenians and other minorities in the Ottoman Empire occurred after the 1908 coup d'état, when the Union and Progress Party, also known as the Young Turks, seized power. This led to the de facto removal of the Sultan from power and the transformation of the empire from a theocratic caliphate into an ordinary secular state on the European model. And if the Muslim Sharia law, by which the country was previously governed, gave many rights to non-Muslim religious communities, the Young Turks were ready to trample on these norms.
Another trigger was the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which many Armenians fought for Russia. On the one hand, using this fact for propaganda purposes, and on the other, suffering defeats from the Russian army, the Young Turk government, headed by the triumvirate of Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha, began mass deportations of the Armenian people from Anatolia and other places to the interior of the empire (to Syria, etc.).
The resettlement was poorly organized and almost immediately led to a series of mass deaths. In addition, the Armenians were subjected to attacks by Kurdish tribes, robbery by army and police officers, and Armenian recruits called up for military service in the armed forces of the Ottoman Empire were shot. At the same time, the Armenian population was also slaughtered in the Mediterranean regions—from Izmir to Cilicia.
In an exclusive interview with Human Online, Mrs. Armine Tyutyunjan, former director of the "House of Moscow" in Yerevan, shared a deeply personal account of her family's tragic history during the Armenian Genocide.
“My grandparents from both my father’s and mother’s side lived in the city of Van,” she began. “But I am not just a granddaughter—I am also a daughter of Genocide victims. My father, only eight years old at the time, was forced to walk from Western Armenia to Yerevan with his younger siblings after their parents were killed by the Turks.”
Mrs. Tyutyunjan reflected with pain on the more recent displacement of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023: “It was especially painful for me to witness the exodus of the Armenian population. The same lines of people stretched for tens of kilometers—only now, unlike in 1915, they were in cars instead of on foot.”
She went on to describe the history of her paternal family:
“The Tyutyunjans were a wealthy and well-known family in Van. We were related to Bishop Garegin Srvandztyants, a prominent scholar and writer, who was the first to document the Armenian epic David of Sassoun. When the Russian Theatre toured the region, their performances were staged in our living room. But both of my father’s parents—my grandparents—were killed by the Turks, and everything they owned was plundered.”
The suffering didn’t end there for her family. Mrs. Tyutyunjan also shared the harrowing story of her maternal grandmother’s escape:
“She was pregnant with my mother when the Turkish punitive forces stormed their home. A soldier grabbed her and raised his yataghan to strike. But with a mother’s instinct to protect her child, she bit the attacker’s hand so hard that he cried out, ‘Gyaur!’—‘Infidel!’—and threw her aside. While he was recovering, she managed to escape. Eventually, she joined a group of fleeing Armenians and made it to Tiflis, where she gave birth to my mother in November 1915.”
Separately, it is necessary to mention the role of Kaiser's Germany in the Armenian Genocide—an ally of the Ottoman Empire at that time, to which the Young Turks were completely and entirely oriented both militarily and politically. Wanting to strengthen the position of the latter within the country, the Germans inspired and encouraged the punishers. In turn, this fact indicates that one of the global causes of the Armenian Genocide was the implementation of the interests of the imperialist powers in the Middle East.
In a number of settlements, the Armenians resisted, but the forces of the hastily organized rebels and regular troops were unequal. As a result, the Genocide took hundreds of thousands of lives already at its beginning, and the total number of killed Armenians is estimated at 1.5 million. There are other estimates that bring the number of victims of the mass extermination of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire to 3 million. However, even if we are guided by the most widespread version, we can say that the Ottoman authorities destroyed about half of the Armenian population of the empire, not counting the victims who were expelled, resettled, robbed, raped, and forced to change their faith.
In another exclusive statement to Human Online, Erol Amatuni said:
"I am writing a dissertation dedicated to the depiction of Turkey in Armenian literature. I often travel to Armenia as a researcher and bring my children with me so they can build a sense of kinship with the Armenian people. Discovering my roots changed everything for me. Though I was raised identifying as a Turk and worked for years in the Istanbul archive, tracing my family tree revealed that I descend from Armenians who converted to Islam during the Armenian Genocide. That discovery reshaped my identity. I began learning the Armenian language, studying the history of the Armenian people, and founded a public organization to promote Armenian culture. I remain a Muslim, but I believe that one can be Armenian and still practice Islam."
After the First World War and the overthrow of the Young Turk government, in 1919–1920 the Ottoman government organized a trial against them, which found the leadership of the "Party of Union and Progress" guilty of the organized extermination of the Armenian population. All the key leaders of the party were sentenced to death, although Enver, Talaat, and Djemal had fled the country by that time and escaped punishment. Nevertheless, the fact of this trial is one of the first cases of recognition and condemnation of the Armenian Genocide.
Throughout its modern history, the Armenian people in Armenia and beyond have been fighting for the recognition and condemnation of the Genocide by the world community. It should be noted that the first time the extermination of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was condemned was by a joint declaration of Great Britain, France, and the Russian Empire on May 24, 1915.
The first country to officially recognize and condemn the Armenian Genocide in this very wording was Uruguay in 1965. Since then, the Genocide has been recognized by 34 countries of the world, many municipal and territorial entities, as well as the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the Parliament of Latin America, the Parliamentary Commission of South America, the World Council of Churches, and the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minority Rights.
Turkey, however, still denies the fact of the mass extermination of the Armenian population and actively prevents further expansion of the list of countries condemning the events of 1915–1923. Its ally Azerbaijan and a number of other countries take the same position. Moreover, Ankara’s actual non-recognition of the presence of Armenians on the territory of the Turkish Republic and the Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan in 1988–1991, as well as the expulsion of 120,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, indicate that the lessons of history have not been learned, and not only Armenian statehood but also the physical existence of the Armenian people is still under threat.
The Genocide is one of the key events in Armenian history, which has had and continues to have a strong influence on the psychology of every Armenian, wherever they live, whatever they do, whatever their values and political views. These tragic events affected almost every Armenian family to one degree or another, leaving behind terrible memories, vivid stories of the heroic behavior of their ancestors, and a clear understanding of the inadmissibility of repeating what happened. The slogan “I remember and demand,” symbolizing the memory of the tragedy and the demand for the restoration of trampled justice, largely determines the life of Armenian society as a whole, serving as an incentive for development, a connecting thread, and a reminder of what could still happen.
Unfortunately, the first Genocide of the 20th century was not the last—20 years later, Adolf Hitler, preparing to attack the USSR and destroy its population, said: “Now, in our time, who still remembers the extermination of millions of Armenians in Turkey in 1915?” And then there was the French genocide of the Algerian population in the 1950s, the American genocide of the Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s, two similar cases in Rwanda and Congo, and the Israeli genocide of Palestinians that continues to this day. This only shows how important it is to remember the lessons of history that, alas, many have forgotten. These and other cases are an obvious reason for every decent person to “remember and demand” together with the Armenians on April 24.
