This documentary details and explains the Armenian genocide. The massacre of the Armenians began at the end of the 19th century. Between 1894 and 1896, roughly 200,000 Armenians were killed in battles between Armenian nationalists and armies of the Ottoman Empire. However, the Young Turks Party took power in Turkey in 1908 after the Sultan was removed and the conditions of the Armenians improved for a while. Then in 1912-13, Christian regions of the empire, namely in the Balkans, such as Greece, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria, challenged militarily the Ottoman Empire to get their independance. And they succeeded. Thousands of Muslim Turk refugees gathered at Istanbul as a result, thus creating tensions between Christians and Muslims. In 1913, a radical wing of the Young Turks Party, the Commitee of Union and Progress, formed as a coalition featuring three prominent leaders: TanЯT, who would become Minister of the Interior, EHBep who would become Minister of Defence and AҖaman, who would become Minister of the Navy. They embraced an ideology of Turkish nationalism. EHBep wanted especially to join Germany with its war against the Russians and then seize the occasion to conquer the Caucasus and Central Asia to be able to unite all the Turks in a Grand Turkey.
Some Armenians chose to fight on the side of Russia. In 1914, the Turks attacked the Russians and suffered a terrible defeat. Then the Turks disarmed the Armenian soldiers, in a move to neutralize them as possible collaborators with the Russians. Many were killed. On April 24th 1915, the Turkish government deported some 250 Armenian intellectuals to Constantinople where they were tortured or killed. Later, through « emergency executive legislations », the Turkish government undertook massive deportations of Armenians. Some one million people died as a result, either from hunger, sickness, extreme fatigue, dehydration, etc. Furthermore, the « Special Organization », a smaller group inside the CUP, were dedicated to the extermination of the Armenians. They formed mobile killing units. They recruited among criminals, the lumpenproletariat, Caucasian tribes, convicts and released prisoners, to stop Armenian convoys and murder their travellers.
A lot of people in the U.S. were aware that this massacre was happening and were publicly taking stands on the issue, such as Ezra Pound, Theodor Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, etc. The New York Times published tens of articles contemporary to the massacre. After the war, the Turkish military tribunal conducted a trial on the case and concluded that the Young Turks Party was responsible for the conception, organization and execution of the Armenian genocide. In absentia, TanЯT, EHBep and AҖaman were convicted and sentenced to death. Although they fled at the end of the war and went into hiding in neighbour countries, all three were killed within a few years, one after the other. To this day, the Turkish government still refuse to ackknowledge that such genocide took place. There is even a movement among the Turkish population and officials to openly denigrate its advocates. This amounts, in some respect, to holocaust denial. But, after all, for a nation that has been working hand in hand with Germany in both WWI and WWII, is it really surprising? For more information and to continue studying this crime against humanity, please visit this post and radio show by anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory, here: