Introduction
The guide Studying Genocides presents nine genocides recognized by the UN, Canada, or Quebec. Here, discover the case of the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire, presented through four sections: the first section provides context for the study with a map, highlights, and a timeline; the second offers a problematization of the case under study; the third examines essential elements of the historical context; and the fourth section describes the genocide according to the six stages of the genocidal process.
EXCERPT FROM AN ACCOUNT
"My father was killed in the Turkish army. It was easier to kill them there than to go and look for them. They called my mother to tell her to pick up her husband’s personal effects in Istanbul. When she got there, they told her not to go back to her village because they were slaughtering Armenians. It was easier to survive in Istanbul, which was then known as Constantinople"
Credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Timeline
Highlights
- Murder of more than 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire
- Creation of concentration camps for Armenians, deportation, rape and mass murder
- Ancient region of Anatolia and Cilicia, now Turkey
- Lands occupied by the Armenians for millenniums
- Armenian neighbourhoods and villages in the Ottoman Empire
- From 1915 to 1923 (period studied: events of 1915-1916)
- The perpetrators were the Muslim Turks in the Ottoman Empire.
- Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmed Djemal led the Turkish government from 1913 to 1918.
- The victims were Christian Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs in the Ottoman Empire.
The full Story
We have developed a comprehensive document that outlines and summarizes the entire narrative. Please download, print, and utilize it for your teaching and study purposes.
Pictures
Testimonials
Group by group, they took us out to a valley and killed us. By a miracle I was not killed. Il survived underneath the corpses. I must have been four or five years old. I was crying. A lady heard me and found me. There isn’t a night that a go to bed and don’t think about the events of those days. I am all alone in this world, completely alone. I relive everything.
“My father followed me with his gaze. He was bidding me farewell as he held a handkerchief to his eyes. I never saw him alive again after that. . . . Afterwards, I witnessed such atrocities that their memory makes my hair stand on end, even after so many years. I saw with my own eyes how the Turkish and Kurdish cowherds went into the caravans to choose young girls, mistreating them like animals and then getting rid of them. . . . In the fields, and while on the road, we saw people dressed like Turks. They were sad, beaten down, despairing, with a torrent of unwept tears in their eyes. Who were they? Their faces were different from Turkish faces.”