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The Armenians are an ancient people, having inhabited the highland
region between the Black, Caspian, and Mediterranean seas for
nearly 3,000 years. They are noted in Greek and Persian sources
as early as the 6th century B.C. On a strategic crossroads
between East and West, Armenia was at various times independent
under a national dynasty, autonomous under native princes who paid
tribute to foreign powers, or subject to direct foreign rule. The
Armenians were the first people to adopt Christianity as a
national religion, developing a distinct Indo-European language,
alphabet, and national-religious culture.
The Turkish invasion of Armenia began in the 11th century A.D.,
and the last Armenian kingdom fell three centuries later. Most of
the territories that had once formed the ancient and medieval
Armenian kingdoms were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the
16th century. As a Christian minority, Armenians endured
second-class citizenship, including restrictions on many aspects
of their participation in society, special taxes, and a
prohibition on bearing arms.
During WWI, The Young Turk political faction made a secret
agreement with Berlin. In return for joining the war against
Great Britain, France, and Russia, they sought the creation of a
new Turkish state extending into Central Asia. The ideology
called "Pan Turkism" (creating an homogenous Turkish state) now
saw Armenians as an obstacle to the realization of that goal.
On April 24th, 1915, several hundred Armenian community leaders
and intellectuals in Constantinople (Istanbul) were arrested, sent
east, and put to death. In May, after mass deportations had
already begun, Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha, claiming
that Armenians could offer aid and comfort to the enemy and were
in a state of imminent rebellion, ordered their deportation (after
the fact) to "relocation centers" - actually the barren Syrian
desert.
Armenians in the Ottoman armies, serving separately in unarmed
labor battalions, were removed and murdered. Of the remaining
population, the adult and teenage males were separated from the
deportation caravans and killed under the direction of Young Turk
functionaries. Women and children were driven for months over
mountains and desert, often raped, tortured, and mutilated.
Deprived of food and water, they fell by the hundreds of thousands
along the routes to the desert. Ultimately, more than half the
Armenian population, 1,500,000 people were annihilated. In this
manner the Armenian people were eliminated from their homeland of
several millennia. Thousands of refugees scattered throughout the
Arab provinces and the Caucasus died of starvation, epidemic, and
exposure. Churches and cultural monuments were destroyed and
small surviving children were renamed and raised as non-Armenians.
"The important point in understanding a tragedy such as this is
not the exact and precise count of the number who died, that will
never be known, but the fact that more than half the Armenian
population perished and the rest were forcibly driven form their
ancestral homeland. Another important point is that what befell
the Armenians was by the will of the government." - excerpted from
the Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide,
published for the California State Board of Education by the
California State Department of Education.
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