April 24 marked the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, during which up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottman Empire.
Tensions always rise between the Armenians and the modern Turkish government at this time of year, and many Armenians are now taking time during the day to reflect on Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Armenians from the Nagorno-Karabakh region in late 2023.
Modern historians look upon the events of 1915-1916 as the first of several genocidal events in the 20th Century, while Turkey disputes the allegation that its Ottoman predecessors were attempting to systematically eliminate the Armenian people, as Nazi Germany would later treat the Jews, or the Hutus of Rwanda would treat the Tutsis.
April 24, 1915, was the day when the Ottoman nationalists known as “Young Turks” ordered the arrest of some 250 Armenian intellectuals and political leaders in Constantinople, the city now known as Istanbul. The Young Turks justified these arrests by claiming the Armenians were treacherous while fighting as part of the Ottoman military in the First World War.
Ongoing accusations of treachery led the Ottomans to begin forcibly relocating Armenians away from the front lines of combat against Russia – which happened to be where most of the Armenians lived. Many died on the march to concentration camps and many more were killed in the camps.
There were numerous international witnesses to these atrocities, including foreign reporters and military officers. Modern Turkish politicians are generally willing to admit that Armenian civilians were killed and abused in great numbers, but they insist there is no documented proof that the Ottoman government was deliberately trying to exterminate the entire Armenian people.
The Armenians say the Ottomans wanted to eliminate them because they were an inconvenient Christian people standing in the way of the Young Turks’ vision for a mighty Turkic empire that would stretch from the Caucasus all the way to China.
The oppressed Uyghur Muslims of East Turkistan, the region annexed by Communist China and rebranded as “Xinjiang province,” are a Turkic people who dwelled on the edge of the empire the Ottomans wished to build. The Uyghurs have been subjected to a campaign of concentration camps, indoctrination, and forced relocation by China, which the U.S. government declared to be genocidal in character during the last days of the first Trump administration.
Many Armenians today accuse Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing – eliminating a people by forcibly relocating them, rather than murdering them all – after its military conquest of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in 2023.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a swath of territory that fell inside the borders of Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but most of its inhabitants were ethnic Armenians, who had dwelled in the area they called the “Republic of Artsakh” for centuries, ever since the height of the greater Armenian kingdom.
The contested region is mountainous and difficult to access, which made it strategically vital during the age of imperial conquest. Several invading powers had the idea to control the region by killing the Armenians, driving them out, or converting them to Islam, but a small number of them hung on until 2023, when Azerbaijan first weakened them with a harsh blockade and then conquered Nagorno-Karabakh by force. Within a few months, the Republic of Artsakh was formally dissolved and most of the Armenian Christians had been driven from their homes.
Writing at the Christian Post last Sunday, religious freedom advocate David Curry urged the U.S. government to hold Azerbaijan accountable for abusing Armenians and other Christians, including the ethnic and religious cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) designated Azerbaijan as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) for oppression in May 2024, but that designation was downgraded to the less urgent “special watch list” status this year. Curry argued that downgrade was unwarranted:
Azerbaijan’s authoritarian regime under President Ilham Aliyev has cultivated an environment where religious freedom is systematically suppressed. Despite claims by Azerbaijani lobbyists that the nation is an exemplar of tolerance, international watchdogs like Freedom House consistently rank it among the worst violators of political rights and civil liberties. The destruction of Armenian Christian landmarks and forced displacement of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh further highlights the regime’s disregard for religious diversity.
The CPC designation by USCIRF could lead to diplomatic actions such as sanctions or other measures aimed at pressuring Azerbaijan to improve its human rights record. However, meaningful change may remain elusive without sustained international advocacy.
Azerbaijan has joined Turkey in downplaying the 1915 genocide, running editorials that argue the Ottomans were right to turn their guns against Armenian saboteurs during the First World War, accusing the Armenians of perpetrating their own massacres, and claiming the death toll from the genocide has been greatly exaggerated.
Imad Tataryan, secretary-general of the Armenian Union Party, said on Thursday that Armenians living across the world should get better at organizing to oppose ethnic cleansing and genocide, against themselves and others.
Tataryan saw a disturbing symmetry between ethnic and religious oppression in Syria today and the Armenian genocide, for example, since many of the Armenians killed in 1915-16 were driven into the Syrian desert to die.
“Any people that loses its leadership and lacks civil and military institutions to defend it becomes vulnerable to genocide. Therefore, it is necessary to build institutions that represent all religious, ethnic, and sectarian components,” he said.
Some in the Armenian diaspora have criticized the government of Armenia for stepping back from its efforts to get the other nations of the world to formally recognize the 1915 genocide, in part because the government believes it is making diplomatic progress with Turkey and Azerbaijan.
In March, Armenian President Nikol Pashinyan told Turkish reporters that obtaining international recognition of the Armenian Genocide “is not among our foreign policy priorities today.” He hinted that insisting on recognition of the event was an obstacle to signing a treaty with Azerbaijan or normalizing relations with Turkey.
“I want to be very clear that in Armenia and among Armenians, [the Genocide] is an indisputable truth. In other words, it is simply impossible to deny or disavow it in our reality, because it is an undeniable truth for all of us,” he added.
No official genocide remembrance events were scheduled in the Armenian capital of Yerevan on Thursday. Some mourners who made the long climb to the genocide memorial in the hills above Yerevan thought Pashinyan had the situation backward and there was no reason to trust any agreement with Turkey or Azerbaijan until they acknowledge the Genocide.
“What our government is even thinking? How can we trust Turkey, which openly supported Azerbaijan during the Karabakh war and still refuses to recognize the genocide?” asked 72-year-old Aram Hayrapetyan, who vowed to continue climbing the hill every year in honor of his late wife, “as long as I have strength in my legs.”
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