"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" - The United Nations Definition of "Genocide"
The Turkish government insists that the events concerning Armenian minorities in 1915 and 1916 were the products of a "war." By bringing to light the fact that some Armenians conspired against the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish government tries to justify the actions it took against the Armenians in the early 20th century. If the Armenian Genocide is a "war," the deaths that resulted are justified as casualties of war.
Time and time again, governments try to defend exterminations by labeling them as "battles," or "wartime events." However, these killings were all "intended to destroy" a group of people. The atomic bombings during World War 2 killed as many as 100,000 in minutes. Why were these events labeled as "bombings" rather than "genocide?" Because of the loose definition of genocide, and the broad labels that governments apply to most of these events, many catastrophes will not be recognized as "genocide" until we as a people are educated to recognize them as such.
Following up on the definition, the criteria for genocide listed by the United Nations includes:
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• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• Deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to physically destroy the group (the whole group or even part of the group)
• Forcefully transferring children of the group to another group
The Turks’ massacre of over one million Armenians visibly meets the criteria for genocide. Estimates place the death toll at one and a half million Armenians, a number that constitutes over half of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. In addition, the Turks deliberately inflicted bodily harm on Armenians through methods of torture such as the bastinado and imitations of the Crucifixion. The Turks’ calculated attempt to destroy the Armenian race is visible in the attitude of Young Turks officials who “made no secret of the fact that the Government had instigated [the torture] and…enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race” (167). Essentially, the massacre of the Armenians can be viewed as a government-sanctioned death warrant to an entire race. One prominent figure of the Young Turks, Pasha Talaat, even boasted, “I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years” (176). The Turkish government looked down upon the Armenians, viewed them as a problem, and found justification and pride by looking back to the past. Even though the Turkish government committed several acts that fall under the definition of genocide, the lack of recognition of these acts as genocide can be summed up by Aunt Gladys’s words, “You only understand things in life when you are ready to understand them” (214). Perhaps, complete recognition of the massacre of Armenians will come in due time once the Turkish Government is willing to admit and “understand” its wrongdoings of the past.
References:
•http://www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/treaties/genocide.asp
•http://www.umd.umich.edu/dept/armenian/facts/genocide.html