The Genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government during World War I represents a major tragedy of the modern age. In this the first Genocide of the 20th century, almost an entire nation was destroyed. The Armenian people were effectively eliminated from the homeland they had occupied for nearly three thousand years. This annihilation was premeditated and planned to be carried out under the cover of war. During the night of April 23-24, 1915, Armenian political, religious, educational, and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested, deported to the interior, and mercilessly put to death.
They killed the Armenians using several methods. First, those who were in the army were disarmed, placed in labor battalions, and then killed. Second, the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were rounded up on April 24, 1915, and then killed. This date is Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy. And finally, the remaining Armenians were called from their home, thinking that they were going to be relocated, and marched to concentration camps in the middle of the dessert, where they would die from lack of food and water.
It began in April of 1915 when the Ottoman government set upon the systematic discrimination of its Armenian population. This persecution continued until the Ottoman Empire died and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was about two million in 1915. One million had perished by 1918 while hundreds and thousands became homeless and stateless. By 1923 the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.
Rachel Tibbetts Claudia Gonzalez The Greek Genocide Who: The Ottoman Empire committed genocidal acts against all the Christian minorities, which included the Christian ottoman Greeks consisting of both the Pontiacs and the Anatolians. These Christian Greeks were all victims to a much broader Turkish genocidal project that was also against Armenians, and Assyrians. All of these minorities including the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were killed under the regimes of the Young Turks, a Turkish nationalist reform party in the early 20th century, and of Mustafa Kemal, the second president of Turkey as of 1930. What: The Greek genocide, also know as the Pontiac genocide, was the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Christian Ottoman Greek
Armenians first migrated to North America in large numbers following the massacres of 1894–95 at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. An attempted genocide during World War I (1914–18) led to another influx. Finally, the rise of Arab nationalism during the 1950s led to the emigration of tens of thousands of Armenians from Islamic countries throughout the Middle East. In the U.S. census of 2000 and the Canadian census of 2001, 385,488 Americans claimed Armenian descent, while 40,505 did so in Canada. The early centers of Armenian settlement in the United States were New York City, Boston, and Fresno, California.
The Armenian people had a lot to move on from. Almost all their population was wiped out. The Kurdish Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Iraqi Government against the entire Kurdish population. In Sarafian Fernandes’ paper “After 16 March 1988, one word came to symbolize the tragedy of the Kurds -- Halabja. Halabja is the Kurdish Auschwitz; not because the scale of the massacre was comparable with that of the Nazi death camp, but because the victims were chosen merely because they were Kurdish civilians.” In the beginning before the genocide, Armenians, Kurds and Turks lived in relative harmony in the Ottoman Empire for centuries.
This greatly influenced the Ottomans to carry out a policy to eliminate its Christian Armenian minority. For years prior to the beginning of the war, the Armenians were already witnessing massacres that were being carried out toward their people. The Ottoman government viewed WWI as an opportunity to rid the country of its Armenian
Genocide did not exist before 1944, that is to say, before the Holocaust’s occurrence. At this time, genocide massively destroyed approximately eleven million human beings, six million of these being Jews. Under the detrimental reign of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, these human beings were tortured and slaughtered in every way a person can be destroyed. The description of the Nazis’ systematic murder was referred to as “genocide,” by the Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. He took “geno-“ from the Greek word for race, and added “-cide” from the Latin word for killing.
It is a word that was used to identify sacrifices that ancient Jews made to their God. During these sacrifices people were burnt in fire. Later in January 30, 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the word Holocaust came back to our world. Six million Jews were killed, including the mass number of other murders such as Romani gypsies, homosexuals, black, and Soviet POWs. From January 1933 to May 1945 about 10 million to 11 million people were killed... from babies to elderly people.
“Human Rights Watch” called this 1992 massacre carried out by Armenian military forces against 613 Azerbaijani civilians, including 106 women and 63 children, as "the largest massacre to date in the conflict." Major U.S. and international media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Independent and others reported about the massacre with horror. While all perpetrators of the tragic events mentioned by ACR 96 were caught, tried and sentenced by the court of law, the executors of 1992 Khojaly Massacre, to this day, have never been brought to justice. Therefore, I call on the California State Assembly members to unanimously reject this flawed, biased, and unjust resolution ACR 96, which encourages racial animosity and hatred.