Essay On Armenian Genocide

1158 Words5 Pages
Matthew Harrington History 101-30 10/16/09 During the beginning of the twentieth century, humankind was witnessing what would be the first of two major world wars. Millions were fighting for their respective countries in hopes to resolve problems that had been building up over the years. The Ottoman Empire was vastly diverse region that consisted of many nation states and at one time consisted much of Southeastern Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. Ruled by Muslim Turks, the Empire was very angered when some of the Ottoman Armenians that were on the border with Russia had helped the Russian Army in WWI to try to defeat the Empire. 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…show more content…
It is determined that 1.5 million out of the 2 million Armenians were killed in this genocide. The only part of the Armenian cultural remaining is their language, songs, poetry, and their tragic memories (Adalian). To the rest of the world the Armenian genocide is unclear and many governments do not except this occurrence as genocide. During the time of the genocide many governments were preoccupied with their countries involvement in WWI. This led to a lack of any attempts to try and stop it from occurring and as some were rescued the overall outcome was too little too late (Adalian). “For the allies, their failure to protect the Armenians had been a major embarrassment, one worth forgetting” (Adalian). Many of the countries were so embarrassed with their lack of help that they felt it was better to just forget what happened all

More about Essay On Armenian Genocide

Open Document