This site is dedicated to remembrance of the victims of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by Ottoman Empire. About 1.5 million Armenians were massacred from 1895 to 1923, and the world closed its eyes while a nation was being exterminated. Their memories will serve as a reminder of what prejudice, racism, nationalism and false progressivism can do if not confronted. And to this day Turkey denies the Armenian genocide happened, but history cannot be hidden or rewritten.
Photo Collection of Armin T. Wegner Caption: "Abandoned and murdered small children of the (Armenian) deportees, "according to the photographer, 1915-1916. Three are dead including stripped boy in gutter. Location: Ottoman empire, region Syria.
What are your thoughts when you look at this picture?
When I see that man walking away in a suit, shows how indifferent a human being can be to the sufferings of others. Children are dying and some already dead he walks away.
These children parents are murdered in the hands of Turks because they were Armenians. Now they are orphans.
Indifference is one of the greatest sins.
The Bible tells us:
James 2:13 "For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy"
As a result of the Genocide of the Armenians in 1915, the deportation from Cilicia (1921) and the disaster of Izmir (1922), more than 1.5 million Western Armenians were exterminated in the hands of Turks, while those who were rescued and miraculously survived, remained homeless and deprived of their motherland; they were forced to migrate and to settle in different countries of the world, creating the Armenian Diaspora as a historical reality.
I would like to warn you, after reading these testimonies you might "lose" your mind thinking how a human being can do such a cruel thing to another human being.
Research on the Armenian Genocide has experienced a remarkable growth in recent years. Survivors' memoirs, editions of diplomatic documents, eyewitness accounts by missionaries and others, case studies, and monographic research on various aspects of the Genocide provide informed insights into the nature of the crime.
A considerable number of the available studies on the subject have involved the denial of this genocide. Deniers allege that the Ottoman government never persecuted systematically or attempted to exterminate the empire's Armenian population. On the contrary, one is asked to believe that it was the Armenians who killed a substantial part of the Muslim population in what is presented as a "civil war". Moreover Armenians are blamed for having started this civil war in order to assist the Russian army's advance on the Eastern front and to bring down the Ottoman government. Deniers maintain that relatively few Armenians died in connection with what they claim to have been a legitimate act of Ottoman government self-defense.
Denial of genocide is not unique to the Armenian case. As with other crimes, perpetrators try to avoid punishment by obstructing investigation and research. Those engaged in denial employ a multitude of techniques. These methods cover a wide range of activities, from simply ignoring the established historical record to the intimidation of scholars.
Denial of both the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide was initiated by the perpetrators immediately upon commencement of the extermination of their targeted victims. However, denial of the Armenian Genocide differs significantly from that of the Holocaust. Whereas the Nazi Germans were permanently crippled by their defeat in World War II, the Ottoman government was able to reorganize itself following defeat. With slightly altered personnel, the government that had been the "Committee of Union and Progress" (CUP), which was responsible for the Armenian Genocide, was able to reemerge by way of the nationalist movement, ostensibly led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Thus, the CUP cadres managed to keep control to Turkish politics for many years to come and were able to perpetuate their denial propaganda as the official Turkish historical thesis on the Armenian Genocide. This denial was, and today still is, formulated in official Turkish government publications and distributed worldwide.
Hilmar Kaiser German research scholar and historian from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy
Those who want to shield today’s Turkey from responsibility for the Armenian Genocide have sought to blame the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire rather than the Republic of Turkey which was not established until 1923.
One wonders then why Turkish officials, who have tried every trick to deny the facts of the Armenian Genocide, have not taken the easy way out by shifting the blame for the Genocide to the long defunct Ottoman Empire.
A frequently advanced explanation is that Turks, as a proud people, cannot accept that their ancestors committed the heinous crime of seeking to eliminate an entire nation. Others have argued that should the Republic of Turkey blame the Ottomans for the Armenian Genocide, it could be held legally liable as the successor state to the Ottoman Empire.
In recent years, however, it has become clear, particularly through the painstaking research conducted by Turkish scholar Taner Akcam, that a key reason why today’s Turkish officials are not prepared to face their history honestly and blame their Ottoman ancestors is that the Republic of Turkey is actually the continuation of the Ottoman state. Indeed, many of the early leaders of the Turkish Republic had been high-ranking Ottoman officials personally involved in the implementation of the Armenian Genocide. Such an unbroken transition in leadership assured the continuity of the Ottomans’ anti-Armenian policies.
In retrospect, it has become apparent that these genocidal policies stretched over a half century, starting with Sultan Abdul Hamid’s massacre of 300,000 Armenians in 1894-96, followed by the killings of 30,000 Armenians in Adana by the Young Turk regime in 1909, culminating in the Genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-23, and the subsequent policies of forced Turkification and deportation of tens of thousands of Armenians by the Republic of Turkey.
An important document from the U.S. archives, known until now to a handful of scholars, was recently posted on an Armenian/Turkish website. It provides incontestable evidence that Armenians continued to be uprooted from their native lands and deported by the Republic of Turkey well into the 1930’s for purely racial reasons.
The document in question is a "Strictly Confidential" cable dated March 2, 1934, sent by U.S. Ambassador Robert P. Skinner from Ankara to the Secretary of State in Washington, reporting the deportation of 600 Armenians from "the interior of Anatolia to Istanbul."
The Ambassador wrote: "It is assumed by most of the deportees that their expulsion from their homes in Anatolia is a part of the Government’s program of making Anatolia a pure Turkish district. They relate that the Turkish police, in towns and villages where Armenians lived, attempted to instigate local Moslem people to drive the Armenians away. … The Armenians were told that they had to leave at once for Istanbul. They sold their possessions receiving for them ruinous prices. I have been told that cattle worth several hundred liras a head had been sold for as little as five liras a head. My informant stated that the Armenians were permitted to sell their property in order that no one of them could say that they were forced to abandon it. However, the sale under these conditions amounted to a practical abandonment." Sass
The Ambassador further reported: "The Armenians were obliged to walk from their villages to the railways and then they were shipped by train to Istanbul. … The real reason for the deportations is unknown…. It is likely, though, that their removal is simply one step in the government’s avowed policy of making Anatolia purely Turkish."
Top be sure, in the 1920’s and 30’s thousands of Armenian survivors of the Genocide were forced out from their homes in Anatolia to other locations in Turkey or neighboring countries. These racist policies were followed in the 1940’s by Varlik Vergisi, the imposition of exorbitant wealth taxes on Armenians, Greeks and Jews, and the 1955 Istanbul pogroms during which many Greeks and some Armenians and Jews were killed and their properties destroyed.
This barbaric continuum of massacre, genocide and deportation highlights the existence of a long-term stratagem implemented by successive Turkish regimes from the 1890’s to recent times in order to solve the Armenian Question with finality.
Consequently, the Republic of Turkey is legally responsible for its own crimes as well as those committed by its Ottoman predecessors.
By Harut Sassounian, Publisher, The California Courier
Members of the Armenian community join a demonstration march in London in 2005. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA
Turkey risks a collapse of its secular political system akin to that of the Soviet Union if it bows to international pressure to recognise the 1915-22 Armenian genocide, the head of Armenia's state memorial to the event has told the Guardian.
Hayk Demoyan said Ankara could not acknowledge the systematic killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman troops during the first world war because it would lead to a wholesale re-writing of history and undermine the ideological basis of the Turkish state.
In remarks that will cast a shadow over attempts to forge a new Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, he said those implicated included Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey and a figure Turks are taught to revere. Historical documents proved Atatürk committed "war crimes" against Armenians and other groups in his drive to create an ethnically homogeneous Turkish state, Demoyan insisted. "Fear of rewriting history is the main fear of modern Turkey," said Demoyan, director of The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia's capital.
"It is a fear of facing historical reality and causing a total collapse of the ideological axis that modern republican Turkey was formed around. Turks get panicked when you compare Atatürk's legacy to Lenin.
Atatürk was sentenced to death in absentia by a military judge to punish war crimes during the first world war. There are documents from non-Armenian sources listing him as a war criminal ."
Demoyan's remarks come amid fledgling attempts to re-establish links between two countries which have not had diplomatic relations since 1994, following a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Turkey's ally.
Tentative efforts towards normalising ties occurred this month when the Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, visited Yerevan to attend a World Cup football match between Turkey and Armenia at the invitation of his Armenian counterpart, Serge Sarkisian.
Unlike most visiting heads of state, Gül did not visit the genocide museum, which displays documentary and photographic exhibits proving, Armenian officials say, that their ethnic brethren were subjected to deliberate genocide. Turkey vehemently denies this and has jailed Turkish citizens who argued otherwise. However, rising numbers of Turkish tourists and journalists have visited the museum recently.
"More than 500 Turks have visited this year. They've come in unprecedented numbers," Demoyan said. "Their reaction is one of shock. At first there is denial. Sometimes they ask: 'What is our sin?' or 'How can we be responsible for this?'. It's not taught in Turkish schools, so we understand their reaction."
Turkey claims the Armenian death toll has been exaggerated and that most victims died from starvation or disease. It also argues that many Turks were killed by Armenian groups.
Statement by 126 Holocaust Scholars, Holders of Academic Chairs, and Directors of Holocaust Research and StudiesCenters– March 7th, 2000
At the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Scholar’s Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches Convening at St. Joseph University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 3-7, 2000, one hundred and twenty-six Holocaust Scholars, holders of Academic Chairs and Directors of Holocaust Research and Studies Centers, participants of the Conference, signed a statement affirming that the World War I Armenian Genocide is an incontestable historical fact and accordingly urge the governments of Western democracies to likewise recognize it as such.
The petitioners, among whom is Nobel Laureate for Peace Elie Wiesel, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, also asked the Western Democracies to urge the Government and Parliament of Turkey to finally come to terms with a dark chapter of Ottoman-Turkish history and to recognize the Armenian Genocide. This would provide an invaluable impetus to the process of the democratization of Turkey.
Below is a partial list of the signatories:
Prof. Yehuda Bauer – Distinguished Professor, HebrewUniversity; Director, The International Institute of Holocaust Research,Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
Prof. Israel Charny, Director – Institute of the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem; Professor at the HebrewUniversity; Editor-in-Chief of The
Encyclopedia of Genocide
Prof. Ward Churchill – Ethnic Studies, The University of Colorado, Boulder
Prof. Stephen Feinstein – Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota
Prof. Saul Friedman – Director, Holocaust and Jewish Studies, Youngston State University, Ohio
Prof. Edward Gaffney – ValparaisoUniversityLawSchool
Prof. Zev Garber – Los AngelesValleyCollege
Prof. Dorota Glowacka – University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Dr. Irving Greenberg, – President, Jewish Life Network
Prof. Herbert Hirsch – VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity
Prof. Irving L. Horowitz – Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University, NJ
Rabbi Dr. Steve Jacobs – TempleSinai Shalom, Huntsville, Alabama; Associate Editor of The Encyclopedia of Genocide
Prof. Steven Katz – Distinguish Professor, Director, Center for Judaic Studies, BostonUniversity
Prof. Richard Libowitz – TempleUniversity
Dr. Elizabeth Maxwell – Executive Director of the International Scholarly, Conference on the Holocaust, London, England
Prof. Erik Markusen – Southwest State University, MN
Prof. Saul Mendlowitz – Dag Hammerskjold Distinguished Professor of International Law, RutgersUniversity
Prof. Jack Needle – Director, Center for Holocaust Studies, BrookdaleCommunity College, Lincroft, NJ
Dr. Philip Rosen – Director, HolocaustEducationCenter of the DelawareValley
Prof. Alan S, Rosenbaum – Dept. of Philosophy, ClevelandStateUniversity
William L. Shulman – President, Association of HolocaustOrganizationsCityUniversity of New York
Prof. Samuel Totten – The University of Arkansas; Assoc. Editor of The Encyclopedia of Genocide
Prof. Elie Wiesel – Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, BostonUniversity; Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Council; Nobel Laureate for Peace
I hereby declare that the originals of these one hundred and twenty-six signatories are on file in my office. All affiliations supplied are for identification purposes only.
Dr. Stephen Feinstein,
Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota
Photo Collection of Armin T. Wegner
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