![]() ![]() These events, and general Turkish suspicion of the Armenian people, led the Turkish government to push for the “removal” of the Armenians from the war zones along the Eastern Front. Indeed, as the war intensified, Armenians organized volunteer battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Turks in the Caucasus region. Military leaders began to argue that the Armenians were traitors: If they thought they could win independence if the Allies were victorious, this argument went, the Armenians would be eager to fight for the enemy. (At the same time, Ottoman religious authorities declared a holy war against all Christians except their allies.) In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. According to this way of thinking, non-Turks-and especially Christian non-Turks-were a grave threat to the new state. A group of reformers who called themselves the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government.Īt first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have an equal place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic Young Turks wanted most of all was to “Turkify” the empire. In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered. In response to large-scale protests by Armenians, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. ![]() “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.” First Armenian Massacreīetween 18, this “box on the ear” took the form of a state-sanctioned pogrom. “I will soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble: At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II-obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights-declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all. This resentment was compounded by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they were to the Ottoman caliphate. They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn grew to resent their success. In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community thrived under Ottoman rule. Christians paid higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and had very few political or legal rights. They permitted religious minorities to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, whom they viewed as “infidels,” to unequal and unjust treatment. The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were Muslim. During the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an independent entity: At the beginning of the 4th century A.D., for instance, it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion.īut for the most part, control of the region shifted from one empire to another. The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years. ![]()
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