The Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust and the Armenian Massacres, was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of about 1.5 million of its minority Armenian subjects inside their historic homeland, which lies within the present-day Republic of Turkey.

The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from Constantinople to Ankara, the majority of whom were eventually murdered.

The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert.

Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre.

Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians, the Ottoman Greeks and the Maronite Christians were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by some historians to be part of the same genocidal policy.

Most Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.

Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation to define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters and to coin the word genocide in 1943.

The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, because scholars point to the organised manner in which the killings were carried out in order to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.

Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide as an accurate term for the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915. It has in recent years been faced with repeated calls to recognise them as genocide.

To date, 29 countries have officially recognized the mass killings as genocide, as have most genocide scholars and historians.