When was armenian genocide

Minority religious communities, like the Christian Armenians, were allowed to maintain their religious, social and legal structures, but were often subject to extra taxes or other measures. Concentrated largely in eastern Anatolia, many of them merchants and industrialists, Armenians, historians say, appeared markedly better off in many ways than their Turkish neighbors, largely small peasants or ill-paid government functionaries and soldiers.

They were led by what became an all-powerful triumvirate sometimes referred to as the Three Pashas. They attacked to the east, hoping to capture the city of Baku in what would be a disastrous campaign against Russian forces in the Caucuses. They were soundly defeated at the battle of Sarikemish. Armenians in the area were blamed for siding with the Russians and the Young Turks began a campaign to portray the Armenians as a kind of fifth column, a threat to the state.

Indeed, there were Armenian nationalists who acted as guerrillas and cooperated with the Russians. They briefly seized the city of Van in the spring of Armenians mark the date April 24, , when several hundred Armenian intellectuals were rounded up, arrested and later executed as the start of the Armenian genocide and it is generally said to have extended to However, there were also massacres of Armenians in , , , , and a reprise between and A later law allowed the confiscation of abandoned Armenian property.

Armenians were ordered to turn in any weapons that they owned to the authorities. At the time a number of influential people spoke out against these atrocities, most notably the distinguished historian Arnold J.

Toynbee, but it has only been since the s that scholars have devoted anything like sustained attention to this human catastrophe. There is more than enough evidence to suggest that the mass murder of the Armenians was a case of genocide, as that crime was subsequently defined in the United Nations Genocide Convention of This year, , marks the centennial of the Armenian Genocide.

Its first phase began on April 24, , as the Ottoman government arrested and murdered hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. The killing expanded into brutal massacres of the male Armenian population across Ottoman lands and the deportation of Armenian women, children, and the elderly into the Syrian Desert. More than one million Armenians were killed—roughly 70 percent of the total Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire.