This article has been written for Easy History by Deniz Gun Erazlan.
Introduction:
On 24 April 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested in Istanbul by the Ottoman authorities. This marked the beginning of what would become one of the 20th century’s first genocides, a campaign of forced deportation, mass killings, and starvation that would claim the lives of an estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenians. Carried out under the cover of World War I, the violence was systematic, state-directed, and devastating.
Today, 110 years later, the Armenian Genocide remains a subject of painful memory and political controversy. For Armenians, it is a foundational trauma, commemorated every April and passed down through generations. For the Turkish state, it remains a term largely denied, avoided, or reframed as wartime tragedy. And for much of the world, it remains a history often forgotten or politically inconvenient to acknowledge.
This article explores what happened in 1915, why it’s called a genocide, and why, more than a century later, the events still matter. As global recognition slowly expands and denial persists, the legacy of the Armenian Genocide continues to shape politics, identity, and the way we understand justice after mass violence.
The Empire on the Brink: Collapse, War, and Scapegoating:
In the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was in crisis. Its borders were shrinking, nationalist movements were gaining ground, and the empire was struggling to modernise. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 deepened these challenges. The Ottoman leadership, dominated by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a political movement led by Turkish nationalists, joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. With enemies on multiple fronts, internal unity became a growing concern.
Among the empire’s many populations, the Armenians were seen as suspect. Though Armenians had lived in Anatolia for centuries, the CUP accused them of colluding with Russia, especially in eastern provinces where Armenian volunteers had joined the Russian army. This accusation, though exaggerated and politically convenient, became the justification for what followed.
On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman government began by arresting hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, politicians, and community leaders in Istanbul. From there, the policy expanded rapidly. Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were disarmed and executed. Civilians were forcibly deported from their homes and sent on foot across deserts toward present-day Syria and Iraq. These “deportations” often became death marches, with starvation, exhaustion, and massacres claiming tens of thousands of lives along the way.
According to historian Taner Akçam, this was no spontaneous breakdown of law and order. It was a coordinated state campaign, designed to remove Armenians from Anatolia. Ottoman officials issued secret orders, used euphemisms like “relocation,” and worked with local militias to ensure that Armenian communities were permanently destroyed. The violence was not limited to one region; it extended from the eastern provinces to cities like Aleppo and even into the Syrian desert.
Eyewitnesses and diplomats reported the atrocities at the time, and as they happened. In a 1916 collection compiled by British MP James Bryce and historian Arnold Toynbee, reports from missionaries, doctors, and foreign officials documented the killings in harrowing detail. One American consul in Aleppo described the deportations as “a massacre, not a relocation.” These reports would later influence Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide decades later.
By 1917, the once-thriving Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire had been reduced to near extinction. Entire communities were wiped out, churches destroyed, and families scattered into exile. In total, between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have perished, not through battle, but through state-orchestrated violence.
Under pressure from Allied powers after the war, the Ottoman government briefly acknowledged the crimes. Several CUP leaders fled abroad, and a few were tried in absentia. But this period of reckoning was short-lived. With the rise of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, the genocide became a taboo subject, erased from official memory and reframed as wartime chaos.
Today, historians like Ronald Grigor Suny and Akçam agree: what happened in 1915 was not an accident of war, but a deliberate attempt to eliminate an ethnic population from the empire. It was, in Lemkin’s terms, a genocide.
Denial and Recognition: A Century of Silence:
The Armenian Genocide is one of the most well-documented atrocities of the 20th century. And yet, for over a hundred years, it has been the subject of fierce denial, especially by the Republic of Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire. While many countries, historians, and human rights organisations have formally recognised the genocide, Turkish governments have consistently rejected the label, arguing instead that the Armenian deaths were the tragic result of civil war, disease, and famine during a time of imperial collapse.
This narrative of denial did not appear immediately after the genocide. In the early years following the First World War, Ottoman courts briefly tried some leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress. There was at least a moment of partial acknowledgment. But with the rise of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the foundation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923, there was a shift. A new national identity was being built, one that focused on sovereignty, unity, and progress. Acknowledging a state-orchestrated atrocity against an ethnic minority did not fit into that vision.
According to sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek, denial became part of the very architecture of modern Turkish nationalism. In her work Denial of Violence, she explains how generations of Turkish citizens were educated to believe that Armenians had betrayed the empire and that their suffering, while regrettable, was not the result of genocide. Public discussion of the events was taboo, and historians or journalists who challenged the official narrative often faced backlash or legal consequences.
Even as survivor testimonies were recorded and Armenian communities in the diaspora campaigned for recognition, Turkey remained firm. For decades, the word “genocide” was treated as an insult to national dignity. Laws like Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code made it a criminal offence to “insult Turkishness,” and were used to prosecute those who publicly discussed 1915 as genocide – including the Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk and murdered journalist Hrant Dink.
Internationally, recognition has been slow and politically complicated. France, Canada, Russia, and most of South America have recognised the genocide in full. The United States, long a close NATO ally of Turkey, only officially used the word “genocide” in 2021, when President Joe Biden issued a statement on April 24 calling the events by their true name. The Turkish government immediately condemned the decision.
As historian Ronald Grigor Suny notes, the denial of genocide is not just a refusal to use a word. It is a strategy – one that protects national myths, avoids legal responsibility, and distances a modern state from the violence of its past. The Turkish state has often promoted alternative explanations: that the war was chaotic, that all populations suffered, or that the numbers are exaggerated. But as the evidence has grown – from Ottoman telegrams to foreign consular reports – the gap between fact and denial has widened.
Still, resistance to forgetting persists. In the Armenian diaspora, especially in the United States, France, and Lebanon, memory is preserved through museums, literature, education, and activism. Survivors’ descendants have become powerful voices in the international campaign for recognition. As journalist and scholar Vicken Cheterian puts it, “the genocide is not over until it is recognised” – because denial itself is part of the ongoing trauma.
The Legacy Today: Memory, Justice, and the Fight for Recognition:
More than a century after the genocide, its consequences continue to ripple through Armenian communities – not only as history, but as living memory. For the global Armenian diaspora, especially in countries like the United States, France, Lebanon, and Argentina, the genocide is a foundational trauma. It is not just a family story passed down from survivors – it is a defining part of identity, and a cause around which communities have organised for decades.
Recognition, for many Armenians, is not just about terminology. It is about justice. As Vicken Cheterian writes, the genocide left not only bodies and ruined towns, but “open wounds” – a sense of historical injury made worse by a century of denial. These wounds are felt in political marginalisation, cultural erasure, and the failure to hold perpetrators accountable. That denial, he argues, is not merely an absence of truth, but an extension of original violence.
This legacy has given rise to memory activism. Across the world, Armenian communities have built genocide memorials, museums, and archives. Testimonies collected by projects like the USC Shoah Foundation preserve the voices of survivors, many of whom were children in 1915. Their stories tell of deportations, family separations, hidden identities, and long exile. These testimonies have been essential in humanising the history, and in countering official denial with personal truth.
In Turkey itself, memory is more fractured. While official state policy remains one of rejection or avoidance, a small but growing number of Turkish scholars, journalists, and activists have begun to confront the past. Writers like Taner Akçam and Fatma Müge Göçek have faced hostility for their work, but also sparked important public conversations. For some younger generations in Turkey, the Armenian Genocide is no longer a forbidden topic – though it remains politically and socially sensitive.
The politics of recognition have also grown more complex. In 2021, the U.S. government formally recognised the genocide, following years of lobbying by Armenian advocacy groups. It was a significant symbolic moment, but it also revealed how deeply tied this issue remains to geopolitics. Turkey condemned the move, warning it would damage relations – just as it has after similar acknowledgments from France, Germany, and others. In many ways, recognising the genocide is still treated as a diplomatic statement, not simply a historical one.
At the regional level, the legacy of the genocide shaped the difficult relationship between Turkey and Armenia. The two countries have no official diplomatic ties, and their shared border remains closed. Recent efforts to normalise relations – often driven by third-party states – have stalled in part due to this unresolved history. Meanwhile, conflicts such as the Nagorno-Karabakh war have reignited trauma in Armenian communities and deepened fears of erasure.
But despite these tensions, the genocide is increasingly visible. In literature, art, film, and education, the story is being told – not only by Armenians, but by those committed to truth and justice. As Cheterian argues, “remembrance is an act of resistance” – one that pushes against both denial and forgetting.
Conclusion:
The Armenian Genocide was not only one of the first mass atrocities of the 20th century – it was a defining moment in the collapse of an empire and the shaping of modern memory. More than a century later, the killings of 1915 remain a source of grief, political tension, and moral reckoning. For many Armenians, the loss is not distant – it lives in family stories, disrupted communities, and the continued absence of recognition.
To remember the genocide is not just to mark a historical fact. It is to honour the victims, confront denial, and uphold the principle that truth matters – even when it is inconvenient. In a world where mass violence still occurs, remembrance is not about the past alone. It is about the future: building a world where justice is not optional, and where no crime of such magnitude is allowed to fade in silence.
References:
- Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press: 2012)
- Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide (Hurst: 2015)
- Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (Oxford University Press: 2015)
- Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press: 2015)
- James Bryce & Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1916)
- Armenian National Institute, “Sample Archival Documents on the Armenian Genocide” (available at https://www.armenian-genocide.org/sampledocs.html)
- USC Shoah Foundation, “Armenian Genocide Testimonies Collection” (available at https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/armenian)
About the Author:
Deniz Gün Eraslan is an undergraduate student of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. His academic interests focus on the history of the Ottoman Empire, Middle Eastern politics, and the study of political memory. He is committed to presenting complex historical subjects in an accessible and thoughtful manner for a broader audience.
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