Thread by @ArmNatInstitute

Today is the 107th anniversary of the #ArmenianGenocide.
On April 24, 1915, Turkish officials arrested 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals in Constantinople. More arrests followed as thousands of Armenian notables were imprisoned, executed or deported.
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This marked the beginning of the systematic destruction of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923.
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The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.
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In its heyday in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful state. By the nineteenth century, the empire was in serious decline. This decline created enormous internal political and economic pressures which contributed to the intensification of ethnic tensions.
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In response to the crisis in the Ottoman Empire, a new political group called the Young Turks seized power by revolution in 1908. From the Young Turks, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), emerged at the head of the government in a coup staged in 1913.
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It was led by a triumvirate: Enver, Minister of War; Talaat, Minister of the Interior (Grand Vizier in 1917); and Jemal, Minister of the Marine. The CUP espoused an ultranationalistic ideology which advocated the formation of an exclusively Turkish state.
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When World War I broke out in August 1914, the Ottoman Empire formed part of the Triple Alliance with the other Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and it declared war on Russia and its Western allies, Great Britain and France.
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Whether retreating or advancing, the Ottoman army used the occasion of war to wage a collateral campaign of massacre against the civilian Armenian population in the regions in which warfare was being conducted.
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These measures were part of the genocidal program secretly adopted by the CUP and implemented under the cover of war. They coincided with the larger program to eradicate the Armenians from Turkey and neighboring countries for the purpose of creating a Pan-Turanian empire.
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Through the spring and summer of 1915, in all areas outside the war zones, the Armenian population was ordered deported from their homes. Convoys consisting of tens of thousands including men, women, and children were driven hundreds of miles toward the Syrian desert.
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The deportations were disguised as a resettlement program. The brutal treatment of the deportees, most of whom were made to walk to their destinations, made it apparent that the deportations were mainly intended as death marches.
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The displacement process also served as a major opportunity orchestrated by the CUP for the plundering of the material wealth of the Armenians and proved an effortless method of expropriating all of their immovable properties.
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The genocidal intent of the CUP measures was also evidenced by the mass killings that accompanied the deportations. Earlier, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman forces had been disarmed and either worked to death in labor battalions or outright executed in small batches.
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With the elimination of the able-bodied men from the Armenian population, the deportations proceeded with little resistance. The convoys were frequently attacked by bands of killers specifically organized for the purpose of slaughtering the Armenians.
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As its instrument of extermination, the government had authorized the formation of gangs of butchers—mostly convicts released from prison expressly enlisted in the units of the so-called Special Organization, Teshkilâti Mahsusa.
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A sizable portion of the deportees, including women and children, were indiscriminately killed in massacres along the deportation routes. Many younger women and some orphaned children were also abducted and placed in bondage in Turkish and Muslim homes.
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The government had made no provisions for the feeding of the deported population. Starvation took an enormous toll much as exhaustion felled the elderly, the weaker and the infirm. Deportees were denied food and water in a deliberate effort to hasten death.
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The survivors who reached northern Syria were collected at a number of concentration camps whence they were sent further south to die under the scorching sun of the desert.
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Through methodically organized deportation, massacre, starvation and dehydration, the Ottoman government reduced its Armenian population to a frightened mass of famished individuals whose families and communities had been destroyed in a single stroke.
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In all, it is estimated that up to a million and a half Armenians perished at the hands of Ottoman and Turkish military and paramilitary forces and through atrocities intentionally inflicted to eliminate the Armenian demographic presence in Turkey.
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In the process, the population of historic Armenia at the eastern extremity of Anatolia was wiped off the map. With their disappearance, an ancient people which had inhabited the region for three thousand years lost its historic homeland and was forced into exile.
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The surviving refugees spread around the world and eventually settled in some two dozen countries on all continents of the globe. Armenians commemorate the Genocide on April 24 at the site of memorials raised by the survivors in all their communities around the world. 22/22

Learn more on our website: armenian-genocide.org/encyclopedia.h…