The Armenian uprising - Ottoman Empire

Armenian village, 1901

The Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war caused great unrest among the Armenian people in the Ottoman provinces of eastern Anatolia, including those along the Caucasus border with Russia.

The sympathies of many Armenians, particularly Orthodox Christians, lay with the neighboring Orthodox Christian-majority Russian Empire, not the Muslim-majority Ottoman Empire by which they were ruled. Many Armenian men crossed the border to join the Russian Army, and others formed guerrilla bands to fight Ottoman forces behind the front lines. The Ottoman authorities responded by imposing ever more repressive measures to try to stamp out this activity, setting in motion a pattern of attacks and reprisals that led to a full-blown uprising in the Armenian city of Van and other eastern Anatolian towns in early 1915. Vicious fighting followed and each side accused the other of atrocities against civilians and combatants alike. 

Guerrilla fighters defend the city of Van, 1915

After crushing the rebellion, the Ottoman leadership decided to deport the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia to less strategically vulnerable areas of the empire. The deportations began on 30 May 1915 and took more than a year to complete. The numbers involved are still a matter of bitter controversy, but some estimate that up to one million Armenian civilians were forcibly deported, of whom between 200,000 and 800,000 died. Armenian survivors’ accounts are full of reports of large-scale massacres, deliberate starvation, beatings, rape, torture and, in the case of children and young women, abduction and forced conversion to Islam. Some atrocities were independently confirmed by American, Swiss and other neutral Western observers. A small number of German military personnel attached to the Ottoman Army, outraged at what they had seen or heard, also spoke out.

To the Armenians, and to many foreign observers, the deportation order amounted to much more than a series of atrocities, no matter how individually shocking each was. To them the order was seen as instigating a deliberate policy of genocide. The leaders who ordered the deportations and the local Ottoman police, Jendarma paramilitaries and Kurdish auxiliaries who carried the orders out therefore stand accused of crimes against humanity. This assessment of the deportations remains the official position of the modern-day Republic of Armenia, the Armenian diaspora all over the world, and at least a dozen other countries, including Canada, Russia and France.    

Armenian war relief poster

The government of the Republic of Turkey, which today controls all of Anatolia, categorically rejects the claim that their Ottoman predecessors deliberately committed genocide against their Armenian subjects. While conceding that thousands of Armenian civilians died, Turkish authorities have insisted that these deaths were mainly due to unintentional neglect under wartime conditions. They blame typhus and cholera outbreaks, or exposure to the elements due to the inadequate provision of transport, food and shelter by Ottoman provincial authorities unable to cope with the demands made upon them by the large numbers of deportees passing through. The Turkish government argues that institutional failure also decimated Ottoman forces during the war. Some Ottoman Army units reportedly lost up to 25% of their men to sickness and disease as they crossed from one part of the empire to another. It is true that – in contrast to the experience of every other principal combatant – more Ottoman soldiers died of disease during the war than were killed in action or died of wounds.

This issue remains a highly sensitive one in both Turkey and Armenia.