I know that what our government (and most of the Turkish population) is denying is that the killings weren't systemized or controlled by the government of the time, but what shows that they actually were systemized?
The controversy over the 1915-17 massacres of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire is whether these acts constitute genocide. Those who say they don’t are not the equivalent of Holocaust-deniers in that while some minimize the figures of the slain, they do not deny that the massacres happened; what they deny is that the massacres reach the legal definition of genocide. Their case is based on three interlinked arguments:
- Unlike the Nazi Holocaust when a defenceless population was murdered only for its identity, the Armenians were engaged in a massive armed revolt, and this is why the Ottoman government decided to deport them.
- The intent of the Ottomans was not massacre but the removal of the Armenians, who had sided with one foreign invading power (Russia) and who were showing signs of collaborating with another (Britain), from the militarily sensitive areas as Turkey suffered a two-front invasion in early 1915.
- While terrible massacres, plus starvation and the cold, took maybe a million lives during the deportations, when the Armenians reached their destinations in Syria and Iraq, which were also part of the Ottoman Empire, they were well-treated and allowed to rebuild their lives, which would not have been the case had the Ottomans intended their destruction.
Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility presents evidence to undermine every one of these arguments.
The short version is that the removals of the Armenian population were planned and implemented prior to any widespread rebellion by the Armenians (which intensified once the Ottomans started subjecting them to, er, genocide), and that the deportations involved the mistreatment and murder of over a million Armenians in order to forestall their subsequent return to a planed homogeneously Muslim Anatolian, Turkish-nationalist state.
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I have always been confused about why the modern Republic of Turkey has to apologize or take responsibility for an event that happened under the Ottoman Empire.
Isnt this kind of like the USA taking responsibility for something that the English or a colonial government did before the Revolutionary War?
How can you be guilty of something that happened before you came into existence.
Related to the idea of the government denying it, why? This was done under the Ottoman Empire right? If so why is it a big deal to recognize this was done by the predecessor?
I have another question about the subject. First and foremost, I'm Turkish. I know and admit that thousands of people were killed by Ottoman rule and they were deported (although they were siding with Russians against Ottomans, the extend of deportation and the destination of deportation -deserts of Syria, Deyr ez Zor namely- was not fair at all).
The acts of mass killings, oppresion and deportation is considered as genocide in todays international laws. So-called Armenian Genocide takes place between 1878-1915 and the international law about genocide is written in 1948. My question is: can this law be enforced retroactively?