The Armenian Genocides: 1894-1896; 1915-1923; 2023- (9.20.23)

Note: As the date in the title suggests, this essay was finished on September 20, 2023. Later that day all of it was a moot point, as Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, and all of the ethnic Armenians fled their ancestral homelands for the Republic of Armenia.    

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     In a remote part of the Lesser Caucasus mountains, a land of tree covered peaks and fecund farmlands, is a region called Nagorno Karabakh. Despite being internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, the locals have maintained, since the fall of the Soviet Union, that they belong to an independent republic called Artsakh. There are an estimated one hundred and twenty thousand people in Nagorno Karabakh – and they are almost entirely ethnic Armenians.

Over the last several years, Azerbaijan and the Republic of Armenia have engaged in a series of border wars over this disputed area, with the Azeris proving themselves the dominant power. Last December, under the pretense of “environmental protests”, Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s dictator for the last two decades, shut down the so-called Lachin Corridor, the only road that connects the Armenian villages of Nagorno Karabakh with the Republic of Armenia proper. No goods or services, including food, medicine, or fuel, have been able to get into Nagorno Karabakh for over nine months. Families wait in breadlines for hours, unsure if there will be anything for them to bring home. One in three deaths in Nagorno Karabakh are currently due to malnutrition, and there is no reason to believe relief is imminent. Aliyev’s goal, in short, is to starve Nagorno Karabakh into submission, to ethnically cleanse the area, and to erase thousands of years of Armenian settlement. They are supported in this genocide by Turkey and, increasingly, by Russia.

     During the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was at war with the Allies, the Turks carried out a system of mass slaughter and starvation against the Armenians within their borders. Armenian intellectuals were rounded up and publicly executed: a common first stage in the destruction of a people. Others were forced into slavery to help the war effort, while the majority of the population had their possessions seized and were forcefully marched hundreds of miles across the barren Anatolian steppe and into the Syrian desert. Many died of hunger, disease, and dehydration along the way. Thousands of girls were forced to convert to Islam, and serve as concubines for Ottoman officers. In the end, somewhere between 1.5-2 million Armenians were murdered. To this day, Turkey’s government dismisses all this history as fiction.

     The United States has always cared about the plight of the Armenians. During the 1894-1896 Hamidian Massacres, which led to the slaughter of 200,000 Armenians, Congress issued a bipartisan condemnation of the Ottomans in the form of the Cullom Resolution. In 1915, at the height of the Armenian Genocide, The New York Times ran an average of two to three stories per week informing readers of the ongoing atrocities. Former President Theodore Roosevelt lobbied for American intervention, and later referred to this as the “greatest crime of the war”. Our ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr., went further, calling it “the greatest crime of the ages”, and vowed that “our people will never forget these massacres”. Generations of American children would later grow up being admonished for not eating all their food, reminded by their parents of the “starving Armenians”.

Over the next fifteen years, Congress created the Near East Foundation to aid surviving children. Through mostly private donations, Americans sent over $116m to educate, clothe, and house over 130,000 Armenian orphans. Thanks in large part to the generosity of regular Americans, the Armenians were able to survive as a people, and ultimately find some sense of peace and stability. Our nation sent a powerful message to the world that we were, to put it bluntly, the good guys, and that we would protect and nurture these victims of genocidal terror.

       On 23 April 2021, Joe Biden became the first US president to use the word “genocide” to describe the Ottoman slaughters of over a century ago. The term itself was not coined until the 1940s, and Cold War tensions meant the United States was reluctant to use it, at risk of alienating the reliably anti-communist Turks. But now that the United States has recognized the butchery of 1915 as a genocide,  we need to make good on Morgenthau's promise that we will “never forget”. The United States needs to work with its allies to stop the current death by hunger taking place in Nagorno Karabakh. Supplies need to be airlifted, demands must be made, and Azerbaijan and Turkey need to face real consequences. They need to be shamed, sanctioned, and reduced to pariahs. We have seen that they ignore resolutions from the International Court of Justice, as well as the pleas of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. We have seen promises by the Azeris to allow for the safe passage of humanitarian aid not come to fruition. And we have seen that Armenia can no longer rely on their erstwhile protector, Russia, who has grown closer to Azerbaijan as a way to repackage and continue to sell their gas on the international market while avoiding Western sanctions. The United States must now ensure that Azerbaijan cannot commit genocide with impunity. 

        On 22 August 1939, a few days before the start of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler gave a speech in Obersalzberg, Austria, ordering Wehrmacht officers “to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language.” Hitler justified this order by asking “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” We have seen what happens when states do not face repercussions for their genocidal actions. There is too much to lose by sitting in silence.