Turkish President Erdogan called the Armenian genocide during the First World War "reasonable." In his opinion, Armenian bandits and their supporters were killing Muslims in Eastern Anatolia, so resettlement "was the smartest action that can be taken." According to various sources, during this "deportation" from 800 thousand to 1.5 million people were killed.
Earlier, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly accused countries that recognize the Armenian genocide in Turkey of massacres and torture. In particular, France, which officially recognized the Armenian genocide in 2001, was accused by Erdogan of the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s.
During Erdogan's rule, Turkey made a U-turn from the policy of a secular state to a "moderate" Islamic state. The basis of ideology is pan-Turkism and neo-Ottomanism. Turkey is trying to revive some semblance of the Ottoman Empire. Carries out a great-power policy. He interferes in the affairs of Syria and Iraq, actually wages a war on the territory of sovereign states (and without an invitation). Conflicts with Israel, acting from the position of the leader of the Muslim world. Strengthens its positions in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Things have come to the point that Erdogan's "red caliphate" is in conflict with the United States, with NATO, although Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Alliance. The bottom line is that Erdogan's "caliphate" claims leadership in most of the Muslim world and begins to speak on behalf of all Muslims. Hence the conflict of interest with Israel and the United States.
Hence the painful reaction of Ankara to the Armenian and Kurdish issues. Indeed, historically, the Turks have less reason to claim the current lands of Asia Minor (Anatolia) than, for example, the Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Slavs. These peoples inhabited the territory of Anatolia during the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) and earlier. A significant part of Anatolia (Western Armenia) was formerly part of the ancient Armenian state. The Seljuk Turks and the Ottoman Turks captured Anatolia, destroyed Byzantium, and created the Ottoman Empire. However, the majority of the population of the Turkish Empire for a long time was made up of Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Slavs, representatives of the Caucasian peoples, etc. Only a few centuries of assimilation, Turkization, Islamization and regular genocides, massacres led to the dominance of the Turkic-speaking population.
However, by the beginning of the 20th century, there were still two large communities - Kurds and Armenians, who were not assimilated. This caused the extreme irritation of the Turkish leadership. Istanbul has already lost almost all possessions in the Balkan Peninsula due to a powerful wave of the national liberation movement, supported by Russia and partly by the European powers. Now the Turks feared that the core of the empire in Asia Minor would be destroyed in the same way.
Erdogan's current policy largely repeats the actions of the Young Turkish government, which came to power during the 1908 revolution. Before coming to power, the Young Turks called for "unity" and "brotherhood" of all the peoples of the empire, therefore they received the support of various national movements. As soon as the Young Turks came to power, they began to brutally put pressure on the national liberation movement. In the ideology of the Young Turks, the first place is occupied by pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism. Pan-Turkism is the doctrine of the unification of all Turkic-speaking peoples under the rule of the Ottoman Turks. This doctrine was used to justify external expansion and incite nationalism. The doctrine of pan-Islamism was used to strengthen Turkey's influence in countries with a Muslim population and as an ideological weapon in the fight against Arab national liberation movements.
The Young Turks began to crush the national movement. So, against the Kurds, they resorted to punitive actions. Government troops in 1910-1914 more than once the Kurdish uprisings in the regions of Dersim, Bitlis, Iraqi Kurdistan were crushed. At the same time, the Turkish authorities traditionally tried to use the Kurdish tribes in the fight against the national liberation movements of other nationalities, in particular, against the Armenians, Arabs and Laz (a related ethnic group to Georgians). In this matter, the Turkish government relied on the Kurdish tribal nobility, very eager to plunder someone else's property. Also Istanbul had to be in 1909-1912. to crush the national uprising in Albania. In 1912 Albania declared its independence.
As for the Armenian issue, the Young Turks did not allow the long-awaited reforms to be carried out, which concerned the settlement of administrative, economic and cultural problems in areas with an Armenian population. Continuing the policy of the previous sultan government of Abdul Hamid II (ruled in 1876-1909), under which the policy of genocide of the Christian population of Turkey was carried out (up to 300 thousand people died), the Young Turks pitted Kurds and Armenians against each other. Thus, the Young Turkish government carried out a kind of preparation for the future extermination of Armenians during the World War.
In 1913, a new coup d'état took place in Turkey. A Young Turkish dictatorship has been established in the country. All power was seized by the leaders of the Unity and Progress party: Enver, Talaat and Jemal. The leader of the triumvirate was Enver Pasha - "Turkish Napoleon", an immensely ambitious man, but without the talent of a real Napoleon. Turkey in 1914 sided with Germany, hoping for revenge in the Balkans and at the expense of Russia in the Caucasus and Turkestan. The Young Turks promised to build the "Great Turan" - from the Balkans and almost to the Yellow Sea. But the problem was that Christian peoples lived in Turkey itself. Then the ideologists of the party found a simple way out - to exterminate the Christians. A little later, Hitler will pursue the same policy, destroying "inferior nations", "subhumans": Russians, Slavs, Jews, Gypsies, etc. And before the Young Turks and Hitlerites, the policy of genocide against a number of peoples was carried out by the British in America, Africa, Australia …
The World War was the right moment for such an action. In January 1915, a secret meeting was held at which the Turkish military-political elite discussed specific plans for the genocide of the Christian population of the empire. So far, an exception has been made only for the Greeks, so that neutral Greece does not side with the Entente. With regard to other Christian peoples, they unanimously spoke out "for complete destruction." Most of the Christians in Turkey were Armenians, so the documents usually speak only of them. Aysors (Assyrians), Syrian Christians and others were added to the Armenians as if automatically.
It seemed that the action boded solid benefits. First, the liquidation of the largest Christian community, the national liberation movement of which could threaten the unity of the Ottoman Empire and the future of the "Great Turan". Secondly, during the war, an “internal enemy” was found, “traitors”, the hatred of which would unite the people around the Young Turk party, on whose “treason” all the failures and defeats could be blamed. Thirdly, the Armenian community was hardworking, many Armenians lived well, they controlled a significant part of the country's economy, industry, finance, most of Turkey's foreign and domestic trade. Many of their villages were prosperous. The Armenians were rivals of the Istanbul and Thessaloniki merchant groups, which financed "Ittihad" ("Unity and Progress"). Confiscation and robbery could replenish the treasury, the pockets of representatives of the central and local authorities (in reality, the destruction of the Armenian commercial, industrial and agricultural community caused even greater destabilization and destruction of the Turkish economy).
Thus, in 1915, the government of Enver organized a terrible massacre of the Armenians. While deliberately destroying the Armenian community, the Young Turkish government announced that Armenians were being deported from their areas of residence for "military reasons." Erdogan is currently adhering to the same version. They say, “gangs of Armenians killed Muslims,” and therefore deportation from the front-line areas, where the Armenians were on the side of the advancing Russians, was justified.
In fact, Enver, Talaat and Jemal conceived and carried out an action of mass genocide of Armenians. The massacre was carried out with cruelty and scale unheard of even for the government of Sultan Abdul-Hamid. Talaat Bey, who served as the Minister of Internal Affairs of the empire, even in official telegrams did not hesitate to say that it was about the complete destruction of Armenians in Turkey. In previous wars of the 18th-19th centuries. the Turks periodically massacred Armenians in entire villages, cities and localities. They tried to suppress their resistance by terror, even potential. Sultan Abdul-Hamid also tried to intimidate the Armenians by throwing regular troops and irregular forces, bandits' detachments on them. Now something else was planned - a total genocide of several peoples. And the organizers of the genocide were quite "civilized" people with a good European education. They understood that it was physically almost impossible to exterminate more than two million people. Therefore, we have provided comprehensive measures. Some of the people were exterminated in all possible ways physically, on the spot. Others were decided to be deported to places where they themselves would die out. In particular, in the area of malaria swamps near Konya in the south-west of Asia Minor and Deir ez-Zor in Syria, where the rotten swamps near the Euphrates were adjacent to the desert. At the same time, the routes were calculated in such a way in order to drive people through mountain and desert roads, where there will be supermortality.
For the operation, the army, police, local irregular formations, Kurdish tribes were involved, armed with the "Islamic militia", which attracted bandits, various rabble, urban and rural poor, ready to profit at someone else's expense. To prevent the organized resistance of the Armenians (and a large-scale Armenian uprising inside Turkey during the war could lead to the collapse of the empire), on the orders of Enver, Christian soldiers began to be disarmed, transferred to the rear units, workers' battalions. Civil Christians in March 1915, by order of Talaat, took away their passports, they were forbidden to leave the villages and cities where they lived. In order to behead the people, to deprive them of their leaders, activists of the Armenian parties, parliament members, representatives of the intelligentsia: teachers, doctors, just authoritative citizens were arrested throughout Turkey. Prominent citizens were declared hostages, and they demanded complete obedience from residents in exchange for preserving their lives. In addition, it was decided to remove generally capable men from the Armenian villages. Additional mobilization was carried out. At the same time, they carried out a campaign to confiscate weapons. Searches were carried out everywhere. Local militia and gendarmes took away everything, including kitchen utensils. All this was accompanied by violence and robbery.
The massacre began in the spring of 1915 (there were some spontaneous outbreaks earlier). It lasted until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and after until 1923. People were simply physically destroyed: they were drowned in rivers and lakes, burned in houses, shot and stabbed with bayonets, thrown into abysses and gorges, starved to death, and killed after cruel torture and violence. Children and girls were raped, sold into slavery. Hundreds of thousands of people, under the supervision of the military, gendarmes, police and Kurdish punishers, were driven from their homes in Western Armenia and sent to the desert lands of Syria and Mesopotamia. The property and goods of the deportees were plundered. Columns of immigrants who were not supplied with food, water, medicine, who were again robbed, killed and raped on the way, melted like snow in spring, as they moved along the mountainous and deserted roads. Thousands of people died from hunger, thirst, disease, cold and heat. Those who reached the designated places, which were not prepared, were in deserted, uninhabitable areas, and again died without water, food and medicine. Up to 1.5 million people were killed in a short time and in the most brutal way. About 300 thousand more people were able to flee to the Russian Caucasus, the Arab East and other places (later large Armenian communities of Western Europe and America would be founded). At the same time, in the Caucasus, they soon again fell under the blow of the Turkish executioners, when the Russian Empire collapsed and the Turks tried to occupy the Russian regions of the Caucasus.
Later, when Greece sided with the Entente in 1917, the Turkish government extended the "deportation" law to the Greeks as well. True, the Greeks were not massacred, but the expulsion of the Greek population was also accompanied by murder, robbery and violence. The number of Greek refugees has reached 600 thousand people.
