Armenian Genocide
The Ottoman destruction of its Armenian population from 1915, in which up to 1.5 million people died, and which Turkey still refuses to call genocide.
On the evening of 24 April 1915 Ottoman police in Constantinople arrested several hundred Armenian writers, teachers, priests, doctors, and politicians. Almost none came back. That date is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and it opens roughly two years in which the Ottoman government destroyed the Armenian population of Anatolia. Estimates of the dead run from 600,000 to 1.5 million. Turkey accepts that Armenians died in enormous numbers and rejects the word genocide, and that refusal is still a live diplomatic problem more than a century later.
Armenians had lived in eastern Anatolia for two and a half thousand years and had been Christian since the fourth century. There were roughly two million of them in the empire before the war, a protected but subordinate community, taxed differently and unable to testify against Muslims in court. As the empire lost its European provinces through the nineteenth century and Muslim refugees poured east, Armenians came to be seen as the next group that would demand independence with a great power standing behind it. Massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II between 1894 and 1896 killed somewhere between 80,000 and 300,000. Another followed at Adana in 1909.
1915
The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War at the end of 1914. In December the war minister Enver Pasha marched an army into the Caucasus mountains in winter and lost most of it at Sarikamish to the Russians and the cold. He blamed Armenian treachery. In April 1915 the Armenians of Van, hearing that surrounding villages were being killed, took up arms and held their quarter until Russian troops arrived, and the government presented this as proof that the whole community was disloyal.
On 27 May a deportation law was passed. Over the following months Armenian communities across Anatolia were ordered out of their homes at a few days' notice. Men were usually separated first and shot. Everyone else was marched south toward the Syrian desert without food, water, or protection, escorted by gendarmes and by irregular units of released convicts organized under the Special Organization. Those who survived the march reached camps around Deir ez-Zor, where most died of starvation and disease or were killed outright in 1916. Assyrian Christians and Pontic Greeks were destroyed by the same methods in the same years.
There was no shortage of witnesses. The American ambassador Henry Morgenthau reported it to Washington in detail. German officers, allies of the Ottomans, filed their own accounts. A German officer named Armin Wegner photographed the convoys and smuggled the pictures out, which is why the images exist at all.
The word, and the argument that will not end
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who invented the term genocide in 1944, said openly that the Armenian case was what set him thinking about it. Ottoman courts-martial in 1919 and 1920 convicted several of the organizers, but they had already fled, and Armenian assassins hunted them down over the following years, killing Talat Pasha in Berlin in 1921.
Turkey's official position is that the deaths resulted from wartime relocation, famine, disease, and mutual killing during a general collapse, not from a state plan to destroy a people, and it puts the Armenian toll at around 300,000. Turkish law has been used to prosecute writers who say otherwise. The journalist Hrant Dink, who was tried under it, was shot dead in Istanbul in 2007.
Recognition has come slowly and always over Turkish objections. France recognized the genocide in 2001, Germany in 2016, the United States through both houses of Congress in 2019 and by President Biden in 2021. Israel, which had held out for decades because of its relationship with Ankara, recognized it in August 2025. Around three dozen countries now do, and Turkey recalls ambassadors each time. The Turkish-Armenian border has been shut since 1993, and an attempt to reopen it in 2009 collapsed.
This is one of the few historical questions that still reliably produces a diplomatic incident, because for Turkey it is not really an argument about 1915. It is an argument about whether the republic founded in 1923 rests on a crime.