The Armenian Genocide and Its Denial Essay Example

Genocide. The killing of hundreds of people. The extermination of a nation. Such a thing may sound too horrible to be true, but it happens right under our very noses. And what is even worse, is when such tragic events are not recognized as what they are, or simply forgotten. Such is the case of the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Forgotten Genocide, the Hidden Holocaust, the Secret Genocide, or the Unremembered Genocide (Balakian xvii). The Jewish Holocaust is well known throughout the world and is taught to all students. But who talks of the Armenians? Who talks of the innocent people being forced by the Turks to leave their 3,000 year-old homeland and march without stopping to the Syrian Desert (Bournoutian 274)? Who remembers the 1.5 million people killed in what is the first genocide of the 20th century? Very few do. And so, here is the unique history of the Armenian Genocide, and the way Turkey denies the horrible act they have done. Armenians and Turks actually lived in harmony for centuries in the Ottoman Empire. However, the idea of nationalism formed, causing the Ottoman Empire to crumble. Ottoman Turkey had a dream of a Pan-Turkic Empire. What this was, was that there were Turkish speaking areas in central Asia, and Turkey wanted to unite with that group. Armenia was the only other ethnic group in between those two groups of Turks, so nationalists in Ottoman Turkey decided to just get rid of them altogether. Things began to get really bad for the Armenians. They were treated worse by the government, and hundreds of thousands were killed in the Hamidian Massacres ordered by
Sultan Abdul Hamid II from 1894 to 1896. Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha were two extreme Turkish nationalists who took complete dictatorial control and planned the extermination of the Armenians, using World War I as a cover up to carry out their plan (“Armenian”). Enver Pasha declared that “The Ottoman