Why Is The Armenian Genocide Wrong

After the mass extermination of six million Jews during the Holocaust, the United Nations decided to create an international law that would prevent these horrific events from being repeated. They recognized the act of genocide as a crime and defined it as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. This meaning was coined in 1948, thirty-one years after the massacres of the Armenian Genocide had already happened. The genocide was perpetrated by a political group of the Ottoman Empire known as the Young Turks. The current Turkish government denies the validity of the genocide claiming that the acts committed against the Armenian population do not constitute
The first criterion that must be fulfilled is “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” (Genocide). The Young Turks created gangs, whose members were ex-convicts, that would cause harm to Armenian people. These “killing squads” would throw people off cliffs, drown them in rivers, crucify them, and burn them alive (Armenian Genocide). After being evacuated from their homes, Armenians were forced to walk to concentration camps. In one camp, named Deir ez-Zor, Armenians faced hardships similar to those of the Jews in the Holocaust. They were starved, beaten, and murdered by ruthless guards. However, some Armenians did not end up in concentration camps. Instead, they were put on ships and thrown overboard (Miansyan). Considering the harm perpreted upon innocent Armenian citizens, denying the atrocities as genocide is seemingly
The final point that needs to be reached in order to be considered a genocide is “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (Genocide). The first massacre of the genocide occured on April 24, 1915 when the Turkish government arrested and killed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. Soon after, ordinary Armenian citizens were taken out of their homes and forced to walk miles through the Mesopotamian desert. Without food or water, marchers were forced to take their clothes off and walk through the desert until they dropped dead. If anyone stopped to rest, they were shot (Armenian Genocide). After the Armenians essentially disappeared from existence, Muslim Turks took over everything that the Armenians once owned. They destroyed anything that had to do with Armenian culture, such as ancient architecture, archives, and old libraries (The Armenian Genocide). In 1914, there were about two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, by 1922, there were under four hundred thousand left (Kifner). The millions of people killed in the Armenian Genocide is the final nail in the Turkish government’s