The word genocide was coined in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his Jewish family in the Holocaust.
But it wasn't the Nazis that first got him thinking about how to stop the intentional destruction of national, ethnic or religious groups. Decades earlier, when he was in college, he heard about the assassination of Talaat Pasha, one of the main organizers of the deportation and mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, by an Armenian man who had survived it. The subsequent trial of the assassin opened his eyes to suffering of the Armenian people.
The Ottoman Empire killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenian Christians during World War I. On Saturday, US President Joe Biden acknowledged it as genocide, making him the first president to do so since Ronald Reagan. It's a move that could further strain relations with US ally Turkey.
The Ottoman Empire comprised many different ethnic and religious groups but was largely controlled by Muslims. In 1908, a group called the Young Turks seized control, first of a society called the Committee of Union and Progress, and then of the government. CUP promised modernization, prosperity, and secular, constitutional reforms.
At first, it seemed as though this vision included ethnic Armenians, most of whom were poor peasants on the eastern side of Anatolia (what is now Turkey). But over the next few years, CUP grew increasingly focused on Turkish nationalism; by 1913, it was a full-on dictatorship.
When World War I broke out, Armenians found themselves physically on both sides of the battlefront between the Ottomans and the Russians. The Ottoman government drafted Armenian men to fight, but when the military suffered heavy losses, they blamed it on Armenians, accusing them of collaborating with the enemy. The Armenian soldiers were disarmed and murdered by Ottoman troops.
On April 24, 1915, the government arrested about 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals. This is seen by many as the beginning of the genocide, and April 24 now marks Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
In the following months, most of those Armenian leaders were killed. The military forced Armenian villagers from their homes and on long, cruel marches to concentrations camps in what is now northern Syria and Iraq. Many of them died along the way; others died in the camps of starvation and thirst. Meanwhile, irregular forces and locals rounded up Armenians in their villages and slaughtered them. Historians estimate that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians died.
The few survivors were often forced to convert to Islam, and Armenian orphans were adopted by Muslim families. The empty homes and businesses were also given to Muslims, some of whom had recently been forced out of the Balkans.
The Republic of Turkey rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, led by its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who had been part of the Young Turks takeover and a revered general. Ataturk brought the long-promised secular reforms and modernization, though by that time the country he united was missing millions of its ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks.
