Massacre of the Armenians 1894–1896

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Armenians killed in the Erzurum massacre , November 1895.
Settlement areas of the Armenians in the northeast of the Ottoman Empire 1896

The massacres of the Armenians from 1894–1896 , also known as the Hamid massacres , were mass crimes against the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire from 1894 to 1896.

The massacres of the Armenians from 1894 to 1896 were  initiated by the Ottoman government, namely by Sultan Abdülhamid II . The massacres began in the Sason region and then spread to all Armenian settlement areas. The death toll ranged from 80,000 to over 300,000. With the help of the local Muslim population and the Hamidiye units , deportations and looting were carried out and attempts were made to force Christian sections of the population to convert to Islam .

In contrast to the genocide of the 20th century, it was not yet an attempt to expel or murder all Armenians of the Ottoman Empire ; instead, the old order of dominance of Muslims over Christians was to be restored. Robert F. Melson described the anti-Armenian riots as "partial genocide". Bernard Lazare described the mass murder of 1898 in a Parisian magazine as holocauste .

The perpetrators' reasons were based on the conviction that the long-lasting weakening of the Ottoman Empire could be stopped by transforming it into a purely Turkish-Islamic bastion, which was to be implemented, among other things, by means of "genocidally colored religiozides ".

Although the massacres were mainly directed against the Armenians , they turned into general anti-Christian pogroms, such as the Diyarbakır massacre . The Ottomans also suppressed revolts by other minorities , but the toughest measures were directed against the Armenians. The leaders of the Ottoman Empire made no distinction between nationalist dissidents and the Armenian population as a whole. The American missionary and contemporary witness Corinna Shattuck described the massacre of December 28, 1895 in Urfa , in which around 1,500 of 4,000 victims were burned alive in a church, in a letter from 1896 as “a massacre that turned into a great Holocaust ".

The events received current attention in Western Europe and the United States, the New York Times reported on September 10, 1895 under the headline "Another Armenian Holocaust" . William Mitchell Ramsay described the massacre in detail in 1897 and concluded: "The Armenians will most likely be exterminated if they cannot escape to other countries." There was indignation in both Europe and America, but ultimately watched the persecution inactive.

Contemporary sources

Scientific literature

  • Peter Balakian : The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response . HarperCollins, New York 2003, ISBN 0-06-055870-9 .
  • Selim Deringil: "The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed": Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895-1897 . In: Comparative Studies in Society and History , 51, April 2009, pp. 344-371, JSTOR 40270330 .
  • Robert Melson: A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894-1896 . In: Comparative Studies in Society and History , 24, No. 3, 1982, pp. 481-509.
  • Louise Nalbandian: The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century . University of California Press, Berkeley 1963.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gunnar Heinsohn: Lexicon of Genocides . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999, ISBN 3-499-22338-4 , p. 78.
  2. ↑ Taner Akçam : A Shameful Act. The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Metropolitan Books, New York 2006, ISBN 0-8050-7932-7 , p. 42.
  3. ↑ Dominik J. Schaller: “La question arménienne n'existe plus.” The genocide of the Armenians during the First World War and its depiction in the historiography. In: Micha Brumlik , Irmtrud Wojak: Genocide and war crimes in the first half of the 20th century. Campus, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-593-37282-7 , pp. 99–128, here: p. 103.
  4. ↑ Michael B. Oren: Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present. WW Norton & Co., New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-393-33030-4 , p. 293.
  5. ↑ Gunnar Heinsohn: Lexicon of Genocides. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999, ISBN 3-499-22338-4 , p. 330.
  6. ^ William L. Cleveland: A History of the Modern Middle East, 2nd ed . Westview Press, Boulder, CO 2000, ISBN 0-8133-3489-6 , pp. 119 .
  7. ^ Letter reproduced in: Frederick Davis Greene: Armenian Massacres or The Sword of Mohammed , 1896 ; also in: Edwin Munsell Bliss: Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities. Edgewood Publishing Company, 1896, Chapter 24, p. 461.
  8. ↑ Michael Oren: Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present . WW Norton & Co., New York 2007, ISBN 0-393-33030-3 , p. 293 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  9. ^ Another Armenian Holocaust . (PDF) In: The New York Times . September 10, 1895. Retrieved January 3, 2015.
  10. ^ William Mitchell Ramsay: Impressions of Turkey During Twelve Years' Wanderings . GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1897, p. 156 f. ( online )
  11. ↑ Gunnar Heinsohn: Lexicon of Genocides . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999, ISBN 3-499-22338-4 , p. 78.