Armenian Genocide Research Paper

http://www.history.com/topics/armenian-genocide
In 1915, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre.
By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country. genocide–a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people.
Turkish government does not acknowledge the enormity or scope of these events.
Despite pressure from Armenians and social justice advocates throughout the world, it is still illegal in Turkey to talk about what happened to Armenians during this era.
THE …show more content…
They permitted religious minorities like the Armenians (Christian) to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, who they viewed as “infidels,” to unequal and unjust treatment. Christians had to pay higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and they had very few political and legal rights.
Even with these issues, the Armenian community was still better educated and wealthier than the Turkish community. This caused the Turkish people to resent the success of the Armenians. They also believed that since the Armenians are mostly Christian, they would be more loyal to Christian governments, such as Russia, than to the Ottoman empire. This was a problem to Turkey because they had an unstable relationship with Russia.
These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II–obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights–declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all. “I Twill soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary …show more content…
In response to large scale protests by Armenians, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered.
THE RISE OF THE YOUNG TURKS
1908: A group of reformers called the “Young Turks” took over the government in Turkey. They then established a more modern constitutional government. The Armenians believed that this change would allow them to have an equal place in the state, but they soon found that the Young Turks only wanted to “Turkify” the area. According to this way of thinking, non-Turks–and especially Christian non-Turks–were a grave threat to the new state
WORLD WAR I
The Turks were on the Germany and Austro-Hungarian Empire side of WWI.
The ottoman empire declared holy war (jihad) against all christians, except their allies.
The Armenians believed that if they fought on the side of Germay, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Turks, and they ended up winning, that the Armenians would gain their independence.
Armenians organized volunteer groups to fight with the Russian army against the Turks.
This added to the Turks suspision of the Armenians and continued to fuel the government towards wanted to remove the

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