Argumentative Essay On Armenian Genocide

The heinous acts initiated in 1915 by Ottoman officials amidst the chaos of World War One saw the execution of one of the first modern genocides - the annihilation of roughly one million ethnic Armenian Christians from their homeland in now modern-day Turkey. Although the policy was unsparingly effective in eliminating almost every existing Armenian community, a strong Armenian diaspora of genocide survivors thrive in the world today – one such case is Manuel Kerkesharian.

The systematic elimination of the Armenian Christian people began in spring 1915 through to autumn 1916. It is widely recognised as having started on the 24th of April 1915 when 245 Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople were arrested, deported and later executed. The

Deportations later expanded to include Armenian inhabitants of all provinces, regardless of proximity to combat zones. However, officials justified the deportations as a ‘precautionary measure’ and claimed collusion between Armenian revolutionaries and Allies to advance a Franco-British landing at the Gallipoli peninsula. Furthermore, the account provided by Turkish state-sanctioned histories and official explanations argue that they were necessary for security reasons. Mr Kerkesharian corroborated the events of the deportation, ‘the Turks started to deport Armenians by train to Osmaniye… People from many places in Turkey concentrated in Osmaniye. There were many tents set up, many people’. Mr Kerkesharian was able to escape the vast network of concentration camps that had been established by the Ottoman government to murder Armenians who had thus survived the deportations. Convoys of Armenians were forced on a death march across the provincial landscape of Anatolia towards the southern desert regions in now modern-day Iraq, northern Saudi Arabia and Syria under blistering heat during the day and bitter cold at night. The Minister of Interior, Talaat Pasha, principal architect of the systematic annihilation, was recorded telling the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., “we will not have Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere