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Between 1915 and 1917, Armenians, a minority in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, were trapped in barren mountains and starved to death, some were injected with viruses as human experiments, and some women became toys for humiliation.
Armenian Genocide
1.5 million Armenians lost their lives in this frenzied genocide, which has been called one of the worst massacres of the 20th century.
Why was it that the peace-loving, beautiful Armenian race, once regarded as an enemy by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, was eager to exterminate it?
Why did the Armenians end up in Turkey, and what kind of conflict did they have with mainstream Turkish society?
A tragic nation that has been invaded for thousands of years
Armenians had lived for generations in the South Caucasus, near present-day Russia to the north and to what is now Turkey to the south, making it a crossroads of transportation and trade.
Geographical location of Armenia
The Armenian Empire was also glorious, controlling more than a third of the Caucasus and present-day eastern Turkey. Unfortunately, there are key transportation routes, but there are not enough armed forces to defend the country.
Since the 8th century AD, Armenians have been invaded by Arabs, Greeks, and Tatars.
From the 16th century to the 18th century, the South Caucasus was gradually swallowed up by Ottoman Turkey, and some Armenians chose to migrate to Russia in the north, while a group of Armenians were forced to acquire Ottoman Turkish citizenship.
Because of religious beliefs, Armenians have never been able to integrate into mainstream society in Ottoman Turkey. Turkey is Muslim, while Armenians are Christian. The clash of religious beliefs has led to the inferior status of Armenians and they are regarded as "second-class citizens".
Armenians today
Whether in economic trade or political life, Armenians were oppressed by the Turks at every turn. Armenians' homes are often robbed, but the local government in Turkey turns a blind eye, and all kinds of harsh taxes and fees are rife with Armenian life.
Life is not satisfactory, and Armenians do not envy the good life of the Turkish people. To this end, some Armenians strive to enter the mainstream society of Turkey and become upper class people through education, joining the army, etc.
With the acquired efforts of the Armenians, some of them gradually became high-ranking intellectuals, celebrities and wealthy businessmen. In the army, there are also hard-working Armenians who have emerged.
Armenians gradually acquired great wealth and became the object of hatred among some people at the bottom of Turkish society. Just as the countries of Europe once hated the rich Jews.
Armenians today
They are obviously pagans, lowly second-class citizens, why can they have such a rich life. The Turks began to envy the Armenians, claiming that they had plundered the wealth that should have belonged to the Turkish people, and the seeds of hatred began to be planted.
If it was pure wealth, it was not enough to provoke genocidal massacres, and what was even more intolerable to the Turkish government was that Armenians began to get involved in the upper politics of the Turkish state.
The Ottoman Turkish Empire attempted to join the mainstream european world and thus emulated the democratic equality of Europe, which gave equal political power to different peoples within its borders.
Some Armenian elites chose to participate in national politics, and when rich and intelligent Armenians entered politics, they quickly gathered a considerable force.
Armenians today
Armenia's political leaders have tried to reach out to the reformists in Turkey in an attempt to further improve the situation of the country's minorities by helping the reformers to establish a more modern constitutional government.
Unfortunately, political reforms did not succeed, the envisaged constitutional government remained unfulfilled, and the presence of Armenians began to be seen as a threat by Turkish leaders.
The mad slaughter begins
In 1914, World War I began.
The Ottoman Turkish Empire joined the Allies and went to war with the Allies represented by Britain, the United States, and France.
first world war
The launch of the war machine represented a huge consumption of domestic assets, and the rich Armenians became fat in the eyes of the Turkish government.
Beginning in 1914, the plan for the purge of armenians was gradually unfolding.
Turkey first excluded non-commissioned officers of the Armenian ethnicity from the army, assigned them to do labor, confiscated their guns, and some soldiers who made minor mistakes were placed in felonies.
Within the Turkish Navy, there are even propaganda materials claiming that the Armenians are allied with the enemy in an attempt to hold a riot in Istanbul!
These propaganda materials gradually spread in society, and the emotions of the Turkish people were mobilized, and they began to open their mouths to the Armenians.
What began as a small-scale civil conflict was when turks stormed armenian settlements late at night, slammed open doors, and pulled sleeping Armenians off their beds. Tools such as nail rakes and sticks were thrown at the Armenians.
Armenian girls were dragged into the streets and subjected to inhumane rape, while Armenian men who tried to protect them were arrested and crucified.
These terrorist acts were tacitly approved by the Turkish authorities, and no police or officials came to investigate the atrocities.
At first, in the eyes of the Armenian elite at the top, this was a ridiculous act of the lower classes against the lower classes, but what they did not expect was that the purge of the elites would soon come.
In April 1915, more than 600 Armenian social elites were arrested by the Turkish government and ruthlessly killed after annexing property.
At the same time, armenian soldiers in the army had been wiped out. Armenians were completely excluded from the country's political-military system, and ordinary Armenian civilians could no longer receive any asylum.
The Ottoman Turkish Parliament soon passed the Tesir Act, which allowed the government and military to expel anyone who might be considered a threat to national security.
Obviously, this was a bill against the Armenians, who slandered the Armenians for secretly associating with Tsarist Russia in an attempt to overthrow the Turkish Empire.
The act stipulates that all the assets left behind by the Armenians after their expulsion shall be attributed to the Turkish Government. By this despicable means, all the wealth that the Armenians had run for a hundred years had been swallowed up by the Turkish government.
A large number of Armenian people were driven to the desert on the border, with only endless loess along the way, and only a small amount of water and food to maintain the most basic life activities.
The Armenian "military forces" responsible for escorting them were actually composed of vicious prisoners in prisons. You can imagine what kind of torture the miserable Armenians suffered at the hands of this group of prisoners.
Among the Armenians in exile, they were subjected to violence, rape and massacres along the way, and only 20% of armenians remained in the end. And these 20% of the Armenians were besieged in the barren mountains without water or food, and starved to death!
In addition to the deportation procession, Armenians were arrested and crammed into concentration camps to act as "guinea pigs" for human experimentation.
Inject them intravenously into morphine, leaving them powerless to resist, and then release biochemical gas into the laboratory for scientists to observe changes in the human body.
Armenian children were not spared, and they were injected with various viruses to facilitate the study of various reactions of the virus in the human body by Turkish scientists.
In concentration camps, if you are lucky enough to survive various human experiments, it does not mean that you can survive. Concentrated massacres and live burials have been carried out in concentration camps, and the bones of Armenians have filled one deep pit after another.
A Turkish soldier who once served in a concentration camp said he had witnessed the burning of five thousand Armenians in the camp.
The tragic plight of the Armenians was soon exposed, the Turkish government was condemned by the international community, and many countries issued statements calling on Turkey to immediately stop the persecution of the Armenians.
But it was useless to speak out, at that time in the midst of a world war, The european and American countries had no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of Ottoman Turkey, and could only allow this massacre to continue.
Since the Turkish government did not recognize this as an act of genocide, any information on the number of Armenians killed was not recorded by the government.
According to the Armenians' own statistics, the number of Armenians who suffered massacres by the Turkish government reached as many as 1.5 million in the two years from 1915 to 1917.
Genocide demons have escaped justice
With the end of 1918, World War I.
The Allies won the victory, as Turkey's allied camp was defeated, and Turkey's crimes against the Armenians were confirmed.
The Armenian people in Turkey have ushered in hope that the countries of Europe and the United States can help themselves and let the inhuman murderers get just punishment.
The Armenians compiled an extraordinarily long list of massacrers, the vast majority of whom were upper-class Ottoman Turkish officials, with a total of more than 130 criminals.
According to the unanimous conclusion of the Allies, the Turkish Government's act against the Armenians was a genocide in which armenians were physically destroyed by various means.
These accused Ottoman Turkish political officials and military generals were detained by the Allies, and the Armenians shed tears of joy, naively believing that justice was on their side.
However, things did not go according to their wishes, as the Turkish side also took a large number of Allied hostages in order to rescue them. Those arrested upper-class Turkish officials were sent back to Turkey in exchange for the release of allied citizens detained by Turkey.
What's more, before Turkey declared defeat, it fled abroad early with a huge amount of money, escaped all punishment, and lived an enviable life.
These cruel demons killed millions of Armenians and ended up unharmed. This unfair verdict is hard for Armenians to accept, but they can't change anything.
On this earth, no one cares about the voice of a weak people, and it is delusional to expect fairness and justice to provide shelter for itself.
To this day, the Government of the Republic of Turkey has also categorically denied this history, not recognizing it as an organized and premeditated genocide.
Their claim is that it is a normal event for Armenians to lose their lives in their own migration due to the harsh natural environment. As for the atrocities of ordinary people and the massacres of concentration camps, Turkey also has a grand excuse.
They bit back at the Armenians, saying that since there were also a large number of Armenians living in Russia, the Armenian community in the country would sympathize with the Allied Russia, thus posing a threat to turkey itself.
Secondly, the mass deaths of Armenians are partly due to the many evils of Armenian gangs, which have been subjected to normal court sentences.
Even the massacres in the concentration camps claimed that they were not deliberately planned, but completely accidental!
In 1920, the Armenians put an end to the tragic history of being enslaved and slaughtered, and in the homeland of the South Caucasus, the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was established, joining the Soviet Union as a member of the Federation.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, on August 23, 1990, Armenia adopted the Declaration of Independence, changed its name to the Republic of Armenia, and officially became an independent and autonomous country.
The tragic experience of the Armenian nation is reminiscent of the atrocities of Chinese exclusion in Indonesia in 1965 and 1998.
The same is under the fence, the same minorities in society. Armenians were slaughtered by the Turkish nation, just as the Chinese were burned and raped by the Indonesians.
In these two massive anti-Chinese massacres, a total of more than 300,000 Chinese were killed, money and property were looted, and Chinese corpses were scattered throughout the city. But until now, the Indonesian government has not acknowledged the atrocities and claims that the number of people injured is the result of media exaggeration.
Only when the nation is strong in its own right can it be free from bullying by foreign nations. Justice and fairness do not fall from the sky, they fight for it with their own fists.