Raymond Ibrahim : On April 24, 2021, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president formally to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.  What was this genocide about, and what is its significance for today? The Genocide Education Project offers a summary of that tragic event which transpired during World War I, specifically between 1915 and 1917:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.

At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

The evidence is indeed overwhelming.  As far back as 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard eyewitness testimony concerning the “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described how she was raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified:

“Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” she wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”  (Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.)

In short, that the Turks orchestrated and carried out a deliberate genocide of Armenians during World War I is an uncontested fact—for those who still care about facts—irrespective of who does or does not acknowledge it (Turkey itself epitomizing the latter category).

Even so, the extent of Turkish atrocities committed against Armenians far exceeds the Armenian Genocide.  In fact, it is more appropriate to see the latter, not as a singular event, but as an especially severe segment of an ancient and ongoing continuum.

The Genocide before the Genocide

The Turks’ initial genocide of Armenians began slightly over a thousand years ago, when the Muslim tribesmen first began to pour into and transform a then much-larger Armenia into what it is today: the eastern portion of modern-day Turkey.

Thus, in 1019, “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword,” writes Matthew of Edessa (d.1144), a chief chronicler for this period.  Three decades later, the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the unwalled city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”

After thoroughly plundering the city, he ordered it, including 800 churches, to be set ablaze and turned into a desert. Arzden was “filled with bodies” and none “could count the number of those who perished in the flames.”  Eight hundred oxen and forty camels were required to cart out the vast plunder, mostly taken from Arzden’s churches. “How to relate here, with a voice stifled by tears,” continues Matthew, the many butchered Armenians who were “left without graves” and “became the prey of carrion beasts,” and “the exodus of women … led with their children into slavery and condemned to an eternal servitude! That was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” laments the chronicler, “so, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.”