Explained: What happened to Armenians in 1915?

U.S. President Joe Biden’s recognition of the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as an ‘act of genocide’ could infuriate Turkey.

The story so far: U.S. President Joe Biden on Saturday officially recognised the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915-16 as “an act of genocide”. Mr. Biden’s announcement on the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day could infuriate Turkey, America’s NATO ally. Up to 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have been killed in the early stage of the First World War within the territories of the Ottoman Empire. In 2019, the U.S. Congress passed resolutions calling the slaughter a genocide, but the Donald Trump administration stopped short of officially calling it so. According to Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide of December 1948, genocide has been described as carrying out acts intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” in 1943, had written that he had been influenced by atrocities against Armenians as well as the Nazi killings of Jews. Before the First World War broke out in 1914, there were 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. According to a study by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in 1922, four years after the War, the Armenian population in the region was about 387,800. This has led historians to believe that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed during the course of the War. Armenians were largely living in the eastern fringes of the Empire. The Ottoman Turks unleashed Turkish and Kurdish militias upon them, killing and pillaging tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported from eastern Anatolia (today’s Turkey) to concentration camps in the Syrian steppe. Most of the deaths occurred during this flight. “Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed,” writes historian David Fromkin in A Peace to End All Peace.