by Armen Changelian

Created on: April 29, 2009   Last Updated: May 02, 2009

According to the Armenian government, as well as various Armenian organizations throughout the worldwide Diaspora, 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were massacred at the hands of the Turks between 1915 and 1918, resulting from a combination of racial oppression, imperialist greed, and government instability. The systematic massacres became known as the Armenian Genocide, the first major genocide of the 20th century.

Armenians as a people had long been ruled by various Empires and entities as Armenian territory frequently swapped hands between the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Mongols. Armenia was finally absorbed by the Ottoman Empire in the eleventh century, but by the mid- to late-1800s, the Ottomans were in decline, and "as the empire gradually disintegrated, formerly subject peoples including the Greeks, Serbs and Romanians achieved their long-awaited independence. Only the Armenians and the Arabs [...] remained stuck in the backward and nearly bankrupt empire, now under [...] Sultan Abdul Hamid." This imperial decline would lead to a shift in nationalist ideals as well as a shift in government.

Seeing their surrounding neighbors gain independence, Armenians began to push for reform as well as their own independence through demonstrations, protests, and revolutionary activities. According to a human rights organization, "the despotic Sultan responded to their pleas with brutal persecutions. Between 1894 and 1896 over 100,000 inhabitants of Armenian villages were massacred during widespread pogroms conducted by the Sultan's special regiments" ("Armenian Genocide"). This barbaric behavior became too much, even for members of the Ottoman government to stomach.

For a brief period in 1908, Turkish nationalists known as the "Young Turks" pressured the Sultan and worked toward political and social reform, much to the delight of Armenians living in the region. However, three fanatics of this group, Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver and Ahmed Djemal, staged a coup d'etat in 1913, overthrowing the government and establishing their own plans for Turkish imperial expansion and assimilation of the surrounding regions. From here on, tensions only grew worse between the Armenians and Turks, with both sides acting out sporadically in opposition of one another's religious, cultural, and political differences. In 1914, the Ottoman government sided with the Central Powers in WWI and used their new alliance as an excuse to disarm all Armenians within

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