Name the horror: Time to recognise for what it was, Armenian genocide

Aligned with the Central Powers during the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was faltering, grappling with territorial losses and internal strife. Dubbed as the Sick Man of Europe, it faced economic strain and relentless military pressures, particularly on its eastern front against Russia. This, coupled with the nationalist zeal of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which sought to preserve the crumbling Empire, fuelled paranoia and aggressive policies, setting the stage for a catastrophe. Starting in April 1915, the course of the coming months saw an estimated 1.5 million Armenians perish in a meticulously orchestrated effort involving mass executions, brutal death marches through the Syrian desert, and deliberate starvation. The figure shoots even higher if we also consider the Hamidian massacres (1894-96), named after the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which saw him unleash a wave of violence against Christian Armenians, slaughtering up to 300,000 in a brutal prelude to the genocide that followed. Fuelled by suspicions of an Armenian collusion with the Russians, and the underlying religious and cultural differences between the ruling Muslim Turks and the Christian Armenians, this annihilation targeted an entire community—men, women, and children—razing their cultural and religious heritage. What began in April 1915 as the arrest and eventual slaughter of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, metastasized into the horrors of rampant deportations, mass drownings, acts of rape and torture, state-sponsored Islamization and confiscation of properties as a deliberate act of erasure. These events came to be known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915-17 and was regarded by Pope Francis as “the first genocide of the 20th century”.

With the ultimate defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War coming as a sigh of relief for the surviving Armenian community, the ensuing revenge exacted by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) in form of targeted political assassinations, as part of the Operation Nemesis, further highlighted the Armenian cause on the global stage. SoghomonTehlirian’s assassination of Talaat Pasha, the former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire and widely regarded as the primary architect of the genocide, was “the watershed moment” in this collective effort. The Ottoman Empire’s larger ethnic cleansing of its non-Muslim subjects carried out during the First World War and its aftermath, which also included the Assyrian and Greek genocides, ultimately paved way for the eventual formation of an ethno-national Turkish state in form of the Republic of Türkiye.

A century and a decade later, the genocide’s legacy endures, marked by recognition from 34 countries, and a persistent denial by Türkiye, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, underscoring its place as a pivotal, contested episode in human history. As the global community stands to acknowledge and commemorate the 110th anniversary of this tragic episode in human history, deliberation by India’s foremost policymakers for an official recognition of these events as a “genocide” would reflect our solemn stand against the ideologies which have also inflicted life-long wounds on our own cultural soul. Such a move would further push not only our bilateral ties with Armenia but also cement us as a stern advocate of historical justice within the democratic world. India and Armenia share historical ties spanning over two millennia, with the latter standing as one of the few countries to have publicly endorsed India’s position on the Kashmir conflict.

Numbering over 11 million today, the Armenian community is spread across the world, with a large majority of Armenians residing outside Armenia. Amidst the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the modern-day Republic of Armenia stands in a precarious position, one which calls for desperate action to rescue it from not only its geographical shackles of being a landlocked state, but also its much inferior economic and military strength, vis-à-vis the Turkic alliance of Türkiye and Azerbaijan. To this day, Türkiye denies any allegation of a genocide, and instead terms the episode as “Events of 1915”, significantly undermining the brutality and magnitude of the atrocities, while downplaying any involvement of the Ottoman government. Its closest allies in form of Azerbaijan and Pakistan remain as the only other countries to explicitly deny any genocide. Far from some European states which went as far as to pay reparations for the sins of their forefathers, the Turkish policy of an emphatic rejection of any deliberate wrongdoing has further aggravated the phenomenon of “genocide denial” across the world, even in cases where the overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise. For the innocent Armenians massacred by the Ottomans, “genocide” isn’t a mere label, but a clarion call to affirm their annihilation as a deliberate act of evil and a recognition that strips away the veil of denial. As the scars of this horror still linger, the Armenian genocide stands as a solemn call for the international community to confront and acknowledge the uncomfortable chapters of history. Such recognition paves the way for reconciliation between estranged communities, fostering new pathways for cooperation and serving as a resolute safeguard against any potential recurrence of such human extremes.