1915, the Armenian genocide and the Christian peoples who perished with them

It took the United States Congress and the President more than a century to say a word that the American ambassador in Constantinople effectively said in a cable in 1915. That is not a story about the slowness of history. It is a story about what a government will trade for convenience.

The facts are not obscure, the witnesses were American, and the victims were Christians whose communities had lived in Anatolia since the first centuries of the faith. Here is what happened, who saw it, who helped, what the record shows and why naming it still matters.

Who lived in the Ottoman Empire

Start with the people, because the story is about them and not about an abstraction. The Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state. Its Christian communities included Armenians, who had been Christian since the early fourth century and had one of the oldest national churches; Assyrians, also called Syriacs and Chaldeans, whose liturgical language descends from Aramaic; and Greeks, whose presence in Anatolia and along the Black Sea coast went back to antiquity. Under the Ottoman system these communities were second-class subjects: tolerated, taxed and periodically abused, but living in their own villages and towns.

By the First World War the empire was crumbling. It had lost territory in the Balkans, and its leaders, the ruling faction known as the Committee of Union and Progress, increasingly turned to a harsher nationalism. When the empire entered the war in late 1914 on the side of Germany, those leaders looked at the Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, as an internal threat. An early military disaster against Russia in the winter of 1914 to 1915, and the claim that Armenian volunteers had aided the Russians, supplied the pretext.

April 24, 1915, and the deportations

The date that Armenians commemorate is April 24, 1915. On that day and in the days around it, Ottoman authorities arrested a large number of Armenian intellectuals, clergy, writers and community leaders in Constantinople, the capital, and sent many of them to the interior. Most were later killed. The aim was to decapitate the community: to remove the leaders who might organize resistance.

What followed was the deportation of the Armenian population. In May 1915 the government adopted a temporary law authorizing the deportation of those it deemed a threat to security, and the law was applied to Armenians across the empire. The method was to order whole communities to leave their homes on a few days' notice, to march them on foot toward the Syrian desert, and to leave them to the mercy of guards, bandits and the terrain. Men were frequently separated and killed. Women, children and the elderly were marched through deserts with little food and water. Many died of exhaustion, disease and starvation, and many were killed along the way. Property was seized. Surviving women and children were in some cases forcibly converted or absorbed into Muslim households.

Estimates of the Armenian dead run from about 600,000 to 1.5 million, with around a million often cited, and the precise figures are debated. The Armenian population of Anatolia was largely destroyed. Assyrian and Greek Christian communities were also targeted, in massacres and deportations in the same period and in the years that followed. Assyrians remember the catastrophe as Seyfo, the sword, and Greeks speak of the destruction of the Pontic Greeks and the expulsion from Asia Minor. The scale of the Assyrian and Greek losses is debated, and I will not give a single number, but the pattern of the targeting of Christian communities is a matter of historical record.

The ambassador who reported it

The Ottoman Empire was not closed to American eyes. The United States was neutral in 1915 and maintained an embassy in Constantinople, as well as consuls and missionaries across Anatolia. They saw it.

Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American ambassador from 1913 to 1916, sent a stream of reports to Washington. In a telegram in mid-July 1915, he described the deportations and the violence against Armenians and reported that a campaign of race extermination was in progress under the pretext of reprisal against rebellion. He did not mince words. He pressed the Ottoman leaders, directly, to stop, and he was told in effect that the matter was an internal affair of the empire. American consuls in the interior, among them Leslie Davis at Harput, filed reports describing what they saw. Missionaries and teachers of American schools and hospitals wrote letters and kept diaries.

The Allies also spoke. On May 24, 1915, Britain, France and Russia issued a joint declaration condemning what they called crimes against humanity and civilization and warning that they would hold the Ottoman officials responsible. It is one of the earliest uses of the phrase "crimes against humanity" in a diplomatic context.

Morgenthau later wrote a memoir of his time as ambassador. The record matters here for a plain reason: the evidence of the killings did not come from one side's propaganda. It came from neutral observers, including American diplomats, and from the testimony of those who survived.

Near East Relief: America responds

The American response was not only diplomatic. A remarkable relief effort grew out of the news. In 1915 American religious and civic leaders formed a relief committee for Armenians and Syrians, which after a few name changes became Near East Relief, chartered by an act of Congress in 1919. It raised money through churches, schools and civic groups across the country, and it sent workers, food, medicine and clothing to the survivors.

By the usual accounting, Near East Relief provided well over a hundred million dollars of assistance between 1915 and 1930, a vast sum for its time, and its signature work was the care of orphans. It ran orphanages and trained children in trades and agriculture, in an effort to give a destroyed generation a future. Its slogan, familiar to those who read the history, was that the children of the region should not be allowed to starve. The charity operated for more than a decade.

This is the other side of the American record, and it is one to be proud of. A people with no strategic interest in Armenia, moved by Christian charity and by plain human sympathy, gave on a massive scale. The work was done by churches and volunteers rather than by a government program, and it saved many thousands of lives. For the model of faith-driven charity at scale, see William and Catherine Booth, the Salvation Army and soup, soap and salvation, and for why local religious bodies are good at this work, see why a church charity knows things a federal program never will.

The word "genocide" and the long delay

The word did not exist in 1915. It was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin had been deeply disturbed by the Ottoman massacres of the Armenians and the lack of any international law to punish them, and he spent his career trying to make mass destruction of a people a crime under international law. His work led to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention is not retroactive, but the historical record of 1915 is the case that inspired the idea.

For decades, the United States did not formally use the word for 1915. The reasons were diplomatic. Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, is a NATO ally and has been a strategic partner, and successive administrations worried about offending it. The Turkish government rejects the genocide label. It acknowledges that large numbers of Armenians died, but it attributes the deaths to wartime conditions, disease and intercommunal violence, and denies that there was a plan of extermination. That position deserves to be stated fairly: it is the official view of a major country, and the historians' consensus runs against it.

Presidents spoke around the question. President Reagan, in a 1981 proclamation on the Holocaust, mentioned the genocide of the Armenians in passing. Subsequent presidents typically used euphemisms, such as "the great catastrophe" or the Armenian term Meds Yeghern, which means "great calamity." Congress passed resolutions at various times, but they were held back repeatedly by the executive branch's appeal to the alliance.

The resolutions of 2019 and the recognition of 2021

In October 2019 the House of Representatives passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, by a vote of 405 to 11. In December 2019 the Senate passed its own resolution by unanimous consent, after earlier efforts had been blocked. The votes reflected a bipartisan consensus that the matter should be put on the record, and they were reached at a time of strain in relations with Turkey.

On April 24, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a statement on Armenian Remembrance Day using the word genocide, the first formal presidential recognition. The word, finally, was in the American record. The Turkish government objected strongly, and the alliance survived.

I want to note that the sequence, from the diplomats' cables in 1915 to the statement in 2021, spans more than a century. It is worth asking what the delay bought. The answer is the same each time: a measure of diplomatic comfort at the price of the historical truth.

The strongest objection and the answer

State the objection in its best form. "The events of 1915 are a matter for historians, not legislatures. Congress should not be passing resolutions about history, and a formal American recognition does nothing for living Armenians and risks a relationship with an important ally. Moreover, the past is complicated: the war was brutal for everyone."

The answer, in numbered points.

1. The facts are not in genuine historical dispute. The deportations, the massacres and the destruction of a community are documented by the perpetrators' own allies, neutral diplomats and survivors. The dispute is political, not scholarly.
2. Recognition is a moral act, and moral acts have effects. A government that refuses to name a crime for reasons of convenience sends a message to the next regime considering one. The refusal to name 1915 is part of the history that led Lemkin to say the world had been too slow.
3. Recognition is not an act against living Turks. It is a statement about a government that ended a century ago. A country that can acknowledge its own history, as America has had to do about slavery and about the removal of the Cherokee, is stronger for it.
4. The alliance argument proves too much. If a friendly government can veto the historical truth, then every alliance becomes a gag. A nation that will not call genocide by name when an ally objects has traded away something that matters more than a base.

Why naming persecution matters

The reasons are practical and moral.

Naming creates a record. A record means that survivors and their descendants are not left to argue with denial. It also changes the incentives of persecutors: a government that knows the world will eventually name what it does has one more reason to hesitate.

Naming also tells the truth about who the victims were. The Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks of 1915 were killed in large part because they were Christians in a state that wanted a different kind of country. The Christian dimension of that catastrophe is the reason a faith-and-family site should tell it, and the reason the modern record of persecution of Christians in the Middle East, described in The 2016 genocide finding for Yazidis and Christians under ISIS rule, has roots in these events. The modern machinery for keeping persecution on the official record, which The 1998 law that put religious persecution on America's foreign agenda explains, exists because of lessons like this one.

There is a Founding thread too. Washington wrote in 1790 that the government of the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." To bigotry no sanction, Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport tells the story of that letter. A republic that holds that principle owes it to the persecuted, wherever they are, to say what was done to them. The same moral clarity animates the story of a German pastor who would not bow to a regime, told in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church that would not bow to the Reich. And a modern state that licenses worship, as How China's Communist Party licenses churches and jails pastors describes, shows that the impulse to control belief did not die in 1923.

The case in brief

1. Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians had lived in Anatolia for centuries, and in 1915 the Ottoman government began a campaign of arrests, deportations and massacres that destroyed most of those communities.
2. The campaign began with the arrests of Armenian leaders in Constantinople on April 24, 1915, and was documented by neutral witnesses, including Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., who reported a campaign of race extermination.
3. Americans responded with Near East Relief, chartered by Congress in 1919, which raised over a hundred million dollars and cared for orphans through churches and volunteers.
4. The United States took a century to name the crime: the House passed a resolution in October 2019, the Senate in December 2019 and President Biden used the word on April 24, 2021.
5. Naming persecution matters because it creates a record, tells the truth about the victims and deters the next regime that thinks the world will look away.

What you can do: read the text of the 2019 House and Senate resolutions at Congress.gov, then ask your senators what they will do to keep the official record of persecution current.