Dimitri François

✝️🇦🇲 The #Armenian Genocide must never be forgotten. Rare archival footage of the forced marches, exile, and #Christian Armenian survivors. This is a historical/educational tweet about the Armenian Genocide. The first large-scale massacres of Armenians occurred during the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896 under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, beginning with the Sasun events of 1894. Scholarly estimates place the death toll between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians. These killings had already shown a pattern of state-tolerated violence against a Christian population seeking reforms and protection. The full-scale genocide unfolded under the Young Turk government (Committee of Union and Progress) during the Armenian Genocide. On the night of 24 April 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, community leaders, writers, doctors, and priests were arrested in Constantinople. Among them was the renowned priest-composer and musicologist Komitas. He was deported, witnessed the unfolding horrors, and suffered a permanent psychological collapse from which he never recovered. He spent the rest of his life in mental institutions and died in Paris in 1935. Countless other clergy were murdered because destroying the priesthood meant destroying the spiritual core of the Armenian people. The campaign followed a clear sequence: Armenian men were disarmed and conscripted into lethal labor battalions; the Temporary Law of Deportation (May 1915) ordered entire populations onto death marches toward the Syrian Desert; and the Special Organization carried out massacres along the routes. Women, children, and the elderly were driven forward for weeks without food or water. During the genocide, many of them were killed, while others were abducted or raped. Those who collapsed from exhaustion were either shot or left to die. Some children were forcibly seized. Special state-run orphanages were also set up with strict procedures intended to deprive their charges of an Armenian identity. Most Armenian children who survived the Armenian Genocide endured exploitation, hard labor without pay, forced conversion to Islam, and physical abuse. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Armenians were forcibly Islamized. Ottoman gendarmes tore every Armenian boy aged five to ten from his mother. They stacked them on the Euphrates and drove swords and bayonets into the pile to save ammunition. The children who lived did it by falling under the bodies and not making a sound. Those who survived had different fates. These atrocities formed part of the same late-Ottoman campaign of genocide that also targeted the Greeks and the Assyrians — three Genocides carried out by the same perpetrators. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word “genocide” in 1944, was deeply influenced by the Armenian case. He repeatedly cited the unpunished destruction of the Armenians as one of the key historical examples that proved the need for an international law against the crime of destroying a people. Uruguay became the first country to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide in 1965. As of 2026, more than 30 countries have formally recognized it. Many key documents of the Committee of Union and Progress were destroyed. A direct descendant of one of the main perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide has broken ranks. Hasan Cemal, grandson of Cemal Pasha, visited the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Armenia in 2008, left a note stating that “to deny the Genocide would mean to be an accomplice in this crime against humanity,” and in 2012 published the book 1915: The Armenian Genocide. Property was seized under "abandoned goods" laws. Ancient towns were renamed. Thousands of Armenian sanctuaries were systematically destroyed. Eternal memory to the 1.5 million blessed, innocent martyrs- men, women, children.