The Armenian Genocide

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The Armenian genocide is a special case of genocide studies. It shows all the essential ‘proof’ needed to determine or define the atrocities that took place in the republic of Turkey, at least by the standards of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. And yet, the Armenian genocide is not internationally recognized as a genocide by all countries, with the United States, Australia and Great Britain only partially, yet not formally recognizing the cruelty and violence imposed by Turkey regarding Armenians. Despite certain countries failing to label the massacre of the Armenians as genocide, it still exhibits one the classic cases of genocide.
The turning point for the Ottoman Empire regarding its relations …show more content…
"Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, [political] or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical [as well as social] destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” (UN.org, prevent …show more content…
Many Armenians suffered “serious bodily or mental harm to members of [their] group.” (UN.org, prevent genocide) In a particularly jarring recollection of a death march in the Deir-el-Zor desert where by the end of the march only a few women and children survived were left to die and had to resort to cannibalism, with some women recalling being forced to eat the corpses of their children to survive. This eventually became a tactic by genocide deniers; by shifting the focus on the heinous acts committed by mothers it shifted the blame and gave greater legitimacy to the actions taken by the Turkish government regarding the Armenians by reducing them into cannibalistic animals that deserved to be extinguished, many who did survive the death marches faced ostracization and suspicion just for surviving. (Totten, 12) However, the issue regarding the International Community's failure in its ability to formally and cohesively recognize the Armenian genocide is not caused by the genocide’s lack of fitting in the confines of the 1948 definition, which is actually problematic as the only working definition
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