The Young Turks were the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. The Young Turk Movement emerged in reaction to the absolutist rule of Sultan Abdul-Hamid (Abdulhamit) II (1876-1909). With the 1878 suspension of the Ottoman Constitution, reform-minded Ottomans resorted to organizing overseas or underground. The backbone of the movement was formed by young military officers who were especially disturbed by the continuing decline of Ottoman power and attributed the crisis to the absence of an environment for change and progress. Working secretly in unconnected clusters under the watchful eye of the Hamidian secret police, the Young Turks succeeded in overturning the rule of the autocratic sultan when the Ottoman armies in European Turkey openly supported the movement. Abdul-Hamid's reinstatement of constitutional and parliamentary rule in July 1908 ushered in a brief period of legalized political activity by a panoply of reformist Turkish parties as well as Armenian political and revolutionary organizations. The Young Turks earned further public support when their intervention was required to suppress the April 1909 counter-revolution staged by the palace...

Turkey is the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, and its official policy on the Armenian Genocide is the denial of its occurrence. Whereas the convening of courts-martial to try the Young Turks for war crimes by the post-World War I Ottoman government amounted to an admission of guilt on the part of the state, the Nationalist government based in Ankara rejected Turkish responsibility for the acts committed against the Armenian population. After gaining military mastery over Turkey, the Nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal, obtained a series of concessions from France and England which absolved Turkey of any further political or material responsibilities vis-à-vis the surviving Armenians. These concessions were formalized in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne which extended international recognition to the Turkish Republic.

The Treaty of Lausanne marked a watershed because it legitimized the Turkish Nationalist program of ethnic consolidation by expelling or repressing minorities. It reversed all terms agreed upon by the Ottoman Empire in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres which had legally obligated the Turkish government to bring accused war criminals to justice. It provided for the transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey thus completing the exodus of the Greeks from Anatolia.

Turkey immediately turned its attention to the suppression of the Kurds, whose language was banned in 1924 and whose ethnic identity was officially denied by the Turkish state until the 1980s. By forcefully promoting Turkism, the Ankara government sought to create an ethnically homogeneous state. In the course of the following decades its treatment of the remnant minorities oscillated from neglect to repression. As it remained neutral during World War II and continued trading with Nazi Germany until nearly the end of the war, Turkey used the occasion of the world crisis to impose extraordinary taxes upon Greeks, Jews and Armenians. The discriminatory exactions economically ruined these small minority communities already confined mostly to Istanbul by the 1940s. In a more violent episode, such as the 1955 rampage in Istanbul, the government encouraged the expulsion of the majority of Greeks remaining in Turkey. Many Jews emigrated to Israel after independence, and the Armenian population dwindled from an estimated 150,000 after World War I to less than half that number by the 1990s.

Soon after its founding, the Turkish Nationalist government adopted a policy of denying the Armenian Genocide and in increasingly more strident steps sought to suppress discussion of the Armenian Genocide in international and public forums. In the 1930s it prevented the making of the film version of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and successfully stamped out all mention of the Armenian atrocities in any government setting until the 1960s. Since the 1970s Turkey has waged a vociferous campaign to prevent official recognition of the Armenian Genocide or the adoption of commemorative legislation in countries such as the United States and Canada by threatening to cancel business contracts and reduce levels of military cooperation. In view of Turkey's NATO membership in the context of the Cold War, the threats were taken seriously.

Turkey has also sponsored publications challenging the basic facts of the Armenian Genocide in a well-financed campaign to spread confusion and plant seeds of doubt even among informed circles. Turkey's overseas embassies have been engaged as its primary instruments for the dissemination of this denial literature. Its ambassadors regularly challenge mention of the Armenian Genocide by the media. Turkey has also pressured governments in an attempt to prevent the convening of international conferences, such as one planned in Israel in 1982, where despite strong pressures to cancel it, the Armenian Genocide was one of the topics presented. This campaign to rewrite history extends to the point of seeking to influence universities worldwide through sophisticated grant-making programs attendant with the expectation of generating scholarship placing Turkey in a better light. These programs constitute part of the overall design to legitimate internationally the viewpoint denying the Armenian Genocide through purportedly disinterested academic production...

The decline of Turkish power and the steady territorial losses in the face of Balkan revolts and Russian military advances isolated the Armenians in a precarious situation. To firmly secure and perpetuate Turkish rule in the remaining territories of the Ottoman state, Abdul-Hamid initiated a program of demographic and political consolidation through the mass slaughter of vast numbers of Armenians beginning in 1894. By so doing he also restricted the economic role of the Armenians, a program which enjoyed popular support among the Turks. In the face of international condemnation, and despite changes in government, the Hamidian policies were applied with regularity over the course of the next thirty years. In a series of genocidal massacres repeated in 1895-1896, 1909, 1915-1918, and 1920-1922, the Armenian population of Turkey was annihilated. The Armenian, also called Hamidian, massacres of 1894-1896 affected all of historic Armenia and Constantinople. The 1909 or Adana massacre devastated Cilicia. The combined deportations and massacres during World War I acquired the dimensions of total genocide and was implemented by the Young Turks who had removed Abdul-Hamid from the throne in 1909. The atrocities between 1920-1922 were committed by the Nationalist Turks who seized power in the Anatolian hinterland in the final years of the Ottoman Empire and created the Turkish Republic...

Missionaries were the first foreign eyewitnesses of the Armenian Genocide. With their successful evangelizing among Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, Protestant missionaries, mostly associated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), had created an extensive network of school, orphanages, hospitals, and colleges across Anatolia and Armenia. On account of US neutrality during the first three years of World War I, the missionaries were allowed to stay in the Ottoman Empire. Their institutions, however, were devastated by the destruction of the Armenian population. The missionaries made heroic attempts to provide for the care and feeding of the destitute, especially orphans, only to face hardships of their own at the hands of Turkish officials. Attempts to provide refuge proved futile and only provoked the ire of the government, which came to look upon them with increasing suspicion. ..

Ahmed Jemal [Djemal, Cemal] Pasha (1872-1922) was the overseer of the Armenian Genocide. A graduate of the War Academy, Jemal was posted in 1898 to the Third Army in Salonika where the new captain joined the underground movement of Ottoman officers known as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which was opposed to the regime of Sultan Abdul-Hamid (Abdulhamit) II. He used his position as a military inspector and staff officer to spread the CUP network in Thrace. By the time of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, Jemal was one of the leaders of the movement and was soon on the executive committee of the CUP. He rejoined his military unit to help suppress the April 1909 counter-revolution. Thereafter he served in a succession of military and administrative posts as the CUP's main trouble-shooter across the Ottoman Empire. In August 1909 he was appointed vali (governor-general) of Adana after the massacre of Armenians in the province. He came to prominence with the January 1913 CUP coup d'etat, which he helped engineer. Thereupon he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general, given command of the First Army based in Istanbul and made military governor of the city, where he also brutally suppressed the liberal opposition. In December 1913 he joined the CUP cabinet as Minister of Works. His appointment as Minister of the Navy in February 1914 placed the key Ottoman ministries in the hands of the CUP and signaled the complete consolidation of power by the Young Turk dictatorial triumvirate of Enver, Talaat and Jemal.

From the time of the Ottoman entry into WWI in November 1914 until December 1917, Jemal was stationed in Damascus as commander of the Fourth Army and served simultaneously as military governor of Syria including the regions of Palestine and Hijaz (Arabia). He led unsuccessful campaigns in 1915 and 1916 against the British in Egypt by advancing on the Suez Canal. Before the British turned the tide, Jemal's administration of Syria had devastated the civilian population in the region. Arab nationalists were summarily hanged, Zionists were persecuted and steps taken to remove Jewish settlements, grain requisitions in Lebanon had driven the populace to the brink of starvation. These calamities, however, paled in comparison to the destruction of the deported Armenian population carried out in Syria during Jemal's rule. By virtue of the fact that he controlled all the resources and the agencies of government in Syria, Jemal had oversight over the final leg of the deportation of the Armenians and the extermination of the surviving population. By mid-1915 Syria was dotted with concentration camps where the weaker members of the Armenian population were starved to death and where the still able-bodied were employed as virtual slave laborers on construction projects, the most notorious being the Baghdad rail line then still to be laid through the mountain passes of northern Syria. Lastly, the infamous killing sites of Rakka, Ras ul-Ain, and Deir el-Zor were locations in his jurisdiction. In this respect, of the Young Turk triumvirs who conspired and executed the Armenian Genocide, Jemal held responsibility as the final enforcer of the secret plan of extermination...

The Armenian Massacres in 1894-1896 were the first near-genocidal series of atrocities committed against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. They were carried out during the reign of Abdul Hamid (Abdulhamit) II (1876-1909), the last sultan effectively to rule over the Turkish state. The massacres broke out in the summer of 1894 in the remote region of Sasun in southern Armenia, where the government relied on the excuse of Armenian resistance to Kurdish encroachment into the last recesses of the mountains to order the sacking of the alpine hamlets. The incident resulted in strong Armenian protests against the sultan's brutal policies and European interventions to quell further disturbances by persuading the Ottoman government to adopt reforms for the Armenian-populated provinces. The police responded to a demonstration held in Constantinople in September 1895 by Armenian political organizations which sought to pressure the government and the European Powers to implement the promised administrative reforms by letting loose a massacre in the capital city. Thereupon, beginning without provocation in the city of Trebizond on the Black Sea, and in a pattern indicating a premeditated plan, a series of massacres spread south through nearly every major Armenian-inhabited town of the empire. It culminated in the single worst atrocity in those months with the burning of the Armenian cathedral of Urfa (ancient Edessa) within whose walls some 3,000 Armenians had taken refuge during the siege of their neighborhood. To a last desperate attempt by Armenian revolutionaries to draw the attention of the world by seizing in Constantinople the European-owned Ottoman Bank in August 1896, the government responded by unleashing wholesale reprisals during which five to six thousand Armenians were killed in the space of three days within sight of the European embassies...

In April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared...

Woodrow Wilson (1865-1924) was the twenty-eighth president of the United States, whose two terms from 1913 to 1921 spanned the years of the Armenian Genocide. Neutrality from 1914 to 1917 during World War I placed the United States in a position to intercede with the Ottomans on behalf of the Armenians. The Department of State, for example, instructed Ambassador Morgenthau to deliver the May 24 Allied note warning the Young Turk regime that it would be held liable for crimes against humanity. US neutrality also made the American Embassy in Constantinople the nexus of the information arriving from the Ottoman provinces about the atrocities committed against the Armenians, much as it served as a distribution point for funds raised in the United States for relief to the refugees. President Wilson also extended his moral support for the efforts of the Near East Relief organization by dedicating two days in October 1916 for a nationwide fundraising drive...

Mehmet Talaat Pasha (1874-1921) (also known as Talaat Bey) was the principal architect of the Armenian Genocide. Born in Edirne (Adrianople), Talaat became a telegrapher at a young age. He was active in the Young Turk movement seeking to overthrow Sultan Abdul Hamid (Abdulhamit) II. He joined the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and quickly emerged a leader in the secret organization. His profession gave him access to the principal means of communication in his era and his assignment as Chief Secretary of Posts and Telegraphs in Salonika (now Thessaloniki, Greece) placed him at the hub of Turkish revolutionary plotting. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, Talaat became one of the most influential politicians of the Ottoman Empire. In 1909 he was appointed Minister of the Interior and then Minister of Posts. By 1912 he was Secretary General of the CUP, which the following year seized complete power in the Ottoman Empire. The 1913 coup saw the rise of the so-called Young Turk triumvirate consisting of Talaat as Minister of the Interior, Enver as Minister of War, and Jemal as Minister of the Marine...

Near East Relief was the name of the American charity specifically organized in response to the Armenian Genocide. At the urging of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. to prevent the complete destruction of the Armenian population, the US government took a number of steps. Among them was the effort to send humanitarian relief. The Department of State quietly turned to the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions to begin an emergency drive for the collection of funds...