ARMENIA.

In the early twenty-first century the Armenian population worldwide is estimated at 5.6 million. In addition to about 3 million inhabitants of the Republic of Armenia, the diaspora includes about 1.25 million in the United States, 900,000 in the former Soviet Union, 375,000 in France, and 310,000 in the Middle East. Fewer than 50,000 Armenians inhabit Turkey, most in Istanbul.

At the turn of the twentieth century the Ottoman Empire was home to most of the world's Armenians; many lived in Constantinople and in the region known as Anatolia, the historical cradle of this Eastern Orthodox people. In 1914 the Turks estimated the number of Armenians to be 1.3 million, while the Armenian patriarchate put the population at 2.4 million. The Armenians comprised the largest and most trustworthy community in the Ottoman empire. In the second half of the nineteenth century Armenians supported efforts to democratize the empire and to spur economic development. The great massacres of 1894–1896 ordered by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II (r. 1876–1909), doubtlessly led to the birth of an Armenian nationalist movement, but did not in themselves undermine the allegiance of the Armenian people, as a whole, to the empire. The almost complete disappearance of Armenians from Turkey—that is, from Constantinople and the vast western part of historic Armenia (the Armenian Republic is situated in the east)—was the result of a genocide perpetrated, beginning in 1915, by the Young Turks, who had come to power in what remained of the Ottoman Empire. In addition to mass murder, the policy of the new Kemalist state forced thousands of surviving Armenians to emigrate at the end of World War I, during the Turkish war of independence conducted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938).

The history of the Armenian people in the twentieth century is doubly tragic. Armenians were victims of the first modern genocide, which destroyed half to two-thirds of the entire community and, in addition, the survivors were cleansed from their historic lands. No other genocide in the twentieth century, moreover, so ensured the impossibility of survivors returning to the place where absolute extermination was the chosen method for elimination. The story is still more tragic if one considers Turkey's persistent refusal to recognize the genocide as a historical fact. Denial frustrates mourning, keeps the events fresh, and perpetrates suffering. It also polarizes the communal memory concerning the great catastrophe of 1915–1917, often to such an extent that younger Armenians are deprived of the broader dimensions of their history.

From the horrific circumstances surrounding the genocide, however, one can discern an essential trait that helps illuminate the whole history of the Armenians. From their origins until 1914, they were an eastern people, but great numbers of them in the diaspora subsequently constituted a western community that adapted readily in countries where they were accepted. Armenians fully adapted to life in France and the United States, readily espousing the values and history of their adopted lands.

EARLY HISTORY

The Armenians originated in the valleys of the Euphrates and Arsanias (also known as the Murat) Rivers in Asia Minor, where they settled in the second millennium b.c.e. Their Indo-European language distinguished them from Semitic and African peoples. The Kingdom of Armenia was created about 330 b.c.e. Six hundred years later, in 313 c.e., after being conquered by the Romans, the Armenians converted to Christianity and, indeed, Armenia became the first officially Christian nation. Ruled first by the Byzantine Empire, then by the Ottoman Empire, the nation's long history indicates its people's ability to adapt and reconstitute state, kingdom, principality and, above all, church.

From the fifteenth century Armenians were under Turkish-Ottoman rule in the west and Persian domination in the east; a portion of Armenian lands fell to Russia in the nineteenth century. Through the centuries the Armenian Church, with a patriarchate established about 1540 in Constantinople, played an important role in maintaining a powerful feeling of union among the disparate Armenian enclaves. The church united almost the entire community, save minorities of about 10 percent Roman Catholic and 5 percent Protestant.

MASSACRES AND EXPULSION

Conditions for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire deteriorated considerably early in the twentieth century. The Hamidian massacres endangered the Armenian nationalist agenda and relations with the Turkish majority grew tense, especially with the arrival of Balkan refugees who perceived Armenians, because they were Christian, as the cause of all their misery. Extreme poverty was also an issue, the result of looting during the pogroms and significant taxation imposed on Armenians by the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman government was known, to service foreign debt. Finally, Armenians increasingly became the scapegoats of the radical nationalism promulgated by the Young Turks who, after coming to power with the 1908 revolution, sought a solution in the eastern part of the empire to all the disasters that had befallen them in the west. The pan-Turkish dream sought unification of the Turkophone lands from Eastern Thrace to Siberia. Armenians densely populated the territory extending south to the Taurus Mountains and the province of Cilicia, north to the Caucasus, west to near the center of Anatolia, and the east as far as Iran. They thus represented a major obstacle to this huge nationalist project. Moreover, when Ottoman defeats brought part of the Armenian population under Russian authority, those remaining in Turkey were increasingly viewed as the enemy within. Western efforts to protect the Armenian community by exerting various kinds of pressure on the Sublime Porte were not truly effective; on the contrary, they magnified the Turkish perception of the Armenians as traitors. The Armenian community could only look to itself, to its nascent political organization—the revolutionary Dashnak Party and the liberal Hintchak Party—as well as to timely and often crucial help from Christian missionaries and foreign-aid associations. But with a second wave of huge massacres in Cilicia in 1909, the situation deteriorated still further.

At about this time emigration to Europe and United States accelerated, an apparent response to the Ottoman persecutions and increasing poverty. On the eve of World War I there were positive developments in the Russian-controlled Armenian territories of Transcaucasia after a series of Russian military victories over the Ottoman armies. Russia dispensed a liberal domestic policy and, on an international plane, favored autonomy for a large part of Armenia—including the portion that had belonged to Turkey. Nevertheless, at a secret gathering at the beginning of World War I, Armenian leaders decided to declare loyalty to the states on which they depended. Their devotion to the nations in which they lived came before their claims of identity as a people.

Like almost all Orthodox Christians in eastern Europe, the Armenians were caught up in the torments and massacres of World War I. Some three hundred thousand from the Van and Erzurum provinces in Eastern Anatolia were evacuated at the beginning of the war by the Russians. Others settled in Transcaucasia, in the territory that would become the Armenian Republic, on the eastern border of historic Armenia. But Armenians who remained near the front lines were among the two hundred thousand civilians killed by the Turkish army during its 1916 offensive in Caucasia, according to Russian statistics. A number survived their deportation to camps in Mesopotamia and Syria, while an estimated fifty thousand Armenians were able to reach the environs of Aleppo, where they endured miserable living conditions. About two hundred thousand others took refuge in Cilicia, counting on protection from the occupying French. But France, threatened by the Turks' progress in their war of independence, agreed on an armistice with Atatürk on 30 May 1920, and the next year signed a separate peace treaty that renounced claims on Cilicia.

The scale of extermination visited upon the Armenians in the years 1915 to 1917 wiped them entirely out of the heart of Anatolia, which henceforth became, according to Kemalist ideology, the historic cradle of Turk civilization. Only a small community survived in Istanbul. In 1927 the first Turkish census reported sixty-five thousand to seventy-seven thousand Armenians registered as inhabitants, their identity papers stamped "ermeni" (Armenian). Some six hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand Armenians escaped the genocide. The fate of the survivors varied.

After considerable hardships, Armenian refugees thereafter ended up in Aleppo, which became the central staging area for out-migration. The diaspora may be said to have begun here. Some Armenians went on to settle in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq; for others, Aleppo was a stepping-stone to the United States and France, the two most frequent western destinations. Still others moved to the Balkans, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and other countries.

However, Armenians were forbidden to return to Turkey, their former homeland. An agreement between Atatürk and the League of Nations, signed after the Lausanne Treaty, made this prohibition official. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were thus declared stateless and were forced to seek a radically different way of life, disconnected from their past—apart from memories and photographs that enabled some to preserve family or community ties. Outside of Constantinople, it was rare for all members of an Armenian family to survive. During the genocide Turkish and Kurdish families captured Armenian women and orphans and forced them to convert to Islam. In addition, Armenians in Turkey under the Kemalist Republic were compelled to change their names and to adapt to Turkish manners and the Turkish way of life. They remained in Turkey but lost their Armenian identity.

THE ARMENIAN STATE

An Armenian state was nonetheless created at the end of World War I and, although it came under Soviet domination, would finally outlast the USSR. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 Armenians in Caucasia fought the Ottoman Empire in defense of Eastern Armenia. In January 1918 a Turkish offensive threatened Yerevan but the Armenian volunteers won several decisive battles, which turned out to be a prelude to the Armenian declaration of independence. Turkey recognized Armenia in the Caucasus with the signing of the Batoum Treaty on 4 June 1918.

The new state, neighbor to other Caucasian independent states such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, immediately found itself in a dramatic and dangerous situation. Its population of one million, including thirty thousand Muslims, was overwhelmed by three hundred thousand refugees living in unsanitary and nutritionally disastrous conditions. The population dropped by 20 percent in a year. Mobilization of public opinion and resources, particularly from the U.S. Near East Relief organization, which was already in action against the genocide, lent support. Progress was swift, with democratic reforms, enfranchisement of both men and women, free and compulsory education, and economic restructuring that included nationalization and agricultural modernization. British troops disembarked at Batoum to enable the republic to extend to the whole of Eastern Armenia—some forty-six thousand square kilometers—more land than the Armenians had ever occupied.

At the Paris Peace Conference, which began on 18 January 1919, the Armenian delegation presented a project for an Armenian mandate that extended from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Ocean. This idea was turned down in favor of an independent Armenia that still had a surface area twice the size of the first state proclaimed in 1918. But the U.S. Senate's refusal to ratify the treaties, together with Atatürk's victorious war over the Allies, dashed Armenian hopes—especially those of the Dashnak Party, then in power in Yerevan.

SOVIET DOMINATION TO INDEPENDENCE

By 1920 the Armenian situation seemed hopeless. While Kemalist troops marched into the Kars and Ardahan provinces, Armenia's neighbors, the Azeris, launched an offensive against the Armenian Republic, where there was, in addition, Bolshevik-led unrest. In December 1920 the Dashnak government resigned the same day that Armenia was forced to sign the Treaty of Alexandropol. The new nation lost half its territory to Turkey and Azerbaijan, which gained the region of Nagorno Karabakh, in spite of the fact that 95 percent of the population of that region was Armenian. This represented a double defeat in that Armenia lost much of its territory to the Turks while being brought into the Soviet Union; in 1936 Armenia would be officially declared a Soviet Republic. Even so, Armenians retained their identity and preserved their culture, thanks in great part to the power of the Armenian Church, which the Soviet authorities failed to destroy.

But Stalinization had a profound influence on Armenia that only started to ebb after World War II. In Joseph Stalin's "great patriotic war," declared against Nazi Germany in 1943, Armenians played conspicuous roles in the Soviet victory. In the aftermath of war, some one hundred thousand Armenians of the diaspora, especially those living in France, responded to an appeal to rejoin the republic. This did not work out as expected, however. While Armenians from France returned, many more emigrated to the United States. Soviet Armenia nevertheless flourished both economically and culturally, for the most part. The Armenian homeland consolidated what remained of its historic territory, enabling it to confront consecutive crises that arose with the collapse of the Soviet Union. A referendum on 21 September 1991 brought Armenia complete independence.

THE NEW REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA

Never reconciled to the loss of Nagorno Karabakh, in 1988 Armenians mobilized for reunification. The neighboring Azeris reacted violently, persecuting Armenians and organizing a pogrom in Sumgait in February 1988. As Soviet power was everywhere contested, an Armenian Committee of the Karabakh was formed, though its operation was hampered by a devastating earthquake on 7 December 1988 that killed some forty-five thousand Armenians. A major leader emerged, however. Levon Ter Petrosian (b. 1945), although imprisoned for a time, organized the Armenian National Movement after his release in June 1989. When this party won the elections in October 1990 he became president of the new Republic of Armenia.

The first years of Armenian independence were difficult and resulted in considerable out-migration. Military operations that aimed to reunite the Karabakh region did not succeed; and, although both parties signed a cease-fire in 1994, Armenia and Azerbaijan remained technically at war. A positive demographic change came with the arrival of Armenians from the "interior diaspora" of the former Soviet Union. Despite difficult relations with neighboring countries and tensions throughout the region, Armenians could hope that the twenty-first century would open a new phase in their nation's history as a European and democratic republic, contending with past and future, reunited after a diaspora in the wake of genocide and decades of Soviet rule.

Exiled Armenians, with the impossibility of returning to their homeland, were forced to live and think with an international perspective—at least for those who settled in Western Europe and the United States. Armenians in the diaspora identify themselves and are recognized as U.S. or French citizens. This should not paper over the significant hardships that emigres experienced, but it helps explain why European and U.S. Armenians did not return to the Republic of Armenia. However, Armenians worldwide preserve common values and a shared identity, the intangible but painful memory of genocide, the spiritual and financial connection to the Armenian Church, and consciousness of an old and prestigious history. Powerful associations energize and organize the contemporary Armenian identity. The Armenian General Benevolent Union, for example, operates worldwide. There are also numerous, often highly patriotic, organizations within the various countries of the diaspora that struggle to compel worldwide recognition of the Armenian genocide. This effort has achieved undeniable progress since the 1990s. At the turn of the twenty-first century travels and various research projects have enabled European Armenians to discover the history of their ancestors in Eastern Turkey and even to work with Turkish intellectuals to recover a culture that was often enough not monocultural but collective, beneficial to both peoples.

See alsoArmenian Genocide; Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal; Turkey; World War I; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avakian, Arra S., and Ara John Movesian. Armenia: A Journey through History. Fresno, Calif., 2000.

Bournoutian, George A. A Concise History of the Armenian People: From Ancient Times to the Present. 4th ed. Costa Mesa, Calif., 2005.

Hovannisian, Richard G. Republic of Armenia. 4 vols. Berkeley, Calif., 1971–1996.

Libaridian, Gerard. Modern Armenia: People, Nation, State. New Brunswick, N.J., 2004.

Miller, Donald E., and Lorna Touryan Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. Berkeley, Calif., and London, 1993.

Sargsyan, Gevorg. From Crisis to Stability in the Armenian Power Sector: Lessons Learned from Armenia's Energy Reform Experience. Washington, D.C., 2006.

Walker, Christopher J, ed. Visions of Ararat: Writings on Armenia. London and New York, 1997.

Vincent Duclert