Armenia & The Armenians
MASSACRE AND DISPERSION OF THE ARMENIANS
The growth of Armenian nationalism aroused the suspicion and
wrath of Sultan Abdul Hamid the tyrant, the despotic ruler of Ottoman
Turkey (1876-1909).
In a frightful series of barbaric massacres beginning in 1894,
nearly 200,000 Armenians were butchered withing 2 years. These wanton
killings were both a cause and response to the series of sporadic acts of
terrorism, visited upon oppressive and callous Turkish government
officials by armed Armenian patriotic groups formed spontaneously, which
were later merged with the well organized Armenian Revolutionaries'
Federation in 1890 (later renamed Armenian Revolutionary Federation).
The desperate act of resorting to armed resistance was with the
sole objective of forcing the tyrannical Sultan into granting the
Armenian people the most elementary of human rights, and at the same time
to arouse the conscience of the European Powers, to intervene on behalf
of reforms for the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.
For 500 years the Armenians had been the most loyal and skilled
citizens of Ottoman Turkey, and yet at the outbreak of World War I, on
the pretext that the Armenians were sympathetic to the Allied Cause, the
Young Turk regime was motivated to attempt solving the problem once and
for all by physically annihilating the Armenians in Turkey.
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