Vahakn Norair Dadrian was an Armenian-American sociologist and historian, born in Turkey, professor of sociology, historian, and an expert on the Armenian genocide.
Musa Kâzım Karabekir was a Turkish general and politician. He was the commander of the Eastern Army of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I and served as Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey before his death.
Halil Kut was an Ottoman military commander and politician. He served in the Ottoman Army during World War I, notably taking part in the military campaigns against Russia in the Caucasus and the British in Mesopotamia.
The Turkish–Armenian War, known in Turkey as the Eastern Front of the Turkish War of Independence, was a conflict between the First Republic of Armenia and the Turkish National Movement following the collapse of the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. After the provisional government of Ahmet Tevfik Pasha failed to win support for ratification of the treaty, remnants of the Ottoman Army's XV Corps under the command of Kâzım Karabekir attacked Armenian forces controlling the area surrounding Kars, eventually recapturing most of the territory in the South Caucasus that had been part of the Ottoman Empire prior to the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) and was subsequently ceded by Soviet Russia as part of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Aram Andonian was an Armenian journalist, historian and writer.
The defense of Van was the armed resistance of the Armenian population of Van against the Ottoman Empire's attempts to massacre the Ottoman Armenian population of the Van Vilayet in the 1915 Armenian genocide. Several contemporaneous observers and later historians have concluded that the Ottoman government deliberately instigated an armed Armenian resistance in the city and then used this insurgency as the main pretext to justify beginning the deportation and slaughter of Armenians throughout the empire. Witness reports agree that the Armenian posture at Van was defensive and an act of resistance to massacre. The self-defense action is frequently cited in Armenian genocide denial literature; it has become "the alpha and omega of the plea of 'military necessity'" to excuse the genocide and portray the persecution of Armenians as justified.
Wilsonian Armenia was the unimplemented boundary configuration of the First Republic of Armenia in the Treaty of Sèvres, as drawn by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's Department of State. The Treaty of Sèvres was a peace treaty that had been drafted and signed between the Western Allied Powers and the defeated government of the Ottoman Empire in August 1920, but it was never ratified and was subsequently superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne. The proposed boundaries of Wilsonian Armenia incorporated portions of the Ottoman vilayets of Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, and Trabzon, which had Armenian populations of varying sizes. The inclusion of portions of Trabzon Vilayet was intended to provide the First Republic of Armenia with an outlet to the Black Sea at the port of Trabzon. A proposed Republic of Pontus was discussed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but the Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos feared the precarious position of such a state, so a portion of it was instead included in the proposed state of Wilsonian Armenia.
Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), did not commit genocide against its Armenian citizens during World War I—a crime documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars. The perpetrators denied the genocide as they carried it out, claiming that Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were resettled for military reasons, not exterminated. In the genocide's aftermath, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed, and denial has been the policy of every government of the Republic of Turkey, as of 2023, and later adopted by the Republic of Azerbaijan, as of 1991.
The Malta exiles were the purges of Ottoman intellectuals by the Allied forces. The exile to Malta occurred between March 1919 and October 1920 of politicians, high ranking soldiers (mainly), administrators and intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire after the armistice of Mudros during the Occupation of Istanbul by the Allied forces. The Malta exiles became inmates in a British prison where various Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) officials were held in the hopes that trials will be held at the Malta Tribunals at a future date.
The Istanbul trials of 1919–1920 were courts-martial of the Ottoman Empire that occurred soon after the Armistice of Mudros, in the aftermath of World War I.
Wehib Pasha also known as Vehip Pasha, Mehmed Wehib Pasha, Mehmet Vehip Pasha, was a general in the Ottoman Army. He fought in the Balkan Wars and in several theatres of World War I. In his later years, Vehib Pasha volunteered to serve as a military advisor to the Ethiopian Army against Fascist Italy during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. He served as the chief of staff to Nasibu Zeamanuel, the Ethiopian Commander-in-Chief on the southern front.
Nuri Killigil, also known as Nuri Pasha (1889–1949) was an Ottoman general in the Ottoman Army. He was the half-brother of Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha.
The Zeitun rebellion or Second Zeitun Resistance took place in the winter of 1895–1896, during the Hamidian massacres, when the Armenians of Zeitun, fearing the prospect of massacre, took up arms to defend themselves from Ottoman troops.
After World War I, the effort to prosecute Ottoman war criminals was taken up by the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and ultimately included in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government organized a series of courts martial in 1919–1920 to prosecute war criminals, but these failed on account of political pressure. The main effort by the Allied administration that occupied Constantinople fell short of establishing an international tribunal in Malta to try the so-called Malta exiles, Ottoman war criminals held as POWs by the British forces in Malta. In the end, no tribunals were held in Malta.
The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, containing the Talat Pasha telegrams, is a book published by historian and journalist Aram Andonian in 1919. Originally redacted in Armenian, it was popularized worldwide through the English edition published by Hodder & Stoughton of London. It includes several documents (telegrams) that constitute evidence that the Armenian genocide was formally implemented as Ottoman Empire policy.
Witnesses and testimony provide an important and valuable insight into the events which occurred both during and after the Armenian genocide. The Armenian genocide was prepared and carried out by the Ottoman government in 1915 as well as in the following years. As a result of the genocide, as many as 1.5 million Armenians who were living in their ancestral homeland were deported and murdered.
Cherkes Ahmet was the leader of Ottoman Turkey's state-sponsored paramilitary marauders of supposedly Circassian origin during World War I. Cherkes Ahmet was from Serres, Macedonia. He was notoriously responsible for the murder of the well-known Armenian writer, literary critic and politician Krikor Zohrab and politician Vartkes Serengülian during the Armenian genocide. Ahmet supported the Committee of Union and Progress during the coup d'état of January 1913 following which he became a leading member of the Special Organization in Van, where he was given the responsibility of subduing the Armenian population by Cevdet Bey, the Governor of Van at the time. Ahmet, along with fellow murderers Halil and Nazim, were tried and executed in Damascus by Djemal Pasha in September 1915. The assassinations became the subject of a 1916 investigation by the Ottoman Parliament led by Artin Boshgezenian, the deputy for Aleppo.
During the Armenian genocide, which occurred in the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of the CUP, Armenian women in the Ottoman Empire were targets of a systematic campaign of genocidal rape, and other acts of violence against women described by scholars as "instruments of genocide" including kidnapping, forced prostitution, sexual mutilation and forced marriage into the perpetrator group.
Bibliography of the Armenian genocide is a list of books about the Armenian genocide:
Mehmed Kemal Bey was an Ottoman administrator and educator from the Young Turk party involved in the Armenian genocide. He served as the sub-prefect of Boğazlıyan, governor of Yozgat, and inspector of deportations in Konya. He is known for organizing the deportation of 40,000 Armenians from Boğazlıyan, establishing "killing sites" in the Yozgat region that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Armenians during the genocide, and overseeing deportations in Konya. Kemal Bey was the first person executed of the Istanbul trials.
