24 April 1915. In Constantinople the police arrest Armenian writers, teachers and deputies. Then the provinces: the men of a village are taken out and shot, and the women, children and old are marched south toward the Syrian desert. Heat, hunger, killing at the wells.
Why then
A collapsing empire at war with Russia treats a Christian minority as an enemy within. Its Young Turk rulers watched Balkan Muslims driven from their homes in 1912–13, and in 1914 drove Greeks off the Aegean coast. A rout by the Russians at Sarikamish and the armed defence of Van are called rebellion.
What they wanted
Talaat, the interior minister, and his circle want an Anatolia that can never side with Russia. Local officials, gendarmes and Kurdish irregulars take land and loot. Some governors refuse the orders and are removed.
What changed
Somewhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenians die, most often counted as about a million. A people that had lived in eastern Anatolia for three thousand years is gone from it. The lawyer who coins the word 'genocide' in 1944 has this case in mind.
Still argued
The deaths are documented, down to consular reports written at the time. The fight is over the word: genocide, as most historians and many states say, or wartime relocation, as Turkey insists.