Anti-Armenian sentiment, also known as anti-Armenianism and Armenophobia, encompasses a wide-ranging spectrum of hostile attitudes and expressions of negative feelings (e.g., fear, aversion, derision, suspiciousness, dislike, etc.), as well as overt chauvinism and xenophobia, harmful stereotypes, and/or prejudice towards Armenians, Armenia, and Armenian culture.
Historically, anti-Armenianism has manifested itself in several ways, ranging from expressions of hatred or of discrimination against individuals of Armenian ethnic background to organized pogroms by mobs or state-sanctioned genocide. Historically, the most destructive and lethal instances of Armenophobia include the Hamidian massacres (1894–1897), the Adana massacre (1909), the Armenian genocide (1915), the Sumgait pogrom (1988), and Operation Ring (1991).
Modern anti-Armenianism frequently consists of expressions of opposition to the actions or existence of an Armenian state, implicit or explicit denial of the Armenian genocide, or belief in an Armenian conspiracy to fabricate history and manipulate public and political opinion for political gain.Black Garden, by Thomas De Waal (Aug 25, 2004), page 42 Anti-Armenianism has also manifested as extrajudicial killing or intimidation of people of Armenian heritage and destruction of cultural monuments.
Turkey
Armenian genocide and its denial
Although in the time of the Ottoman Empire's occupation of historically Armenian lands (alongside other territories throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe), Armenians who lived across the empire's territory were, in practice, able to achieve relatively high social status and significant personal wealth as members of the community, they were never considered de jure equal to the majority Turkish citizens, having their social status limited to "second-class citizens," including being regarded as fundamentally alien to the predominantly Muslim (Turkish) character of Ottoman society.Communal Violence: The Armenians and the Copts as Case Studies, by Margaret J. Wyszomirsky, World Politics, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Apr., 1975), p. 438 In 1895, several revolts among the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in pursuit of equal treatment led to Sultan Abdül Hamid deciding to respond by indiscriminately targeting the empire's Armenian population, which eventually resulted in the notorious Hamidian massacres, during which between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were murdered.Hamidian Massacres, Armenian Genocide.
During and after World War I, the Ottoman government, led by the CUP triumvirate, perpetrated a massacre of between 1.2 and 1.8 million Armenians, in one of the greatest atrocities in history, known as Armenian genocide.Levon Marashlian. Politics and Demography: Armenians, Turks, and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute, 1991.Samuel Totten, Paul Robert Bartrop, Steven L. Jacobs (eds.) Dictionary of Genocide. Greenwood Publishing, 2008, , p. 19.Noël, Lise. Intolerance: A General Survey. Arnold Bennett, 1994, , p. 101.. The Turkish government continues to aggressively deny the Armenian genocide. This position has been criticized in a letter from the International Association of Genocide Scholars to – then Turkish Prime Minister, now President – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. from the International Association of Genocide Scholars to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, June 13, 2005
Contemporary Cenk Saraçoğlu argues that anti-Armenian attitudes in Turkey "are no longer constructed and shaped by social interactions between the 'ordinary people' ... Rather, the Turkish media and state promote and disseminate an overtly anti-Armenian discourse." According to a 2011 survey in Turkey, 73.9% of respondents admitted having unfavorable views toward Armenians. The survey showed an unfavorable stance toward Armenians was "relatively more widespread among those participants with lower levels of education and socioeconomic status." According to Minority Rights Group, while the government recognizes Armenians as a minority group, as used in Turkey, this term denotes second-class status.
Hrant Dink, the editor of the weekly bilingual newspaper Agos, was assassinated in Istanbul on January 19, 2007, by Ogün Samast, who was reportedly acting on the orders of Yasin Hayal, a militant Turkish ultra-nationalist. For his statements on Armenian identity and the Armenian genocide, Dink had been prosecuted three times under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code for "insulting Turkishness." (The law was later amended by the Turkish parliament, changing "Turkishness" to "Turkish Nation" and making it more difficult to prosecute individuals for the said offense.) Dink had also received numerous death threats from Turkish nationalists who viewed his "iconoclastic" journalism (particularly regarding the Armenian genocide) as an act of treachery.
İbrahim Şahin and 36 other alleged members of the Turkish ultra-nationalist Ergenekon group were arrested in January 2009 in Ankara. The Turkish police said the roundup was triggered by orders Şahin gave to assassinate 12 Armenian community leaders in Sivas.Turkish police uncover arms cache, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10, 2009 According to the official investigation in Turkey, Ergenekon also had a role in the murder of Hrant Dink.
In 2002, a monument was erected in memory of Turkish-Armenian composer Onno Tunç in Yalova, Turkey. The monument to the composer of Armenian origin was subjected to much vandalism over the course of the years, in which unidentified people had taken out the letters on the monument. In 2012, the Yalova Municipal Assembly decided to remove the monument. Bilgin Koçal, the former mayor of Yalova, informed the public that the memorial had been destroyed by time and that it would shortly be replaced with a new one in the memory of Tunç. On the other hand, a similar memorial stays in place at the village of Selimiye, where an aircraft had crashed; and the people in the village of 187 expressed their protest about the vandalism claims regarding the memorial in Yalova, adding that they paid from their own funds to keep up the maintenance of the monument in their village against the wearing effect of natural causes.
Sevag Balikci, a Turkish soldier of Armenian descent, was shot dead on April 24, 2011, the day of the commemoration of the Armenian genocide, while serving in the military in Batman. It was later discovered that killer Kıvanç Ağaoğlu was an ultra-nationalist. Through his Facebook profile, it was uncovered that he was a sympathizer of nationalist politician Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu and Turkish agent/contract killer Abdullah Çatlı, who himself had a history of anti-Armenian activity, such as the Armenian Genocide Memorial bombing in a Paris suburb in 1984. Furthermore, his Facebook profile also showed that he was a Great Union Party (BBP) sympathizer, a far-right nationalist party in Turkey. Testimony given by Sevag Balıkçı's fiancée stated that he was subjected to psychological pressure at the military compound. She was told by Sevag over the phone that he feared for his life because a certain military serviceman threatened him by saying, "If war were to happen with Armenia, you would be the first person I would kill."
On February 26, 2012, on the anniversary of the Khojaly Massacre, the Atsız Youth led a demonstration in Istanbul that contained hate speech and threats towards Armenia and Armenians. Chants and slogans during the demonstration include: "You are all Armenian, you are all bastards", "bastards of Hrant [Dink] can not scare us", and "Taksim Square today, Yerevan Tomorrow: We will descend upon you suddenly in the night."
In 2012, the ultra-nationalist ASIM-DER group (founded in 2002) had targeted Armenian schools, churches, foundations, and individuals in Turkey as part of an anti-Armenian hate campaign.
Azerbaijan
Status of Armenian cultural monuments
In November 2020, the British newspaper The Guardian wrote about Azerbaijan's campaign of comprehensive "cultural cleansing" in Nakhichevan:
Satellite imagery, extensive documentary evidence, and personal accounts showed that 89 churches, 5,840 khachkars, and 22,000 tombstones were destroyed between 1997 and 2006, including the medieval necropolis of Djulfa, the largest ancient Armenian cemetery in the world. The Azerbaijani response has consistently been to simply deny that Armenians had ever lived in the region.
The most publicized case of mass destruction concerns gravestones at a medieval Armenian cemetery in Julfa, a sacred site of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Charles Tannock, the member of the foreign affairs committee of the European Parliament, argued: "This is very similar to the Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban. They have concreted the area over and turned it into a military camp." The destruction of the cemetery has been widely described by Armenian sources, and some non-Armenian sources, as an act of cultural genocide.
European Parliament published a resolution on 10 March 2022, condemning the destruction of the Armenian heritage in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). The resolution read:
European Parliament ... Strongly condemns Azerbaijan's continued policy of erasing and denying the Armenian cultural heritage in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, in violation of international law and the recent decision of the ICJ...
Ongoing genocide risk Since 2020, Azerbaijan has attacked Armenian positions in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh (Second Nagorno-Karabakh War), Armenia (border crisis), and has also imposed a blockade on the Republic of Artsakh. These events have resulted in numerous organizations, including those which specialize in genocide studies, reporting that Armenians are at risk of being subjected to another genocide. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention considers Armenians to be "one of the most threatened identities in the world today." Sheila Paylan, international criminal lawyer and legal advisor to the United Nations has warned that "The international community should take its R2P [Responsibility to Protect] commitments more seriously or risk becoming silently complicit in the next Armenian genocide—or ethnic cleansing." Caucasus expert Laurence Broers draws parallels between "the Russian discourse about Ukraine as an artificial, fake nation, and the Azerbaijani discourse about Armenia, likewise claiming it has a fake history", thereby elevating the conflict to an "existential level" for Armenians. A coalition of various human rights organizations also issued a collective genocide warning in response to the blockade: "All 14 risk factors for atrocity crimes identified by the UN Secretary-General's Office on Genocide Prevention are now present."
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention – Since 2021, the organization has issued various "Red Flag Alerts" on Azerbaijan which the organization says poses a threat of genocide to Armenians. It described the Azerbaijan's blockade of the Republic of Artsakh as "a criminal act which intends to create terror and unbearable conditions of life for the population of Artsakh. These events are not isolated events; they are, instead, being committed within a larger genocidal pattern against Armenia and Armenians by the Azerbaijani regime." The group also wrote "The genocidal intent of Baku has never been clearer and the actions carried out up to the moment highly predict this outcome."