Anti-Armenian sentiment or Armenophobia in Turkey is hostility towards and persecution of Armenians manifesting in Turkey. It dates back to the Ottoman Empire, something that eventually culminated in the Armenian genocide. Today, anti-Armenian sentiment is widespread in Turkish society. In a 2011 survey in Turkey, 73.9% of respondents admitted having unfavorable views toward Armenians. According to Minority Rights Group, while the government recognizes Armenians as a minority group, as used in Turkey this term denotes second-class status. The word "Armenian" is widely used as an insult in Turkey by both civilians and by politicians.
Expressions of anti-Armenian sentiment in Turkey include religious discrimination and violence towards Armenians, destruction and desecration of Armenian cultural heritage in Turkey, vandalism towards Armenian churches, monuments and signs in Armenian language, and denial of the Armenian genocide. Denial of the Armenian genocide has been the policy of every government of Turkey.
Other examples include denying Armenian churches legal status, restricting clergy training, interfering in leadership, and seizing community properties, and portrayals of Christians as foreign or disloyal.
History
The presence of Armenians in Anatolia is documented since the sixth century BCE, almost two millennia before Turkish presence in the area. The Ottoman Empire effectively treated Armenians and other non-Muslims as second-class citizens under Islamic rule, even after the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms intended to equalize their status. Although it was possible for Armenians to achieve status and wealth in the Ottoman Empire, as a community they were never accorded more than "second-class citizen" status and were regarded as fundamentally alien to the Muslim 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
Within the social hierarchy of Muslim Ottoman society, Armenians occupied a subordinate position due to the fact that they were not Muslim. Non-Muslims and Christians, in particular, were derided as Giaours ("infidels"). The subordinate status was reified through state-sanctioned attire. In 1580, the Ottoman authorities imposed sumptuary regulations on non-Muslim subjects that reflected and visibly reinforced their subordinate social status. Non-Muslims were formally prohibited from dressing like Muslims and were required to wear distinctive clothing, a policy justified on the grounds that their proper condition under Islamic law was one of "humility and abjection". Violations of such clothing restrictions could be punishable by death.
In 1823, during the Greek War of Independence and an Ottoman war with Persia, tensions arose between the Ottoman central government and the Janissaries over the proposed expulsion of a member of the Bektashi Order, a Muslim Sufi religious order closely associated with the Janissary corps. The government suspected the man of spying for Persia, while the Janissaries revered and protected him. During negotiations, some Janissaries attempted to redirect attention from the suspected spy by arguing that a more serious security concern was posed by the large Orthodox Christian and Armenian populations of — comprising half of Constantinople's population — whom they said could not be trusted. Citing rumors that European powers were supporting the Greek rebels, they asked the government either to expel the city's Orthodox Christians and Armenians, to massacre them, or to permit the Janissaries to do so. The central government rejected the proposal, although Sultan Mahmud II expressed distrust toward the Orthodox Christian population. Historian Masayuki Ueno interprets the episode as evidence that the atmosphere of suspicion created by the Greek revolt extended beyond the Greeks themselves: despite their different ethnic and confessional identity, Armenians also became objects of suspicion among members of the Muslim elite. The incident therefore illustrates an early instance in which Armenians were collectively portrayed as a potential security threat and subjected to calls for expulsion or mass violence, within the broader anti-Christian tensions of the period.
British ethnographer William M. Ramsay who spent 20 years conducting research in Turkey in the late 1800s, described the attitudes towards Armenians as follows: "Turkish rule...meant unutterable contempt... The Armenians...were dogs and pigs...to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing that belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life."
Beginning in 1880, the name Armenia was forbidden to be used in official documents of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a Turkification campaign to play down the role of Armenians in the region. By the 1890s, Armenians faced forced conversions to Islam and increasing land seizures, which led a handful to join revolutionary parties such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, also known as Dashnaktsutyun). In 1895, revolts among the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in pursuit of equal treatment led to Sultan Abdül Hamid's decision to massacre at least 100,000 of Armenians in the state-sponsored Hamidian massacres.
In 1909, the authorities failed to prevent the Adana massacre, which resulted in a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the district resulting in the deaths of 20,000–30,000 Armenians.Raymond H. Kévorkian, "The Cilician Massacres, April 1909" in Armenian Cilicia, eds. Richard G. Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian. UCLA Armenian History and Culture Series: Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces, 7. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, 2008, pp. 339-69. The Ottoman authorities denied any responsibility for these massacres, accusing Western powers of meddling and Armenians of provocation, while presenting Muslims as the main victims and failing to punish the perpetrators. These same tropes of denial would be employed later to deny the Armenian genocide.
The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) came to power in two coups in 1908 and in 1913. In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire lost almost all of its European territory in the Balkan Wars; the CUP blamed Christian treachery for this defeat. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees fled to Anatolia as a result of the wars; many were resettled in the Armenian-populated eastern provinces (Western Armenia) and harbored resentment against Christians. In August 1914, CUP representatives appeared at an ARF conference demanding that in the event of war with the Russian Empire, the ARF incite Russian Armenians to intervene on the Ottoman side. The ARF declined, instead declaring that Armenians should fight for the countries in which they were citizens. In October 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers.
Armenian genocide
During the Ottoman invasion of Russian and Persian territory in late 1914, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians. A few Ottoman Armenian soldiers defected to Russia—seized upon by both the CUP and later deniers as evidence of Armenian treachery—but the Armenian volunteers in the Russian army were mostly Russian Armenians. Massacres turned into genocide following the catastrophic Ottoman defeat by Russia in the Battle of Sarikamish (January 1915), which was blamed on Armenian treachery. Armenian soldiers and officers were removed from their posts pursuant to a 25 February order issued by Minister of War Enver Pasha. In the minds of the Ottoman leaders, isolated incidents of Armenian resistance were taken as evidence of a general insurrection.
In mid-April, after Ottoman leaders had decided to commit genocide, Armenians barricaded themselves in the eastern city of Van. The defense of Van served as a pretext for anti-Armenian actions at the time and remains a crucial element in works that seek to deny or justify the genocide. On 24 April, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals were arrested in Constantinople. Systematic deportation of Armenians began, given a cover of legitimacy by the 27 May deportation law. The Special Organization guarded the deportation convoys consisting mostly of women, children, and the elderly who were subject to systematic rape and massacres. Their destination was the Syrian Desert, where those who survived the death marches were left to die of starvation or disease in makeshift camps. Deportation was only carried out in the areas away from active fighting; near the front lines, Armenians were massacred outright. The leaders of the CUP ordered the deportations, with interior minister Talat Pasha, aware that he was sending the Armenians to their deaths, taking a leading role. In a cable dated 13 July 1915, Talat stated that "the aim of the Armenian deportations is the final solution of the Armenian Question."
Historians estimate that 1.5 to 2 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, of whom 800,000 to 1.2 million were deported or killed during the genocide. In 1916, a wave of massacres targeted the surviving Armenians in Syria; by the end of the year, only 200,000 were still alive. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 women and children were integrated into Muslim families through such methods as forced marriage, adoption, and conversion. The state confiscated and redistributed property belonging to murdered or deported Armenians.
Post-genocide
After the genocide ended, following the Turkish War of Independence and the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Turkish government enacted on 15 April 1923 the "Law of Abandoned Properties" which confiscated properties of any Armenian who was not present on their property, regardless of the circumstances of the reason. While local courts were authorized to appraise the value of any property and provide an avenue for property owners to make claims, the law prohibited the use of any power of attorney by absent property holders, preventing them from filing suit without returning to the country. In addition, the defendant in the case would be the state of Turkey which had created specially tasked committees to deal with each case.
In addition to this law, the Turkish government continued revoking the citizenship of many people with a law on 23 May 1927 which stated that "Ottoman subjects who during the War of Independence took no part in the National movement, kept out of Turkey and did not return from 24 July 1923 to the date of the publication of this law, have forfeited Turkish nationality." Additionally, a further law passed on 28 May 1928 stipulated that those who had lost their citizenship would be expelled from Turkey, not allowed to return, and that their property would be confiscated by the Turkish government, and Turkish migrants would be resettled in the properties.
The incident of The Twenty Classes was a policy used by the Turkish government to conscript the male non-Turkish minority population mainly consisting of Armenians, Greeks and Jews during World War II. All of the twenty classes consisted of male minority population, including the elders and mentally ill. They were given no weapons and quite often they did not even wear military uniforms. These non-Muslims were gathered in labor battalions where no Turks were enlisted. They were allegedly forced to work under very bad conditions. The prevailing and widespread point of view on the matter was that wishing to partake in the World War II, Turkey gathered in advance all unreliable non-Turkish men regarded as a “fifth column”.