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Along with a multimedia presentation created from the only known photographs of the Armenian genocide, letters, posters, books and other rare artifacts document the Near East Foundation's massive relief effort.
It happened decades before the Holocaust. Before the atrocities in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Before Darfur.
It effectively destroyed an entire nation, leaving more than 1.5 million people dead and millions displaced from a homeland they had occupied for nearly 3,000 years.
It has been condemned as a “crime against humanity” and the “murder of a nation,” yet largely remains a forgotten part of history.
“It” was the genocide of Armenian nationals by the Turkish government during the first world war.
On April 24, 1915, Armenian political, religious, educational and intellectual leaders in Constantinople (now, Istanbul) were arrested and murdered when a triumvirate of extreme Turkish nationals took control of the region in an effort to eliminate the Armenian people and create a Pan-Turkic empire that spread to Central Asia.
In the years that followed, the Turkish government ordered the deaths or deportation of Armenians to “relocation centers” in the barren deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia.
The greatest torment was reserved for women and children run ragged for months over mountains and across deserts. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation and exposure to the elements.
In the decade following the Armenian Genocide, the New York-based Near East Relief (since renamed the Near East Foundation) raised over $100 million to help the surviving Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians, Greeks and other victims of the Ottoman Turks’ depredations. The Near East Foundation has since grown into a major international development organization working in dozens of countries.
This exhibition documents through letters, photographs, posters, books and other printed materials the Foundation’s massive relief effort. Also included in the display is a multimedia presentation of the only known photographs of the genocide, taken by the German army officer Armin T. Wegner.
As reports of the atrocities eventually spread throughout the world, U.S. and Allied Powers vowed to hold responsible those members of the Turkish government and others who planned or participated in the massacres.
President Theodore Roosevelt condemned the actions of the Turkish government, writing that “…the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it ….”
Pledges to help later were buried, but the “Forgotten Genocide” paved the way for future atrocities: While persuading associates in the 1930s that a Jewish Holocaust would be tolerated by the West, Adolf Hitler said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
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