nature said:I have a question about armenian genocid:
The ottoman sultans were tolerant on minorities (jewish were protected by sultans, whereas they were not wellcomed elsewere) and on religions, so why these atrocities on Armenians?
They didn't only attack the Armenians, they also murdered Assyrians, Greeks, and Kurds, among others. See this article:
The Young Turks leaders' systematic policy of violent 'turkification' first targeted the Greeks: "More than 100,000 Ottoman Greeks were expelled from the Aegean and Thrace to create living space for Muslim refugees who had themselves been brutally driven away from Crete and the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were deported from the coastal regions to the interior due to alleged strategic reasons during the war. Finally the anti-Greek campaign of the Young Turks found its continuation in [Turkey's first President] Mustafa Kemal's expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks. The burning of Smyrna [known today as İzmir, Turkey] and the slaughter of its Christian inhabitants in 1922 marked the symbolic end of Greek presence in Turkey." The massacres and forced deportations had cost the lives of up to one million Greeks.
Approximately 300,000 Assyrians residing in the Ottoman Empire were murdered; their villages were burned, and churches were destroyed. The number of Armenians who were targeted by the Young Turks' policy in 1915 however exceeded that of the others, with up to 1.5 million Armenians meeting their death by either being burned alive - sometimes in groups of only women and children - or dying from starvation and fatigue on the death marches leading to the Syrian desert. While some Kurds joined Ottoman soldiers in murdering, raping and looting Armenians, some Kurdish groups such as the Alevis from Dersim [today Tunceli Provence, Turkey] gave refuge to Armenians. As a result, they too were not exempted from the Young Turks' brutality. During World War I, up to 700,000 Kurds - including the perpetrators - were forcibly removed with approximately half of the displaced perishing.
I don't know much about their treatment of the Jews, so I'm not sure if they've been treated in a similar way.
nature said:When I was young, I remember our turkish neighbors speaking about their country: how Ataturk positively changed the country, giving women the right to vote, the only country on the world that gave this equality to women, idem for education, with a rate of alphabetisation the higher on the world, the abolition of religious wearing for women, laicity. it's said that his adopted daughter was an Armenian girl!
So: how a leader that respected women and children have been able to continue such atrocities?
Good question nature. Maybe he did create those positive changes for the Turkish population, while continuing its violent policies against minorities and most non-Turkish, non-Muslim groups. So, some Turkish people mostly remember the 'good stuff', while not being told (in history class for example) about these kind of massacres. Ataturk was a member of the Young Turks, and as you read above, is partly responsible for the deaths of Greeks. Added: Maybe he continued such atrocities against minorities, because those people are not as important to him. One of their goals was to 'turkify' their empire, so minorities were often not treated well. Hope this answers your questions a bit, others may know more.