#thepromiseedit

“If I sign this confession, destroys everything I've ever written.”

The Promise (2016), starring Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon, is an historical drama movie about the Armenian genocide.

The Armenian Genocide refers to the systematic extermination of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire between 1915-1923, orchestrated by the Ottoman Imperial Government.

The genocide was implemented through several phases - the arrest of the Armenian elite and intellectuals; the conscription of able-bodied Armenian men into the Ottoman army followed by murder by their Turkish fellow soldiers; the deportation of women, children, and the eldery on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water; and the organized “butcher battalions” to carry out the slaughter in Armenian villages.

There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War - approximately one and a half million Armenians were killed during the genocide. The survivors were either exiled or forcibly islamized. The Armenian diaspora around the world came to be as a direct result of the genocide.

Other Christian ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire such as the Assyrians and the Greeks were similarly targeted for extermination. The term “genocide” was first coined to specifically describe the massacre of Armenians. It is accepted that Nazi Germany viewed the extermination of Armenians as a model to follow for the Holocaust.