22 - Genocide

Summary

This chapter focuses on a study of the murder of the Ottoman Armenians and other Anatolian Christians during the First World War, which incorporates an account of pre-war state-minority relations. Then, it discusses the violent political landscape of a very large part of greater Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. The most extensive anti-civilian violence occurred in the lands of the older dynastic land empires in the east, south-east and east-central parts of the continent. The removal of the Armenians from eastern Asia Minor mainly took place, and from western Anatolia and the province of Edirne in Thrace, 1915. In eastern Anatolia, men and youngsters were mostly massacred on the spot, with those in the army, mostly already separated into unarmed labour-battalions, also killed. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918 allowed the relaunch of pan-Turkist schemes and raised the spectre of further Armenian extermination.