The material only took shape with the bringing to light of the contents of the archives of Germany, Austria-Hungary (States allied with Turkey), and the United States (a neutral country), as well as the instructional records prepared after the Mudros Armistice, which put an end to the war with the Ottoman Empire. This corpus of works shows the individual and collective experience of the victims, but has remained inexorably confined to the Armenian world. It was the first nationalist party to rise to power that would conceptualize and execute a program of extermination against a segment of its population which had previously, as a social body, been excluded as an “internal enemy.” This destruction was carried out as a necessary condition of the formation of the Turkish Nation-State.įor decades, this crime has not been the object of any study acknowledging it as such, but has, in response, engendered a vast literature of accounts almost exclusively published in Armenian. The Young Turk Committee was strongly influenced by a Europe racked by extreme nationalist movements but still dominated by liberal governments. Between April and September of 1915, the 3000-year-old Armenian land-the Armenian provinces of the East and of Asia Minor-were methodically emptied of their population-wiped off the map-in the space of a few months.
The context of war-with Turkey on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary-created propitious conditions for a massive outburst of violence and allowed for the legitimization of measures that were inconceivable in times of peace. infra, “The Consequences of Mass Violence”).
Among the countless instances of violence observed during the First World War, the extermination of the Armenians constitutes the bloodiest episode that affected the civilian population: around 1.5 million people lost their lives in 1915-1916-victims of the Young Turk regime (Cf.
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