Turkey’s thirty-year genocide
by James Bradshaw, MercatorNet:
The Armenian genocide is just one part of a decades-long tragedy, with many lessons to be learned.
The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924
by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, 2019, 672 pp.
Most students of history are aware of the Armenian Genocide, in which huge numbers of Armenian Christians were slaughtered by Ottoman Turk forces during World War I.
In recent years, the Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi sought to follow in the path of many others in investigating what happened during this period.
Morris and Ze’evi came to believe that what we call the Armenian Genocide constitutes just one awful chapter within a ‘Thirty-Year Genocide’ which destroyed Turkey’s Christian community, and their 2019 book advances this argument.
In the late 19th century, the population of modern-day Turkey was around 20 percent Christian. Three decades later, that was down to two percent. During the intervening period, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Christians were killed, with many others fleeing or being deported.
Beginning in 1894, Armenians were targeted in a series of attacks, which set the stage for future and larger-scale atrocities. After the war ended, a new period of hostilities commenced in which the Turkish nationalists renewed their assault on the remaining Christians.
“The destruction of the Christian communities was the result of deliberate government policy and the will of the country’s Muslim inhabitants,” Morris and Ze’evi argue. “The murders, expulsions, and conversions were ordered by officials and carried out by other officials, soldiers, gendarmes, policemen and, often, tribesmen and the civilian inhabitants of towns and villages. All of this occurred with the active participation of Muslim clerics and the encouragement of the Turkish press.”
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