Deportation and Annihilation: Turkey’s Genocide of Christian Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians (1894-1924)
18th September 2019
In The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities 1894-1924 (Harvard University Press, 2019), historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi have produced a new “documentary” history of the Armenian genocide that resulted from sifting through thousands of reports, letters, and diary entries from Western observers, including diplomats, military officers, Christian missionaries working in Turkey, businessmen, and other travelers. In this way, Morris and Ze’evi did an end-around the official scrubbing of the archives, or the sealing off of crucial information, that the Turkish government, they say, has engaged in systematically for decades to obliterate Turkey’s role in genocide. Yet, traces remain. The historians made use of postwar trials of war criminals in Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, and interviews published in the Turkish press. Their conclusion is damning.