The Thirty-Year Genocide

This incisive work transmits to us in these dark days of political turmoil, says Colin Shindler

 

This remarkable book by two eminent Israeli historians recalls the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire by the Turks during the First World War and places it in the wider context of how the Turks treated their ethnic minorities.

The authors remark that, between 1894 and 1924, they had cleared Asia Minor of four million Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians) and that there were three waves of cleansing — under the successive regimes of the Sultan, the Young Turks and Kemal Atatürk.

In response to fake news that Armenians were slaughtering Muslims across the Empire, the Urfa massacre of December 1895 took the lives of half the town’s Armenian population of 20,000 people. “Jews and donkeys” were employed to remove the dead.

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