It is clear from everything that I read about the Great War that there was a deliberate and organised killing of huge numbers of Christians by the Ottoman authorities from 1915 onwards. But once we are past that things get hazy and the victims of spin.
Most people know of this as the Armenian Genocide. But significant numbers of other Christians, chiefly Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic and related groups, were also massacred brutally, and it didn't finish in 1915. The Syrian Orthodox call it the Sayfo, a Syriac word meaning the sword.
It is worth thinking about the causes of the appalling massacres, deportations, rapes and plunder that went on.
Enver Pasha had been appalled by the Christian Bulgarian massacres of Muslims in the First Balkan war. They were brutal and Enver vowed revenge against Christians. His revulsion and violent reaction is a significant contribution to the massacres.
Russia was putting political pressure on the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to rebel against the government. The Russians generally thought of the Armenians as heretics, being non-Chalcedonian in their creed. But always keen to cause chaos in the Ottoman Empire, the Russians encouraged the Armenian separatists, and the reaction of the regime in the Empire was the gross move to destroy the Armenian presence in the Empire. It was done with the sort of brutality which has been seen in Rwanda, the Balkans and Syria over the last decades, a carefully planned mass murder.
Ironically one of the commemorations on 24 April look place in the Republic of Armenia, well within the Russian Empire in 1915 and far from the killings and deportations, a country whose own human rights practices since independence from the Soviet state have been far from exemplary.
The Ottomans intended to drive the Armenians from Anatolia down the Euphrates to Deir ez Zor, where a few weeks ago Da'esh, or ISIS, destroyed the church commemorating the genocide. Genocide can be cultural.
The Syrian government has been keen to emphasise the 1915 genocide, partly to embarrass the Turkish government, but also to distract people from the catastrophic situation it has created within its own borders. The Turkish leadership has been unwise: it has moved slowly towards a recognition of the facts of the killings, and it would not have been difficult to have said: That was the decaying Ottoman Empire, we are the young Turkish Republic: what happened under the Sultan is not of our doing. But foolishly they have not taken this line.
The greatest sorrow is that in huge areas of the old Ottoman Empire there is chaos, as in Libya and Yemen, as well as genocide in Syria and Iraq. It is so much easier to condemn for evil in the past to work to bring and end to the terrible human suffering today.
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