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‘A Fate Worse Than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide |
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Samstag, den 06. August 2011 um 11:04 Uhr |
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Matthias Bjørnlund
All tell the same story and bear the same scars: their men were all killed on the first days’ march from their cities, after which the women and girls were constantly robbed of their money, bedding, clothing, and beaten, criminally abused and abducted along the way. Their guards forced them to pay even for drinking from the springs along the way and were their worst abusers but also allowed the baser element in every village through which they passed to abduct the girls and women and abuse them. We were not only told these things but the same things occurred right here in our own city before our very eyes and openly on the streets.1
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The 1914 cleansing of Aegean Greeks as a case of violent Turkification |
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Samstag, den 23. Juli 2011 um 20:56 Uhr |
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Matthias Bjørnlund
In 1992, Greek historian Ioannis Hassiotis wrote that “[i]t is strange that both Greek and Armenian historians should have treated the first persecutions of the Greeks in 1913–14 and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 as separate phenomena.”1 The tendency to treat as separate phenomena various aspects of CUP policies of what I would dub “violent Turkification”—interconnected policies of, for example, ethnic cleansing and genocide aimed at the homogenization of the Ottoman Empire—is not new, nor can it merely be seen in the writings of Greek and Armenian scholars. Before, during, and after WWI, the wide range of mainly Western diplomats, missionaries, etc. in the empire would primarily witness and report on the specific aspect of CUP policies that was the Armenian genocide—a fact that has often been reflected in scholarly accounts that have likewise tended to focus on this event rather than on the persecution of other groups.2 Two main reasons for this seem to be that: (1) before, during, and after the Armenian genocide many such observers (especially missionaries) worked among Armenians rather than among, for example, Greeks or Assyrians; and (2) these observers were therefore generally more receptive to the suffering of those they had often literally built their lives around, and were placed at geographical locations where they could mainly observe the destruction of the Armenians. A third reason is that many saw the Armenian genocide, with its widespread, large-scale, and systematic massacres and death marches, as more condensed in time and more radical in its intent and execution than other campaigns of destruction.
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Eyewitness accounts of the Armenian genocide from the Danish archives: Digin Versjin |
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Mittwoch, den 30. März 2011 um 20:43 Uhr |
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Introduced, translated, and annotated by Matthias Bjørnlund
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