Armenieninfo.net

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.

Introduced, translated, and annotated by Matthias Bjørnlund