Similarly, these and other historians of the genocide display almost complete inattention to Turkish behavior under the nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) toward the Armenians during 1919–1923. During those years the Turks massacred many thousands of Armenians (in Marash alone, perhaps seven thousand, or even as many as twenty thousand, were massacred in February 1920), and many tens of thousands, most of them returnees from the World War I deportations, were re-deported by the Turks. This was all part of the last stage of cleansing Turkey of its Christians, of which the deportations and genocide of 1915–1916 were the undoubted centerpiece.

Armenian historians have almost uniformly zoomed in on what happened to the Armenians and ignored the Greeks—and Greek historians have often done the same in relation to the Armenians, each seeking to “singularize” their own people’s suffering (much as Jewish historians have tended to “privatize” the term “Holocaust” and criticize its use by the Armenians to define what happened to them). But whether it is good history to deal with the Armenians in isolation from what befell Ottoman Assyrians and Greeks may be questioned. What happened to the Armenians in 1894–1896, 1915–1916 and 1919–1923 formed part of a wider process of ethnic cleansing/genocide that was unleashed in stages by the Turks against all the empire’s Christians (except in Constantinople, where Christians were generally allowed to survive because the city was under intense Western scrutiny). The Armenian genocide should be viewed as part of this wider policy and process, which also saw more than half a million Assyrians and Greeks massacred and at least twice that number expelled or forced to flee their homes during the fateful years from 1914 to 1923.

Benny Morris, who has written books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Dror Ze’evi, an Ottomanist, are completing a book on the destruction of the Ottoman non-Muslim minorities, 1878–1923.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Mane Papyan