The Armenian genocide of 1915-1917: political, historical and juridical perspectives with regards to the word ‘genocide’, with specific mention of current revisionist trends

Abstract

The large-scale massacres of Christian Armenians which took place in the Ottoman empire during 1915-1917 at the instigation of the ruling party C.U.P. (Committee Union and Progress), have been widely acknowledged as an act of genocide by both historians and genocide and holocaust specialists alike. When Raphael Lemkin coined the word ‘genocide’ in 19431, he spoke of these massacres as a seminal example of what genocide consists of. However, the refusal by successive Turkish governments to acknowledge these acts as genocide, in compliance with the widely accepted definition of this crime since the Convention of Human Rights of 1948, compels one to assess again the nature of the crimes committed, while looking at the current political implications of this denial. The present paper intends to do so using three main bodies of sources: recent declarations stemming from the international community with regard to the issue at stake; testimonies from foreign eye-witnesses and diplomats holding office in Turkey at the time of the massacres; documents that date from the Turkish Court Martial of 1919 in which the perpetrators were judged and sentenced to death. The goal of the conclusion is to point briefly towards the limitations of current international provisions with regard to prevention of genocide, and to sketch an ethical view on the phenomenon of revisionist historiography.