Genocide and the end of the Ottoman Empire

In the process of Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian imperial collapse, roughly in the decade 1912–23, millions of soldiers were killed in regular military hostilities. But hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians were also victimized as a result of expulsions, pogroms and other forms of persecution and mass violence. The Balkan wars of 1912–13 erased the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans and marked a devastating blow to Ottoman political culture. The years 1915–16 saw the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (and many Syriacs), organized by the Young Turk political elite, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Lastly, the period 1917–23 is of great significance for the history of the Caucasus, both North and South, as it witnessed wars of annihilation and massacres of civilians. All three processes occurred amidst a critical depacification of inter-state relations and societal conditions, as well as a profound crisis of inter-ethnic relationships between and within states.¹ In these processes, large-scale destruction and arson of villages, beatings and torture, forced conversions, and indiscriminate mass killings occurred.