ABSTRACT
The murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 presaged Adolf Hitler’s even more gargantuan assault on European Jews in the 1940s. A “Christian genocide” framing acknowledges the historic claims of the Assyrian and Greek peoples, and the movements stirring for recognition and restitution among Greek and Assyrian diasporas. Foreign intervention increasing, and Armenian nationalists insurgent, vengeful massacres swept across Armenian-populated territories. It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion. Ambassador Morgenthau to the US Secretary of State, July 16, 1915. A British officer based in Persia, Sir Percy Sykes, later suggested that if the Assyrians had not fled in terror to northern Persia, they would have experienced “extermination at the hands of Turks and Kurds.” Turkey’s defeat in the First World War, and the subsequent collapse and occupation of the Ottoman Empire, offered surviving Armenians an opportunity for national self-determination.
