ABSTRACT
This chapter details negotiations between Turkish and Armenian leaders preceding the Genocide and offers a new interpretation of its causes. It suggests that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government perceived Armenians not only as an unwelcome ethnic group but also as a social group that threatened the traditional authoritarian order of Ottoman society. The victims of twentieth-century premeditated genocide—the Jews, the Gypsies, the Armenians—were murdered in order to fulfill the state's design for a new order. War was used in both cases to transform the nation to correspond to the ruling elite's formula by eliminating groups conceived of as alien, enemies by definition. The nationalist perspective creates many obstacles to an understanding of the full and real picture of Armeno-Turkish relations and mutual perceptions during the period preceding the Genocide. The liberation movement among Armenians, which turned into an armed struggle in the 1890s acquired depth and an inter-ethnic scope in the 1900s.
