The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 New Book from Harvard University Press

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written by Gregory Pappas A new book is being released in days by Harvard University Press by two leading Israeli genocide scholars about the genocide of Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Christians in Turkey. According to the book description, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s

Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, the

book will cover the period between 1894 and 1924, when three waves of By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents and have denied that it was a genocide. But The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction.violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population.

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, the