By Jean Sevillia,
Seuil, 510 p., 30 €.
1915-2015: The centenary of the Armenian genocide spilled much ink. Bringing truthful testimony and reports of time, specialists take us into the heart of a bloody massacre.
April 24, 1915, 600 Armenian notables were killed in Constantinople. This massacre gave the signal for a massacre that would cost lives, in just over a year, to almost 1.3 million people in Asia Minor, or two-thirds of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Between 1894 and 1896, from 200,000 to 250,000 Armenians, Ottoman subjects had already been killed, and a million other dispossessed and driven from their land. In 1909, the Young Turks seized power and replaced the Sultan Abdul Hamid I. Mohamed V, which accepted the constitutional dictatorship of the nationalists. Or the Young Turks advocated a policy based on ethnic and cultural homogeneity of Turkey, which implied the removal of Christian minorities. As of April 1909, 30,000 Armenians were killed in Cilicia. In 1914, the Ottomans entered the war on the side of the Central Powers and the first failures of the Turkish army against the Russians provide the trigger of extermination that had been prepared and planned, including the deportation of the populations concerned. Report lefigaro.fr
On the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, many books published in 2015. He just released two specialists, Raymond Kevorkian and Yves Ternon is a real amount. Organized chronologically, the book presents the facts, region by region, from contemporary documents: orders or reports of officers or officials Ottoman witness accounts, including Western religious settled in Turkey, diplomats, reports or foreign journalists. It is a succession of horrors. After the fall of the Young Turks in October 1918, a Turkish captain, enraged against his own country, will discuss “thousands of little children crushed against the walls and stones, girls that are strangling after being raped, men and women whose number reached hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the sword and who, under the blows of the ax, fill the pits and wells. “
Many states have recognized the responsibility of their rulers then in mass crimes committed in the twentieth century. So when Turkey she will refuse to do so?
Memorial of the Armenian Genocide, Raymond H. Kevorkian and Yves Ternon, Seuil, 510 p., 30 €.