Odile Jacob Armenian Genocide / Le Génocide des Arméniens (Oj.Histoire)

Among the countless acts of violence perpetrated during World War I, the extermination of the Armenian population constitutes the bloodiest episode involving civilians. From 1915 to 1916, more than 1,500,000 people were killed. Wartime conditions, by creating a situation favourable to the unleashing of extreme violence, helped legitimise measures that would have been inconceivable in peacetime.But, argues Raymond Kévorkian, those crimes were merely the logical outcome of a process that had begun several decades earlier, when the Turkish nation-State had conceived the physical elimination of a part of its own population as a prerequisite for its construction.The book is divided into three sections: ? the first examines the creation and development of the ideology of the Young Turks, up to the moment when the decision to exterminate the Armenians was taken;? the second part is a region-by-region examination of the geography of genocide, and allows the author to observe the different forms of treatment reserved for the civilian population and for Armenian conscripts;? the thied and final part concerns the trials held for war crimes following the Armistice of Mudros, and the attempts by the Allied powers to establish a higher international tribunal.In September 2006 France will begin to commemorate the Year of Armenia, with numerous public events, including a major exhibition at the Louvre Museum.Raymond Kévorkian, a historian, teaches at the Institut Français de Géopolitique, at the University of Paris-VIII-Saint-Denis. He is the director of the Bibliothèque Nubar, the Armenian library in Paris, and the author of numerous works on the history of modern and contemporary Armenia and Armenians.