"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide

"Diyarbakir was a ruined landscape of destroyed or abandoned houses and people left without work or sustenance," writes Suny (A Question of Genocide), a scholar of Armenian and Soviet history at the University of Michigan, describing scenes that prefigured the Armenian genocide of 1915. The chaos and social collapse produced by the death throes of the Ottoman Empire could be seen as early as two decades before WWI, as Asia Minor's ancient traditions of religious and ethnic tolerance gave way to horrifying communal violence: "War, hunger, and dislocated populations tore asunder the threadbare fabric of Ottoman society." Suny, whose own ancestors perished in the massacres, manages to approach his subject with both a scholarly detachment and a certain sentiment, lending his work academic and emotional weight. Tracing how a growing sense of Turkish nationalism turned localized disturbances into a coordinated national policy of extermination, he argues that the conflict arose with "the accelerating construction of different ethnoreligious communities within the complex context of an empire." Precise and objective, Suny demonstrates that genocide was instigated by the grassroots and adopted by the Young Turks only after it had proven its usefulness as a political strategy. (Apr.)