The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal

Abstract

The deportation of the majority of the Armenian population from the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the massacres that accompanied it are of commanding interest. The paucity of scholarly contributions in this area, however, has impeded the development of interest in the subject, thereby contributing to the nebulous state surrounding the conditions that led to the disappearance of an entire nation from its ancestral territories. Some maintain that this nebulousness is compounded by the intrusion of political calculation. 1 At issue is whether or not the disaster was intentionally organized by the Ottoman authorities, and whether or not the scope of Armenian losses bore any relationship to that intention.