Children of Armenia
A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justice
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From 1915 to 1923, the Ottoman Empire drove the Armenians from their ancestral homeland and slaughtered 1.5 million of them in the process. While there was an initial global outcry and a movement led by Woodrow Wilson to aid the “starving Armenians,” the promises to hold the perpetrators accountable were never fulfilled. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Bobelian profiles the leading players—Armenian activists and assassins, Turkish diplomats, U.S. officials— each of whom played a significant role in furthering or opposing the century-long Armenian quest for justice in the face of Turkish denial of its crimes, and reveals the events that have conspired to eradicate the “forgotten Genocide” from the world’s memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Turkish government against its Armenian subjects drags on in the form of Turkish denial and global indifference, according to this rancorous history. Journalist Bobelian gives a sketchy rundown of the massacres ("what difference did it make if several hundred thousand Armenians died rather than 1.5 million?"), but his main story is the ensuing refusal of Turkey and the international community especially the United States to properly acknowledge the crime. He chronicles a generations-long contest between moral claims and realpolitik; after initial Western outrage, the genocide was shoved off the agenda of Turkish-American relations by commercial interests and the anti-Soviet alliance. The book provides an exhaustive account of the perennial battles between Armenian-American activists and Turkey's lobbyists over congressional genocide resolutions. The victimization of the Armenians' excuses much for Bobelian, who blames Armenian terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s he sympathetically profiles an aging survivor who assassinated two Turkish diplomats on "frustration and rage" over Ankara's denials. One leaves this j'accuse wondering if the quest for justice can be taken to an unhealthy extreme.
