British Parliamentary Debates on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918

British Parliamentary Debates on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918

Eric Avebury and Ara Sarafian

London: Gomidas Institute, 2003
xiv+ 98 pp, map,
ISBN 1-903656-11-7, paperback
UK£10.00 / US$16.00 OUT OF STOCK
UK£20.00 / US$32.00 SPECIAL RESERVE
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"The Turkish authorities within the little time of five mouths proceeded systematically to exterminate a whole race out of their dominions. They did so riot in thousands or tens of thousands, but in hundreds of thousands. One estimate states that five hundred thousand persons were killed within the five months, while according to another estimate the number was as runny as eight hundred thousand killed. There have been massacres of the Armenians before this last one. Ten years ago thirty thousand were massacred, and ten years before that a hundred thousand. But those massacres, which made the world shudder at the time, shrink into insignificance beside these massacres which we have been unconsciously living through in the last six or seven months."

Aneurin Williams, MP, (Hansard, 16 November 1915)

"I think it may be said, without the least fear of exaggeration, that no more horrible crime has been committed in history of the world... This is a premeditative crime determined on long ago. ... It was a long-considered, deliberate policy to destroy and wipe out of existence the Armenians in Turkey. It was systematically carried out. It was ordered from above..." - Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 16 November 1915

This is a systematic collection of British Parliamentary debates between 1915-18 on the treatment of Ottoman Armenians, including invaluable background insights from British archives. These debates show the manner in which the Armenian issue was understood during World War I, and provides the background against the British Parliamentary Blue Book, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-15 was commissioned by British authorities.

The appendix also includes a critical analysis of the Allied Declaration of 23 May 1915 (British text), the Report by the Committee on Armenian Atrocities (4 October 1915) which crysallised British opinion on the Armenian Genocide, and two eye-witness accounts of the Armenian Genocide.
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