Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications

Abstract

If a man is killed in Paris, it is a murder; the throats of fifty thousand people are cut in the East, and it is a question. Victor Hugo During World War I, as the rest of the world looked on, the Ottoman Empire carried out one of the largest genocides in the world's history, slaughtering huge portions of its minority Armenian population. The Armenian genocide followed decades of persecution by the Ottomans and came only after two similar but smaller round of massacres in the 1894-96 and 1909 periods had resulted in two hundred thousand Armenians deaths. In all, over one million Armenians were put to death. The European Powers, who defeated the Turks time and again on the battlefield, were unable or unwilling to prevent this slaughter. Even worse, they failed to secure punishment of the perpetrators following World War I. The events of that time have subsequently slipped into the shadows of world history, thus gaining the title "the forgotten genocide."' To this day, Turkey denies the genocidal intent of these mass murders.