The Armenians
During the course of the First World War considerably over a million Armenians were slaughtered in one of the most horrific but least known genocides of recent history. The then government of Ottoman Turkey made a decision to liquidate their Armenian subjects as a people. Armenian conscripts into the Ottoman army were starved, beaten and machine gunned. Armenian intellectuals were murdered. In Armenian villages men were taken away and shot, while their women and children were rounded up and forced to walk southwards into the deserts, where many collapsed and died of hunger and exhaustion. The survivors were then incarcerated in open-air concentration camps, from which few emerged alive.
Please note that the terminology in the fields of minority rights and indigenous peoples’ rights has changed over time. MRG strives to reflect these changes as well as respect the right to self-identification on the part of minorities and indigenous peoples. At the same time, after over 50 years’ work, we know that our archive is of considerable interest to activists and researchers. Therefore, we make available as much of our back catalogue as possible, while being aware that the language used may not reflect current thinking on these issues.