Professor Ron Grigor Suny
Professor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan; Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago; and Senior Researcher, National Research University- Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
In his lecture he will discuss the deportations and mass killing of Armenians and Assyrians of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. 100 years later it remains a largely forgotten or deliberately obscured genocide.
When: 15.00 – 17:30
Where: MB 503
The lecture is followed by reception.
Abstract
The deportations and mass killing of Armenians and Assyrians of the Ottoman Empire during World War I remains 100 years later a largely forgotten or deliberately obscured genocide. When Raphael Lemkin first coined the term “genocide,” he applied it primarily to two cases – the Nazi killing of European Jews in World War II and the Armenian massacres a quarter century earlier. Yet the governments of the Republic of Turkey and a few allied “scholars” deny that a genocide occurred in the late Ottoman Empire and claim instead that the Young Turks never intended to eliminate two of their subject peoples.
A look at the overwhelming archival and other evidence of deportations and mass murder of a designated ethnoreligious group, planned, initiated, and carried out by the Young Turk authorities, should be enough to convince any serious investigator that, by any conventional definition, genocide had occurred. This talk focuses on the “why” and “when” of genocide. Professor Suny brings together ideological/political factors,social/environmental context, and emotions (”affective dispositions”) as key to the framing of the ultimate decision to commit mass murder.
English 
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