Voices from the Hidden Genocide, 1918

Description

VOICES FROM THE HIDDEN GENOCIDE, 1918 contains the words and stories of the Armenian survivors of the massacre that happened in northern Persia in 1918, which was the continuation of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in Turkey. Before the publication of The Survivor by Rosemary Hartounian Cohen, few people knew about the 1918 massacre. It was rarely mentioned in history books. Perhaps most chilling is that the Armenian massacre of 1918 took place outside the borders of the Ottoman Empire. With impunity, the Turks crossed the border into a neighboring sovereign country in order to massacre the Christian residents. Turkish soldiers entered large cities in northwest Persia: Khoy, Salmas, Urmia, Maku, Gharadagh and many smaller Christian villages. They killed the men, raped the young girls and kidnapped the children under the age of ten. They looted the houses and farm buildings, stealing life savings, furniture, farm animals and everything else of value. Their actions destroyed the local economies. Famine and epidemics covered the region. Persia, which had declared neutrality during the Great War, was never respected by its neighbors or world powers. Christians as well as Muslims in Persia's northwestern cities suffered enormously. The Turkish government denies that the killings of 1915 constituted a genocide and says that they were an internal matter and an unavoidable consequence of the war. Then why did the Turks cross into a neighboring country and massacre nearly the entire Christian population?