Eric Bogosian
It would be a mistake to think of the Ottoman leaders who engineered
the mass destruction of the Armenians during World War I as nothing more
than bloodthirsty barbarians. To be sure, many of their proxies were
intensely violent characters common to the frontier lands of Eastern
Asia Minor. But the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, the key figures in
the Committee for Union and Progress, specifically Talat Pasha, Enver
Pasha, Doctor Behaeddin Shakir and associates such as Ziya Gokalp, were
urbane Europeans. They saw the world through European eyes and
understood very well European law. To be sure, the eradication of the
Armenian people from their homelands was a massive and terrible
bloodletting, but it was not the product of a breakdown of civilization.
Instead it was, like the Holocaust that would follow only 25 years
later, a centrally organized, criminal act planned and prosecuted by
wily and callous political leaders.
