Okay, hello everyone. This is lecture 5.1 about the Armenian genocide. It's the first substantive lecture of module five. And so I would like to start by telling you a story. This is Esther Wroneon in 1915. She was a young Armenian woman in the year 1915. Living in the Anatolian town of a messiah. Anatolia is this region here in Asia Minor or kind of the bridging between Turkey and Western Europe, Greece would be here. See and this is kinda the inference to Western Europe execute. This is the islands of Greece here already. So Asia Minor is the western most kind of protrusion of Asia. And it is a region that is today identified with Turkey. The Armenian people seemed to have been living in this region since biblical times. From the 17th century onward. They were a Christian minority in a majority Muslim empire, the Ottoman Empire. In spite of that, the Armenian people who were Christians lived there. A relatively peaceful existence, as did most religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire. But all this changed in 1915. In May of 1915, rumors of persecution of Christians began reaching esters hometown. She saw several Armenian men dragged by Turkish soldiers to the center of the town and hanged. Shortly after that, a group of Turkish soldiers set fire to a church, burning everyone inside. Some young Armenian women agreed to marry muslim men and to become Muslim in order to avoid persecution. Esther did not agree. Instead, she joined the caravan, kind of a convoy or a precession of Armenian people that were deported from her town and took to the desert to an unknown destination accompanied by Turkish soldiers. In the desert. The Turkish soldiers, together with other militias that we will talk about later, killed demand and abuse the women. Esters grandmother smeared her face with mud and with garlic, hoping that soldiers would be less inclined to take her that way. She saw a lot of horrible things on, on the way. As a young girl, she saw pits that were filled with naked bodies. She saw bodies float in the river. She was so exhausted and broken by all of which, by all of this, by everything she experienced, that she looked dead. A Kurdish militia men. And I will talk more about the Kurds later on and there another minority in the Ottoman Empire, but they had an important role in carrying out the Armenian Genocide. Anyway, a Kurdish militia man grabbed her and flung her onto a card with other bodies. Because he thought she was basically dead, where she lay on top of rotting flesh. And an older woman, elderly woman, founder, where she was dumped with the other bodies and saved her. And she was brought to the home of a Turkish man and told to live as a Muslim so that she could be spared if she would reveal that she's Armenia and she'd have to be killed. So if she'd lived as a Muslim, she could kinda either real identity and she will be spared the man plant to marry her off to another Muslim man. She begged not to do that. He agreed to center it to an orphanage instead. But before doing that, he did rape her. In the orphanage. She lived a difficult life, but eventually she was married off to a Muslim man and forced to live as the Muslim ones. That man found a crucifix hidden under her mattress. And when he did, he whipped her until he drew blood from her. In 1920, eventually five years. She managed to escape and with the help of others, she ended up in the United States. And this is a picture of her presumably later in life in the United States. So ester is a survivor of the Armenian Genocide from 1915 until the early 1920's, with the bulk of the killing being in 1915/1916, the Turkish state engaged in the systematic persecution of Christian minorities living in its territories. The largest target group was the Armenians, was not the only one, but it was the largest. Between 50%, 75 of the Armenians living in the territory of the Ottoman Empire were killed. So we're gonna be talking about the Armenian Genocide this week or today and the next lecture. And what I'd like today to talk about the background to the Armenian genocide. And really that will occupy most of the lecture. We will get to the genocide itself only at the end. But my feeling is that since a lot of students are less familiar with this case from the 20th century, background is necessary here, specifically understanding what exactly was the Ottoman Empire and what explains the fact that the genocide took place at the exact moment when it did, which is early in the 20th century, you know what was going on in the Ottoman Empire at that point in time. That will help us understand this sudden persecution. It's not so sudden, but this extreme persecution of Christians. I'll then make some points about war and genocide more generally. This is, I am going to extrapolate from this case to make some more general observations about patterns relating to war and genocide. There's a tight relationship between war and genocide. And I'd like to discuss that a little bit. And then I'll talk about the stages of the Armenian genocide. Because the Armenian genocide is probably the first case where we can see a very clear laying out of a plan, kind of stages of, of this targeting of the Armenian population. And I will talk about these stages because we see them Again, it's an issue of patterns. We see these stages repeating themselves in other cases that we will talk about later in the semester. I want to introduce you to a few key terms that I will use in the lecture today. First of all, the Ottoman empire of course talk about that. Then is the term the Great unweaving, which I will explain basically coming apart of the Ottoman Empire, which was a process that unfolded from the kind of last decades of the 19th century into the early decades of the 20th century. I'll talk about the Tanzimat, what that was. It's a series of reforms carried out in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and in an attempt to modernize it. And these reforms are an important background for understanding the Young Turks revolution. That the term that I want to talk about, which is the uprising of several secular, NOT religious, Muslim clerics, but secular generals, secular leaders, who would lead a revolution that will topple down the empire toppled down to Seoul, done that. Or the Salton, as Americans would probably say, tupled down the soul done which ruled the Ottoman Empire and build in its place a modern secular nation state. And if you remember in lecture five, when I gave an overview of this module, I defined what a nation state is. So the Young Turks revolution, which led to the nation state will talk about World War One. World War One broke out in 1914. The Armenian Genocide kinda begins in 1915. So that context, the links there between these two events are very clear. And then I'll talk about the Special Organization, which is a name, a general name of these paramilitary squads or militias that actually carried out the killing and deportation of the Armenians on the ground. It's just, you have a list here of the key terms, but we'll go over all of these again kind of in the course of the lecture. And I'm just kind of signaling to you or singling out for you terms that you should pay attention. Hint, module review. You go but I'm saying, I don't do the winks. Well, I should probably never do that again. Anyway. Too late. It's on tape now. Anyway, I'm going to stop now and I'll continue in the next segment with beginning to talk about the background to the Armenian genocide.