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| Poppies near the Mountains of Ararat, Turkish/Armenian border |
The Armenian Genocide is too big a subject to cover in research notes. This is only the barest outline; I recommend Dawn MacKeen's The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey for readers who want to know more.
Djinn is a bit of historical fiction in which WWI happens early, in the 1880s. All of the necessary pieces of the tragedy had been invented by then: railroads, machine guns, dynamite, even the telegraph. These were in fact employed in warfare in colonial possessions in the late 1800s, e.g., the Mahdist Rebellion in Sudan. In one rail-transport and machine gun enhances battle, the British lost 48 troops, the Sudanese 11,000.
The Armenian Genocide also had precursors in the late 1800s. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians were killed during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, along with some 25,000 Assyrians.
The background story here is that the Ottoman Empire--aka the "sick man or Europe"--had been hemorrhaging Christians throughout the 1800s. They lost Greece in the 1820s, Serbia by the 1860s, Romania in 1878, etc. Meanwhile the British had effectively taken over Egypt, the Italians grabbed Libya, the French were in Algeria, and the British were also busy over in Aden. They had just lost a disastrous war with the Russians, and decided the Armenians were clearly the next group hankering for independence.
Whether the Armenians were or not is a matter of debate. Some Armenians did join revolutionary groups or imagine an independent Armenia under Russian auspices, but the vast majority did not.
To be clear, I don't think wanting to be independent is any worse than wanting a divorce. If Texas declared itself independent tomorrow, I'd wish Texas good luck, not call for a Texan genocide. "She wanted a divorce" does not excuse murdering your spouse.
Things calmed down by 1897, but with WWI the desire to blame the Armenians (and Christians generally) for the nation's problems ramped up again.
The massive hemorrhage of the 1800s upset the ethnic balance of the Empire. Unlike The drier, more desert provinces on the other side of the Mediterranean, the southeast European provinces were densely populated (and paid a lot of taxes). In the 1530s, (according to Egypt Today,) the population of the Ottoman Empire was 80% non-Muslim. Of those, the majority were Christians. By the mid to late 1800s Christians were about 40% of the Empire and by WWI they were 20-25%. Regardless of the exact numbers, the loss of European territory caused the empire to lose a lot of Christians and it's much easier to push around a group that constitutes 20% of the population than one that's 50%.
At the same time, the whole concept of "nationhood" was taking off in the 1800s. Peoples who had simply been "subjects" of empires like the Habsburgs or the Holy Roman started seeing themselves as "citizens" of "nations." Many of the spun-off states, like Greece, were motivated by their view of themselves as nations. The Ottomans began asking themselves what it meant for them to be a nation instead of an empire, too.
Long story short, the Committee of Union and Progress, aka the CUP, was founded in 1889 and pressed for democratic reform. The sultan promptly banned them, but they won in the end and began a project of "Turkification" and "Islamification," though we can also blame Abdul Hamid II for that. (The CUP went secular post WWI.)
By the beginning of WWI, the sultan was a figurehead, the CUP (lead by the three pashas--Enver, Talaat, and Djemal--) was in charge, and Enver Pasha had the bright idea of attacking the Russians, in the mountains, in winter. Napoleon could have told him how that would go. The results were disastrous, he blamed the Armenians, and the Temporary Law of Deportation was passed.
The Armenians were not the only people genocided during WWI (and the 1800s,) theirs was just the most notable. Muslims were subject to "ethnic cleansing" during the wars of independence in southeastern Europe and during the First Balkan War of 1912. Greeks were butchered and Syrians intentionally starved to death. Over the border, the Russians were busy slaughtering Muslim communities they suspected of disloyalty. I don't even know the total scale of genocide in this era.
The Armenian population numbered about 2 million souls at the beginning of WWI. Between 600,000 and 1.5 million of them were murdered, and yet more were massacred during the civil war that broke out in Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans had refined their methods between the 1890s and 1915. The Armenians were forced from their homes and into makeshift camps, essentially open-air prisons. From time to time they were forced to move again, herded onto trains and sent to the next campsite. Hunger, disease, thirst, exhaustion, and the elements (not to mention bullets and beatings) killed many along the way. So many bodies were dumped into the Euphrates that the river was blocked and the bodies had to be dynamited out of the way. Finally they were marched into the desert and shot.
The overall death toll in the Ottoman Empire during the war was enormous. To put it in perspective, France lost about 1.7 million people, or about 4.3% of its population. Russia lost about 3 million people, but being a larger country, this only amounted to about 1.8% of the population. Germany lost about 4%. The UK lost 2%. Belgium probably lost a little under 2%.
The Ottoman Empire lost nearly 15% of their population, (about 3 million people,) and that's only counting one of the three wars they fought that decade.
The Ottomans suffered the second highest casualty rate of any combatant country in WWI (Persia, which did not fight in WWI, somehow managed to lose 19% of its population! and Serbia lost a contentious 17-28%) and the second highest total, after Russia. If we include deaths suffered in the First Balkan War and the subsequent civil war, the totals would of course be higher.
Most of the Ottoman dead were self-inflicted, victims of intentional starvation and genocide.
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