Armenians in Turkey were always seen as dangerous rivals: Suren Manukyan

In the Ottoman Empire, governments changed and different political forces came to power, yet the policy toward Armenians remained unchanged. This was said by Suren Manukyan, head of the Department of Comparative Genocide Studies at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, in a live broadcast on Alpha News, in response to a question about the origins of the mass killings of Armenians. According to him, this policy continued through the Hamidian massacres, which may not have been genocidal in nature but reached an enormous scale: around 200,000 victims.

Speaking about the causes of the Armenian Genocide, Manukyan emphasized that one of them was Turkey’s transformation from an Ottoman empire into a nation-state.

“There are several causes of the Armenian Genocide, and their combination led to the tragedy. The first cause was Turkey’s transformation from an Ottoman empire into a nation-state, accompanied by a nationalist ideology. According to this ideology, the strong must prevail and the weak must disappear. The second cause was that Armenians held significant economic potential, which the new Turkish state needed for its initial accumulation of capital. That capital had to be seized and redistributed. Today, the largest Turkish economic structures are built on expropriated Armenian capital,” said Manukyan.

He added that there was also a political cause, as Armenians were always perceived by Turkey as dangerous competitors.

“Armenians were a dynamically developing, progressive people with a strong identity and a networked structure, which the Turks perceived as a threat. There was also a geopolitical dimension, which was present everywhere at that time,” Manukyan concluded.