FORCED TRANSFER OF ARMENIAN CHILDREN DURING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: SELECTION, DESTRUCTION, ASSIMILATION

Abstract

The annihilation of the Armenian community had a crucial role in the Unionist project of transforming the Ottoman empire into a Turkish nation-state. The article was written taking into consideration ideas circulating among the Armenian society presenting conversion during the Armenian genocide and assimilation as a “window” of salvation, as well as the tendency to inflate the numbers of converted Armenians and assign to it a political potential. The main issue of the article is to show that the forcible transfer and assimilation of the genocide were not unambiguous by presenting the content of some of the genocidal orders of forcible transfer, their implementation, and consequences. As a result of this state-led and state-coordinated action, selected representatives of the Armenian community specified by gender and age were put in the state institutions or in the households of individual Turks, continuing to be victims of the genocidal system: they were destroyed, sometimes subjected to sexual or labor exploitation beforehand and to the conversion of identity. In general, the article emphasizes that forced assimilation was one of the methods of the Armenian Genocide, aimed at the destruction of the Armenian people as such.