The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2004

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide. Peter Balakian. William Heinemann. [pounds sterling]18.99. xxi 474 pages. ISBN 0-434-00816-8. This impressive study, first published last year in the U.S., is concerned with some of the worst atrocities in modern European history. The massacre of 200,000 Armenian Christians living within the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s and in 1915, was 'the template' for the horrors perpetrated by Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot and then again, by rampaging savages in Rwanda and more recently, in The Sudan.

This new study takes advantage of oral records and of newly released government files to show that at its heart the murders were a result of Mohammedan hatred of Christians within the European part of the Empire. Because Turkey as the successor state to the Ottoman Empire continues to deny the atrocities, books such as this are still necessary to inform a new generation of the horrors endured by Armenians. (P.J.W.)