Not Like a Lamb to the Slaughter: Humanitarian Resistance during the Armenian Genocide

The Programme of Armenian Studies and The Wiener Library are delighted to co-organise a lecture by Dr Khatchig Mouradian.

The scholarship (and the popular discourse) on humanitarian efforts during the Armenian Genocide focuses on the role of western missionaries and consuls, who emerge as selfless heroes protecting and saving hundreds of thousands of helpless Armenians. What remains neglected in scholarly inquiry is Armenian agency. In this illustrated lecture, Mouradian argues that it was the Armenians who drove this humanitarian resistance waged in the Ottoman Empire during the genocide, drawing upon previously untapped primary sources as well as fresh insights from others. Focusing on Aleppo and a the network of concentration camps in Ras ul-Ain and along the banks of the Euphrates River from Meskeneh to Der Zor during the World War I, Mouradian explores the interactions between the local, regional, and central authorities on the one hand, and the humanitarian resistance waged by a network of Armenians aided by locals and western missionaries on the other. Mouradian discusses how, and why, a series of fateful decisions affecting hundreds of thousands of Armenian deportees, rolled out beginning in fall 1915, culminated in a second wave of massacres in the Syrian desert in summer 1916, and how thousands of Armenians survived the carnage through the efforts of the humanitarian resistance network.

Khatchig Mouradian is the Henry S. Khanzadian Kazan Visiting Professor at CSU Fresno (Fall 2016 Semester), and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights (CGHR) at Rutgers University, where he also serves as the coordinator of the Armenian Genocide Program.