Friday, May 7, 2021, at 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific
On Zoom and the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute YouTube channel.

PRESENTER
DR. KHATCHIG MOURADIAN, Armenian and Georgian Specialist at the Library of Congress and Lecturer at Columbia University

Many Armenian Genocide survivors wrote about their concentration camp experience in newspaper articles and memoirs published in the decades after World War I, yet it took almost a century for the first scholarly examinations of their internment to appear. Focusing on the Meskeneh concentration camp on the lower bend of the Euphrates, this lecture situates the internment and destruction of Armenians in Ottoman Syria within the global history of concentration camps. Map: Genocide march routes and locations of concentration camps in Ottoman Syria (Aram Andonian Archives, AGBU Nubar Library, Paris)

Providing an overview of the structure, administration, life, and resistance in concentration camps based on Armenian accounts, Ottoman archives, and western diplomatic records, Mouradian argues that this glaring manifestation of total war, one directed towards the empire’s very own Armenian subjects, constitutes an important moment of transition in the use internment as a weapon of annihilation.

ORGANIZER
UCLA Promise Armenian Institute

CO-SPONSORS
Ararat-Eskijian Museum (AEM)
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)
UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History
UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies