Too little, too late | 16 April 2015

For most of us, the centenary of the Great War means recalling the misery and sacrifices of the Western Front: Ypres, the Marne, Arras, Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme. Few of us give as much thought to the Eastern Front and, apart from regular studies of the ever-popular, self-mythologising Lawrence of Arabia, fewer still dwell on the first world war in the Middle East. This was the theatre that hosted the Arab Revolt, famously dismissed by Lawrence as ‘a sideshow of a sideshow’.

The Great War centenary brings renewed attention to another neglected tragedy of the conflict. Starting in 1915, the Turks embarked on a process that culminated in the systematic extermination of the Armenian people. By the end of the war between 600,000 and one million had been killed, according to the more conservative estimates (the historian Bernard Lewis reckoned the true figure was 1.5 million). That equated to the annihilation of 90 per cent of Ottoman Armenians.