Starvation and Its Political Use in the Armenian Genocide

Starvation is widely recognized as a weapon of extreme mass violence, a gross violation of human rights, and a crime in international criminal law, yet forced starvation is still practiced today. Starvation was used as a political tool against Ukraine in the Holodomor, was part of Nazi strategy during World War II, and is one of the most readily identified aspects of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire during the period 1915 to 1923. This study examines how starvation was used by the Young Turk regime as a deliberate policy against the Armenians, the Armenians' experience of starvation, and why starvation was chosen as a tool of genocide. Starvation was highly effective in the large number of Armenians that perished, and was deliberately chosen as a method of killing, partly for plausible deniability and partly for the prolonged suffering it caused, resulting in the eradication of Armenian identity.