University of Michigan historian Ronald Suny, whose new book explains the history of the Armenian genocide. As reports Armenpress, WHEN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE entered World War I on Germany’s side in 1914, more than 15 million individuals-an ethnic mix of Kurds, Turks, and other groups—lived in Anatolia. Among them was a population of an estimated 2 million to 2.5 million Armenians, mostly concentrated in the six provinces of Eastern Anatolia, along what was quickly becoming the bloody front of Russo-Ottoman conflict.

By the war’s end, 90 percent of the empire’s Armenian population had disappeared, University of Michigan historian Ronald G. Suny explained in a Thursday seminar sponsored by Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Within a few short months, they’d been slaughtered, driven into exile to face certain starvation in the deserts of modern-day Syria, or forcibly converted and assimilated into local Muslim communities.

“The word for what happened had not yet been invented,” Suny reflected. “At the time, those who needed a word borrowed it from the Bible, and called it holocaust. My great-grandparents were among the victims.” (His paternal grandfather, Grikor Mirzaian Suni, hailed today as a founder of modern Armenian music, escaped to Russia soon after the war began.)

Speaking to a room crowded with fellow scholars and members of the local Armenian community, Suny traced the historical causes of the 1915 genocide. His book “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton) will appear in March; the following month marks the centennial of the genocide, commemorated on April 24, the date that Ottoman authorities began rounding up Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul.