The implication that the existence of an Armenian-Turkish political dynamic necessarily undermines the applicability of the epithet ‘genocide’ is very common among apologists not only for the Armenian genocide, but for others as well, and merits some attention.

The response is that a dynamic did exist, but it was vastly unequal, which is why, indeed, the genocide could be perpetrated. More importantly, many if not most recorded cases of inter-group slaughter emerge out of some sort of inter-group political dynamic, whether it be between Croats and Serbs in the Second World War, Poles and Ukrainians during and after the Second World War, Armenians and Turks during the First World War, Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, or Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs in the 1990s. Even cases of imperial genocide and mass murder, such as the destruction of the Hereros and Nama by the Wilhelmine army in 1904, or the white settler slaughter of aboriginals in Queensland, though not a result of any political dispute as such, were not infrequently precipitated by violent victim resistance against their oppressors. The point is that their qualification for the category of genovcide rests upon the intent and extent of the killings, not upon the behaviour of some of the victim people, because genocide by its nature is indiscriminate within the victim group. The behaviour of some of the victims may help to explain genocidal actions; it clearly does not justify them and certainly does not prohibit their legal and historical categorization as such.

Part of the problem seems to be that our understanding of the generic phenomenon of genocide is overly determined by the case with which most people are familiar, the Nazi murder of the Jews. In that case, unusually, there was little/no interactive dynamic between victim and perpetrator at the political level. Such a dynamic as existed did so only in Hitler's head. Since the term ‘genocide’ was invented during the Second World War and the genocide convention introduced in the light of Nazi atrocity, the preoccupation with the Holocaust as an ‘ideal type’ genocide against which others have to be measured is not surprising. Nevertheless the author of the term and inspiration behind the convention, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, was clear that his thinking had a much wider relevance and had been particularly influenced by the Armenian case.