A Turkish trotskyist I knew resisted the characterisation of the early 20c. massacres as a genocide. He said that there was no doubt that the Armenians were run out of town, robbed and murdered on their way. But that it was wrong to characterise it as a systematic, state-organised genocide on a par with Nazi Germany. It sounded convincing to me.
[WS:] I am not convinced by that argument. Just because the Turks were less technologically and organizationally efficient in exterminating their target population than the Nazis were, that does not mean that the act was not a genocide. By that logic, Rwanda atrocities would not qualify as genocide because the Hutus used machetes instead of gas.
What counts is the intent of exterminating a population, and that intent has been established in case of Turkey, at least according to Fisk's piece posted to this list some time ago. The perpetrators should not be exonerated simply because they were inefficient in carrying out that intent.
To my knowledge, the only fully successful act of genocide in modern times was carried out by the people who brought us the concentration camp (yes, the British, who invented it during the Second Boer War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War) - they managed to fully wipe out the native population of Tasmania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmania#Indigenous_people.
Wojtek