BETRAYAL: The Promise Never Kept - Genocide and the West's Secret War for Oil

by Shahan Natalie, Soghomon Tehlirian, Armen Garo, Sylvia Natalie Manoogian, and Ara Khachig Manoogian At the turn of the 20th century, when the Ottoman and Russian empires were on the verge of collapse, world powers were competing to secure a share of natural resources from those failing states, most notably untapped crude oil. BETRAYAL: The Promise Never Kept is the first publication of its kind that chronicles acts of genocide and the West’s secret war for oil, as it relates to World War I. Using never before published materials from the archival collection of Shahan Natalie, an 11-year-old genocide survivor and orphan, destined to become a journalist, poet, human rights activist and revolutionary, Betrayal connects the dots to reveal who was truly behind the crimes against humanity, which took the lives of 2.5 million Christian Armenians living in their ancestral home, carried out by the Turks and Germans over a 30-year span of time (1894-1923). Betrayal also shares the censored me