The greatest human tragedy of all time

[Mouzafphaerre]

.

The Ottoman Empire was in 1917 all but a nation-state (Empire being almost the antithesis of nation-state), yet it's responsible for the first large-scall genocide of the 20th century.

You mean 1915, I guess, the Armenian Genocide. (That alone deserves a nomination for the thread title.)

The ruling oligarchs, namely the Ittihad-Terakki regime of what remained of the empire, who had absolute dictatorial power since 1913, with an old figurehead of an emperor signing the death warrant even of his own brother-in-law under the gunpoint of Enver, the chief of the oligarchs and the mind behind the genocide, was far into the process of transforming the ruin of the empire into an ethno-religious "nation state". In 1915, the Ottoman Empire was no more an empire than the Empire of Central Africa. The Balkan countries had already seceded or lost in war, Syria and Iraq already under invasion and the most important, populous and influential non-Muslim community being massacred or mass-expelled.

Indeed, the current regime of the "nation state" of Turkey is a direct continuation of the Ittihad-Terakki dictatorship and not of the empire, which had all but nominally gone down in 1908 when they had first taken over the rule.

Your point is moot.
.