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Dead Reckoning: The Armenian Genocide And The Politics Of Silence

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  • Dead Reckoning: The Armenian Genocide And The Politics Of Silence

    DEAD RECKONING: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE POLITICS OF SILENCE
    By Elizabeth Kolbert

    The New Yorker, USA
    Oct 30 2006

    On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican
    of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a
    House resolution-later to be known as H.R. 596-on the slaughter of
    the Armenians. The measure urged the President, in dealing with the
    matter, to demonstrate "appropriate understanding and sensitivity."

    It further instructed him on how to phrase his annual message on
    the Armenian Day of Remembrance: the President should refer to the
    atrocities as "genocide." The bill was sent to the International
    Relations Committee and immediately came under attack. State Department
    officials reminded the committee that it was U.S. policy to "respect
    the Turkish government's assertions that, although many ethnic
    Armenians died during World War I, no genocide took place."

    Expanding on this theme, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in a
    letter to Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, wrote that while
    he in no way wanted to "downplay the Armenian tragedy . . . passing
    judgment on this history through legislation could have a negative
    impact on Turkish-Armenian relations and on our security interests in
    the region." After committee members voted, on October 3rd, to send
    H.R. 596 to the floor, Turkish officials warned that negotiations
    with an American defense contractor, Bell Textron, over four and a
    half billion dollars' worth of attack helicopters were in jeopardy.

    On October 5th, the leaders of all five parties in the Turkish
    parliament issued a joint statement threatening to deny the U.S. access
    to an airbase in Incirlik, which it was using to patrol northern
    Iraq. Finally, on October 19th, just a few hours before H.R. 596
    was scheduled to be debated in the House, Hastert pulled it from
    the agenda. He had, he said, been informed by President Clinton that
    passage of the resolution could "risk the lives of Americans."

    The defeat of H.R. 596 is a small but fairly typical episode in a
    great campaign of forgetting. Like President Clinton, President Bush
    continues to "respect the Turkish government's assertions" and to issue
    Armenian Remembrance Day proclamations each year without ever quite
    acknowledging what it is that's being remembered. If in Washington
    it's politically awkward to refer to the genocide, it is positively
    dangerous to do so in Istanbul. Last year, Turkey's leading author,
    Orhan Pamuk, was prosecuted merely for having brought up the subject
    in a press interview. "A million Armenians were killed and nobody but
    me dares to talk about it, " he told the Sunday magazine of the Swiss
    newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Pamuk, now a recipient of the Nobel Prize in
    Literature, was accused of having violated Section 301 of the Turkish
    penal code, which outlaws "insulting Turkishness." (The charge was
    eventually dropped, on a technicality.) A few months later, another
    prominent Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, was charged with the same
    offense, for having a character in her most recent novel, "The Bastard
    of Istanbul," declare, "I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who
    lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915,
    but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide." The charges
    were dropped after Shafak argued that the statement of a fictional
    person could not be used to prosecute a real one, then reinstated by
    a higher court, and then dropped again.

    It is in this context that Taner Akcam's new history, "A Shameful Act:
    The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility"
    (Metropolitan; $30), must be considered. The book is dryly written
    and awkwardly translated, but nevertheless moving.

    Akcam grew up in far northeastern Turkey and was educated at Ankara's
    Middle East Technical University, where he became the editor of a
    leftist journal. In 1976, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years
    in prison for spreading propaganda. Using a stove leg to dig a tunnel,
    he managed to escape after a year, and fled to Germany. Akcam is one
    of the first Turkish historians to treat the Armenian genocide as
    genocide-he now lives in exile in Minnesota-and in "A Shameful Act"
    he tries to grapple both with the enormity of the crime and with the
    logic of its repression.

    Any writer who takes on genocide as his topic accepts obligations
    that, if not exactly contradictory, are clearly in tension. The
    first is to describe the event in a way that is adequate to its
    exceptionality. (The original U.N. resolution on the subject, approved
    in 1946, describes genocide as an act that "shocks the conscience
    of mankind.") The second is to make sense of it, which is to say,
    to produce an account of the unspeakable that anyone can understand.

    Akcam begins his history in the nineteenth century, when roughly
    two million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire, some in
    major cities like Istanbul and Izmir, and the rest in the provinces
    of central and eastern Anatolia. Already, the Armenians were in
    a peculiarly vulnerable position: Christians living in the heart
    of a Muslim empire, they were subject by law to special taxes and
    restrictions, and by tradition to extortion and harassment. As the
    century wore on, the so-called Sick Man of Europe kept shedding
    territory: first Greece, in the Greek War of Independence; and then,
    following the Russo-Turkish War, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and
    Bosnia and Herzegovina. These humiliating defeats eroded the Ottomans'
    confidence, which, in turn, Akcam argues, "resulted in the loss of
    their tolerance." Muslim assaults on Christians increased throughout
    the empire, and the ancient prejudices against the Armenians hardened
    into something uglier.

    In 1876, Sultan Abdulhamid II came to power. Abdulhamid, who ruled
    the empire for thirty-three of its last forty-six years, was a deeply
    anxious man, perhaps paranoid. He maintained a vast network of spies;
    turned Yildiz Palace, overlooking the Bosporus, into a ramshackle fort;
    and demanded that each dish be tasted by his chief chamberlain before
    being served. Abdulhamid soon took anti-Armenianism to new heights. (It
    was rumored that the Sultan's own mother, a former dancing girl, was
    Armenian, but he always denied this.) He shut down Armenian schools,
    threw Armenian teachers in jail, prohibited the use of the word
    "Armenia" in newspapers and textbooks, and formed special Kurdish
    regiments, known as the Hamidiye, whose raison d'etre appears to
    have been to harass Armenian farmers. Encouraged by American and
    European missionaries, the Armenians turned to the outside world for
    help. The English, the French, and the Russians repeatedly demanded
    that Istanbul institute "reforms" on the Armenians' behalf.

    Officially, the Sultan acceded to these demands, only to turn around
    and repress the Armenians that much more vigorously. "By taking away
    Greece and Romania, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish state,"
    Abdulhamid complained. "Now, by means of this Armenian agitation, they
    want to get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts. This
    would be the beginning of totally annihilating us, and we must fight
    against it with all the strength we possess."

    In the mid-eighteen-nineties, tens of thousands of Armenians were
    murdered. The slaughter began in Sasun, in eastern Anatolia, where
    Armenians had refused to pay taxes on the ground that the government
    had failed to protect them from Kurdish extortion. The killings in
    Sasun provoked an international outcry, which was answered with the
    Sultan's usual promises of reform, and then with a string of even
    bloodier massacres in the provinces of Erzurum, Ankara, Sivas, Trabzon,
    and Harput. In the wake of the killings, William Gladstone, the former
    British Prime Minister, labelled Abdulhamid "the great assassin."

    Finally, in 1909, Abdulhamid was pushed aside. The coup was engineered
    by a group composed, for the most part, of discontented Army
    officers-the original Young Turks. The Young Turks spoke loftily of
    progress and brotherhood-on the eve of the revolt, one of their leaders
    is said to have declared, "Under the blue sky we are all equal"-and
    the empire's remaining Christians celebrated their ascendancy. But
    the logic of slaughtering the Armenians had by this point been too
    well established.

    When the First World War broke out, the Young Turks rushed to join the
    conflict. "That day of revenge, which has been awaited for centuries
    by the nation's young and old, by its martyrs and by its living,
    has finally arrived," the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies asserted in
    a letter to the armed forces. By 1914, the empire was being led
    by a troika-nicknamed the Three Pashas-composed of the Minister of
    the Interior, the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of War. In
    December, the War Minister, Ismail Enver, decided to lead the Third
    Army in an attack against the Russians on the Caucasian front. Enver
    planned to press all the way east to Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan,
    where he hoped to incite the local Muslims to join the Ottomans' cause,
    and, as a first step, he ordered his forces to divide up and follow
    different routes to Sarikamish, a Russian military outpost. The idea
    was for all the troops to arrive at the same time and surprise the
    enemy with their strength; instead, they straggled in over a period
    of several days, with devastating results.

    The Ottomans lost about seventy-five thousand men at Sarikamish, out
    of a total force of ninety thousand. A German officer attached to the
    Third Army described the defeat as "a disaster which for rapidity and
    completeness is without parallel in military history." The Russians
    had encouraged the Armenians to form volunteer regiments to fight
    against the Ottomans, and some (though not many) had heeded this
    call. The Armenians' role in the disaster became one of the pretexts
    for the genocide.

    On April 24, 1915, some two hundred and fifty prominent
    Armenians-poets, doctors, bankers, and even a member of the Ottoman
    parliament-were arrested in Istanbul. They were split up into groups,
    loaded onto trains, shipped off to remote prisons, and eventually
    killed. (The Armenian Day of Remembrance is marked each year on the
    anniversary of these arrests.) Around the same time, orders were
    issued to begin rounding up Armenians wholesale and deporting them.

    "Some regional variations notwithstanding," Akcam reports, the
    deportations "proceeded in the same manner everywhere." Armenians
    would be given a few days or, in some cases, just a few hours to
    leave their homes. The men were separated from the women and children,
    led beyond the town, and either tortured or murdered outright. Their
    families were then herded to concentration camps in the Syrian desert,
    often bound by ropes or chains. Along the way, they were frequently
    set upon by Kurdish tribesmen, who had been given license to loot
    and rape, or by the very gendarmes who were supposed to be guarding
    them. A Greek witness wrote of watching a column of deportees being
    led through the Kemakh Gorge, on the upper Euphrates. The guards
    "withdrew to the mountainside" and "began a hail of rifle fire,"
    he wrote. "A few days later there was a mopping-up operation: since
    many little children were still alive and wandering about beside
    their dead parents." In areas where ammunition was in short supply,
    the killing squads relied on whatever weapons were at hand-axes,
    cleavers, even shovels. Adults were hacked to pieces, and infants
    dashed against the rocks. In the Black Sea region, Armenians were
    loaded onto boats and thrown overboard. In the area around Lake Hazar,
    they were tossed over cliffs.

    At the time of the deportations, the U.S. had not yet entered the
    war. It maintained an extensive network of diplomats in the region,
    and many of these provided detailed chronicles of what they had seen,
    which Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador in Istanbul,
    urgently forwarded to Washington. (Other eyewitness accounts came from
    German Army officers, Danish missionaries, and Armenian survivors.) In
    a dispatch sent to the State Department on November 1, 1915, the
    U.S. consul in Aleppo wrote:

    It is extremely rare to find a family intact that has come any
    considerable distance, invariably all having lost members from disease
    and fatigue, young girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen,
    and about all the men having been separated from the families and
    suffered fates that had best be left unmentioned, many being done
    away with in atrocious manners before the eyes of their relatives
    and friends. So severe has been the treatment that careful estimates
    place the number of survivors at only 15 percent of those originally
    deported. On this basis the number surviving even this far being less
    than 150,000 . . . there seems to have been about 1,000,000 persons
    lost up to this date.

    An American businessman who made a tour of the lower Euphrates the
    next year reported having encountered "all along the road from Meskene
    to Der-i-Zor graves containing the remains of unfortunate Armenians
    abandoned and dead in atrocious suffering. It is by the hundreds
    that these mounds are numbered where sleep anonymously in their last
    sleep these outcasts of existence, these victims of barbary without
    qualification." Morgenthau repeatedly confronted the Ottoman Interior
    Minister, Mehmed Talât, with the contents of these dispatches, telling
    him that the Americans would "never forget these massacres." But the
    warnings made no impression. During one session, Morgenthau later
    recalled in a memoir, Talât turned to him and asked if he could
    obtain a list of Armenians who had purchased life-insurance policies
    with American firms. "They are practically all dead now, and have no
    heirs left to collect the money," the Interior Minister reasoned, and
    therefore the unclaimed benefits rightfully belonged to the government.

    The official explanation for the Armenian deportations was that
    they were necessary for security reasons, and this is still the
    account provided by state-sanctioned histories today. "Facts on
    the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918)," a volume produced by the
    Turkish Historical Society, was published in English in 2002. It
    begins with an epigram from John F. Kennedy ("For the great enemy
    of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived, and
    dishonest-but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic")
    and the reassurance that it is "not a propaganda document." The book
    argues that Russia and its allies had "sown the seeds of intrigue and
    mischief among the Armenians, who in turn had been doing everything in
    their power to make life difficult for Ottoman armies." Deciding that
    "fundamental precautions" were needed, the Ottoman authorities took
    steps to "relocate" the Armenians away from the front. They worked to
    insure that the transfer would be effected "as humanely as possible";
    if this goal was not always realized, it was because of disease-so
    difficult to control during wartime-or rogue bands of "tribal people"
    who sometimes attacked Armenian convoys. "Whenever the government
    realized that some untoward incidents had taken place . . . the
    government acted very promptly and warned the local authorities." In
    support of this "Arbeit Macht Frei" version of events, "Facts on the
    Relocation of Armenians" cites the very Ottoman officials who oversaw
    the slaughter. Turkish officials, in turn, now cite works like "Facts"
    to support their claim that the period's history remains contested. In
    March, 2005, just before the commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary
    of the Day of Remembrance, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip
    Erdogan, called for an "impartial study" to look into what had really
    happened to the Armenians. The International Association of Genocide
    Scholars responded that such a call could only be regarded as still
    more propaganda. "The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented
    by thousands of official records . . . by eyewitness accounts of
    missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by
    decades of historical scholarship," the association's directors wrote
    in a letter explaining their refusal to participate. An academic
    conference on the massacres planned for later that spring in Istanbul
    was banned by a court order. (After much maneuvering, it was held at
    a private university amid raucous protests.)

    The Ottomans formally surrendered to the Allies on October 30, 1918.

    The Paris Peace Conference opened the following year, and it took
    another year for the Allies to agree on how to dispose of the empire.

    The pact that finally emerged-the Treaty of Sèvres-awarded Palestine,
    Transjordan, and Mesopotamia to the English, Syria and Lebanon to
    the French, Rhodes and a chunk of southern Anatolia to the Italians,
    and Izmir and western Anatolia to the Greeks. Eastern Anatolia, with
    a prize stretch of Black Sea coast, was to go to the Armenians. The
    Bosporus and the Dardanelles were to be demilitarized and placed under
    international control. From an imperial power the Turks were thus
    transformed into something very close to a subject people. This was
    the final disgrace and, as it turned out, also the start of a revival.

    As the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had been fighting
    against history; they had spent more than a century trying-often
    unsuccessfully-to fend off nationalist movements in the regions
    they controlled. Now, in defeat, they adopted the cause as their
    own. In the spring of 1920, the Turkish Nationalists, led by Mustafa
    Kemal-later to be known as Ataturk-established a new government in
    Ankara. (The government's founding is celebrated every April 23rd,
    one day before the Armenian Day of Remembrance.) During the next
    three years, the Nationalists fought a series of brutal battles,
    which eventually forced the Allies to abandon Sèvres. A new treaty
    was drawn up, the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Republic of Turkey
    was created. The big losers in this process were, once again, the
    Armenians: Lausanne returned all of Anatolia to Turkish control.

    In Akcam's view, what happened between 1920 and 1923 is the key to
    understanding the Turks' refusal to discuss what happened in 1915.

    The Armenian genocide was what today would be called a campaign of
    ethnic cleansing, and as such it was highly effective. It changed
    the demographics of eastern Anatolia; then, on the basis of these
    changed demographics, the Turks used the logic of self-determination
    to deprive of a home the very people they had decimated. Although
    the genocide was not committed by the Nationalists, without it the
    nationalist project wouldn't have made much sense. Meanwhile, the
    Nationalists made sure that the perpetrators were never punished.

    Immediately after the end of the war, the Three Pashas fled the
    country. (The Interior Minister, Talât, was assassinated in Berlin
    by an Armenian who had been left for dead in a pile of corpses.) In
    an attempt to mollify the Allies, the Ottomans arrested scores of
    lower-ranking officials and put some of them on trial, but, when the
    Nationalists came to power, they suspended these proceedings and freed
    the suspects. A separate prosecution effort by the British, who were
    keeping dozens of Ottoman officers locked up in Malta, similarly came
    to nothing, and eventually the officers were sent home as part of
    a prisoner-of-war exchange. Several went on to become high-ranking
    members of Mustafa Kemal's government. For the Turks to acknowledge
    the genocide would thus mean admitting that their country was founded
    by war criminals and that its existence depended on their crimes.

    This, in Akcam's words, "would call into question the state's very
    identity." And so the Turks prefer to insist, as "Facts on the
    Relocation of Armenians" puts it, that the genocide is a "legend."

    It is, of course, possible to question Akcam's highly psychologized
    account. Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and,
    while a history of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership,
    denying it may be; several European governments have indicated that
    they will oppose the country's bid unless it acknowledges the crimes
    committed against the Armenians. Are the Turks really willing to risk
    their country's economic future merely in order to hide-or pretend
    to hide-an ugly fact about its origins? To believe this seems to
    require a view of Turkish ethnic pride that gets dangerously close to
    a national stereotype. In fact, many Turkish nationalists oppose E.U.
    membership; from their perspective, denying the Armenian genocide
    serves an eminently practical political purpose.

    That being said, Akcam clearly has a point, and one that Americans, in
    particular, ought to be able to appreciate. Before the arrival of the
    first Europeans, there were, it is estimated, at least forty million
    indigenous people living in the Americas; by 1650, fewer than ten
    million were left. The decline was the result of casual cruelty on the
    one hand-diseases unwittingly spread-and systematic slaughter on the
    other. Every November, when American schoolchildren are taught about
    Thanksgiving, they are insistently told the story of how the Pilgrims,
    in their gratitude, entertained the kindly Wampanoag. We now know
    that the comity of that original Thanksgiving was entirely atypical,
    and that, by 1621, the Wampanoag were already a dying nation. While it
    was cowardly of Congress to pull H.R. 596, passing it would, in its own
    way, also have been problematic. We may side with the Armenians, but,
    historically speaking, we probably have more in common with the Turks.

    http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/art icles/061106crbo_books2

    --Boundary_(ID_V5fp1qWHVa ltXA35GnUHvw)--
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