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Ankara's Unacknowledged Genocide
The Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2013
Volume XX: Number 1
pp. 17-26
by Efraim Karsh
It is commonplace among Middle East scholars across the political
spectrum to idealize the Ottoman colonial legacy as a shining example
of tolerance. "The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire," wrote
American journalist Robert Kaplan, "was more hospitable to minorities
than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it
... Violent discussions over what group got to control which territory
emerged only when the empire came to an end, after World War I."[1]
Bernard Lewis went a significant step further, ascribing the wholesale
violence attending the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to attempts to
reform its Islamic sociopolitical order. "The classical Ottoman
Empire enabled a multiplicity of religious and ethnic groups to live
side by side in mutual tolerance and respect, subject only to the
primacy of Islam and the supremacy of the Muslims," he wrote. "The
liberal reformers and revolutionaries who abolished the old order and
proclaimed the constitutional equality of all Ottoman citizens led
the Ottoman Empire into the final bitter and bloody national
struggles-the worst by far in the half-millennium of its history."[2]
And Edward Said, in an exceptional display of unanimity with his
intellectual foe, was similarly effusive. "What they had then seems a
lot more humane than what we have now," he argued. "Of course, there
were inequities. But they lived without this ridiculous notion that
every millet has to have its own state."[3]
Even Elie Kedourie, whose view of Ottoman colonialism was far less
sentimental, could see some advantages in the empire's less than
perfect sociopolitical order: "Ottoman administration was certainly
corrupt and arbitrary, but it was ramshackle and inefficient and left
many interstices by which the subject could hope to escape its
terrors, and bribery was a traditional and recognized method of
mitigating severities and easing difficulties."[4]
While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is
also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is
demonstratively wrong. The imperial notion, by its very definition,
posits the domination of one ethnic, religious, or national group over
another, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. It tolerated the
existence of vast non-Muslim subject populations in its midst, as did
earlier Muslim (and non-Muslim) empires-provided they acknowledged
their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of
things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate
status=80'let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke-they were
brutally suppressed, and none more so than the Armenians during World
War I.
Historical Context
An important strand in Ottoman idealization has been the charge that
it was the importation of European ideas to the empire, notably those
of nationalism and statehood, that undermined the deeply ingrained
regional order with devastating consequences to subjects and rulers
alike. In Kedourie's words: "A rash, a malady, an infection spreading
from Western Europe through the Balkans, the Ottoman empire, India,
the Far East and Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to
leave it weakened and defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous
adventurers, for further horror and atrocity: Such are the terms to
describe what the West has done to the rest of the world, not
wilfully, not knowingly, but mostly out of excellent intentions and by
example of its prestige and prosperity."[5]
Evocative of the fashionable indictment of nationalism as the scourge
of international relations, this prognosis is largely misconceived.
For it is the desire to dominate foreign creeds, nations, or
communities, and to occupy territories well beyond the "ancestral
homeland" that contains the inevitable seeds of violence-not the wish
to be allowed to follow an independent path of development. In each of
imperialism's three phases-empire-building, administration, and
disintegration-force was the midwife of the historical process as the
imperial power vied to assert its authority and to maintain its
control over perennially hostile populations; and while most empires
have justified their position in terms of a civilizing mission of
sorts, none willfully shed its colonies, let alone its imperial
status, well after they had outlived their usefulness, or had even
become a burden. Hence the disintegration of multinational,
multidenominational, and multilingual empires has rarely been a
peaceful process. On rare occasions-the collapse of the Soviet Union
being a salient example-violence has followed the actual demise of the
imperial power. In most instances, however, such as the collapse of
the British, the French, and the Portuguese empires, among others,
violence is endemic to the process of decolonization as the occupied
peoples fight their way to national liberation.
The Ottoman Empire clearly belonged to the latter category. A far cry
from the tolerant and tranquil domain it is often taken for,
Turkey-in-Europe was the most violent part of the continent during the
century or so between the Napoleonic upheavals and World War I as the
Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the
nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of
independence of the 1820s, the Danubian nationalist uprisings of 1848,
the Balkan explosion of the 1870s, and the Greco-Ottoman war of
1897-all were painful reminders of the cost of breaking free from an
imperial master.[6] And all pale in comparison with the treatment
meted out to the foremost nationalist awakening in Turkey-in-Asia: the
Armenian.
Prelude to Catastrophe
Unlike Europe, where the rise of nationalism dealt a body blow to
Ottoman imperialism, there was no nationalist fervor among the Ottoman
Empire's predominantly Arabic-speaking Afro-Asian subjects. One
historian has credibly estimated that a mere 350 activists belonged to
all the secret Arab societies operating throughout the Middle East at
the outbreak of World War I, and most of them were not seeking actual
Arab independence but rather greater autonomy within the Ottoman
Empire.[7] This made the rise of Armenian nationalism the foremost
threat to Ottoman integrity in that part of the empire.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Armenian population
of the Ottoman Empire totaled some two million persons, three-quarters
of whom resided in so-called Turkish Armenia, namely, the vilayets of
Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Sivas, Kharput, and Diarbekir in eastern
Anatolia. The rest, about half a million Armenians, were equally
distributed in the Istanbul-eastern Thrace region and in Cilicia, in
southwestern Anatolia.[8]
As a result of Russian agitation, European and American missionary
work, and, not least, the nationalist revival in the Balkans, a surge
of national consciousness began to take place within the three
Armenian religious communities-Gregorian, Catholic, and Protestant. In
the 1870s, Armenian secret societies sprang up at home and abroad,
developing gradually into militant nationalist groups. Uprisings
against Ottoman rule erupted time and again; terrorism became a common
phenomenon, both against Turks and against noncompliant fellow
Armenians-before it was eventually suppressed in a brutal campaign of
repression in 1895-96, in which nearly 200,000 people perished and
thousands more fled to Europe and the United States.
Turkish Armenia did not remain quiet for long. By 1903, a vicious
cycle of escalating violence was in operation yet again, and two years
later, Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid narrowly escaped an assassination
attempt by Armenian nationalists. In the early 1910s, despite years of
cultural repression, including a ban on the public use of the Armenian
language and a new round of horrendous massacres (in the spring of
1909), Armenian nationalism had been fully rekindled. In April 1913,
for example, Armenian nationalists asked Britain to occupy the
southern region of Cilicia, from Antalya to Alexandretta, and to
internationalize Istanbul and the straits as a means of "repairing the
iniquity of the [1878] Congress of Berlin," which had stipulated
Ottoman reforms "in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians." At
about the same time, a committee of the Armenian National Assembly,
the governing body of the Apostolic Ottoman Christians, submitted an
elaborate reform plan for Ottoman Armenia to the Russian embassy in
Istanbul.[9]
Bowing to international pressure, in February 1914, the Ottoman
authorities accepted a Russo-German proposal for the creation of two
large Armenian provinces, to be administered by European
inspectors-general appointed by the great powers. This was a far cry
from the Armenians' aspirations for a unified independent state as its
envisaged territory was partitioned into two separate entities rather
than creating a cohesive whole, yet it was the most significant
concession they had managed to extract from their suzerain, and most
of them were anxious to preserve this gain come what may. Hence, when
the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the
German-Austro-Hungarian Triple Alliance, the Armenians immediately
strove to demonstrate their loyalty: Prayers for an Ottoman victory
were said in churches throughout the empire, and the Armenian
patriarch of Istanbul, as well as several nationalist groups,
announced their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and implored the
Armenian masses to perform their obligations to the best of their
ability.
Not everyone complied with this wish. Scores of Ottoman Armenians,
including several prominent figures, crossed the border to assist the
Russian campaign. Others offered to help the Anglo-French-Russian
entente by different means. In February 1915, for example, Armenian
revolutionaries in the Cilician city of Zeitun pledged to assist a
Russian advance on the area provided they were given the necessary
weapons; to the British, they promised help in the event of a naval
landing in Alexandretta.[10]
Although these activities were an exception to the otherwise loyal
conduct of the Armenian community, they confirmed the Ottoman
stereotype of the Armenians as a troublesome and treacherous
people. This view was further reinforced by a number of crushing
defeats in the Caucasus, in which (non-Ottoman) Armenians were
implicated in the Russian war effort. Above all, as the largest
nationally-aware minority in Asiatic Turkey, the Armenians constituted
the gravest internal threat to Ottoman imperialism in that domain; and
with Turkey-in-Europe a fading memory and Turkey-in-Africa under
Anglo-French-Italian domination, the disintegration of Turkey-in-Asia
would spell the end of the Ottoman Empire, something that its rulers
would never accept.
Before long, the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to the kind of
retribution that had been inflicted on rebellious Middle Eastern
populations since Assyrian and Babylonian times: deportation and
exile. Having been rendered defenseless, they were uprooted from their
homes and relocated to the most inhospitable corners of Ottoman Asia,
with their towns and villages swiftly populated by new Muslims
arrivals, and their property seized by the authorities or plundered by
their Muslim neighbors.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Turkish Armenia
The first step in this direction was taken in early 1915 when Armenian
soldiers in the Ottoman army were relegated to "labor battalions" and
stripped of their weapons. Most of these fighters-turned-laborers
would be marched out in droves to secluded places and shot in cold
blood, often after being forced to dig their own graves. Those
fortunate enough to escape summary execution were employed as laborers
in the most inhumane conditions.
At the same time, the authorities initiated a ruthless campaign to
disarm the entire Armenian population of personal weapons before
embarking on a genocidal spree of mass deportations and massacres. By
the autumn of 1915, Cilicia had been ethnically cleansed and the
authorities turned their sights on the foremost Armenian settlement
area in eastern Anatolia. First to be cleansed was the zone bordering
Van, extending from the Black Sea to the Iranian frontier and
immediately threatened by Russian advance; only there did outright
massacres often substitute for otherwise slow deaths along the
deportation routes or in the concentration camps of the Syrian
desert. In other districts of Ottoman Armenia, depopulated between
July and September, the Turks attempted to preserve a semblance of a
deportation policy though most deportees were summarily executed after
hitting the road. In the coastal towns of Trebizond, for example,
Armenians were sent out to sea, ostensibly for deportation, only to be
thrown overboard shortly afterward. Of the deportees from Erzerum,
Erzindjan, and Baibourt, only a handful survived the initial stages of
the journey.[11]
The Armenian population in western Anatolia and in the metropolitan
districts of Istanbul was somewhat more fortunate as many people were
transported in trains-although grossly overcrowded-for much of the
deportation route, rather than having to straggle along by foot. In
Istanbul, deportations commenced in late April when hundreds of
prominent Armenians were picked up by the police and sent away, most
of them never to be seen again; some five thousand "ordinary"
Armenians soon shared their fate. Though the majority of the city's
150,000-strong community escaped deportation, Armenians were squeezed
out of all public posts with numerous families reduced to appalling
poverty. Deportations in Ankara began toward the end of July; in
Broussa, in the first weeks of September; and in Adrianople, in
mid-October. By early 1916, scores of deportees, thrown into a string
of concentration camps in the Syrian desert and along the Euphrates,
were dying every day of malnutrition and diseases; many others were
systematically taken out of the camps and shot.[12]
The Ottoman authorities tried to put a gloss of legality and innocence
on their actions. The general deportation decree of May 27, 1915, for
example, instructed the security forces to protect the deportees
against nomadic attacks, to provide them with sufficient food and
supplies for their journey, and to compensate them with new property,
land, and goods necessary for their resettlement. But this decree was
a sham. For one thing, massacres and deportations had already begun
prior to its proclamation. For another, as is overwhelmingly borne out
by the evidence, given both by numerous firsthand witnesses to the
Ottoman atrocities and by survivors, the rights granted by the
deportation decree were never followed.
Consider the provisions for adequate supplies for the journey and
compensation for the loss of property. After the extermination of the
male population of a particular town or village, an act normally
preceding deportations, the Turks often extended a "grace period" to
the rest of the populace, namely, women, children, and the old and the
sick, so they could settle their affairs and prepare for their
journey. But the term normally given was a bare week, and never more
than two, which was utterly insufficient for all that had to be
done. Moreover, the government often carried away its victims before
the stated deadline, snatching them without warning from streets,
places of employment, or even their beds. Last but not least, the
local authorities prevented the deportees from selling their property
or their stock under the official fiction that their expulsion was to
be only temporary. Even in the rare cases in which Armenians managed
to dispose of their property, their Muslim neighbors took advantage of
their plight to buy their possessions at a fraction of their real
value.[13]
Nor did the deportees receive even a semblance of the protection
promised by the deportation decree. On the contrary, from the moment
they started on their march, indeed even before they had done so, they
became public outcasts, never safe from the most atrocious outrages,
constantly mobbed and plundered by the Muslim population as they
straggled along. Their guards connived at this brutality. There were,
of course, exceptions in which Muslims, including Turks, tendered help
to the long-suffering Armenians, but these were very rare, isolated
instances.
Whenever the deportees arrived at a village or town, they were
exhibited like slaves in a public place, often before the government
building itself. Female slave markets were established in the Muslim
areas through which the Armenians were driven, and thousands of young
Armenian women and girls were sold in this way. Even the clerics were
quick to avail themselves of the bargains of the white slave market.
Suffering on the deportation routes was intense. Travelers on the
Levantine railway saw dogs feeding on the bodies of hundreds of men,
women, and children on both sides of the track, with women searching
the clothing of the corpses for hidden treasure. In some of the
transfer stations, notably Aleppo, the hub where all convoys
converged, thousands of Armenians would be left for weeks outdoors,
starving, waiting to be taken away. Epidemics spread rapidly, chiefly
spot typhus. In almost all cases, the dead were not buried for days,
the reason being, as an Ottoman officer cheerfully explained to an
inquisitive foreigner, that it was hoped the epidemics might get rid
of the Armenians once and for all.[14]
As the deportees settled into their new miserable existence, they were
forced to work at hard labor, making roads, opening quarries, and the
like; for this, they were paid puny salaries, which effectively
reduced them to starvation; work in the neighboring villages that
could earn them some livelihood was strictly forbidden. Water was
normally brought to the camps by trains; no springs were to be found
within a radius of miles. The scenes at the arrival of the water
trains, by no means a regular phenomenon, were
heartbreaking. Thousands of people would rush toward the stopping
place, earth-jars and tin cans in hand, in a desperate bid for their
share of this elixir of life. But when at long last the taps were
opened, people would often be barred from filling their vessels,
having to watch the precious water running out on the sun-baked
ground.
Independent estimates of the precise extent of Armenian casualties
differ somewhat, but all paint a stark picture of national
annihilation. In his official report to the British parliament in July
1916, Viscount Bryce calculated the total number of uprooted Armenians
during the preceding year as 1,200,000 (half slain, half deported), or
about two thirds of the entire community. Johannes Lepsius, the chief
of the Protestant Mission in the Ottoman Empire who had personally
witnessed the atrocities and had studied them thoroughly, put the
total higher, at 1,396,000, as did the American Committee for Armenian
and Syrian Relief, which computed the number of deaths at about
600,000 and of deportees at 786,000. Aaron Aaronson, a world-renowned
Zionist agronomist who set up the most effective
pro-Anglo-French-Russian entente intelligence network in the Middle
East during World War I, estimated the number of deaths at between
850,000 and 950,000.[15]
Genocide or "Collateral Damage"?
Turkey has never acknowledged any wrongdoing vis-Ã -vis the
Armenians. While some leaders and administrators of the Young Turks
regime, which ruled the empire since July 1908, were court-martialed
immediately after the war for crimes committed during their ten-year
rule, including the Armenian atrocities, this was done in deference to
the victorious Allied powers rather than out of true conviction. Even
the newly-established Turkish republic (1923), despite its
renunciation of much of the Ottoman imperial legacy, would not disown
its arguably most heinous crime since its founding father,
Gen. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk "whatever his disagreements with the Young
Turks leaders ... was after all imbued with Young Turk ideas."[16] Not
only did Ankara fail to acknowledge any intention or plan to destroy
Armenian nationalism, but the deportations and killings were presented
as a natural act of self-defense against a disloyal population. In the
words of Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, doyen of Turkish historians: "It's one
thing to say that the Turks killed the Armenians spontaneously, and
another to say that, when the Armenians revolted, the Turks, who were
locked in a life or death struggle, used excessive force and killed a
good many people."[17]
Given their idealization of the Ottoman legacy, it was only a question
of time for Western scholars to adopt this narrative.[18] "The Turks
had an Armenian problem caused by the advance of the Russians and an
anti-Ottoman population living in Turkey, which was seeking
independence and openly sympathized with the Russians coming from the
Caucasus," argued Lewis.
"There were also Armenian gangs - the Armenians boast of the heroic
feats performed by the resistance, and the Turks certainly had
problems of maintaining order under wartime conditions. For the Turks,
it was a matter of taking punitive and preventive measures against an
unreliable population in a region threatened with foreign
invasion."[19]
The distance from here to the substitution of perpetrators for victims
and vice versa is short. In Lewis's words: "No one disputes that
terrible things happened [and] that many Armenians - and also Turks -
died. But the exact circumstances and the final tally of the victims
will doubtless never be known."[20] Elsewhere, he described the
episode as a result of "a desperate struggle ... between two nations
for the possession of a single homeland, that ended with the terrible
slaughter of 1915, when, according to estimates, more than a million
Armenians perished, as well as an unknown number of Turks."[21]
The nature of the conflict was of course quite different. Far from "a
desperate struggle between two nations for the possession of a single
homeland," it was a brutal repression by an imperial power of a
subject population; and while Armenian national aspirations
undoubtedly posed a grave threat to the integrity of the Ottoman
Empire, there can be no moral or political equivalence between these
aspirations and their repression.
Moreover, even if most Armenians helped the Russian war effort, which
they most certainly did not, there was no military =80' let alone
moral - justification for the uprooting of almost an entire nation
from its ancestral habitat, not to mention those communities that were
far removed from the war zone (e.g., Cilicia, western Anatolia,
etc.). Even the Nazis, who exacted horrendous collective punishment
for acts of resistance, did not exile a single occupied nation from
its homeland (apart, of course, from their Jewish citizens, singled
out for collective destruction).
Nor for that matter is there any symmetry between the military (and
other) resources at the empire's disposal and those available to its
subjects, not least since states by definition control the means of
collective violence. In the Armenian case, this inherent inequality
was aggravated by the comprehensive disarming of the community; and
while some "gangs" may have retained their weapons, the vast majority
of Armenians surrendered them to the authorities despite their stark
realization that the 1895-96 massacres had been preceded by very
similar measures.
The ethnic cleansing of a virtually unarmed nation cannot, therefore,
but indicate that, in the words of Turkish-American scholar Taner
Akçam, "the wartime policies of the Ottoman government toward the
Armenians were never ... the result of military exigencies" but were
rather the culmination of a preconceived design to destroy Armenian
nationalism, for which war provided the ideal pretext.[22]
Drawing on a wealth of Ottoman, German, British, and U.S. documents,
Akçam unveils a disturbing picture of elaborate planning and
meticulous execution of Ottoman Armenia's ethnic cleansing. He traces
this design to the Ottomans' defeat in the Balkan wars of 1912-13,
which sealed their creeping expulsion from Europe and convinced the
Young Turks leadership, dominated since January 1913 by the radical
triumvirate-minister of war Enver Pasha, minister of the interior
Talat Pasha, and minister of the navy Djemal Pasha-of the empire's
imminent demise absent drastic homogenization of the Anatolian
homeland: "The Christian population was to be reduced; that is,
removed, and the non-Turkish Muslim groups were to be
assimilated."[23]
This resulted in a campaign of massacres and expulsions against the
Ottoman Greeks, suspended after November 1914 under German pressure,
and culminating in the cleansing of the Armenians. The six
historically Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia were emptied of
their inhabitants, who either perished on the harrowing track to exile
or were resettled in the deserts of present-day Syria and Iraq. Most
of the Cilician and West Anatolian Armenians endured a similar fate.
Akçam identifies a "dual track mechanism" used for the ethnic
cleansing of the Armenians, and Christians more generally:
=80¢ A legal track, comprising official state acts such as the
bilateral population exchange agreements of 1913-14 with Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Greece, or the May 1915 decree authorizing the Armenian
deportation. Representing Atatürk's subscription to the Young Turk
belief in the need to homogenize the fatherland, the "legal" ethnic
cleansing of the Anatolian Greeks was eventually completed by the 1923
population exchange that drove some 1.3 million Greeks out of Turkey
(and about 400,000 Turks out of Greece).
=80¢ An unofficial track, consisting of extrajudicial acts of
violence, including forced evacuations, killing orders, and massacres.
Maximum effort was expanded to create the impression that none of
these actions were ever connected to the government, both during the
war and in subsequent decades through systematic destruction of
archival source material, yet the massive documentation provided by
Akçam proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the deep involvement of the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the Young Turks' ruling
party-from local administrators and bureaucrats all the way to senior
members, including Talat-in the orchestration and implementation of
extrajudicial violence and massacres.[24]
Not that these findings should surprise anyone. For one thing, the
"dual track mechanism" described by Akçam has remained a lasting
feature of Turkish political life to this very day. In republican
Turkey, this phenomenon has been known as the "deep state"-an opaque
underworld where powerful elements within the state, especially the
military and security services, act in conjunction with violent
extremist groups and the apolitical criminal underworld to undertake
special, illegal operations in the political interest of the country's
ruling elite. For another, the antique imperial practice of exiling
entire nations and communities has become an extreme rarity in modern
times, precisely because of its deliberate genocidal intent to destroy
"a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such."[25] It
must have occurred to the Ottoman leadership that the exiling of
almost an entire nation-over a million men, women, and children=80'to
a remote, alien, and hostile environment amidst a general war without
the minimal provisions for surviving the harrowing voyage and its
aftermath, was tantamount to a collective death sentence.[26] In the
end, whatever their initial intention, the Ottoman actions amounted to
nothing short of genocide.
Conclusion
Few crimes against humanity have been so widely and so comprehensively
ignored as the Ottoman Empire's ethnic cleansing of its Armenian
population during World War I.
Mesmerized by the myth of a benevolent Ottoman colonialism (in stark
contrast to their scathing indictment of the Western colonial legacy),
Western scholars and intellectuals have turned a blind eye to the
overwhelming body of evidence of Ottoman genocidal intentions and
practices. For their part, Western politicians and leaders were loath
to bring the Armenian skeleton out of the closet given Turkey's
position as an important anti-Soviet bastion and an alluring bridge to
the Muslim Middle East. And while the end of the Cold War has
increased Western propensity to address the issue-in 2005 the European
parliament conditioned Turkey's accession to the European Union on its
recognition of the Armenian genocide[27]-Ankara has remained as
defiant as ever.
When in March 2010 a U.S. congressional committee passed a resolution
branding the Armenian massacres as "genocide," over the objections of
the Obama administration, Turkey recalled its ambassador for
"consultations."[28] In his 2008 election campaign, presidential
hopeful Barack Obama stated that "America deserves a leader who speaks
truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all
genocides. I intend to be that President." As president, he chose to
make Turkey the site of his first overseas trip ignoring the Armenian
genocide altogether in his address to the Turkish parliament.[29] When
in December 2011, France's lower chamber approved a bill making denial
of any genocide a criminal offence, Ankara froze relations with Paris,
recalling its ambassador and suspending all economic, political, and
military meetings.[30]
With its strategic significance made more complex by recent Middle
Eastern upheavals, and the ruling Justice and Development Party
(Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) openly pining for lost Ottoman
glories, Turkey is unlikely to shed this longtime denial and own up to
its painful past.
Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is professor of
Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London.
[1] Robert D. Kaplan, "At the Gates of Brussels," The Atlantic
Monthly, Dec. 2004.
[2] Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New
York: Schocken Books, 1998), pp. 129-30.
[3] Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader
(London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 430.
[4] Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and other Middle-Eastern
Studies (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1984), p. 293.
[5] Ibid., p. 286.
[6] Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle
for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999), chaps. 2, 5, 6.
[7] Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Frank
Cass, 1993), chap. 28.
[8] For population figures, see, for example, Mallet to Grey, Oct. 7,
1914, British Foreign Office (hereafter FO), FO 371/2137/56940;
"Turkey: Annual Report, 1913. By the Embassy," FO 371/2137/79138, 25.
[9] See Fontana to Lowther, Mar. 25, 1913, FO 371/1773/16941; Lowther
to Grey, Apr. 5, 10, 1913, FO 371/1773/16736; Admiralty to FO,
Apr. 15, 1913, FO 371/1775/17825.
[10] Ironside to Foreign Office, Mar. 3, 1915, and War Office to the
Foreign Office, Mar. 4, 1915, FO 371/2484/25073 and 25167; Foreign
Office to Ironside, Mar. 9, 1915, FO 371/2484/28172 and 22083.
[11] Karsh and Karsh, Empires of the Sand, chap. 10.
[12] Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire:
Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs. Laid before the Houses of Parliament as an
Official Paper and Now Published by Permission (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1916), pp. 645-9.
[13] Ibid., pp. 641-2; Johannes Lepsius, Der Todesgang des armenischen
Volkes (Potsdam: Missionshandlung und Verlag, 1930), pp. 301-4.
[14] Aaron Aaronson, "On the Armenian Massacres: Memorandum Presented
to the War Office, London, Nov. 1916," Aaronson Archives (Zichron
Yaacov, Israel), File 2C/14.
[15] Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians, pp. 649-51, "Annex F:
Statistical Estimate Included in the Fifth Bulletin of the American
Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, Dated New York, 24th May
1916"; Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenian, 1914-1918 (Potsdam:
Tempelverlag, 1919), pp. lxv, 256; Lepsius, Der Todesgang, pp. 301-4;
Aaron Aaronson, "Pro Armenia," Nov. 16, 1916, p. 13, Aaronson
Archives, File 2C/13; Aaronson, "On the Armenian Massacres."
[16] Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 95-6.
[17] Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The
Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. xi.
[18] See, for example, Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, Reform,
Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975,
History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 315; Guenther Lewy, "Revisiting
the Armenian Genocide," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2005, pp. 3-12;
Michael Gunter, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See also Michael M. Gunter, Middle
East Quarterly, Winter 2013, pp. 37-46.
[19] Bernard Lewis, interview with Le Monde, Nov. 16, 1993.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd ed. (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 356. Interestingly, in
the first and second editions of the book (1961, 1968), Lewis
described these tragic events as "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when
a million and half Armenians perished." (p. 356). In his Le Monde
interview, he reduced the fatality figure to "hundreds of thousands of
Armenians [who] died of hunger and cold," dismissing the description
of these deaths as genocide as "the Armenian version of this event."
While he raised the figure to more than a million in the third edition
of The Emergence, he still put Armenian casualties on a par with those
of their Ottoman oppressors.
[22] Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity, p. xix.
[23] Ibid., p. xv.
[24] Akçam's research also reaffirms the validity of early
documentation of the Armenian atrocities whose authenticity has
subsequently been questioned, notably Aram Andonian's 1920 book The
Memoirs of Naim Bey, as many newly discovered documents echo their now
discredited predecessors.
[25] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, 78 U.N. Treaty Series (UNTS) 277, entered into force on
Jan. 12, 1951, art. 2.
[26] It has been argued (see Michael Gunter's article in this issue)
that the claim of an Armenian genocide "rests on a logical fallacy and
ignores the huge loss of life among Turkish civilians, soldiers, and
prisoners-of-war. ... that surely cannot be explained in terms of a
Young Turk plan of annihilation." Of course, the Young Turks'
indifference to their own people's suffering and mortality does not
preclude the existence of an annihilationist plan vis-Ã -vis the
Armenians, just as Hitler's readiness to sacrifice millions of German
lives did not preclude his annihilationist design vis-Ã -vis the Jews.
[27] "European Parliament resolution on the opening of negotiations
with Turkey," Sept. 38, 2005.
[28] "Armenian genocide resolution passes US Congress Committee,"
Voice of America, Mar. 3, 2010.
[29] "Barack Obama calls for passage of Armenian genocide resolution,"
Armenian National Committee of America, Jan. 20, 2008; remarks by
President Obama to the Turkish parliament, Ankara, Office of the Press
Secretary, Apr. 6, 2009.
[30] The Guardian, Dec. 22, 2011.
Image Caption: "The ethnic cleansing of Turkish Armenia was
accomplished in a variety of ways including deportations and outright
massacres. Here, Armenian deportees struggle to survive in makeshift
tents erected in the Syrian desert to which they were deported in
1915."
The Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2013
Volume XX: Number 1
pp. 17-26
by Efraim Karsh
It is commonplace among Middle East scholars across the political
spectrum to idealize the Ottoman colonial legacy as a shining example
of tolerance. "The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire," wrote
American journalist Robert Kaplan, "was more hospitable to minorities
than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it
... Violent discussions over what group got to control which territory
emerged only when the empire came to an end, after World War I."[1]
Bernard Lewis went a significant step further, ascribing the wholesale
violence attending the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to attempts to
reform its Islamic sociopolitical order. "The classical Ottoman
Empire enabled a multiplicity of religious and ethnic groups to live
side by side in mutual tolerance and respect, subject only to the
primacy of Islam and the supremacy of the Muslims," he wrote. "The
liberal reformers and revolutionaries who abolished the old order and
proclaimed the constitutional equality of all Ottoman citizens led
the Ottoman Empire into the final bitter and bloody national
struggles-the worst by far in the half-millennium of its history."[2]
And Edward Said, in an exceptional display of unanimity with his
intellectual foe, was similarly effusive. "What they had then seems a
lot more humane than what we have now," he argued. "Of course, there
were inequities. But they lived without this ridiculous notion that
every millet has to have its own state."[3]
Even Elie Kedourie, whose view of Ottoman colonialism was far less
sentimental, could see some advantages in the empire's less than
perfect sociopolitical order: "Ottoman administration was certainly
corrupt and arbitrary, but it was ramshackle and inefficient and left
many interstices by which the subject could hope to escape its
terrors, and bribery was a traditional and recognized method of
mitigating severities and easing difficulties."[4]
While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is
also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is
demonstratively wrong. The imperial notion, by its very definition,
posits the domination of one ethnic, religious, or national group over
another, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. It tolerated the
existence of vast non-Muslim subject populations in its midst, as did
earlier Muslim (and non-Muslim) empires-provided they acknowledged
their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of
things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate
status=80'let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke-they were
brutally suppressed, and none more so than the Armenians during World
War I.
Historical Context
An important strand in Ottoman idealization has been the charge that
it was the importation of European ideas to the empire, notably those
of nationalism and statehood, that undermined the deeply ingrained
regional order with devastating consequences to subjects and rulers
alike. In Kedourie's words: "A rash, a malady, an infection spreading
from Western Europe through the Balkans, the Ottoman empire, India,
the Far East and Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to
leave it weakened and defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous
adventurers, for further horror and atrocity: Such are the terms to
describe what the West has done to the rest of the world, not
wilfully, not knowingly, but mostly out of excellent intentions and by
example of its prestige and prosperity."[5]
Evocative of the fashionable indictment of nationalism as the scourge
of international relations, this prognosis is largely misconceived.
For it is the desire to dominate foreign creeds, nations, or
communities, and to occupy territories well beyond the "ancestral
homeland" that contains the inevitable seeds of violence-not the wish
to be allowed to follow an independent path of development. In each of
imperialism's three phases-empire-building, administration, and
disintegration-force was the midwife of the historical process as the
imperial power vied to assert its authority and to maintain its
control over perennially hostile populations; and while most empires
have justified their position in terms of a civilizing mission of
sorts, none willfully shed its colonies, let alone its imperial
status, well after they had outlived their usefulness, or had even
become a burden. Hence the disintegration of multinational,
multidenominational, and multilingual empires has rarely been a
peaceful process. On rare occasions-the collapse of the Soviet Union
being a salient example-violence has followed the actual demise of the
imperial power. In most instances, however, such as the collapse of
the British, the French, and the Portuguese empires, among others,
violence is endemic to the process of decolonization as the occupied
peoples fight their way to national liberation.
The Ottoman Empire clearly belonged to the latter category. A far cry
from the tolerant and tranquil domain it is often taken for,
Turkey-in-Europe was the most violent part of the continent during the
century or so between the Napoleonic upheavals and World War I as the
Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the
nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of
independence of the 1820s, the Danubian nationalist uprisings of 1848,
the Balkan explosion of the 1870s, and the Greco-Ottoman war of
1897-all were painful reminders of the cost of breaking free from an
imperial master.[6] And all pale in comparison with the treatment
meted out to the foremost nationalist awakening in Turkey-in-Asia: the
Armenian.
Prelude to Catastrophe
Unlike Europe, where the rise of nationalism dealt a body blow to
Ottoman imperialism, there was no nationalist fervor among the Ottoman
Empire's predominantly Arabic-speaking Afro-Asian subjects. One
historian has credibly estimated that a mere 350 activists belonged to
all the secret Arab societies operating throughout the Middle East at
the outbreak of World War I, and most of them were not seeking actual
Arab independence but rather greater autonomy within the Ottoman
Empire.[7] This made the rise of Armenian nationalism the foremost
threat to Ottoman integrity in that part of the empire.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Armenian population
of the Ottoman Empire totaled some two million persons, three-quarters
of whom resided in so-called Turkish Armenia, namely, the vilayets of
Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Sivas, Kharput, and Diarbekir in eastern
Anatolia. The rest, about half a million Armenians, were equally
distributed in the Istanbul-eastern Thrace region and in Cilicia, in
southwestern Anatolia.[8]
As a result of Russian agitation, European and American missionary
work, and, not least, the nationalist revival in the Balkans, a surge
of national consciousness began to take place within the three
Armenian religious communities-Gregorian, Catholic, and Protestant. In
the 1870s, Armenian secret societies sprang up at home and abroad,
developing gradually into militant nationalist groups. Uprisings
against Ottoman rule erupted time and again; terrorism became a common
phenomenon, both against Turks and against noncompliant fellow
Armenians-before it was eventually suppressed in a brutal campaign of
repression in 1895-96, in which nearly 200,000 people perished and
thousands more fled to Europe and the United States.
Turkish Armenia did not remain quiet for long. By 1903, a vicious
cycle of escalating violence was in operation yet again, and two years
later, Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid narrowly escaped an assassination
attempt by Armenian nationalists. In the early 1910s, despite years of
cultural repression, including a ban on the public use of the Armenian
language and a new round of horrendous massacres (in the spring of
1909), Armenian nationalism had been fully rekindled. In April 1913,
for example, Armenian nationalists asked Britain to occupy the
southern region of Cilicia, from Antalya to Alexandretta, and to
internationalize Istanbul and the straits as a means of "repairing the
iniquity of the [1878] Congress of Berlin," which had stipulated
Ottoman reforms "in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians." At
about the same time, a committee of the Armenian National Assembly,
the governing body of the Apostolic Ottoman Christians, submitted an
elaborate reform plan for Ottoman Armenia to the Russian embassy in
Istanbul.[9]
Bowing to international pressure, in February 1914, the Ottoman
authorities accepted a Russo-German proposal for the creation of two
large Armenian provinces, to be administered by European
inspectors-general appointed by the great powers. This was a far cry
from the Armenians' aspirations for a unified independent state as its
envisaged territory was partitioned into two separate entities rather
than creating a cohesive whole, yet it was the most significant
concession they had managed to extract from their suzerain, and most
of them were anxious to preserve this gain come what may. Hence, when
the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the
German-Austro-Hungarian Triple Alliance, the Armenians immediately
strove to demonstrate their loyalty: Prayers for an Ottoman victory
were said in churches throughout the empire, and the Armenian
patriarch of Istanbul, as well as several nationalist groups,
announced their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and implored the
Armenian masses to perform their obligations to the best of their
ability.
Not everyone complied with this wish. Scores of Ottoman Armenians,
including several prominent figures, crossed the border to assist the
Russian campaign. Others offered to help the Anglo-French-Russian
entente by different means. In February 1915, for example, Armenian
revolutionaries in the Cilician city of Zeitun pledged to assist a
Russian advance on the area provided they were given the necessary
weapons; to the British, they promised help in the event of a naval
landing in Alexandretta.[10]
Although these activities were an exception to the otherwise loyal
conduct of the Armenian community, they confirmed the Ottoman
stereotype of the Armenians as a troublesome and treacherous
people. This view was further reinforced by a number of crushing
defeats in the Caucasus, in which (non-Ottoman) Armenians were
implicated in the Russian war effort. Above all, as the largest
nationally-aware minority in Asiatic Turkey, the Armenians constituted
the gravest internal threat to Ottoman imperialism in that domain; and
with Turkey-in-Europe a fading memory and Turkey-in-Africa under
Anglo-French-Italian domination, the disintegration of Turkey-in-Asia
would spell the end of the Ottoman Empire, something that its rulers
would never accept.
Before long, the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to the kind of
retribution that had been inflicted on rebellious Middle Eastern
populations since Assyrian and Babylonian times: deportation and
exile. Having been rendered defenseless, they were uprooted from their
homes and relocated to the most inhospitable corners of Ottoman Asia,
with their towns and villages swiftly populated by new Muslims
arrivals, and their property seized by the authorities or plundered by
their Muslim neighbors.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Turkish Armenia
The first step in this direction was taken in early 1915 when Armenian
soldiers in the Ottoman army were relegated to "labor battalions" and
stripped of their weapons. Most of these fighters-turned-laborers
would be marched out in droves to secluded places and shot in cold
blood, often after being forced to dig their own graves. Those
fortunate enough to escape summary execution were employed as laborers
in the most inhumane conditions.
At the same time, the authorities initiated a ruthless campaign to
disarm the entire Armenian population of personal weapons before
embarking on a genocidal spree of mass deportations and massacres. By
the autumn of 1915, Cilicia had been ethnically cleansed and the
authorities turned their sights on the foremost Armenian settlement
area in eastern Anatolia. First to be cleansed was the zone bordering
Van, extending from the Black Sea to the Iranian frontier and
immediately threatened by Russian advance; only there did outright
massacres often substitute for otherwise slow deaths along the
deportation routes or in the concentration camps of the Syrian
desert. In other districts of Ottoman Armenia, depopulated between
July and September, the Turks attempted to preserve a semblance of a
deportation policy though most deportees were summarily executed after
hitting the road. In the coastal towns of Trebizond, for example,
Armenians were sent out to sea, ostensibly for deportation, only to be
thrown overboard shortly afterward. Of the deportees from Erzerum,
Erzindjan, and Baibourt, only a handful survived the initial stages of
the journey.[11]
The Armenian population in western Anatolia and in the metropolitan
districts of Istanbul was somewhat more fortunate as many people were
transported in trains-although grossly overcrowded-for much of the
deportation route, rather than having to straggle along by foot. In
Istanbul, deportations commenced in late April when hundreds of
prominent Armenians were picked up by the police and sent away, most
of them never to be seen again; some five thousand "ordinary"
Armenians soon shared their fate. Though the majority of the city's
150,000-strong community escaped deportation, Armenians were squeezed
out of all public posts with numerous families reduced to appalling
poverty. Deportations in Ankara began toward the end of July; in
Broussa, in the first weeks of September; and in Adrianople, in
mid-October. By early 1916, scores of deportees, thrown into a string
of concentration camps in the Syrian desert and along the Euphrates,
were dying every day of malnutrition and diseases; many others were
systematically taken out of the camps and shot.[12]
The Ottoman authorities tried to put a gloss of legality and innocence
on their actions. The general deportation decree of May 27, 1915, for
example, instructed the security forces to protect the deportees
against nomadic attacks, to provide them with sufficient food and
supplies for their journey, and to compensate them with new property,
land, and goods necessary for their resettlement. But this decree was
a sham. For one thing, massacres and deportations had already begun
prior to its proclamation. For another, as is overwhelmingly borne out
by the evidence, given both by numerous firsthand witnesses to the
Ottoman atrocities and by survivors, the rights granted by the
deportation decree were never followed.
Consider the provisions for adequate supplies for the journey and
compensation for the loss of property. After the extermination of the
male population of a particular town or village, an act normally
preceding deportations, the Turks often extended a "grace period" to
the rest of the populace, namely, women, children, and the old and the
sick, so they could settle their affairs and prepare for their
journey. But the term normally given was a bare week, and never more
than two, which was utterly insufficient for all that had to be
done. Moreover, the government often carried away its victims before
the stated deadline, snatching them without warning from streets,
places of employment, or even their beds. Last but not least, the
local authorities prevented the deportees from selling their property
or their stock under the official fiction that their expulsion was to
be only temporary. Even in the rare cases in which Armenians managed
to dispose of their property, their Muslim neighbors took advantage of
their plight to buy their possessions at a fraction of their real
value.[13]
Nor did the deportees receive even a semblance of the protection
promised by the deportation decree. On the contrary, from the moment
they started on their march, indeed even before they had done so, they
became public outcasts, never safe from the most atrocious outrages,
constantly mobbed and plundered by the Muslim population as they
straggled along. Their guards connived at this brutality. There were,
of course, exceptions in which Muslims, including Turks, tendered help
to the long-suffering Armenians, but these were very rare, isolated
instances.
Whenever the deportees arrived at a village or town, they were
exhibited like slaves in a public place, often before the government
building itself. Female slave markets were established in the Muslim
areas through which the Armenians were driven, and thousands of young
Armenian women and girls were sold in this way. Even the clerics were
quick to avail themselves of the bargains of the white slave market.
Suffering on the deportation routes was intense. Travelers on the
Levantine railway saw dogs feeding on the bodies of hundreds of men,
women, and children on both sides of the track, with women searching
the clothing of the corpses for hidden treasure. In some of the
transfer stations, notably Aleppo, the hub where all convoys
converged, thousands of Armenians would be left for weeks outdoors,
starving, waiting to be taken away. Epidemics spread rapidly, chiefly
spot typhus. In almost all cases, the dead were not buried for days,
the reason being, as an Ottoman officer cheerfully explained to an
inquisitive foreigner, that it was hoped the epidemics might get rid
of the Armenians once and for all.[14]
As the deportees settled into their new miserable existence, they were
forced to work at hard labor, making roads, opening quarries, and the
like; for this, they were paid puny salaries, which effectively
reduced them to starvation; work in the neighboring villages that
could earn them some livelihood was strictly forbidden. Water was
normally brought to the camps by trains; no springs were to be found
within a radius of miles. The scenes at the arrival of the water
trains, by no means a regular phenomenon, were
heartbreaking. Thousands of people would rush toward the stopping
place, earth-jars and tin cans in hand, in a desperate bid for their
share of this elixir of life. But when at long last the taps were
opened, people would often be barred from filling their vessels,
having to watch the precious water running out on the sun-baked
ground.
Independent estimates of the precise extent of Armenian casualties
differ somewhat, but all paint a stark picture of national
annihilation. In his official report to the British parliament in July
1916, Viscount Bryce calculated the total number of uprooted Armenians
during the preceding year as 1,200,000 (half slain, half deported), or
about two thirds of the entire community. Johannes Lepsius, the chief
of the Protestant Mission in the Ottoman Empire who had personally
witnessed the atrocities and had studied them thoroughly, put the
total higher, at 1,396,000, as did the American Committee for Armenian
and Syrian Relief, which computed the number of deaths at about
600,000 and of deportees at 786,000. Aaron Aaronson, a world-renowned
Zionist agronomist who set up the most effective
pro-Anglo-French-Russian entente intelligence network in the Middle
East during World War I, estimated the number of deaths at between
850,000 and 950,000.[15]
Genocide or "Collateral Damage"?
Turkey has never acknowledged any wrongdoing vis-Ã -vis the
Armenians. While some leaders and administrators of the Young Turks
regime, which ruled the empire since July 1908, were court-martialed
immediately after the war for crimes committed during their ten-year
rule, including the Armenian atrocities, this was done in deference to
the victorious Allied powers rather than out of true conviction. Even
the newly-established Turkish republic (1923), despite its
renunciation of much of the Ottoman imperial legacy, would not disown
its arguably most heinous crime since its founding father,
Gen. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk "whatever his disagreements with the Young
Turks leaders ... was after all imbued with Young Turk ideas."[16] Not
only did Ankara fail to acknowledge any intention or plan to destroy
Armenian nationalism, but the deportations and killings were presented
as a natural act of self-defense against a disloyal population. In the
words of Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, doyen of Turkish historians: "It's one
thing to say that the Turks killed the Armenians spontaneously, and
another to say that, when the Armenians revolted, the Turks, who were
locked in a life or death struggle, used excessive force and killed a
good many people."[17]
Given their idealization of the Ottoman legacy, it was only a question
of time for Western scholars to adopt this narrative.[18] "The Turks
had an Armenian problem caused by the advance of the Russians and an
anti-Ottoman population living in Turkey, which was seeking
independence and openly sympathized with the Russians coming from the
Caucasus," argued Lewis.
"There were also Armenian gangs - the Armenians boast of the heroic
feats performed by the resistance, and the Turks certainly had
problems of maintaining order under wartime conditions. For the Turks,
it was a matter of taking punitive and preventive measures against an
unreliable population in a region threatened with foreign
invasion."[19]
The distance from here to the substitution of perpetrators for victims
and vice versa is short. In Lewis's words: "No one disputes that
terrible things happened [and] that many Armenians - and also Turks -
died. But the exact circumstances and the final tally of the victims
will doubtless never be known."[20] Elsewhere, he described the
episode as a result of "a desperate struggle ... between two nations
for the possession of a single homeland, that ended with the terrible
slaughter of 1915, when, according to estimates, more than a million
Armenians perished, as well as an unknown number of Turks."[21]
The nature of the conflict was of course quite different. Far from "a
desperate struggle between two nations for the possession of a single
homeland," it was a brutal repression by an imperial power of a
subject population; and while Armenian national aspirations
undoubtedly posed a grave threat to the integrity of the Ottoman
Empire, there can be no moral or political equivalence between these
aspirations and their repression.
Moreover, even if most Armenians helped the Russian war effort, which
they most certainly did not, there was no military =80' let alone
moral - justification for the uprooting of almost an entire nation
from its ancestral habitat, not to mention those communities that were
far removed from the war zone (e.g., Cilicia, western Anatolia,
etc.). Even the Nazis, who exacted horrendous collective punishment
for acts of resistance, did not exile a single occupied nation from
its homeland (apart, of course, from their Jewish citizens, singled
out for collective destruction).
Nor for that matter is there any symmetry between the military (and
other) resources at the empire's disposal and those available to its
subjects, not least since states by definition control the means of
collective violence. In the Armenian case, this inherent inequality
was aggravated by the comprehensive disarming of the community; and
while some "gangs" may have retained their weapons, the vast majority
of Armenians surrendered them to the authorities despite their stark
realization that the 1895-96 massacres had been preceded by very
similar measures.
The ethnic cleansing of a virtually unarmed nation cannot, therefore,
but indicate that, in the words of Turkish-American scholar Taner
Akçam, "the wartime policies of the Ottoman government toward the
Armenians were never ... the result of military exigencies" but were
rather the culmination of a preconceived design to destroy Armenian
nationalism, for which war provided the ideal pretext.[22]
Drawing on a wealth of Ottoman, German, British, and U.S. documents,
Akçam unveils a disturbing picture of elaborate planning and
meticulous execution of Ottoman Armenia's ethnic cleansing. He traces
this design to the Ottomans' defeat in the Balkan wars of 1912-13,
which sealed their creeping expulsion from Europe and convinced the
Young Turks leadership, dominated since January 1913 by the radical
triumvirate-minister of war Enver Pasha, minister of the interior
Talat Pasha, and minister of the navy Djemal Pasha-of the empire's
imminent demise absent drastic homogenization of the Anatolian
homeland: "The Christian population was to be reduced; that is,
removed, and the non-Turkish Muslim groups were to be
assimilated."[23]
This resulted in a campaign of massacres and expulsions against the
Ottoman Greeks, suspended after November 1914 under German pressure,
and culminating in the cleansing of the Armenians. The six
historically Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia were emptied of
their inhabitants, who either perished on the harrowing track to exile
or were resettled in the deserts of present-day Syria and Iraq. Most
of the Cilician and West Anatolian Armenians endured a similar fate.
Akçam identifies a "dual track mechanism" used for the ethnic
cleansing of the Armenians, and Christians more generally:
=80¢ A legal track, comprising official state acts such as the
bilateral population exchange agreements of 1913-14 with Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Greece, or the May 1915 decree authorizing the Armenian
deportation. Representing Atatürk's subscription to the Young Turk
belief in the need to homogenize the fatherland, the "legal" ethnic
cleansing of the Anatolian Greeks was eventually completed by the 1923
population exchange that drove some 1.3 million Greeks out of Turkey
(and about 400,000 Turks out of Greece).
=80¢ An unofficial track, consisting of extrajudicial acts of
violence, including forced evacuations, killing orders, and massacres.
Maximum effort was expanded to create the impression that none of
these actions were ever connected to the government, both during the
war and in subsequent decades through systematic destruction of
archival source material, yet the massive documentation provided by
Akçam proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the deep involvement of the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the Young Turks' ruling
party-from local administrators and bureaucrats all the way to senior
members, including Talat-in the orchestration and implementation of
extrajudicial violence and massacres.[24]
Not that these findings should surprise anyone. For one thing, the
"dual track mechanism" described by Akçam has remained a lasting
feature of Turkish political life to this very day. In republican
Turkey, this phenomenon has been known as the "deep state"-an opaque
underworld where powerful elements within the state, especially the
military and security services, act in conjunction with violent
extremist groups and the apolitical criminal underworld to undertake
special, illegal operations in the political interest of the country's
ruling elite. For another, the antique imperial practice of exiling
entire nations and communities has become an extreme rarity in modern
times, precisely because of its deliberate genocidal intent to destroy
"a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such."[25] It
must have occurred to the Ottoman leadership that the exiling of
almost an entire nation-over a million men, women, and children=80'to
a remote, alien, and hostile environment amidst a general war without
the minimal provisions for surviving the harrowing voyage and its
aftermath, was tantamount to a collective death sentence.[26] In the
end, whatever their initial intention, the Ottoman actions amounted to
nothing short of genocide.
Conclusion
Few crimes against humanity have been so widely and so comprehensively
ignored as the Ottoman Empire's ethnic cleansing of its Armenian
population during World War I.
Mesmerized by the myth of a benevolent Ottoman colonialism (in stark
contrast to their scathing indictment of the Western colonial legacy),
Western scholars and intellectuals have turned a blind eye to the
overwhelming body of evidence of Ottoman genocidal intentions and
practices. For their part, Western politicians and leaders were loath
to bring the Armenian skeleton out of the closet given Turkey's
position as an important anti-Soviet bastion and an alluring bridge to
the Muslim Middle East. And while the end of the Cold War has
increased Western propensity to address the issue-in 2005 the European
parliament conditioned Turkey's accession to the European Union on its
recognition of the Armenian genocide[27]-Ankara has remained as
defiant as ever.
When in March 2010 a U.S. congressional committee passed a resolution
branding the Armenian massacres as "genocide," over the objections of
the Obama administration, Turkey recalled its ambassador for
"consultations."[28] In his 2008 election campaign, presidential
hopeful Barack Obama stated that "America deserves a leader who speaks
truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all
genocides. I intend to be that President." As president, he chose to
make Turkey the site of his first overseas trip ignoring the Armenian
genocide altogether in his address to the Turkish parliament.[29] When
in December 2011, France's lower chamber approved a bill making denial
of any genocide a criminal offence, Ankara froze relations with Paris,
recalling its ambassador and suspending all economic, political, and
military meetings.[30]
With its strategic significance made more complex by recent Middle
Eastern upheavals, and the ruling Justice and Development Party
(Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) openly pining for lost Ottoman
glories, Turkey is unlikely to shed this longtime denial and own up to
its painful past.
Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is professor of
Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London.
[1] Robert D. Kaplan, "At the Gates of Brussels," The Atlantic
Monthly, Dec. 2004.
[2] Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New
York: Schocken Books, 1998), pp. 129-30.
[3] Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader
(London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 430.
[4] Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and other Middle-Eastern
Studies (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1984), p. 293.
[5] Ibid., p. 286.
[6] Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle
for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999), chaps. 2, 5, 6.
[7] Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Frank
Cass, 1993), chap. 28.
[8] For population figures, see, for example, Mallet to Grey, Oct. 7,
1914, British Foreign Office (hereafter FO), FO 371/2137/56940;
"Turkey: Annual Report, 1913. By the Embassy," FO 371/2137/79138, 25.
[9] See Fontana to Lowther, Mar. 25, 1913, FO 371/1773/16941; Lowther
to Grey, Apr. 5, 10, 1913, FO 371/1773/16736; Admiralty to FO,
Apr. 15, 1913, FO 371/1775/17825.
[10] Ironside to Foreign Office, Mar. 3, 1915, and War Office to the
Foreign Office, Mar. 4, 1915, FO 371/2484/25073 and 25167; Foreign
Office to Ironside, Mar. 9, 1915, FO 371/2484/28172 and 22083.
[11] Karsh and Karsh, Empires of the Sand, chap. 10.
[12] Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire:
Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs. Laid before the Houses of Parliament as an
Official Paper and Now Published by Permission (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1916), pp. 645-9.
[13] Ibid., pp. 641-2; Johannes Lepsius, Der Todesgang des armenischen
Volkes (Potsdam: Missionshandlung und Verlag, 1930), pp. 301-4.
[14] Aaron Aaronson, "On the Armenian Massacres: Memorandum Presented
to the War Office, London, Nov. 1916," Aaronson Archives (Zichron
Yaacov, Israel), File 2C/14.
[15] Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians, pp. 649-51, "Annex F:
Statistical Estimate Included in the Fifth Bulletin of the American
Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, Dated New York, 24th May
1916"; Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenian, 1914-1918 (Potsdam:
Tempelverlag, 1919), pp. lxv, 256; Lepsius, Der Todesgang, pp. 301-4;
Aaron Aaronson, "Pro Armenia," Nov. 16, 1916, p. 13, Aaronson
Archives, File 2C/13; Aaronson, "On the Armenian Massacres."
[16] Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 95-6.
[17] Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The
Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. xi.
[18] See, for example, Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, Reform,
Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975,
History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 315; Guenther Lewy, "Revisiting
the Armenian Genocide," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2005, pp. 3-12;
Michael Gunter, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See also Michael M. Gunter, Middle
East Quarterly, Winter 2013, pp. 37-46.
[19] Bernard Lewis, interview with Le Monde, Nov. 16, 1993.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd ed. (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 356. Interestingly, in
the first and second editions of the book (1961, 1968), Lewis
described these tragic events as "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when
a million and half Armenians perished." (p. 356). In his Le Monde
interview, he reduced the fatality figure to "hundreds of thousands of
Armenians [who] died of hunger and cold," dismissing the description
of these deaths as genocide as "the Armenian version of this event."
While he raised the figure to more than a million in the third edition
of The Emergence, he still put Armenian casualties on a par with those
of their Ottoman oppressors.
[22] Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity, p. xix.
[23] Ibid., p. xv.
[24] Akçam's research also reaffirms the validity of early
documentation of the Armenian atrocities whose authenticity has
subsequently been questioned, notably Aram Andonian's 1920 book The
Memoirs of Naim Bey, as many newly discovered documents echo their now
discredited predecessors.
[25] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, 78 U.N. Treaty Series (UNTS) 277, entered into force on
Jan. 12, 1951, art. 2.
[26] It has been argued (see Michael Gunter's article in this issue)
that the claim of an Armenian genocide "rests on a logical fallacy and
ignores the huge loss of life among Turkish civilians, soldiers, and
prisoners-of-war. ... that surely cannot be explained in terms of a
Young Turk plan of annihilation." Of course, the Young Turks'
indifference to their own people's suffering and mortality does not
preclude the existence of an annihilationist plan vis-Ã -vis the
Armenians, just as Hitler's readiness to sacrifice millions of German
lives did not preclude his annihilationist design vis-Ã -vis the Jews.
[27] "European Parliament resolution on the opening of negotiations
with Turkey," Sept. 38, 2005.
[28] "Armenian genocide resolution passes US Congress Committee,"
Voice of America, Mar. 3, 2010.
[29] "Barack Obama calls for passage of Armenian genocide resolution,"
Armenian National Committee of America, Jan. 20, 2008; remarks by
President Obama to the Turkish parliament, Ankara, Office of the Press
Secretary, Apr. 6, 2009.
[30] The Guardian, Dec. 22, 2011.
Image Caption: "The ethnic cleansing of Turkish Armenia was
accomplished in a variety of ways including deportations and outright
massacres. Here, Armenian deportees struggle to survive in makeshift
tents erected in the Syrian desert to which they were deported in
1915."