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Al-Jazeera, Qatar
April 24 2014
What we all get wrong about Armenia, Turkey and genocide
The popular understanding of genocide presumes a clear-cut division
between victims and killers
April 24, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Nick Danforth @ajam
Several years ago, a Turkish acquaintance told me that one of her
ancestors had been an Ottoman governor in Eastern Anatolia during
World War I. He was dismissed, she said, when he disobeyed an order to
kill the Armenians living in his province. Amazed, I suggested that
she must be one of the only people in Turkey who actually believed
there was an Armenian genocide. "No," she said, "you can't call it
that. The Armenians did terrible things to the Turks, too."
What this woman described ' a government instructing its officials to
kill all the members of an ethnic group in a given region ' was the
very definition of genocide. And yet she found the term unacceptable.
So does Turkey's prime minister, even though he recently expressed his
sympathy for Armenian suffering in a statement on the global
commemorations of April 24. Indeed, beneath this apparent
contradiction lies an often overlooked fact: Our popular understanding
of genocide presumes a neat division between a nation of collectively
guilty perpetrators and their collectively innocent victims. Such a
definition fails to account for the suffering Turks know their
ancestors endured; they acknowledge it by responding to Armenian
accusations by saying that `millions of people of all religions and
ethnicities lost their lives in the First World War.' With this in
mind, Turks often deny the mass killing of Armenians amounted to
genocide, when what many of them mean to say is that their nation's
crime was different from the Holocaust.
In this they are correct. The Holocaust was a unique case: there was a
clear moral line dividing the murderers and the victims, and this has
regrettably become the template for evaluating all charges of
genocide. As a result, the one thing both Turks and Armenians in this
debate implicitly agree on is that any historical evidence of Turkish
victimhood somehow negates Turkish guilt. Thus, Turks tend to
highlight examples of crimes committed against them ' villages
massacred by Russian forces or families burned out of their homes by
Armenian guerrillas ' in order to refute accusations of genocide. And
by insisting that things like this never happened, their Armenian
counterparts indirectly perpetuate the absurd idea that a nation
cannot both suffer atrocities and perpetrate them against others in an
even more systematic form.
As long as we demand that our history conforms to an impossibly simple
moral template, we will be unable to understand what happened to the
Armenians and, more dangerously, unable to confront genocide in the
world today.
Moral narratives
As a wealth of scholarship makes clear, mass killings seldom fit the
black-and-white narratives that nationalist historians and their
readers crave. The guilt or innocence of individuals can be absolute,
but it is not easily tallied along national or ethnic lines. In
Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia, to name just a few examples, civil war and
genocide were closely related phenomena, with militarily weak states
engaged in what they believed to be existential conflicts.
This was the very situation in which the Ottoman Empire found itself
during World War I. So there is nothing paradoxical about suggesting
that, as is common in these situations, genocide led to, but was also
provoked by, acts of mass violence committed against Turks. In former
Yugoslavia, for example, Croatian and Bosnian officers were tried in
The Hague for acts of genocide alongside their more notorious Serbian
counterparts.
Which is why, both in private and increasingly now in public, a
growing number of historians ' Mark Mazower's thoughtful discussions
of the subject and UÄ?ur Ã`mit Ã`ngör's more recent scholarship stand out
' believe both that the Ottoman government organized and carried out
an unprecedented campaign of genocide against Armenians in 1915, and
also that this crime was motivated, in part, by waves of ethnic
cleansing committed against the Ottoman Empire's Muslim population in
the Balkans and the Caucasus.
Turks are left to choose whether to believe that their people were
evil or that they were blameless. Not surprisingly, almost all choose
the latter.
Throughout the course of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire lost
territory to nationalist movements in the Balkans. When these nations
became independent, their new Christian rulers, driven by the brutal
fighting they had just endured, sought to create new, "purified"
nations, usually by killing or expelling as many Ottoman Muslims as
they could. When Bulgaria became independent in 1878, for example,
hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians fled toward Istanbul, and by
some estimates as many as half died along the way.
Farther east, the Russian army used a scorched earth campaign to
secure the Caucasus, including the city of Sochi, from the Muslim
Circassians who lived there. Again, hundreds of thousands died, and
the survivors sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire.
Before World War I broke out, a small number of Armenians, living in
the eastern portion of what was left of the Ottoman Empire, had
already formed revolutionary groups in order to fight for their
independence. Despite what some Turks now claim, by 1915 these violent
separatists did not command widespread support among the Armenian
population. But for Ottoman leaders who had seen small nationalist
movements in the Balkans grow into insurmountable ones, the pattern
appeared all too obvious. The Ottoman interior minister, Talat Bey,
made the comparison explicit by saying he would not let Armenia become
`the Bulgaria of the East.'
When the threat of Armenian independence was exacerbated by the
outbreak of war with Russia, destroying the Armenian population of the
Ottoman Empire became, in Talat's chilling euphemism, a way to remove
`this abscess with its root.' The resulting campaign elevated mass
murder, which men like Talat had seen carried out on a smaller scale,
to the level of state policy, and death tolls rose accordingly. Not
coincidentally, many of the paramilitary thugs who actually
orchestrated the killing were Circassians who were eager to avenge the
crimes committed against their own families. And when Russian troops
advanced into Ottoman territory, this cycle of violence continued,
with Armenian militias committing atrocities against Muslim villagers
that live on in Turkish memory today.
Pre-emptive strike
The men who planned the Ottoman campaign of mass murder may genuinely
have believed they were committing a pre-emptive or defensive atrocity
against people whose future disloyalty they were sure of. It should be
obvious that such fears cannot justify killing more than a million
innocent civilians. And yet the Ottoman government's motives are worth
explaining, if only to help show that, seen in a broader historical
context, there was nothing uniquely monstrous about `Turkish' behavior
as a whole over the past two centuries.
Narratives that acknowledge, but also insist on contextualizing, the
genocide have not been popular with either Turkish or Armenian
nationalists. This has made it difficult for historians of any
background to air such views publicly. And until a decade or so ago,
when restrictions in Turkey began to loosen, it was almost impossible
for Turkish historians to speak in any nuanced way about this issue.
Ironically, in the U.S., the Turkish government's effort to suppress
any recognition of what happened has ceded the debate to the Armenian
side, whose version of history, though more accurate on several
crucial points, is nonetheless deeply distorted by anti-Turkish
hostility. As a result, Turks are left to choose between a version of
history in which their people are evil, and another version in which
they are blameless. Not surprisingly, almost all choose the latter.
Contemporary calls of `never again' fall back on the simplistic
black-and-white rhetoric that we seem to demand in identifying
genocide.
It is important to consider this history in order to be intellectually
prepared to confront genocide in the world today. Contemporary calls
of `never again' frequently fall back on the simplistic
black-and-white narrative that's practically required for an incident
to qualify in our minds as genocide. If it doesn't, then that opens
the door to objections that we heard during the crises in Darfur,
Rwanda and Bosnia: "It's more complicated,' `This is really more of a
civil war' or `Both sides are committing atrocities.'
Not realizing that such statements are applicable to almost any
genocide, we lose our desire to do anything. But the line between
perpetrator and victim is never as clear-cut as we want it to be. That
does not make the crime any less horrific, nor make us any less
responsible for trying to stop it.
Nick Danforth is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University. He writes
about Middle East maps, history and politics at Midafternoon Map.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/what-we-all-get-wrongaboutthearmeniangenocide.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
April 24 2014
What we all get wrong about Armenia, Turkey and genocide
The popular understanding of genocide presumes a clear-cut division
between victims and killers
April 24, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Nick Danforth @ajam
Several years ago, a Turkish acquaintance told me that one of her
ancestors had been an Ottoman governor in Eastern Anatolia during
World War I. He was dismissed, she said, when he disobeyed an order to
kill the Armenians living in his province. Amazed, I suggested that
she must be one of the only people in Turkey who actually believed
there was an Armenian genocide. "No," she said, "you can't call it
that. The Armenians did terrible things to the Turks, too."
What this woman described ' a government instructing its officials to
kill all the members of an ethnic group in a given region ' was the
very definition of genocide. And yet she found the term unacceptable.
So does Turkey's prime minister, even though he recently expressed his
sympathy for Armenian suffering in a statement on the global
commemorations of April 24. Indeed, beneath this apparent
contradiction lies an often overlooked fact: Our popular understanding
of genocide presumes a neat division between a nation of collectively
guilty perpetrators and their collectively innocent victims. Such a
definition fails to account for the suffering Turks know their
ancestors endured; they acknowledge it by responding to Armenian
accusations by saying that `millions of people of all religions and
ethnicities lost their lives in the First World War.' With this in
mind, Turks often deny the mass killing of Armenians amounted to
genocide, when what many of them mean to say is that their nation's
crime was different from the Holocaust.
In this they are correct. The Holocaust was a unique case: there was a
clear moral line dividing the murderers and the victims, and this has
regrettably become the template for evaluating all charges of
genocide. As a result, the one thing both Turks and Armenians in this
debate implicitly agree on is that any historical evidence of Turkish
victimhood somehow negates Turkish guilt. Thus, Turks tend to
highlight examples of crimes committed against them ' villages
massacred by Russian forces or families burned out of their homes by
Armenian guerrillas ' in order to refute accusations of genocide. And
by insisting that things like this never happened, their Armenian
counterparts indirectly perpetuate the absurd idea that a nation
cannot both suffer atrocities and perpetrate them against others in an
even more systematic form.
As long as we demand that our history conforms to an impossibly simple
moral template, we will be unable to understand what happened to the
Armenians and, more dangerously, unable to confront genocide in the
world today.
Moral narratives
As a wealth of scholarship makes clear, mass killings seldom fit the
black-and-white narratives that nationalist historians and their
readers crave. The guilt or innocence of individuals can be absolute,
but it is not easily tallied along national or ethnic lines. In
Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia, to name just a few examples, civil war and
genocide were closely related phenomena, with militarily weak states
engaged in what they believed to be existential conflicts.
This was the very situation in which the Ottoman Empire found itself
during World War I. So there is nothing paradoxical about suggesting
that, as is common in these situations, genocide led to, but was also
provoked by, acts of mass violence committed against Turks. In former
Yugoslavia, for example, Croatian and Bosnian officers were tried in
The Hague for acts of genocide alongside their more notorious Serbian
counterparts.
Which is why, both in private and increasingly now in public, a
growing number of historians ' Mark Mazower's thoughtful discussions
of the subject and UÄ?ur Ã`mit Ã`ngör's more recent scholarship stand out
' believe both that the Ottoman government organized and carried out
an unprecedented campaign of genocide against Armenians in 1915, and
also that this crime was motivated, in part, by waves of ethnic
cleansing committed against the Ottoman Empire's Muslim population in
the Balkans and the Caucasus.
Turks are left to choose whether to believe that their people were
evil or that they were blameless. Not surprisingly, almost all choose
the latter.
Throughout the course of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire lost
territory to nationalist movements in the Balkans. When these nations
became independent, their new Christian rulers, driven by the brutal
fighting they had just endured, sought to create new, "purified"
nations, usually by killing or expelling as many Ottoman Muslims as
they could. When Bulgaria became independent in 1878, for example,
hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians fled toward Istanbul, and by
some estimates as many as half died along the way.
Farther east, the Russian army used a scorched earth campaign to
secure the Caucasus, including the city of Sochi, from the Muslim
Circassians who lived there. Again, hundreds of thousands died, and
the survivors sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire.
Before World War I broke out, a small number of Armenians, living in
the eastern portion of what was left of the Ottoman Empire, had
already formed revolutionary groups in order to fight for their
independence. Despite what some Turks now claim, by 1915 these violent
separatists did not command widespread support among the Armenian
population. But for Ottoman leaders who had seen small nationalist
movements in the Balkans grow into insurmountable ones, the pattern
appeared all too obvious. The Ottoman interior minister, Talat Bey,
made the comparison explicit by saying he would not let Armenia become
`the Bulgaria of the East.'
When the threat of Armenian independence was exacerbated by the
outbreak of war with Russia, destroying the Armenian population of the
Ottoman Empire became, in Talat's chilling euphemism, a way to remove
`this abscess with its root.' The resulting campaign elevated mass
murder, which men like Talat had seen carried out on a smaller scale,
to the level of state policy, and death tolls rose accordingly. Not
coincidentally, many of the paramilitary thugs who actually
orchestrated the killing were Circassians who were eager to avenge the
crimes committed against their own families. And when Russian troops
advanced into Ottoman territory, this cycle of violence continued,
with Armenian militias committing atrocities against Muslim villagers
that live on in Turkish memory today.
Pre-emptive strike
The men who planned the Ottoman campaign of mass murder may genuinely
have believed they were committing a pre-emptive or defensive atrocity
against people whose future disloyalty they were sure of. It should be
obvious that such fears cannot justify killing more than a million
innocent civilians. And yet the Ottoman government's motives are worth
explaining, if only to help show that, seen in a broader historical
context, there was nothing uniquely monstrous about `Turkish' behavior
as a whole over the past two centuries.
Narratives that acknowledge, but also insist on contextualizing, the
genocide have not been popular with either Turkish or Armenian
nationalists. This has made it difficult for historians of any
background to air such views publicly. And until a decade or so ago,
when restrictions in Turkey began to loosen, it was almost impossible
for Turkish historians to speak in any nuanced way about this issue.
Ironically, in the U.S., the Turkish government's effort to suppress
any recognition of what happened has ceded the debate to the Armenian
side, whose version of history, though more accurate on several
crucial points, is nonetheless deeply distorted by anti-Turkish
hostility. As a result, Turks are left to choose between a version of
history in which their people are evil, and another version in which
they are blameless. Not surprisingly, almost all choose the latter.
Contemporary calls of `never again' fall back on the simplistic
black-and-white rhetoric that we seem to demand in identifying
genocide.
It is important to consider this history in order to be intellectually
prepared to confront genocide in the world today. Contemporary calls
of `never again' frequently fall back on the simplistic
black-and-white narrative that's practically required for an incident
to qualify in our minds as genocide. If it doesn't, then that opens
the door to objections that we heard during the crises in Darfur,
Rwanda and Bosnia: "It's more complicated,' `This is really more of a
civil war' or `Both sides are committing atrocities.'
Not realizing that such statements are applicable to almost any
genocide, we lose our desire to do anything. But the line between
perpetrator and victim is never as clear-cut as we want it to be. That
does not make the crime any less horrific, nor make us any less
responsible for trying to stop it.
Nick Danforth is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University. He writes
about Middle East maps, history and politics at Midafternoon Map.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/what-we-all-get-wrongaboutthearmeniangenocide.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress