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KILLING FIELDS OF THE YOUNG TURKS
The Spectator, UK
April 16 2015
On the centenary of the Armenian genocide, Justin Marozzi is appalled
by how this great catastrophe has been almost entirely buried,
through neglect or denial, until now Books
Justin Marozzi 18 April 2015
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian
Genocide Ronald Grigor Suny
Princeton, pp.520, £24.95, ISBN: 9780691147307
Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
Thomas de Waal
OUP, pp.259, £20, ISBN: 9780199350698
For most of us, the centenary of the Great War means recalling the
misery and sacrifices of the Western Front: Ypres, the Marne, Arras,
Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme. Few of us give as much thought to
the Eastern Front and, apart from regular studies of the ever-popular,
self-mythologising Lawrence of Arabia, fewer still dwell on the first
world war in the Middle East. This was the theatre that hosted the Arab
Revolt, famously dismissed by Lawrence as 'a sideshow of a sideshow'.
The Great War centenary brings renewed attention to another neglected
tragedy of the conflict. Starting in 1915, the Turks embarked on a
process that culminated in the systematic extermination of the Armenian
people. By the end of the war between 600,000 and one million had been
killed, according to the more conservative estimates (the historian
Bernard Lewis reckoned the true figure was 1.5 million).
That equated to the annihilation of 90 per cent of Ottoman Armenians.
In recent years it has come to be known by most of the world as the
Armenian genocide, a term hotly contested by the Turkish authorities.
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else tells the fiercely
disputed story of what happened to the Armenians in the aftermath of
the Battle of Sarikamish in early 1915, when Ottoman defeat by the
Russians triggered a punitive response from the Young Turks against
what was seen as Armenian treachery. The killing fields stretched
1,000 miles east from Istanbul. Armenian soldiers were disarmed,
demobilised and killed. Armenian intellectuals and politicians in
Istanbul followed them to their graves. Of the survivors, hundreds of
thousands of Christian women and children suffered forced conversion
to Islam and joined the families of Arabs, Turks and Kurds.
A typical eyewitness account, from an American missionary, recorded how
they gathered all the men into one place and carried them out in
companies of about 25 each to be shot down in cold blood. Others
were tied with their heads sticking through the rungs of a ladder
and decapitated, others hacked to pieces or mutilated before death.
Needless to say, the mass extermination of a people had its
accomplices, by turn willing and unwilling, carefully orchestrated and
out of control far from the centre of authority. Yet the administration
set the tone. Talat Pasha, the Young Turk leader who branded Armenians
'enemies of the state', and Enver Pasha, his minister of war, were
arguably the architects of the massacres. Cemal Pasha, the last of
the 'three pashas' triumvirate who ruled the Ottoman empire during
the Great War, who was no shrinking violet when it came to hanging
Arab nationalists, was decidedly less keen on erasing the Armenians
from history.
Ronald Grigor Suny, an Armenian-American whose great-grandparents
fell victim to the genocide, has written a tremendously powerful,
scrupulously balanced, rigorous and humane account of a tragedy that
still casts a shadow over the modern state of Turkey. It is likely to
become the definitive reference book on the subject for years to come.
The context of war and invasion, he argues, created 'a mental and
emotional universe' that included 'perceived threats, the Manichean
construction of internal enemies, and a pervasive fear that triggered a
deadly, pathological response to real and imagined immediate and future
dangers'. The view grew among the Young Turks, in power from 1908, that
all Armenians were a dangerous fifth column allied to the Russians.
There have long been two defining narratives surrounding the events
of 1915, lined up like opposing armies, bombarding each other with
accusations and denials. The traditional Turkish case argues that
the measures taken against the Armenians during a time of crisis
were a rational and reasonable government response to the rebellious
behaviour of a traitorous minority. The Armenian counterpart to this
line has often held the Turks to be inherently bloodthirsty and bent on
extermination, the Armenians as entirely blameless amid the maelstrom
of a collapsing Ottoman empire.
Suny has little truck with the cultural demonisation of the Turks,
be it Armenian or western European. Exhibit A for the latter is
Gladstone's notorious description of the Turks as 'the one great
anti-human specimen of humanity' who left 'a broad line of blood'
wherever they went.
Within the crumbling empire, the Armenians were by no means alone
in revolutionary intent. From the 1890s, there was fierce, sometimes
militant, opposition to Sultan Abdulhamid II from both Macedonians and
Young Turks, not to mention Arabs, Albanians, Circassians and Kurds.
It is important to remember that for centuries before 1915, Armenians,
alongside other minorities, were integrated into a multinational
Ottoman empire, albeit as second-class citizens. One thinks of the
Abbasid caliphate headquartered in Baghdad for half a millennium from
the late eighth century, a cosmopolitan affair of Muslims, Jews and
Christians thriving together.
Terminology is critical. Today many of us find it bewildering
that British government ministers, the BBC and other media
routinely describe the terrorists of Daesh as 'Islamic State',
unintentionally conferring religious and national legitimacy on a
self-declared caliphate whose absurdity would be amusing if it were
not so disgustingly blood-soaked. Suny is right to conclude that
although controversies still rage over the Armenian genocide, and
will continue to do so, the weight of scholarly opinion has shifted
dramatically in the 21st century toward the view that 'the Ottoman
government conceived, initiated and implemented deliberate acts of
ethnic cleansing and mass murder, targeted at specific ethno-religious
communities'. In a word, genocide.
At one level, official Turkish denial in the face of all this evidence
makes little sense. Yet at another it is eminently understandable. The
destruction of the Armenians, together with the ethnic cleansing and
population exchanges of the Anatolian Greeks, was the 'foundational
crime' that facilitated the formation of 'an ethno-national Turkish
republic'. One followed the other.
Commemorating the centenary of the genocide in a no less moving
account, Thomas de Waal's Great Catastrophe brings to bear a very
personal focus, through history informed by reportage and travelogue.
De Waal, a journalist and scholar based at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, is as interested in the 'history of the history'
as in the genocide itself: how it has been remembered and denied over
the decades.
Both Suny and de Waal write of the Turkish thaw in coming to terms
with the events of 1915, a process that is not without its dangers.
Take the story of Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian activist who had
devoted himself to improving understanding between Armenians and Turks
through Agos, the newspaper he founded and edited from the late 1990s.
Less interested in the question of denial or acknowledgment --
he opposed foreign governments' genocide resolutions -- he argued
that the real problem was a lack of comprehension on the part of
Turkey. Only democracy would allow that. In 2007, Dink was shot dead
by a 17-year-old Turkish nationalist.
Armenian activism unquestionably has helped force the issue
of historical scrutiny and political accountability. As the
Armenian-American writer Leon Surmelian proclaimed in his essay
'Mourning is not Enough', published in 1965 on the 50th anniversary of
the atrocities, there was a responsibility to stand up and be counted.
'For too long now we have been the forgotten people of the western
world. And we deserve to be forgotten forever if we take no action
now.'
It has been a long, fraught process. Starting in 2000, the Workshop
for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship, brainchild of Suny and another
colleague, brought Turkish and Armenian scholarship together in joint
endeavour for the first time. In 2011 its contributors published A
Question of Genocide, helping establish an academic consensus on the
slaughter. There is an instructive comparison to be made here with
Germany after the Holocaust, a war crime that triggered a level of
soul-searching as yet unmatched in Turkey.
Both books offer painful reading, compelling for the general reader,
cathartic for Armenian and Turk alike. For a century since the
massacres, one people has been haunted by silence, the other by
denial. The walls of both have now started to come tumbling down. As
an Armenian from the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, an epicentre
of the atrocities that was once more than half Christian, puts it:
'For the Turks 100 years is too soon, for us it is too late.'
'They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else', £21.95 and 'Great
Catastrophe', £18 are available from the Spectator Bookshop, Tel:
08430 600033. Justin Marozzi is the author of Baghdad: City of Peace,
City of Blood.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator
magazine, dated 18 April 2015
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9498672/at-last-a-calm-definitive-account-of-the-armenian-genocide/
The Spectator, UK
April 16 2015
On the centenary of the Armenian genocide, Justin Marozzi is appalled
by how this great catastrophe has been almost entirely buried,
through neglect or denial, until now Books
Justin Marozzi 18 April 2015
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian
Genocide Ronald Grigor Suny
Princeton, pp.520, £24.95, ISBN: 9780691147307
Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
Thomas de Waal
OUP, pp.259, £20, ISBN: 9780199350698
For most of us, the centenary of the Great War means recalling the
misery and sacrifices of the Western Front: Ypres, the Marne, Arras,
Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme. Few of us give as much thought to
the Eastern Front and, apart from regular studies of the ever-popular,
self-mythologising Lawrence of Arabia, fewer still dwell on the first
world war in the Middle East. This was the theatre that hosted the Arab
Revolt, famously dismissed by Lawrence as 'a sideshow of a sideshow'.
The Great War centenary brings renewed attention to another neglected
tragedy of the conflict. Starting in 1915, the Turks embarked on a
process that culminated in the systematic extermination of the Armenian
people. By the end of the war between 600,000 and one million had been
killed, according to the more conservative estimates (the historian
Bernard Lewis reckoned the true figure was 1.5 million).
That equated to the annihilation of 90 per cent of Ottoman Armenians.
In recent years it has come to be known by most of the world as the
Armenian genocide, a term hotly contested by the Turkish authorities.
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else tells the fiercely
disputed story of what happened to the Armenians in the aftermath of
the Battle of Sarikamish in early 1915, when Ottoman defeat by the
Russians triggered a punitive response from the Young Turks against
what was seen as Armenian treachery. The killing fields stretched
1,000 miles east from Istanbul. Armenian soldiers were disarmed,
demobilised and killed. Armenian intellectuals and politicians in
Istanbul followed them to their graves. Of the survivors, hundreds of
thousands of Christian women and children suffered forced conversion
to Islam and joined the families of Arabs, Turks and Kurds.
A typical eyewitness account, from an American missionary, recorded how
they gathered all the men into one place and carried them out in
companies of about 25 each to be shot down in cold blood. Others
were tied with their heads sticking through the rungs of a ladder
and decapitated, others hacked to pieces or mutilated before death.
Needless to say, the mass extermination of a people had its
accomplices, by turn willing and unwilling, carefully orchestrated and
out of control far from the centre of authority. Yet the administration
set the tone. Talat Pasha, the Young Turk leader who branded Armenians
'enemies of the state', and Enver Pasha, his minister of war, were
arguably the architects of the massacres. Cemal Pasha, the last of
the 'three pashas' triumvirate who ruled the Ottoman empire during
the Great War, who was no shrinking violet when it came to hanging
Arab nationalists, was decidedly less keen on erasing the Armenians
from history.
Ronald Grigor Suny, an Armenian-American whose great-grandparents
fell victim to the genocide, has written a tremendously powerful,
scrupulously balanced, rigorous and humane account of a tragedy that
still casts a shadow over the modern state of Turkey. It is likely to
become the definitive reference book on the subject for years to come.
The context of war and invasion, he argues, created 'a mental and
emotional universe' that included 'perceived threats, the Manichean
construction of internal enemies, and a pervasive fear that triggered a
deadly, pathological response to real and imagined immediate and future
dangers'. The view grew among the Young Turks, in power from 1908, that
all Armenians were a dangerous fifth column allied to the Russians.
There have long been two defining narratives surrounding the events
of 1915, lined up like opposing armies, bombarding each other with
accusations and denials. The traditional Turkish case argues that
the measures taken against the Armenians during a time of crisis
were a rational and reasonable government response to the rebellious
behaviour of a traitorous minority. The Armenian counterpart to this
line has often held the Turks to be inherently bloodthirsty and bent on
extermination, the Armenians as entirely blameless amid the maelstrom
of a collapsing Ottoman empire.
Suny has little truck with the cultural demonisation of the Turks,
be it Armenian or western European. Exhibit A for the latter is
Gladstone's notorious description of the Turks as 'the one great
anti-human specimen of humanity' who left 'a broad line of blood'
wherever they went.
Within the crumbling empire, the Armenians were by no means alone
in revolutionary intent. From the 1890s, there was fierce, sometimes
militant, opposition to Sultan Abdulhamid II from both Macedonians and
Young Turks, not to mention Arabs, Albanians, Circassians and Kurds.
It is important to remember that for centuries before 1915, Armenians,
alongside other minorities, were integrated into a multinational
Ottoman empire, albeit as second-class citizens. One thinks of the
Abbasid caliphate headquartered in Baghdad for half a millennium from
the late eighth century, a cosmopolitan affair of Muslims, Jews and
Christians thriving together.
Terminology is critical. Today many of us find it bewildering
that British government ministers, the BBC and other media
routinely describe the terrorists of Daesh as 'Islamic State',
unintentionally conferring religious and national legitimacy on a
self-declared caliphate whose absurdity would be amusing if it were
not so disgustingly blood-soaked. Suny is right to conclude that
although controversies still rage over the Armenian genocide, and
will continue to do so, the weight of scholarly opinion has shifted
dramatically in the 21st century toward the view that 'the Ottoman
government conceived, initiated and implemented deliberate acts of
ethnic cleansing and mass murder, targeted at specific ethno-religious
communities'. In a word, genocide.
At one level, official Turkish denial in the face of all this evidence
makes little sense. Yet at another it is eminently understandable. The
destruction of the Armenians, together with the ethnic cleansing and
population exchanges of the Anatolian Greeks, was the 'foundational
crime' that facilitated the formation of 'an ethno-national Turkish
republic'. One followed the other.
Commemorating the centenary of the genocide in a no less moving
account, Thomas de Waal's Great Catastrophe brings to bear a very
personal focus, through history informed by reportage and travelogue.
De Waal, a journalist and scholar based at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, is as interested in the 'history of the history'
as in the genocide itself: how it has been remembered and denied over
the decades.
Both Suny and de Waal write of the Turkish thaw in coming to terms
with the events of 1915, a process that is not without its dangers.
Take the story of Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian activist who had
devoted himself to improving understanding between Armenians and Turks
through Agos, the newspaper he founded and edited from the late 1990s.
Less interested in the question of denial or acknowledgment --
he opposed foreign governments' genocide resolutions -- he argued
that the real problem was a lack of comprehension on the part of
Turkey. Only democracy would allow that. In 2007, Dink was shot dead
by a 17-year-old Turkish nationalist.
Armenian activism unquestionably has helped force the issue
of historical scrutiny and political accountability. As the
Armenian-American writer Leon Surmelian proclaimed in his essay
'Mourning is not Enough', published in 1965 on the 50th anniversary of
the atrocities, there was a responsibility to stand up and be counted.
'For too long now we have been the forgotten people of the western
world. And we deserve to be forgotten forever if we take no action
now.'
It has been a long, fraught process. Starting in 2000, the Workshop
for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship, brainchild of Suny and another
colleague, brought Turkish and Armenian scholarship together in joint
endeavour for the first time. In 2011 its contributors published A
Question of Genocide, helping establish an academic consensus on the
slaughter. There is an instructive comparison to be made here with
Germany after the Holocaust, a war crime that triggered a level of
soul-searching as yet unmatched in Turkey.
Both books offer painful reading, compelling for the general reader,
cathartic for Armenian and Turk alike. For a century since the
massacres, one people has been haunted by silence, the other by
denial. The walls of both have now started to come tumbling down. As
an Armenian from the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, an epicentre
of the atrocities that was once more than half Christian, puts it:
'For the Turks 100 years is too soon, for us it is too late.'
'They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else', £21.95 and 'Great
Catastrophe', £18 are available from the Spectator Bookshop, Tel:
08430 600033. Justin Marozzi is the author of Baghdad: City of Peace,
City of Blood.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator
magazine, dated 18 April 2015
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9498672/at-last-a-calm-definitive-account-of-the-armenian-genocide/