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The following article by Prof.
Guenter Lewy appeared in the Dec. 2005 edition of COMMENTARY Magazine, a
journal published by the American Jewish Committee since 1945.
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The term “genocide,” coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish
émigré lawyer Raphael Lemkin, was meant to describe Hitler’s then-ongoing campaign to
exterminate the Jews of Europe. But Lemkin’s interest in this most heinous of crimes—what
he and others would define as the planned effort to destroy an entire people or ethnic
group—long predated the rise of the Nazis.
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Raphael
Lemkin |
The atrocities that first drew him to the issue emerged from a
different world war and a different context. They were the vicious actions not of Germans
against Jews in the early 1940’s but of Ottoman Turks against Turkey’s Armenian
minority in 1915-16.
Today, however, the Armenian case remains controversial in a way that the Holocaust,
outside the fevered confines of the Arab world, does not. Like every one of its
predecessors since the rise of modern Turkey, the current government in Ankara vehemently
rejects the charge of genocide, and has exerted strong diplomatic pressure against any
attempt by outsiders to place the events of World War I in a class with Hitler’s Final
Solution. In this, the Turks have been seconded not just by pro- Turkish apologists but by
a number of respected historians, including, most notably, Bernard Lewis, the dean of
American Orientalists and an expert on Turkey.
Against this view is the great tide of world opinion, from the official proclamations of
various governments and religious bodies to the declared consensus of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars. Indeed, so strong is sentiment on this question that
even now, nearly a century after the fact, the issue continues to color Turkey’s
dealings with other nations. On September 29, the European parliament in Strasbourg
adopted a resolution demanding that, as a condition of admission to the European Union,
Turkey acknowledge the mass killing of its Armenians during World War I as an instance of
genocide. And even beyond the issue of what happened in 1915-16 and its relevance to
Turkey’s political situation today, the Armenian case continues to occupy a place of
precedence in the litany of all subsequent instances of mass murder and “ethnic
cleansing,” including most recently the killings in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda in the
1990’s and those in Sudan today.
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No one, it should be stressed, disputes the extent of Armenian suffering at the
hands of the Turks.
With little or no notice, the Ottoman government forced Armenian men, women, and
children to leave their historic communities; during the subsequent harrowing trek
over mountains and through deserts, large numbers of them died of starvation and
disease, or were murdered. Although the absence of good statistics on the size of
the pre-war Armenian population in Turkey makes it impossible to establish the true
extent of the loss of life, reliable estimates put the number of deaths at more than
650,000, or around 40 percent of a total Armenian population of 1.75 million.
The historical question at issue is premeditation that is, whether the Turkish
regime intentionally organized the annihilation of its Armenian minority. According
to the Genocide Convention of 1948, such an intent to destroy a group is a necessary
condition of genocide; most other definitions of this crime of crimes similarly
insist upon the centrality of malicious intent. Hence the crucial problem to be
addressed is not the huge loss of life in and of itself but rather whether the
Turkish government deliberately sought the deaths that we know to have occurred.
The Armenians have lived in the southern Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the
Caspian Sea, since ancient times. In the early 4th century c.e., they were the first
nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion. Much of their long history,
however, has been spent under foreign rule. The last independent Armenian state
(before the present-day, post-Soviet Republic of Armenia) fell in 1375, and by the
early 16th century most Armenians were subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Under the
millet system instituted by Sultan Mohammed II (1451-1481), they enjoyed religious,
cultural, and social autonomy as a “loyal community,” a status that lasted well
into the 19th century.
Though large numbers of Armenians settled in Constantinople and in other Ottoman
towns, where they prospered as merchants, bankers, and artisans, the majority
continued to live as peasants in eastern Anatolia. During the autocratic rule of
Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909), the lot of the Armenians deteriorated, and nationalistic
sentiment began to emerge. In June 1890, Armenian students in the Russian-controlled
area of the Caucasus organized the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Demanding the
political and economic emancipation of Turkish Armenia, the Dashnaks (as they were
known) waged guerrilla warfare against Turkish army units, gendarmerie posts, and
Kurdish villages involved in attacks on Armenians. They operated from bases in the
Caucasus and Persia and took advantage of eastern Anatolia’s mountainous terrain.
When, in 1908, the nationalist, modernizing movement known as the Young Turks seized
power in Constantinople in a bloodless coup, the Dashnaks declared an end to their
fighting. But the truce did not last. With Turkey’s entry into World War I on the
side of Germany and against Russia, the Armenians’ traditional ally, the Dashnaks
resumed their armed resistance. By April 1915, Armenian guerrilla activities had
picked up momentum. Roads and communication lines were cut. Henry Morgenthau, the
American ambassador in Constantinople, reported to Washington on May 25 that nobody
put the Armenian guerrillas “at less than 10,000, and 25,000 is probably closer to
the truth.” Meanwhile, the Russian branch of the Dashnaks was organizing
volunteers to fight the Turks on the Caucasus front.
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Most of these volunteers—numbering 15,000, according to one Armenian source—were
themselves Russian subjects, exempt from military service, but some of them were Turkish
Armenians who had crossed the border to join the volunteer units. Offers of help also
poured in from the Armenian diaspora, from as far away as Western Europe and the U.S. In
March 1915, the Dashnak organization in Sofia, Bulgaria, proposed to land 20,000
volunteers on the Turkish coast in the Armenian stronghold of Cilicia. That same month,
the Boston-based Armenian National Defense Committee of America informed the British
foreign secretary that it was making “preparations for the purpose of sending volunteers
to Cilicia, where a large section of the Armenian population will unfurl the banner of
insurrection against Turkish rule.” It was hoped that the British and French governments
would supply them with ammunition and artillery.
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Antranik
Toros Ozanian |
Turkish fears of an internal revolt were exacerbated the following
month by an uprising that took place in the city of Van. Close to the Russian border and
in the heartland of historic Armenia, Van had long been a center of nationalist agitation.
On April 24, 1915, the Turkish governor reported that 4,000 Armenian fighters had opened
fire on the police stations, burned down Muslim houses, and barricaded themselves in the
Armenian quarter. About 15,000 refugees from the countryside eventually joined the
now-besieged rebels. Less than a month later, the insurgents were saved by the advancing
Russian army, forcing the Turkish garrison to retreat. Whether the Van uprising was a
rebellion designed and timed to facilitate the advance of the Russians or a defensive
action aimed at preventing the already planned deportation of the Armenian community
remains one of the points of fierce contention in the historiography of the time. [48]
Commentary December 2005 When not tying down Turkish army units, the Dashnaks were of
significant help to the Russian army itself (leaving aside the 150,000 Armenian subjects
of the czar who served in its ranks). Deeply familiar with the rugged mountains of eastern
Anatolia, the Armenian volunteers were invaluable scouts and guides. In one famous
episode, the legendary Armenian military leader Andranik Ozanian met with General
Mishlayevsky, commander of the czar’s forces in the Caucasus, late in the summer of
1914, pointing out the routes through which the Russian army could advance on Turkey.
Thus, as the Turks saw it, the Armenian people the world over had thrown in their lot with
the Allied cause and were arrayed against them in a fateful struggle. Having come to
consider the Armenians a fifth column, the Ottoman regime decided to take decisive
measures to put an end to their treasonable actions. As Morgenthau reported to Washington
in July 1915: “[B]ecause Armenian volunteers, many of them Russian subjects, have joined
the Russian army in the Caucasus and because some have been implicated in armed
revolutionary movements and others have been helpful to Russians in their invasion of the
Van district, terrible vengeance is being taken.” In the eyes of the Young Turks,
however, the issue was not so much vengeance as national survival in a situation of
extreme danger caused by serious military setbacks. The British had taken Basra in
Mesopotamia and were moving toward Baghdad. The Allies had launched their assaults on the
Dardanelles. Fearing the fall of the capital, the Turks were making preparations to
evacuate the sultan and the treasury from Constantinople. Meanwhile, Russian troops were
advancing into eastern Anatolia, and Armenian guerrillas were active in the rear of the
Turkish army, threatening the very lifelines of the empire. Even if only a limited number
of Armenians had actually taken up arms, the authorities in Constantinople understood
themselves to be dealing with a population of traitors.
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Boghos
Nubar |
Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the war
and at the Paris peace conference in 1919, the Armenians would make no bones about
their contribution to the Allied victory. To the contrary: Boghos Nubar, the head of
the Armenian delegation, asserted in late October 1918 that his people had in fact
been belligerents, fighting alongside the Allies on all fronts; in particular, he
wrote to the French foreign minister, 150,000 Armenians had fought in the Russian
army and had held the front in the Caucasus after the Russians dropped out of the
war in 1917. As Nubar would tell the peace conference on March 8, 1919, the Turks
had devastated the Armenians “in retaliation for our unflagging devotion to the
cause of the Allies.” By means of such rhetoric Nubar was obviously hoping to win
the support of the peace conference for an independent Armenia. But, the essential
facts were correct as he stated them: the Armenians had indeed supported the Allies
in a variety of ways. Ignoring warnings from many quarters, large numbers of them
had fought the Turks, and the government, with its back to the wall, reacted
resolutely and viciously. Although none of this can serve to justify what the Turks
did to them, it provides indispensable historical context for the human catastrophe
that ensued.
There is no denying the dimensions of that catastrophe. The harsher methods employed
by the Young Turks included the killing of Armenian notables in Constantinople and
the eastern provinces. As for Armenian civilians, perhaps as many as 1 million were
turned out of their homes. On a journey through the most inhospitable terrain, they
routinely lacked shelter and food and were often subjected to the murderous violence
of their government-provided escorts and the Kurdish tribesmen who occupied the
route southward to Ottoman-controlled Syria. Massive numbers died along the way. Can
we account for this tragedy without the hypothesis of a genocidal plan on the part
of the Young Turks? Most authors supporting the Armenian cause answer in the
negative. They cite foreign diplomats on the scene who, in the face of the large
number of deaths, concluded that so terrible a loss of life could only be an
intended outcome of the deportations. And yet such a conclusion once again ignores
the immediate backdrop against which this horrific episode must be seen.
If one of the main causes of the Armenian disaster was starvation, the Armenians
were hardly alone in experiencing such deprivation. Severe food shortages were
endemic to Turkey at the time. The military mobilization of large numbers of
peasants in 1914, as well as the reckless requisitioning of their horses, oxen, and
carriages, had made it impossible to bring in the harvest and left many fields
untilled for the following year’s crop. In the spring of 1915, Ambassador
Morgenthau told Washington that the empire’s whole domestic situation was “deplorable,”
with “thousands of the populace . . . daily dying of starvation.” In the late
[49] The First Genocide of the 20th Century? spring and summer of 1915, the Ottoman
provinces of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria were devastated by a plague of locusts,
creating famine conditions. To exacerbate matters, Allied warships had blockaded the
coast of Syria and Lebanon, thus preventing the import of food from Egypt.
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Moreover, the food that was available in Turkey often could not be distributed. The
country’s few existing one-track railroads were overburdened, and shortages of
coal and wood frequently rendered locomotives unusable. A crucial tunnel on the line
toward Syria—the famous Baghdad railway—remained unfinished until late in the
war. The resulting scarcities afflicted even the Turkish army, whose troops, as one
German officer reported, received a maximum of one third of their allotted rations.
In circumstances where soldiers in the Turkish army were dying of undernourishment,
it is not so surprising that little if any food was made available to the deported
Armenians. Indeed, the mistreatment of common Turkish soldiers, the subject of many
comments by contemporaries, makes an instructive comparison with the wretched lot of
the Armenians. Although “provisions and clothing had been confiscated to supply
the army,” wrote an American missionary in Van, “the soldiers profited very
little by this. They were poorly fed and poorly clothed when fed or clothed at all.”
The Danish missionary Maria Jacobsen noted in her diary on February 7, 1915: “The
officers are filling their pockets, while the soldiers die of starvation, lack of
hygiene, and illness.”
Many had neither boots nor socks, and were dressed in rags. The treatment of Turkish
soldiers who were wounded or sick was especially appalling. Those who managed to
reach hospitals—many never did—perished in large numbers because of unsanitary
conditions and a lack of basic supplies. Patients shared beds or simply lay next to
each other on the floor in facilities that often lacked running water and
electricity. Typhus, cholera, dysentery, and other infectious diseases spread
rapidly. As Maria Jacobsen noted on May 24, 1916, a cholera outbreak in the city of
Malatia was killing 100 soldiers a day. “The army there,” she wrote, “will
soon be wiped out without a war.” The Turks experienced some 244,000 combat deaths
during World War I. As against this, some 68,000 soldiers died of their wounds and
almost a half-million of disease—a ratio of non-combat to combat deaths almost
certainly unmatched by any of the other warring nations. This terrible toll
obviously does not excuse the treatment of the Armenians, but neither can it be
simply ignored in any assessment of the general conditions against which they met
their fate. Many of the Turkish deaths could have been prevented by better sanitary
conditions and medical care. A government so callous about the suffering of its own
soldiers was hardly about to show concern for the terrible human misery that would
result from deporting a minority population rightly or wrongly suspected of treason.
One of the problems bedeviling the Armenian side in this controversy is that no
authentic documentary evidence exists to prove the culpability of the central
government of Turkey for the massacre of 1915-16. In the face of this lack,
Armenians have relied upon materials of questionable authenticity like The Memoirs
of Naim Bey by Aram Andonian. The English edition of this book, first published in
1920, offers in evidence 30 alleged telegrams by Talaat Pasha, Turkey’s minister
of the interior, some of which order the killing of all Armenians irrespective of
sex or age. But the book is considered a forgery not only by Turkish historians but
by practically every Western student of Ottoman history.
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Similarly unreliable are the verdicts of Turkish military tribunals that in 1919-20 found
the top leadership of the Young Turk regime, together with a special-forces outfit called
Teskilat-i Mahsusa, responsible for the massacres of the Armenians. These trials suffered
from serious deficiencies of due process; more importantly, all of the original trial
documents are lost, leaving nothing but copies of some documents that were printed in the
government gazette and the press.
It is true that no written record of Hitler’s order for the Final Solution of the “Jewish
question” has been found, either. But the major elements of the decision-making process
leading up to the annihilation of the Jews of Europe can be reconstructed from events,
court testimony, and a rich store of authentic documents. It is doubtful that the
Nuremberg trials would ever have achieved their tremendous significance in authenticating
the crimes of the Nazi regime if they had had to rely on a few copies instead of on the
thousands of original documents preserved in archives. Barring the unlikely discovery of
sensational new documents in the Turkish archives, it is safe to say that no similar
evidence exists for the tragic events of 1915-16. At the same time, a number of facts
about the deportations argue against the thesis that they constituted a premeditated
program for exterminating the Armenians of Turkey. For one thing, the large [50]
Commentary December 2005 Armenian communities of Constantinople, Smyrna, and Aleppo were
spared deportation and, apart from tribulations that also afflicted the Muslim populations
of these cities, survived the war largely intact. This would be analogous to Hitler’s
failing to include the Jews of Berlin, Cologne, and Munich in the Final Solution.
Moreover, the trek on foot that took so many lives was imposed only on the Armenians of
eastern and central Anatolia, a part of the country that had no railroads. Elsewhere, and
despite the fact that the one-spur Baghdad line was overburdened with the transport of
troops and supplies, Armenian deportees were allowed to purchase rail tickets and were
thus spared at least some of the trials of the deportation process. If, as is often
alleged, the intent was to subject the exiles to a forced march until they died of
exhaustion, why was this punishment not imposed on all? Similar variation can be found in
the fortunes of other parts of the Armenian population. While many of the exiles were left
to fend for themselves and often died of starvation, others were given food here and
there. Some gendarmes accompanying the convoys sold their charges to Kurds who pillaged
and murdered them, but other gendarmes were protective. In some places all Armenians,
irrespective of creed, were sent away, while in others Protestant and Catholic (as opposed
to Gregorian) Armenians were exempted. Many of the deportees succumbed to the harsh
conditions in their places of resettlement, but others were able to survive by making
themselves useful as artisans or traders. In some locations, not even conversion to Islam
could purchase exemption from deportation; in others, large numbers of Armenians were
allowed, or forced, to convert and were saved. All of these differences, of both treatment
and outcome, are difficult to reconcile with a premeditated program of total annihilation.
How, then, to explain the events of 1915-16? What accounts for the enormous loss of life?
The documentary evidence suggests that the Ottoman government wanted to arrange an orderly
process of deportation—even a relatively humane one, to gauge by the many decrees
commanding protection and compassionate treatment of the deportees. But, leaving aside the
justice of the expulsion order itself, the deportation and resettlement of the Armenians
took place, as we have seen, at a time of great insecurity and dislocation throughout the
country and in conditions of widespread suffering and deprivation among Turkish civilians
and military personnel. The job of relocating several hundred thousand people in a short
span of time and over a highly primitive system of transportation was simply beyond the
ability of the Turkish bureaucracy. Many observers on the scene, indeed, saw the tragedy
in this light, constantly citing the incompetence and inefficiency of the Ottoman
bureaucracy. “The lack of proper transportation facilities,” wrote the American consul
in Mersina in September 1915, “is the most important factor in causing the misery.”
The German consul in Aleppo told his ambassador around the same time that the majority of
Armenian exiles were starving to death because the Turks were “incapable of solving the
organizational task of mass feeding.” A lengthy memorandum on the Armenian question
drawn up in 1916 by Alexander von Hoesch, an official in the German embassy, pointed to a
basic lack of accountability: some local officials had sought to alleviate the hardships
of the exiles, but others were extremely hostile to the Armenians and, in defiance of
Constantinople, had abandoned them to the violence of Kurds or Circassians.
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Today, the stakes in this historical controversy remain high, and both sides
continue to use heavyhanded tactics to advance their views. The Turkish government
regularly threatens retaliation against anyone calling into question its own version
of events, a threat made good most recently by its cancellation of an order for a
$149-million French spy satellite after the French national assembly declared in
2001 that the killing of the Armenians during World War I was a case of genocide.
For their part, the Armenians have also played hardball. When Bernard Lewis, in a
1994 letter to Le Monde, questioned on scholarly grounds the existence of a plan of
extermination on the part of the Ottoman government, a French-Armenian organization
brought suit and a French court convicted Lewis of causing “grievous prejudice to
truthful memory.” But there are also more hopeful signs, at least on the academic
front. In the last several years, a number of conferences have brought together
Turkish and Armenian scholars willing to discuss the events of 1915-16 without a
political agenda. Turkish historical scholarship has shown signs of a
post-nationalist phase, while some scholars on the Armenian side, too, now engage in
research free of propagandistic rhetoric.
Needless to say, such efforts have brought down accusations of betrayal, even
treason, upon the heads of the offending historians; it would be foolish to expect
genuine reconciliation any time soon. [51] The First Genocide of the 20th Century?
All of which raises deeply troubling questions, not least about the role played by
the Notion of genocide itself in perpetuating the almost century-old impasse between
Turks and Armenians. For, once this charge is on the table, any sort of mutually
acceptable resolution becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve. As
the Turkish historian Selim Deringil has written, both sides need to “step back
from the was-it-genocide-or-not dialogue of the deaf” and instead seek a “common
project of knowledge.” If, then, we were to follow this advice, how best should we
judge the Armenian tragedy? The primary intent of the deportation order was
undoubtedly not to eradicate an entire people but to deny support to the Armenian
guerrilla bands and to remove the Armenians from war zones and other strategic
locations. For the Ottomans, painful experience with other Christian minorities
during the Balkan wars (1912-13) had created extreme sensitivity to rebellion and
territorial loss. Talaat Pasha, the minister of the interior, is supposed to have
told the cabinet in 1915, “We have to create a Turkish bloc, free of foreign
elements, which in the future will never again give the Europeans the opportunity to
interfere in the internal affairs of Turkey.” Ambassador Morgenthau reported being
told on several occasions by Enver Pasha, the Turkish minister of war, that the
government had to act forcefully against any community, however small, that was bent
upon independence and was acting directly against the interests of the empire. For
the human disaster subsequently endured by its Armenian population, the Ottoman
regime certainly bears its due measure of responsibility, just as it does for
general corruption, bungling misrule, and indifference to the suffering of its own
population during World War I. And one can go further: with the benefit of
hindsight, it is also possible to question whether the severity of the threat posed
by Armenian revolutionaries justified the drastic remedy of even partial
deportation. The Canadian researcher Gwynne Dyer may have put the case most
appropriately in writing that, although Turkish allegations of wholesale disloyalty,
treason, and revolt on the part of the Ottoman Armenians were “wholly true as far
as Armenian sentiment went,” they were “only partly true in terms of overt acts,
and totally insufficient as a justification for what was done” to the Armenians.
If both Armenians and Turks could accept this appraisal, even as a starting point
for further discussion, they would reach an important milestone toward settling one
of modern history’s most bitter and longstanding conflicts. [52]
Unfortunately, the
footnotes are unavailable. The above article was obtained second-hand and may not be
100% accurate.
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Related:
Responses to
the above
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