More on the Armenian genocide

I mentioned in the previous post that Robert Fisk deals with the Armenian genocide in his book, The Great War for Civilisation (2005). I see that he has a new column on the subject, A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect Independent 10/12/07. He writes:

The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.

For what it's worth, partisans of the present-day official Turkish position on this question claim that British propagandists grossly inflated the significance and scope of Ottoman Turks' attacks on Armenians.

Fisk cites an extant order by Ottoman Sultan Enver Pasha on the intentions of the anti-Armenian actions:

On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."

Fisk notes that "the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301."

Another Fisk article available online about the Armenian genocide is Let me denounce genocide from the dock Independent 10/14/06.

Left Out in Turkey by Christopher de Bellaigue New York Review of Books 07/14/07 (behind subscription) discusses among other things how Turkey's official position on the Armenian genocide functioned as one obstacle to their membership in the European Union:

Many Armenians agree that Turkey must recognize the events of 1915 as genocide. Turkish officials vigorously resist a label that, they rightly fear, will result in their being associated with horrors comparable to the Holocaust and may expose them to class-action lawsuits. It is hard to argue that the writing and understanding of history have benefited from the bitter controversy over the word "genocide." Many individual Turks accept that the Ottomans committed an appalling crime, but the same Turks violently react against suggestions that the crime was genocide.[7] The attitude of these Turks, in turn, enrages many Armenians, for some of whom it is the label of genocide that counts—more so than an appropriate show of contrition or even an honest appraisal of the past.[8] So a distorted "debate" is taking place in the shadow of Turkey's bid for EU membership.

Israeli "new historian" Michael Oren reviews the book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility by Taner Akçam, in The Mass Murder They Still Deny New York Review of Books 05/10/07 (behind subscription). Oren notes that 1915 was not the first times that the Ottoman rulers had turned on the Armenians with deadly fury:

Between 1894 and 1896, Turkish troops rampaged through Armenian villages, ransacking an estimated one million houses and killing as many 200,000. "All the Armenians in sight were killed and their houses and stores robbed," one American diplomat wrote. "Another Armenian Holocaust!" exclaimed a New York Times headline in what may have been the first use of the word to denote genocide.

The outlines of what happened in 1915 were not a secret to the outside world, though in wartime everyone is (or should be!) cautious about the tales that "the fog of war" can produce. Oren writes:

America's representative in Aleppo, Syria, Jesse B. Jackson, observed railway cars crammed with starving Armenian deportees, few of whom, if any, he expected to survive. From the Persian frontier, the Presbyterian missionary William Shedd wrote about the execution of eight hundred villagers, mostly old people and young women, and from the Caucasus, Reverend Richard Hill reported seeing "children...dying by the hundreds" whose "frenzied mothers would...fling them...into the fields, so as not to see the[ir] dying agonies." Other correspondents saw the inhabitants of entire towns driven into rivers to drown or herded into churches that were then set ablaze.

These grisly descriptions reached not only Allied embassies but also the general public, through extensive press coverage of the carnage. In May 1915 the Allied Powers issued a declaration protesting these "crimes against humanity" and vowing to hold Turkey's leaders "personally responsible." A similar process occurred in the United States, though it was still maintaining its neutrality in the war. In response, the nation's leading philanthropists and clergymen, Christians and Jews, joined in creating the Committee on the Armenian Atrocities, which raised a monumental $100 million for Near East relief.

The fate of the Armenians also figured prominently in the debates surrounding America's entry into the conflict against Germany and Austria-Hungary in April 1917. A large majority of both Houses of Congress demanded a declaration of war against Turkey as well, in order to rescue the Armenians. "The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war," former president Theodore Roosevelt said, "and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it."

While Roosevelt may well have been right in his judgment on that particular point, its worth remembering in all of his contemporaneous comments on the Great War that he had become rabidly anti-German and more jingoistic than he had ever been before.

Oren reports on the outcome of the anti-Armenian operation:

Allied forces eventually defeated the Turks and occupied large segments of Anatolia but never sought justice for those guilty of "crimes against humanity." As many as 1.5 million Armenians had been murdered, but outside of the surviving Armenian community, their memory swiftly faded.

Oren describes how, over the course of the 19th century, pressure on the Ottoman Empire from Christian powers led to increased hostility toward the Armenian Christians. There was clearly a religious aspect to this. He describes the implementation of the process during the Great War:

Most of the slaughter was organized by officials of the national regime, provincial governors, and the gendarmes. Akçam is at his best in reconstructing the process through which the decisions were made, usually in secret without the knowledge of the cabinet or the parliament. Orders were given to bring the Armenian problem, in Interior Minister Talat's phrase, to "a final end, in a comprehensive and absolute way." Akçam proves baseless the Turkish claims that the Armenian casualties were incurred during an Armenian uprising in the city of Van in eastern Turkey or in the process of relocating pro-Russian Armenians who lived near the front lines in World War I. Some 55,000 Armenians were massacred in Van before the rebellion while most of the Armenians deported lived nowhere near the battlefields. On the other hand, Akçam cites instances in which ordinary Turks, even religious officials, risked their lives to save Armenians. His book is dedicated to one of them, Haji Halil, who hid an Armenian family of eight.

Haji Halil, however, was an exception. All but a few Muslims remained silent throughout the atrocities and some participated in them. In his memoirs, Lewis Einstein, yet another American Jewish diplomat assigned to the Istanbul embassy, tells of watching as an elderly Muslim woman borrowed an officer's pistol and shot a passing Armenian refugee in the head. Unencumbered by domestic opposition or objections from Turkey's German and Austrian allies, Turkish slaughter of the Armenians persisted until the Treaty of Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, ended the war in the east.

Oren describes how power politics among the Allies carving up the Middle East after the First World War stymied any action on the Armenian genocide. He continues:

The final and ultimately insurmountable hurdle, however, arose in May 1919 with the Greek invasion of Smyrna, which resulted in the mass killing and deportation of innumerable Muslims from the area. Armenians demanded independence in six Anatolian provinces. These events rallied nationalist forces under the charismatic command of General Mustapha Kemal. Influenced by his Unionist past and eager to reunite the Turks after years of defeat and fractiousness, Kemal - who later adopted the name Atatürk, "Father Turk" - all but suppressed any further mention of genocide. The massacres, he claimed, were the work of a small and unauthorized clique—a "shameful act," but one for which the Turkish nation bore no collective responsibility.

The Kemalist armies proved victorious, driving out the Greeks and forcing the Allies to sue for a treaty. At the Lausanne Conference in 1923, which established Turkey's permanent borders, the Armenian massacres were not even mentioned; nor were the Armenians allowed to take part (while the claims of the Kurds were disregarded). The question of the Armenian genocide would remain in abeyance for more than eighty years, by which time its denial had become a part of Turkish law and identity. The last of the Armenian witnesses to the crime reached the age of one hundred, and the memories of emaciated children, destroyed villages, and mass graves faded.

Congress' timing in considering a symbolic resolution on the Armenian genocide right now is certainly open to question.

But the event itself certainly is a very important one in the history of the Middle East and the world. Thanks to Dick Cheney's war in Iraq, we're part of the neighborhood now in a way we never have been before.

Tags: armenian genocide, michael oren, robert fisk