Armenian Genocide |
Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman
soldiers, are marched through
Mamüret-ül Aziz, (today Elâzığ), known as Kharpert by
Armenians, to a prison in the nearby Mezireh district, April
1915 |
Location |
Ottoman
Empire |
Date |
1915–1923 |
Target |
Armenian population |
Attack type |
Deportation,
mass murder |
Deaths |
600,000 - 1,800,000[1][2][3] |
Perpetrators |
Young Turk government |
The Armenian Genocide[4]
(Armenian:
Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն,
[hɑˈjɔtsʰ tsʰɛʁɑspɑnuˈtʰjun]), also known as the
Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and,
traditionally among Armenians, as the Great Crime (Armenian:
Մեծ Եղեռն,
[mɛts jɛˈʁɛrn]; English transliteration: Medz Yeghern
[Medz/Great + Yeghern/Crime])[5][6]
was the
Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority
Armenian subjects from their historic homeland in the territory
constituting the present-day
Republic of Turkey. It took place during and after
World War I and was implemented in two phases: the wholesale
killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and
forced labor, and the deportation of women, children, the elderly
and infirm on
death marches to the
Syrian Desert.[7][8]
The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at
between 1 and 1.5 million. The
Assyrians, the
Greeks and other minority groups were similarly targeted for
extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is
considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal
policy.[9][10][11]
It is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern
genocides,[12][13]:p.177[14]
as scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were
carried out to eliminate the Armenians,[15]
and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the
Holocaust.[16]
The word genocide[17]
was coined in order to describe these events.[18][19]
The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April
24, 1915, the day when Ottoman authorities arrested some
250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in
Constantinople.[20][21]
Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and
forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and
water, to the desert of what is now
Syria.
Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with
rape and
other
sexual abuse commonplace.[22]
The majority of
Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the
Armenian genocide.
Turkey, the
successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the
events.[23]
In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as
genocide. To date, twenty countries have
officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most
genocide scholars and historians accept this view.[24][25][26][27]
Background
Life under
Ottoman rule
Armenia had come largely under Ottoman rule during the 15th and 16th
centuries. The vast majority of Armenians, grouped together under the
name
Armenian millet (community) and led by their spiritual head,
the
Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, were concentrated in the
eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire (commonly referred to as
Western Armenia), although large communities were also found in the
western provinces, as well as in the capital
Constantinople. The Armenian community was made up of three
religious denominations: the
Armenian Apostolic to which the overwhelming majority of Armenians
belonged, and the
Armenian Catholic and
Armenian Protestant communities. With the exception of the empire's
urban centers and the extremely wealthy, Constantinople-based Amira
class, a social elite whose members included the Duzians (Directors of
the Imperial Mint), the
Balyans (Chief Imperial Architects) and the
Dadians (Superintendent of the Gunpowder Mills and manager of
industrial factories), most Armenians — approximately 70% of their
population — lived in poor and dangerous conditions in the rural
countryside.[28][29]
There, the Armenians were subject to the whims of their Turkish and
Kurdish neighbors, who would regularly overtax them, subject them to
brigandage and kidnapping, force them to convert to Islam, and
otherwise exploit them without interference from central or local
authorities.[29]
In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Muslim
dhimmi
system, they, like all other
Christians, were accorded certain limited freedoms (such as the
right to worship), but were in essence treated as
second-class citizens and referred to in Turkish as
gavours,
a pejorative word meaning "infidel" or "unbeliever".[30]:25,
445 The British ethnographer,
William Ramsay, writing in the late 1890s after having visited the
Ottoman Empire, described the conditions of the Armenians:
Turkish rule...meant unutterable contempt...The Armenians (and
Greeks) were dogs and pigs...to be spat upon, if their shadow
darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he
wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of
centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn,
centuries in which nothing belonged to the Armenian, neither his
property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was
sacred or safe from violence – capricious, unprovoked violence –
to resist which by violence meant death.
[30]:43
In addition to other legal limitations, Christians were not
considered equals to
Muslims: testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was
inadmissible in courts of law; they were forbidden to carry weapons or
ride atop horses; their houses could not overlook those of Muslims; and
their religious practices were severely circumscribed (e.g., the ringing
of church bells was strictly forbidden).[31]:24
Violation of these statutes could result in punishments ranging from the
levying of exorbitant fines to execution.
Reform implementation, 1840s–80s
The majority of the Armenian population was concentrated in
the east of the Ottoman Empire.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, the three major European powers,
Great Britain, France and
Russia (known as the Great Powers), took issue with the Empire's
treatment of its Christian minorities and increasingly pressured the
Ottoman government (known as the
Sublime Porte) to extend equal rights to all its citizens. Starting
in 1839 and ending with the declaration of a constitution in 1876, the
Ottoman government implemented a series of reforms, known as the
Tanzimat, to improve the situation of minorities, although these
were all largely abortive. The Muslims of the empire were loath to
consider the Christians as their social equals. By the late 1870s, the
Greeks,
along with several other Christian nations in the
Balkans,
frustrated with their conditions, had, often with the help of the
Powers, broken free of Ottoman rule. The Armenians remained, by and
large, passive during these years, earning them the title of millet-i
sadika or the "loyal millet".[32]:192
In the mid-1860s and early 1870s, things began to change as an
intellectual class began to emerge among Armenian society. Educated in
the European university system or in American missionary schools in the
Ottoman Empire, these Armenians began to question their second-class
status in society and initiated a movement that asked for better
treatment from their government. In one such instance, after amassing
the signatures of peasants from Western Armenia, the Armenian Communal
Council petitioned to the Ottoman government to redress the issues that
the peasants complained about the most: "the looting and murder in
Armenian towns by [Muslim]
Kurds and
Circassians, improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior
by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as
witnesses in trial". The Ottoman government considered these grievances
and promised to punish those responsible, though no meaningful steps
were ever taken.[31]:36
Following the violent suppression of Christians in the uprisings in
Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bulgaria and
Serbia
in 1875, the Great Powers invoked the 1856
Treaty of Paris by claiming that it gave them the right to intervene
and protect the Ottoman Empire's Christian minorities.[31]:35ff
Under growing pressure, the government of
Sultan
Abdul Hamid II declared itself a constitutional monarchy with a
parliament (which was almost immediately
prorogued) and entered into negotiations with the powers. At the
same time, the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople, Nerses II,
forwarded Armenian complaints of widespread "forced land seizure… forced
conversion of women and children, arson,
protection extortion, rape, and murder" to the Powers.[31]:37
After the conclusion of the 1877–78
Russo-Turkish War, the Armenians began to look more toward the
Russian Empire as the ultimate guarantors of their security. Nerses
approached the Russian leadership during its negotiations with the
Ottomans in
San Stefano and in the
eponymous treaty, convinced them to insert a clause, Article 16,
stipulating that the Russian forces occupying the Armenian-populated
provinces in the eastern Ottoman Empire would withdraw only with the
full implementation of reforms.[33]
Great Britain was troubled with Russia's holding on to so much Ottoman
territory and forced it to enter into new negotiations with the
convening of the
Congress of Berlin in June 1878. Armenians also entered into these
negotiations and emphasized that they sought
autonomy, not independence from the Ottoman Empire.[31]:38
They partially succeeded, as Article 61 of the
Treaty of Berlin contained the same text as Article 16 but removed
any mention that Russian forces would remain in the provinces; instead,
the Ottoman government was periodically to inform the Great Powers of
the progress of the reforms.
Armenian revolutionary movement
As it turned out, the reforms were not forthcoming. Upset with this
turn of events, a number of disillusioned Armenian intellectuals living
in Europe and Russia decided to form political parties and societies
dedicated to the betterment of their compatriots living inside the
Ottoman Empire. In the last quarter of the 19th century, this movement
came to be dominated by three parties: the Ramkavar
(Constitutional-Democrat; Armenakan),
Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, and the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun). While the
parties differed somewhat in ideology, they were all committed to the
same goal of seeing the social status of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
improve. Parallel to their efforts, another group of Armenians, seeing
the futility of asking for reforms and the unwillingness of the European
powers in pressuring the Ottoman government to implement reforms, were
convinced that the only possibility of improving the plight of the
Armenians was through self-defense.[34][35]
Hamidian Massacres, 1894–96
Since 1876, the Ottoman state had been led by Sultan
Abdul Hamid II. From the beginning of the reform period after the
signing of the Berlin treaty, Hamid II attempted to stall their
implementation and asserted that Armenians did not make up a majority in
the provinces and that Armenian reports of abuses were largely
exaggerated or false. In 1890, Hamid II created a
paramilitary outfit known as the
Hamidiye which was made up of Kurdish irregulars who were tasked
to "deal with the Armenians as they wished".[30]:40
As Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions (often as a
result of over-taxation) in Armenian populated towns, such as in
Sasun in 1894 and
Zeitun in 1895–96, these regiments were increasingly used to deal
with the Armenians by way of oppression and massacre. In some instances,
Armenians successfully fought off the regiments and brought the excesses
to the attention of the Great Powers in 1895 who subsequently condemned
the Porte.[31]:40–2
The Powers forced Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to
curtail the powers of the Hamidiye in October 1895 which, like
the Berlin treaty, was never implemented. On October 1, 1895, 2,000
Armenians assembled in Constantinople to petition for the implementation
of the reforms but Ottoman police units converged towards the rally and
violently broke it up.[30]:57–8
Soon, massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then
engulfed the rest of the Armenian-populated provinces of
Bitlis,
Diyarbekir,
Erzerum,
Harput,
Sivas,
Trabzon
and Van.
Estimates differ on how many Armenians were killed but European
documentation of the violence, which became known as the
Hamidian massacres, placed the figures from anywhere between
100–300,000 Armenians.[36]
Although Hamid was never directly implicated in ordering the
massacres, it is believed that they had his tacit encouragement
approval.[31]:42
Frustrated with European indifference to the massacres, Armenians from
the Dashnaktsutiun party
seized the European-managed
Ottoman Bank on August 26, 1896. This incident brought further
sympathy for Armenians in Europe and was lauded by the European and
American press, which vilified Hamid and painted him as the "great
assassin" and "bloody Sultan".[30]:35,115
While the Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms,
these never came into fruition due to conflicting political and economic
interests.
Prelude to
genocide
The
Young Turk Revolution of 1908
On July 24, 1908, Armenians' hopes for equality in the empire
brightened once more when a
coup d'état staged by officers in the
Turkish Third Army based in
Salonika removed Abdul Hamid from power and restored the country to
a constitutional monarchy. The officers were part of the
Young Turk movement that wanted to reform administration of the
decadent state of the Ottoman Empire and modernize it to European
standards. The movement was an anti-Hamidian coalition made up of two
distinct groups: the
secular
liberal
constitutionalists and the
nationalists; the former was more
democratic and accepted Armenians into their wing whereas the latter
was more intolerant in regard to Armenian-related issues and their
frequent requests for European assistance.[30]:140–1
In 1902, during a congress of the Young Turks held in Paris, the heads
of the liberal wing,
Sabahaddin and
Ahmed Riza Bey, partially persuaded the nationalists to include in
their objectives to ensure some rights to all the minorities of the
empire.
One of the numerous factions within the Young Turk movement was a
secret revolutionary organization called The Committee of Union and
Progress. It drew its proliferating membership from disaffected army
officers based in Salonika and was behind a wave of mutinies against the
central government. In 1908, elements of the Third Army and the Second
Army Corps declared their opposition to the Sultan and threatened to
march on the capital to depose him. Hamid, shaken by the wave of
resentment, stepped down from power as Armenians, Greeks,
Arabs,
Bulgarians and Turks alike rejoiced in his dethronement.[30]:143–4
The Adana
Massacre of 1909
Main article:
Adana Massacre
An Armenian town left pillaged and destroyed after the
massacres in
Adana in 1909.
A
countercoup took place on April 13, 1909. Some Ottoman military
elements, joined by
Islamic
theological students, aimed to return control of the country to the
Sultan and the rule of
Islamic law.
Riots and fighting broke out between the reactionary forces and CUP
forces, until the CUP was able to put down the uprising and
court-martial the opposition leaders.
While the movement initially targeted the Young Turk government, it
spilled over into
pogroms
against Armenians who were perceived as having supported the restoration
of the
constitution.[31]:68–9
When Ottoman Army troops were called in, many accounts record that
instead of trying to quell the violence they actually took part in
pillaging Armenian enclaves in
Adana
province.[37]
15,000–30,000 Armenians were killed in the course of the "Adana
Massacre".[31]:69[38]
The Balkan wars
In 1912, the
First Balkan War broke out and resulted in a defeat of the Ottoman
Empire and the loss of 85% of its territory in Europe. Many in the
empire saw their defeat as "Allah's divine punishment for a society that
did not know how to pull itself together".[31]:84
The Turkish nationalist movement in the country gradually came to view
Anatolia as their last refuge. That the Armenian population formed a
significant minority in this region would figure prominently in the
calculations of the Young Turks who would eventually carry out the
Armenian Genocide.
An important consequence of the Balkan Wars was also the mass
expulsion of Muslims (known as muhajirs) from the Balkans. In
fact, beginning in the mid-19th century, hundreds of thousands of
Muslims, including
Circassians and
Chechens, were expelled or forced to flee from the Caucasus and the
Balkans (Rumelia)
as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars and the conflicts in the Balkans.
Muslim society in the empire was incensed by this flood of refugees and
overcome by a sense of revenge. A journal published in Constantinople
expressed the mood of the times: "Let this be a warning...O Muslims,
don't get comfortable! Do not let your blood cool before taking
revenge".[31]:86
As many as 850,000 of these refugees were settled in areas where the
Armenians were resident from the period of 1878–1904. The muhajirs
resented the status of their relatively well-off neighbors and, as
historian
Taner Akçam and others have noted, the refugees would come to play a
pivotal role in the killings of the Armenians and the confiscation of
their properties during the genocide.[31]:86–87
World War I
On November 2, 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the
side of the
Central Powers. The
Middle Eastern theatre of World War I became the scene of action.
The combatants were the Ottoman Empire, with some assistance from the
other
Central Powers, and primarily the
British and the
Russians among the
Allies of World War I. The conflicts at the
Caucasus Campaign, the
Persian Campaign and the
Gallipoli Campaign[citation
needed] affected where the Armenian people lived in
significant amounts. Before the declaration of war at the
Armenian congress at Erzurum the
Ottoman government requested the Ottoman Armenians to facilitate the
conquest of
Transcaucasia by inciting a rebellion with the
Russian Armenians against the tsarist army in the event of a
Caucasus front.[31]:136[39]
Battle of
Sarikamish
On December 24, 1914 Minister of War
Enver Pasha developed a plan to encircle and destroy the Russian
Caucasus Army at
Sarikamish, to regain territories lost to Russia after the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Enver Pasha's forces were routed at
the
Battle of Sarikamis, and almost completely destroyed.
In the summer of 1914,
Armenian volunteer units were established under the Russian Armed
forces. As the Russian Armenian conscripts had already been sent to the
European Front, this force was uniquely established from Armenians that
were not Russian or who were not obligated to serve. An Ottoman
representative,
Karekin Bastermadjian (Armen Karo), was also brought into to this
force. Initially they had 20,000 men, but it was reported that their
number subsequently increased. Returning to Constantinople, Enver
publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians in the region having actively
sided with the Russians.[30]:200
Labor
battalions, February 25
On February 25, 1915, the war minister
Enver Pasha sent an order to all military units that Armenians in
the active Ottoman forces be demobilized and assigned to the unarmed
Labour battalion (Turkish: amele taburlari). Enver Pasha
explained this decision as "out of fear that they would collaborate with
the Russians". As a tradition, the Ottoman Army drafted non-Muslim males
only between the ages of 20 and 45 into the regular army. The younger
(15–20) and older (45–60) non-Muslim soldiers had always been used as
logistical support through the labor battalions. Before February, some
of the Armenian recruits were utilized as laborers (hamals),
though they would ultimately be executed.[40]
Transferring Armenian conscripts from active field (armed) to
passive, unarmed logistic section was an important aspect of the
subsequent genocide. As reported in "The
Memoirs of Naim Bey", the extermination of the Armenians in these
battalions was part of a premeditated strategy on behalf of the
Committee of Union and Progress. Many of these Armenian recruits
were executed by local Turkish gangs.[30]:178
Events at
Van, April 1915
Armed Armenian civilians and self-defense units holding a
line against Ottoman forces in the walled
Siege of Van in May 1915.
On April 19, 1915,
Jevdet Bey demanded that the
city of Van immediately furnish him 4,000 soldiers under the pretext
of
conscription. However, it was clear to the Armenian population that
his goal was to massacre the able-bodied men of Van so that there would
be no defenders. Jevdet Bey had already used his official writ in nearby
villages, ostensibly to search for arms, but in fact to initiate
wholesale massacres.[30]:202
The Armenians offered five hundred soldiers and exemption money for the
rest in order to buy time, but Djevdet accused Armenians of "rebellion"
and asserted his determination to "crush" it at any cost. "If the rebels
fire a single shot", he declared, "I shall kill every Christian man,
woman, and" (pointing to his knee) "every child, up to here".[41]:298
On April 20, 1915, the armed conflict of the
Siege of Van began when an Armenian woman was harassed and the two
Armenian men that came to her aid were killed by Ottoman soldiers. The
Armenian defenders protected 30,000 residents and 15,000 refugees in an
area of roughly one square kilometer of the Armenian Quarter and suburb
of Aigestan with 1,500 ablebodied riflemen who were supplied with
300 rifles and 1,000 pistols and antique weapons. The conflict lasted
until
General Yudenich came to rescue them.[42]
Similar reports reached Morgenthau from Aleppo and Van, prompting him
to raise the issue in person with Talaat and Enver. As he quoted to them
the testimonies of his consulate officials, they justified the
deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that
complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had
taken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians.
Arrest and deportation of Armenian notables, April 1915
Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed
en masse by Ottoman authorities on the night of April
24, 1915.
On April 24, 1915,
Red Sunday (Armenian:
Կարմիր Կիրակի), was the night on which the
leaders of Armenians of the Ottoman capital,
Constantinople, and later extending to other Ottoman centers were
arrested and moved to two holding centers near Ankara by then minister
of interior
Mehmed Talaat Bey with his
order on April 24, 1915. These Armenians were later deported with
the passage of Tehcir Law on 29 May 1915. The date 24 April,
Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorates the Armenian notables
deported from the Ottoman capital in 1915, as the precursor to the
ensuing events.
In his order,
order on April 24, 1915, Talaat claimed "have long been pursuing to
gain an administrative autonomy and this desire is displayed once more,
in no uncertain terms, with the inclusion of the Russian Armenians who
have assumed a position against us together with the Daschnak Committee
in no time in the regions of Zeytûn (Zeitun
Resistance (1915)), Bitlis, Sivas, and Van (Siege
of Van) in accordance with the decisions they have previously taken
(Armenian
congress at Erzurum)". By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already
begun a
propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire
as a threat to the empire's security. An
Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:
In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda
material was thoroughly prepared in Constantinople. [It included
such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy.
They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Committee
of Union and Progress leaders and will succeed in opening the
straits (of the
Dardanelles)".
[32]:220
On the night of April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government rounded up and
imprisoned an estimated
250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders.[30]:211–2
This date coincided with Allied troop landings at
Gallipoli after unsuccessful Allied
naval attempts to break through the Dardanelles to Constantinople in
February and March 1915.
Triple
Entente's reaction
On May 24, 1915, the
Triple Entente warned the
Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against
humanity and civilization, the
Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they
will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the
Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated
in such massacres".[43]
Massacres
Mass burnings
Eitan Belkind was a
Nili
member, who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned
to the headquarters of Kamal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the
burning of 5,000 Armenians.[44]:181,183
Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, describes how a population of a
village were taken all together, and then burned.[45]
The Commander of the Third Army Vehib's 12-page affidavit, which was
dated 5 December 1918, was presented in the Trabzon trial series (March
29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment,[46]
reporting such a mass burning of the population of an entire village
near Mush.[47]
that in Bitlis, Mus and
Sassoun, "The shortest method for disposing of the women and
children concentrated in the various camps was to burn them". And also
that "Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these
scenes were horrified and maddened at remembering the sight. They told
the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the
air for many days after".
Drowning
Trabzon was the main city in Trabzon province; Oscar S. Heizer, the
American consul at Trabzon, reports: "This plan did not suit Nail
Bey.... Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea
and thrown overboard".[48]
The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: "I saw
thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were
capsized in the Black Sea".[49]
The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drowned in the Black
Sea.[50]
Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé
d'affaires, writes: "Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at
Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing".[51]
Use
of poison and drug overdoses
The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton writes in a parenthesis when
introducing the crimes of Nazi doctors, "Perhaps Turkish doctors, in
their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest,
as I shall later suggest".[52]
Morphine overdose: During the Trabzon trial series of the
Martial court, from the sittings between March 26 and May 17, 1919, the
Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that
Dr. Saib caused the death of children with the injection of morphine.
The information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and
Vehib), both Dr. Saib's colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital,
where those atrocities were said to have been committed.[53][54]
Toxic gas: Dr. Ziya Fuad and Dr. Adnan, public health services
director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits reporting cases in which two
school buildings were used to organize children and send them to the
mezzanine to kill them with toxic gas equipment.[55][56]
Typhoid inoculation: The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal
wrote "on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the Third Army in
January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent
Armenians slated for deportation at Erzican were inoculated with the
blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood
‘inactive’".[57][58]
Jeremy Hugh Baron writes: "Individual doctors were directly involved in
the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false
certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim's brother-in-law
Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized
the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over
six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938".[59]
Deportations
Map of massacre locations and deportation and
extermination centers
Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote,
[41]
"Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian
provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in
its several forms—massacre,
starvation,
exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the
refugees. The Turkish policy was that of
extermination under the guise of
deportation".
In May 1915,
Mehmed Talaat Pasha requested that the
cabinet and
Grand Vizier
Said Halim Pasha legalize a measure for relocation and settlement of
Armenians to other places due to what Talaat Pasha called "the Armenian
riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the
country". However, Talaat Pasha was referring specifically to events in
Van and extending the implementation to the regions in which alleged
"riots and massacres" would affect the security of the war zone of the
Caucasus Campaign. Later, the scope of the immigration was widened
in order to include the Armenians in the other provinces.
On 29 May 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the
Temporary Law of Deportation ("Tehjir Law"), giving the Ottoman
government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a
threat to national security.[30]:186–8
The "Tehjir Law" brought some measures regarding the property of the
deportees, but during September a new law was proposed. By means of the
"Abandoned Properties" Law (Law Concerning Property, Dept's and Assets
Left Behind Deported Persons, also referred as the "Temporary Law on
Expropriation and Confiscation"), the Ottoman government took possession
of all "abandoned" Armenian goods and properties. Ottoman parliamentary
representative
Ahmed Riza protested this legislation:
It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as "abandoned
goods" for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their
properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed
from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its
efforts is selling their goods… If we are a constitutional
regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we
can’t do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my
village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can
never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor
the law can allow it.
[61]
On 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament passed the "Temporary
Law of Expropriation and Confiscation", stating that all property,
including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be
confiscated by the authorities.[32]:224
With the implementation of
Tehcir law, the confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter
of Armenians that ensued upon the law's enactment outraged much of the
western world. While the Ottoman Empire's wartime allies offered
little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has
since come to attest to the witnesses' horror at the killings and mass
starvation of Armenians.[62]:329–31[63]:212–3[64]
In the United States,
The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of
the Armenian people, describing the process as "systematic",
"authorized" and "organized by the government".
Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as "the greatest
crime of the war".[65]
Historian Hans-Lukas Kieser states that, from the statements of Talat
Pasha
[66] it is clear that the officials were aware that the
deportation order was genocidal.[67]
Another historian
Taner Akçam states that the telegrams show that the overall
coordination of the genocide was taken over by Talat Paşa.[68]
Death marches
An Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field
"within sight of help and safety at Aleppo".
The Armenians were marched out to the
Syrian
town of
Deir ez-Zor and the
surrounding desert. A good deal of evidence suggests that the
Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to sustain
the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived.[69]
By August 1915, The New York Times repeated an unattributed
report that "the roads and the
Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive
are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole
Armenian people".[70]
Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to
rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these
activities themselves.[69]
Deprived of their belongings and marched into the desert, hundreds of
thousands of Armenians perished.
Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very
high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the
authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being
driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of
slave drivers. With few exceptions no shelter of any kind is
provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left
under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary
relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.
[69]
Similarly, Major General
Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein noted that "The Turkish
policy of causing starvation is an all too obvious proof… for the
Turkish resolve to destroy the Armenians".[32]:350
German engineers and laborers involved in building the railway also
witnessed Armenians being crammed into cattle cars and shipped along the
railroad line. Franz Gunther, a representative for
Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad
Railway, forwarded photographs to his directors and expressed his
frustration at having to remain silent amid such "bestial cruelty".[30]:326
Major General
Otto von Lossow, acting military attaché and head of the German
Military
Plenipotentiary in the Ottoman Empire, spoke to Ottoman intentions
in a conference held in
Batum in 1918:
The Turks have embarked upon the "total extermination of the
Armenians in
Transcaucasia… The aim of Turkish policy is, as I have
reiterated, the taking of possession of Armenian districts and
the extermination of the Armenians. Talaat's government wants to
destroy all Armenians, not just in Turkey but also outside
Turkey. On the basis of all the reports and news coming to me
here in
Tiflis there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks
systematically are aiming at the extermination of the few
hundred thousand Armenians whom they left alive until now.
[32]:349
Extermination
camps
It is believed that 25 major
concentration camps existed, under the command of
Şükrü Kaya, one of the right-hand men of Talaat Pasha. The majority
of the camps were situated near Turkey's modern
Iraqi and
Syrian borders, and some were only temporary transit camps. Others, such
as
Radjo,
Katma, and
Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for
mass graves; these sites were vacated by autumn 1915. Some authors
also maintain that the camps
Lale,
Tefridje,
Dipsi,
Del-El, and
Ra's al-'Ayn were built specifically for those who had a life
expectancy of a few days.[71]
Relief
The American Committee for Relief in the Near East is a relief
organization established in 1915, just after the deportations, whose
primary aim was to alleviate the suffering of the Armenian people. Henry
Morgenthau played a key role in rallying support for the organization.
Between 1915 and 1930, distributed humanitarian relief across a wide
range of geographical locations. ACRNE eventually spent over ten times
the initial estimate, see
original estimate, that amount and helped an estimated close to
2,000,000 refugees.[72]
In its first year, the ACRNE cared for 132,000 Armenian orphans from
Tiflis,
Yerevan,
Constantinople,
Sivas,
Beirut,
Damascus, and
Jerusalem. A relief organization for refugees in the Middle East
helped donate over $102 million (budget $117,000,000) [1930 value of
dollar] to Armenians both during and after the war.[73][74]:336
Teshkilat-i
Mahsusa
The
Committee of Union and Progress founded a "special organization" (Turkish:
Teşkilat-i Mahsusa) that participated in
the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.[75]
This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special
forces outfit, and it has been compared by some scholars to the Nazi
Einsatzgruppen.[30]:182,
185 Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction
the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central
prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special
organization.[76]
According to the
Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November
1914, 124 criminals were released from
Pimian prison. Little by little from the end of 1914 to the
beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to
form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to
escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.[77]
Vehib Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those
members of the special organization, the "butchers of the human
species".[78]
Trials
Turkish
courts-martial
In 1919, Sultan
Mehmed VI ordered domestic courts-martial to try members of the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (Turkish: "Ittihat Terakki")
for their role in taking the Ottoman Empire into World War I. The
courts-martial blamed the members of CUP for pursuing a war that did not
fit into the notion of
Millet. The Armenian issue was used as a tool to punish the leaders
of the CUP. Most of the documents generated in these courts were later
moved to international trials. By January 1919, a report to Sultan
Mehmed VI accused over 130 suspects, most of whom were high
officials. The military court found that it was the will of the CUP to
eliminate the Armenians physically, via its
special organization. The 1919 pronouncement reads as follows:
The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named
crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principal
factors of these crimes the fugitives
Talat Pasha, former Grand Vizir,
Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register
of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck
off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former
Minister of Education, members of the General
Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral
person of that party;… the Court Martial pronounces, in
accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty
against Talat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.
The term
Three Pashas, which include
Mehmed Talaat Pasha and
Ismail Enver, refers to the triumvirate who had fled the Empire at
the end of World War I. At the trials in Constantinople in 1919 they
were sentenced to death in absentia. The courts-martial officially
disbanded the CUP and confiscated its assets, and the assets of those
found guilty. At least two of the three were later assassinated by
Armenian vigilantes.
International
trials
Following the
Mudros Armistice, the preliminary
Peace Conference in Paris established "The Commission on
Responsibilities and Sanctions" in January 1919, which was chaired by US
Secretary of State Lansing. Based on the commission's work, several
articles were added to the
Treaty of Sèvres, and the acting government of the
Ottoman Empire, Sultan
Mehmed VI and
Damat Adil Ferit Pasha, were summoned to trial. The Treaty of Sèvres
(August 1920) planned a trial to determine those responsible for the
"barbarous and illegitimate methods of warfare… [including] offenses
against the laws and customs of war and the principles of humanity".[16]
Article 230 of the
Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire "hand over to the
Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter
as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance
of the state of war on territory which formed part of the
Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914".
Various Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were
transferred to Malta, where they were held for some three years
while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris
and Washington to investigate their actions.[79]
However, the
Inter-allied tribunal attempt demanded by the Treaty of Sèvres never
solidified and the detainees were eventually returned to Turkey in
exchange for British citizens held by Kemalist Turkey.
Trial of
Soghomon Tehlirian
On March 15, 1921, former
Grand Vizier
Talaat Pasha was assassinated in the
Charlottenburg District of Berlin, Germany, in broad daylight and in
the presence of many witnesses. Talaat's death was part of "Operation
Nemesis", the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation's codename for their covert
operation in the 1920s to kill the
planners of the Armenian Genocide.
The subsequent trial of the assassin,
Soghomon Tehlirian, had an important influence on
Raphael Lemkin, a
lawyer
of Polish–Jewish
descent who campaigned in the
League of Nations to ban what he called "barbarity" and "vandalism".
The term "genocide",
created in 1943, was coined by Lemkin who was directly influenced by the
massacres of Armenians during World War I.[80]:210
Armenian population, deaths, survivors, 1914 to 1918
While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives
during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western
scholars that over 500,000 Armenians died between 1914 and 1918.
Estimates vary between 600,000,[81]
to 1,500,000 (per Western scholars,[82]
Argentina,[83]
and other states).
Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of
Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the
British Foreign Office, who estimated that 600,000 Armenians "died
or were massacred during deportation" in the years 1915–16.[84][85]
Justin McCarthy calculated an estimate of the pre-war Armenian
population, then subtracted his estimate of survivors, arriving at a
figure of a little less than 600,000 for Armenian casualties for the
period 1914 to 1922.[86]
In a more recent essay, he projected that if the Armenian records of
1913 were accurate, 250,000 more deaths should be added, for a total of
850,000.[87]
However, Mccarthy's numbers have been highly contested by many
specialists. Some of them, like Frédéric Paulin, have severely
criticized McCarthy's
methodology and suggested that it is flawed.[88]
Hilmar Kaiser[89]
another specialist has made similar claims, as have professor
Vahakn N. Dadrian[90]
and professor Levon Marashlian.[91]
The critics not only question McCarthy's methodology and resulting
calculations, but also his primary sources, the Ottoman censuses. They
point out that there was no official statistic census in 1912; rather
those numbers were based on the records of 1905 which were conducted
during the reign of Sultan Hamid.[92]
While Ottoman censuses claimed an Armenian population of 1.2 million,
Fa'iz El-Ghusein (the
Kaimakam of
Kharpout) wrote that there were about 1.9 million Armenian's in the
Ottoman Empire,[93]
and some modern scholars estimate over 2 million. German official
Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter wrote that fewer than 100,000
Armenians survived the genocide, the rest having been exterminated (German:
ausgerottet).[94]:329–30
Armenian population, deaths, survivors |
|
|
|
|
1893–96 Armenian population in Ottoman Empire: 1,003,571
(Ottoman Turkish statistics) |
1912 Armenian population in
Six vilayets of Ottoman Empire According to Armenian
Patriarchate of Constantinople :1,018,00 |
1914 Armenian population in Ottoman Empire: 1,219,323
(Ottoman Turkish statistics) |
1921 Armenian population in Turkey: 281,000 (US estimate) |
Contemporaneous reports and reactions
Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the
Ottoman Empire's own allies, Germany and
Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of
state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene
on behalf of the Armenians, including
Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government
officials who claimed they were retaliating against a pro-Russian
insurrection.[13]:177
On May 24, 1915, the
Triple Entente warned the
Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against
humanity and civilization, the
Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they
will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the
Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated
in such massacres".[43]
The
American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE, or "Near East
Relief") was a charitable organization established to relieve the
suffering of the peoples of the
Near
East.[95]
The organization was championed by
Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
Morgenthau's dispatches on the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized
much support for ACRNE.[96]
The U.S. Mission in the Ottoman Empire
Workers of the American Committee for Relief in the Near
East in
Sivas.
An article by the
New York Times dated 15 December 1915 states that
one million Armenians had been either deported or executed
by the Ottoman government.
The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman
Empire, including locations in
Edirne,
Kharput,
Samsun,
Smyrna,
Trebizond,
Van,
Constantinople, and
Aleppo.
The United States was officially a neutral party until it joined with
the Allies in 1917. In addition to the consulates, there were also
numerous
Protestant
missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions,
including Van and Kharput. The events were reported regularly in
newspapers and literary journals around the world.[30]:282–5
On his return to the United States having served for thirty years as
United States Consul and Consul General in the Near East,
George Horton wrote his own account of "the Systematic Extermination
of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of
Certain Great Powers; with the True Story of the Burning of Smyrna".[97]:title
Horton's account quotes numerous contemporary communications and
eyewitness reports including eyewitness accounts of the massacre of
Phocea in 1914 by a Frenchman and the Armenian massacres of 1914/15 by
an American citizen and a German missionary.[97]:28–9,34–7.
Many Americans vocally spoke out against the genocide, including
former president
Theodore Roosevelt,
rabbi
Stephen Wise,
William Jennings Bryan, and
Alice Stone Blackwell. In the United States and the United Kingdom,
children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and
to "remember the starving Armenians".[98]
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many
consular officials reported to the ambassador what they were witnessing.
In his memoirs which he completed writing in 1918, Morgenthau wrote,
"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations,
they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they
understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no
particular attempt to conceal the fact…"[41]:309
In memoirs and reports, their staff vividly described the brutal methods
used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities
committed against the Christian minority.[99]
Allied forces in the Middle East
On the Middle Eastern front, the British military was engaged
fighting the Ottoman forces in southern Syria and
Mesopotamia. British diplomat
Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account
from a captured Ottoman soldier:
The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain
in twelve hours… some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under
the guardianship of some hundred
Kurds… These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality
mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take
parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations,
but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and
old women… One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100
Armenian men himself… the empty desert cisterns and caves were
also filled with corpses…
[62]:327
Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative
holocaust" and noted that "the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was
about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be.
[…] There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and
executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for
clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish
ambitions, cherishing national ambitions that could only be satisfied at
the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and
Caucasian Moslems".[62]:329
Arnold Toynbee: The Treatment of Armenians
Arnold J. Toynbee published a widely studied book
The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1916. It was a
collection of documents. Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts,
British politician
Viscount Bryce and historian Toynbee compiled statements from
survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested
to the systematized massacring of innocent Armenians by Ottoman
government forces.[100]
The book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to
build up sentiment against the Central Powers, but Bryce had submitted
the work to scholars for verification before its publication.
University of Oxford Regius Professor
Gilbert Murray stated, "…the evidence of these letters and reports
will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness
is established beyond question".[32]:228
Other professors, including
Herbert Fisher of
Sheffield University and former
American Bar Association president
Moorfield Storey, came to the same conclusion.[32]:228–9
Joint Austrian and German mission
As allies during the war, the Imperial German mission in the Ottoman
Empire included both military and civilian components. Germany had
brokered a deal with the
Sublime Porte to commission the building of a railroad stretching
from Berlin to the Middle East, called the
Baghdad Railway. Germany's diplomatic mission at the beginning of
1915 was led by Ambassador Baron
Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (who was later succeeded by Count
Paul Wolff Metternich following his death in 1915). Like Morgenthau,
von Wangenheim began to receive many disturbing messages from consul
officials around the Ottoman Empire detailing the massacre of Armenians.
From the province of
Adana,
Consul Eugene Buge reported that the CUP chief had sworn to kill and
massacre any Armenians who survived the deportation marches.[30]:186
In June 1915, von Wangenheim sent a cable to Berlin reporting that Talat
had admitted that the deportations were not "being carried out because
of 'military considerations alone'". One month later, he came to the
conclusion that there "no longer was doubt that the Porte was trying to
exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire".[63]:213
When Wolff-Metternich succeeded von Wangenheim, he continued to
dispatch similar cables: "The Committee [CUP] demands the extirpation of
the last remnants of the Armenians and the government must yield… A
Committee representative is assigned to each of the provincial
administrations…
Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything
that is not Turkish".[101]
Turkish official teasing starved Armenian children by
showing bread, 1915
Another notable figure in the German military camp was
Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who documented various massacres of
Armenians. He sent fifteen reports regarding "deportations and mass
killings" to the German chancellery. His final report noted that fewer
than 100,000 Armenians were left alive in the Ottoman Empire: the rest
having been exterminated (German:
ausgerottet).[62]:329–30
Scheubner-Richter also detailed the methods of the Ottoman government,
noting its use of the Special Organization and other bureaucratized
instruments of genocide.
Children taken in by Near East Relief
The Germans also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to
Israeli historian, Bat Ye’or, who writes: "The Germans, allies of the
Turks in the First World War… saw how civil populations were shut up in
churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death,
and reduced to ashes".[102]
German officers stationed in eastern Turkey disputed the government's
assertion that Armenian revolts had broken out, suggesting that the
areas were "quiet until the deportations began".[63]:212
Other Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians.
As Hans Humann, the German naval attaché in Constantinople said to US
Ambassador Henry Morgenthau:
I have lived in Turkey the larger part of my life… and I know the
Armenians. I also know that both Armenians and Turks cannot live
together in this country. One of these races has got to go. And I
don't blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians. I
think that they are entirely justified. The weaker nation must
succumb. The Armenians desire to dismember Turkey; they are against
the Turks and the Germans in this war, and they therefore have no
right to exist here.[41]:375
In a genocide conference held in 2001, professor Wolfgang Wipperman
of the
Free University of Berlin introduced documents evidencing that the
German High Command was aware of the mass killings at the time but chose
not to interfere or speak out.[62]:331
Photographs exist that may also suggest the Germans participated in
the mass killing and some of the German witnesses to the Armenian
holocaust would go on to play a role in the Nazi regime -
Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, for example, was attached to the
Turkish 4th Army in 1915 with instructions to monitor "operations"
against the Armenians who later became Hitler's foreign minister and
"Protector of Bohemia and Moravia" during Reinhard Heydrich's terror in
Czechoslovakia.[103]
Armin T. Wegner
German military medic
Armin T. Wegner enrolled as a medic at the outbreak of World War I
during the winter of 1914–15. He defied censorship in taking hundreds of
photographs[104]
of Armenians being deported and subsequently starving in northern Syrian
camps[62]:326
and in the deserts of Der Zor. Wegner was part of a German detachment
under von der Goltz stationed near the
Baghdad Railway in
Mesopotamia. Wegner was eventually arrested by the Germans and
recalled to Germany.
Wegner protested against the atrocities perpetrated in an open letter
submitted to US President
Woodrow Wilson at the peace conference of 1919. The letter made a
case for the creation of an independent Armenian state. Also in 1919,
Wegner published The Road of No Return ("Der Weg ohne Heimkehr"),
a collection of letters he had written during what he deemed the
"martyrdom" (German: "Martyrium") of the Armenians.[105]
A documentary film depicting Wegner's personal account of the Armenian
Genocide through his own photographs called "Destination Nowhere: The
Witness" and produced by Dr J Michael Hagopian premiered in Fresno on 25
April 2000. Prior to the release of the documentary he was honored at
the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan for championing the plight of
Armenians throughout his life.
Russian military
The Russian Empire's response to the bombardment of its Black Sea
naval ports was primarily a land campaign through the Caucasus. Early
victories against the Ottoman Empire from the winter of 1914 to the
spring 1915 saw significant gains of territory, including relieving the
Armenian bastion resisting in the city of Van in May 1915. The Russians
also reported encountering the bodies of unarmed civilian Armenians as
they advanced.[106]
In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of
Erzerum led the Russians to retaliate against the Ottoman III Army
whom they held responsible for the massacres, destroying it in its
entirety.[107]
Swedish Embassy and Military Attaché
Sweden, as a neutral state during the entire World War I, had
permanent representatives in the Ottoman Empire, able to continuously
report on the ongoing events in the country. The Swedish Embassy in
Constantinople, represented by Ambassador Per Gustaf August Cosswa
Anckarsvärd, along with Envoy M. Ahlgren, and the Swedish Military
Attaché, Captain Einar af Wirsén, closely followed the development
throughout the empire, reporting, among others, on the Armenian
massacres. On July 7, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched a two-page report to
Stockholm, beginning with the following information:
The persecutions of the Armenians have reached hair-raising
proportions and all points to the fact that the Young Turks want
to seize the opportunity, since due to different reasons there
are no effective external pressure to be feared, to once and for
all put an end to the Armenian question. The means for this are
quite simple and consist of the extermination (utrotandet) of
the Armenian nation.
[108]:39
During the remainder of 1915 alone, Anckarsvärd dispatched six other
reports entitled "The Persecutions of the Armenians". In his report on
July 22, Anckarsvärd noted that the persecutions of the Armenians were
being extended to encompass all Christians in the
Ottoman Empire:
[The deportations] can not be any other issue than an
annihilation war against the Greek nation in Turkey and as
measures hereof they have been implementing forced conversions
to Islam, in obvious aim to, that if after the end of the war
there again would be a question of European intervention for the
protection of the Christians, there will be as few of them left
as possible.
[108]:40
On August 9, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched yet another report,
confirming his suspicions regarding the plans of the Turkish government,
"It is obvious that the Turks are taking the opportunity to, now during
the war, annihilate [utplåna] the Armenian nation so that when the peace
comes no Armenian question longer exists".[108]:41
When reflecting upon the situation in Turkey during the final stages
of the war, Envoy Alhgren presented an analysis of the prevailing
situation in Turkey and the hard times which had befallen the
population. In explaining the increased living costs he identified a
number of reasons: "obstacles for domestic trade, the almost total
paralysing of the foreign trade and finally the strong decreasing of
labour power, caused partly by the mobilisation but partly also by the
extermination of the Armenian race [utrotandet af den armeniska rasen]".[108]:52
Wirsén, when writing his memoirs from his mission to the Balkans and
Turkey, Minnen från fred och krig ("Memories from Peace and
War"), dedicated an entire chapter to the Armenian genocide, entitled
Mordet på en nation ("The Murder of a Nation"). Commenting on the
interpretation that the deportations resulted from the purported
collaboration of the Armenians with the Russians, Wirsen concludes that
their subsequent deportations were nothing but a cover for their
extermination.: "Officially, these had the goal to move the entire
Armenian population to the steppe regions of Northern Mesopotamia and
Syria, but in reality they aimed to exterminate [utrota] the Armenians,
whereby the pure Turkish element in Asia Minor would achieve a
dominating position".[108]:28
In conclusion, Wirsén made the following note: "The annihilation of
the Armenian nation in Asia Minor must revolt all human feelings… The
way the Armenian problem was solved was hair-raising. I can still see in
front of me Talaat's cynical expression, when he emphasized that the
Armenian question was solved".[108]:29
Bodil Biørn
In 1905 the missionary nurse Bodil Biørn (1871–1960) was sent to
Armenia. First based in the town of Mezereh (now Elazig) and later in
Mush, she worked for widows and orphaned children in cooperation with
missionaries from the German Hülfsbund. She witnessed the massacres of
1915 in Mush and saw most of the children in her care murdered along
with Armenian priests, teachers, and assistants. She barely escaped
after 9 days on horseback but stayed on in the region for another 2
years under increasingly difficult working conditions. After a period at
home she again went to Armenia and, until she retired in 1935, worked
for Armenian refugees in Syria and Lebanon. Bodil Biørn was also an able
photographer. Many of her photos are now in the WMF archive, which since
the organisation was dissolved in 1982 has been preserved in the
National Archives of Norway. In combination with her comments, written
in her photo albums or on the back of the prints themselves, these
photos bear strong witness of the atrocities that she saw.[109]
Ottoman reactions
According to Celal Bey, the former governor of Halep Province, a
deputy of Konya, explained him the situation and said:
Blood flowing instead of water in the river, and thousands of
innocent children, blameless elderly, helpless women and strong
youths were flowing towards death in this blood flow.
[110]
Halil Paşa (Kut), uncle of
Enver Paşa wrote "the Armenian nation, because of trying to erase my
country from history as prisoners of the enemy, in the most horrible and
painful days of my homeland…" in his memory.[111]
In 1919, Ahmet Refik wrote "the
Unionists (Committee of Union and Progress) wanted to remove the
problem of
Vilâyât-ı Sitte with annihilating Armenians" in his work entitled
İki Komite İki Kıtal.[112]
At a secret session of the National Assembly, held on October 17,
1920,
Hasan Fehmi Bey (Kolay), deputy of Bursa at the time, said:
As you know, the issue of relocation was an event that made
world to yell blue and made all of us to be considered as
murderer. We knew, before we done it, the Christian world won't
tolerate it and they would direct anger and hatred toward us.
Why did we impute the title of murderer to our race? Why did we
enter into such decisive and difficult struggle? That was done
just for securing the future of our country that we know as more
precious and sacred than our lives.
[113]
Persia
Due to the weak central government and Tehran's inability to protect
its territorial integrity, no resistance was offered by the mostly
Islamic Persian troops when, after the withdrawal of Russian troops from
the extreme northwest of Persia, Islamic Turks invaded the town of
Salmas in northwestern Persia and tortured and massacred the Christian
Armenian inhabitants in the cruelest possible manner.[114]
Study
of the Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide is widely corroborated by the international
genocide scholars. The
International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), consisting of
world's foremost experts on genocide,[citation
needed] unanimously passed a formal resolution
affirming the fact of the Armenian Genocide. According to IAGS, "Every
book on comparative genocide studies in the English language contains a
segment on the Armenian Genocide. Leading texts in the international law
of genocide such as
William Schabas's 'Genocide in International Law' cite the Armenian
Genocide as presursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on
crimes against humanity. Polish Jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined
the term
genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians
and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he
meant by genocide. The killings of Armenians is genocide as defined by
the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide. 126 leading scholars of the holocaust including
Elie Wiesel, and
Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June
2000 declaring the "inconstestable fact of the Armenian genocide" and
urging western democracies to acknowledge it. "The
Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the
Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC), have affirmed the historical
fact of the Armenian Genocide".[14]
British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, whose 1917 report remains a
critical primary source, changed his evaluation later in life,
concluding, "These…Armenian political aspirations had not been
legitimate....Their aspirations did not merely threaten to break up the
Turkish Empire; they could not be fulfilled without doing grave
injustice to the Turkish people itself".[115]
For Turkish historians, supporting the national republican myth is
essential to preserving Turkish national unity. The usual Turkish
argument is that the deportations were necessary because the Armenians
had allied themselves with the Russian army in wartime and that around
600,000 Armenians perished during the marches, largely due to isolated
massacres, disease, or malnourishment.[116]
"There was no genocide committed against the Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire before or during World War I".[117]
Genocide scholars
Roger Smith,
Eric Markusen, and
Robert Jay Lifton wrote in Professional Ethics and the Denial of
the Armenian Genocide (Holocaust and Genocide Studies): "Where
scholars deny genocide in the face of decisive evidence ... they
contribute to false consciousness that can have the most dire
reverbrations. Their message, in effect, is ... mass murder requires no
confrontation, no reflection, but should be ignored, glossed over".[118]
Some dissident historians and scholars in Turkey, including
Yektan Türkyilmaz, have been trying to reclaim the Armenians as part
of Ottoman and Turkish history and acknowledge the wrongs done to the
Armenians as a condition for reconciliation with them on the basis of
confidence in Turkish national unity.[119]
Defining
genocide
Hebrew University scholar
Yehuda Bauer suggests of the Armenian Genocide, "This is the closest
parallel to the
Holocaust".[120]
He nonetheless distinguishes several key differences between the
Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, particularly in regard to
motivation:
[T]he Nazis saw the Jews as
the central problem of world
history. Upon its solution depended the future of mankind.
Unless International Jewry was defeated, human civilization
would not survive. The attitude towards the Jews had in it
important elements of pseudo-religion. There was no such
motivation present in the Armenian case; Armenians were to be
annihilated for power-political reasons, and in Turkey only… The
differences between the holocaust and the Armenian massacres are
less important than the similarities—and even if the Armenian
case is not seen as a holocaust in the extreme form which it
took towards Jews, it is certainly the nearest thing to it.
[120]
Bauer has also suggested that the Armenian Genocide is best
understood, not as having begun in 1915, but rather as "an ongoing
genocide, from 1896, through 1908/9, through World War I and right up to
1923".[121]
Lucy Dawidowicz also alludes to these earlier massacres as at least
as significant as World War I era events:
In 1897, when the
Dreyfus Affair was tearing France apart,
Bernard Lazare, a French Jew active in Dreyfus's defense,
addressed a group of Jewish students in Paris on the subject of
anti-Semitism. "For the Christian peoples", he remarked, "an
Armenian solution" to their Jew-hatred was available. He was
referring to the Turkish massacres of Armenians, which in their
extent and horror most closely approximated the murder of
European Jews. But, Lazare went on, "their sensibilities cannot
allow them to envisage that". The once unthinkable "Armenian
solution" became, in our time, the achievable "Final Solution",
the Nazi code name for the annihilation of the European Jews.
[122]
Law professor
Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" in 1943, has stated
that he did so with the fate of the Armenians in mind, explaining that
"it happened so many times… First to the Armenians, then after the
Armenians,
Hitler took action".[123]
Several international organizations have conducted studies of the
events, each in turn determining that the term "genocide" aptly
describes "the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915–16".[124]
Among the organizations affirming this conclusion are the
International Center for Transitional Justice, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the United
Nations'
Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of
Minorities.[124][125]
One public figure who objected to the use of the term "genocide" was
Israeli Foreign Minister
Shimon Peres, who was subsequently rebutted by Dr Israel Charny,
executive director of the
Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem.[126]
In 2002, the
International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) was asked by
the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission to provide a report on
the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the controversy. An
independent legal counsel drafted memorandum for the ICTJ stated that in
the opinion of the independent legal counsel "legal scholars as well as
historians, politicians, journalists and other people would be justified
in continuing to so describe [the events as genocide]"[127]
and further that the Republic of Turkey was not liable for the event.[citation
needed]
In 2005, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed[128]
that scholarly evidence revealed the "Young Turk government of the
Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an
unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians
were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and
forced death marches". The IAGS also condemned Turkish attempts to deny
the factual and moral reality of the Armenian Genocide. In 2007, the
Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity] produced a letter[129]
signed by 53
Nobel Laureates re-affirming the Genocide Scholars' conclusion that
the 1915 killings of Armenians constituted genocide.[130][131]
While some consider denial to be a form of
hate speech or politically minded
historical revisionism, several western academics have expressed
doubts as to the genocidal character of the events.[132][133][134]
The most important counterpoint may be that of British scholar
Bernard Lewis. While he had once written of "the terrible holocaust
of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished",[135]
he later came to believe that the term "genocide" was distinctly
inaccurate, because the "tremendous massacres"[136]
were not "a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government".[137]
This opinion has been joined by
Guenter Lewy.[138]
Academic views within the Republic of Turkey are often at odds with
international consensus: this may partly stem from the fact that to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide in Turkey carries with it a risk of
criminal prosecution. Many Turkish intellectuals have been prosecuted
for characterizing the massacres as genocide.[139][140]
Bat Ye'or has suggested that "the genocide of the Armenians was a
jihad".[141]
Ye'or holds jihad and what she calls "dhimmitude"
to be among the "principles and values" that led to the Armenian
Genocide.[142]
This perspective is challenged by Fà'iz el-Ghusein, a
Bedouin
Arab witness of the Armenian persecution, whose 1918 treatise aimed "to
refute beforehand inventions and slanders against the Faith of Islam and
against Moslems generally… [W]hat the Armenians have suffered is to be
attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress… [I]t has been due to
their nationalist fanaticism and their jealousy of the Armenians, and to
these alone; the Faith of Islam is guiltless of their deeds".[143]:49
Arnold Toynbee writes that "the
Young Turks made
Pan-Islamism and Turkish Nationalism work together for their ends,
but the development of their policy shows the Islamic element receding
and the Nationalist gaining ground".[144]
Toynbee, and various other sources, report that many Armenians were
spared death by marrying into Turkish families or converting to Islam.
El-Ghusein points out that many converts were put to death, concerned
that Westerners would come to regard the "extermination of the
Armenians"[143]:49
as "a black stain on the history of Islam, which ages will not efface".[143]:51
In one instance, when an Islamic leader appealed to spare Armenian
converts to Islam, El-Ghusein quotes a government functionary as
responding that "politics have no religion", before sending the converts
to their deaths.[143]:49
Noam Chomsky has suggested that, rather than the Armenian Genocide
having been relegated to the periphery of public awareness, "more people
are aware of the Armenian genocide during the First World War than are
aware of the
Indonesian genocide in 1965".[145]
Taner Akçam's A Shameful Act has contextualized the Armenian
Genocide with the desperate Ottoman struggle at
Gallipoli, suggesting that panic of imminent destruction caused
Ottoman authorities to opt for deportation and extermination.[31]:125–8
On October 10, 2009 in Zurich, despite overwhelming opposition by
Armenians in Armenia and in the Diaspora, the Armenian government signed
the Armenia-Turkey Protocols, one of the provisions of which stipulates
the establishment of a research commission "to study the two country's
historical grievances".[146]
The agreement must still be ratified by the parliaments of both
countries in order to take effect.
Just a day before, on 9 October 2009 in London,
Geoffrey Robertson QC, eminent jurist, barrister and judge,
published a detailed legal opinion[147]
which comprehensively and methodically countered the British
Government's reasons for not formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide.
Republic of Turkey and the Genocide
According to Kemal Çiçek, the head of the Armenian Research Group at
the
Turkish Historical Society, in Turkey there is no official thesis on
the Armenian issue.[148]
The
Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of
Armenians during the "relocation" or "deportation"
cannot aptly be deemed "genocide", a position that has been supported
with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not
deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings
were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat[149]
as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various
characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs".[150][151][152]
Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or
anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide"
was not coined until 1943). Turkish World War I casualty figures are
often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.[153]
According to the retired ambassador of Turkey to Germany and Spain;
Volkan Vural, the Turkish state should apologize for what happened to
the Armenians during the deportations of 1915 and what happened to the
Greeks during
Istanbul Pogrom[154][155]
He also states that, "I think that, the Armenian issue can be solved by
politicians and not by historians. I don't believe that historical facts
about this issue is not revealed. The historical facts are already
known. The most important point here is that how this facts will be
interpreted and will affect the future".[154]
Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically
demonstrated "tolerance of Turkish people"[156]
itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military
document leverages 11th century history to cast doubt on the Armenian
Genocide: "It was the
Seljuq Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the
Turkish domination in 1071 from the
Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man
should".[156]
A
Der Spiegel article addressed this modern Turkish conception of
history thus:
Would you admit to the crimes of your grandfathers, if these
crimes didn't really happen?" asked ambassador Öymen. But the
problem lies precisely in this question, says
Hrant Dink, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Istanbul-based
Armenian weekly
Agos.
Turkey's bureaucratic elite have never really shed themselves of the
Ottoman tradition — in the perpetrators, they see their fathers,
whose honor they seek to defend. This tradition instills a sense of
identity in Turkish nationalists — both from the left and the right,
and it is passed on from generation to generation through the school
system. This tradition also requires an antipole against which it
could define itself. Since the times of the Ottoman Empire,
religious minorities have been pushed into this role.[157]
In 2007,
Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a circular that calls the government
institutions to use "1915 Events" (in Turkish, 1915 Olayları) phrase
instead of the "so-called Armenian genocide" (in Turkish, sözde Ermeni
soykırımı) phrase.[158]
Turkey has started an "Initiative to Resolve Armenian Allegations
Regarding 1915", by using archives in Turkey, Armenia and other
countries.[159]
Armenian president
Robert Kocharian rejected this offer by saying, "It is the
responsibility of governments to develop bilateral relations and we do
not have the right to delegate that responsibility to historians. That
is why we have proposed and propose again that, without pre-conditions,
we establish normal relations between our two countries".
Additionally, Turkish foreign minister of the time,
Abdullah Gül, invited the United States and other countries to
contribute to such a commission by appointing scholars to "investigate
this
tragedy and open ways for Turks and Armenians to come together".[161]
The Turkish government continues to protest against the formal
recognition of the genocide by other countries and to dispute that there
ever was a genocide.
Controversies
Efforts by the Turkish government and its agents to quash mention of
the genocide have resulted in numerous scholarly, diplomatic, political
and legal controversies. Prosecutors acting on their own initiative have
utilized
Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting "insulting
Turkishness" to silence a number of prominent Turkish intellectuals who
spoke of atrocities suffered by Armenians in the last days of the
Ottoman Empire (as of yet, most of these cases have been dismissed).[162]
These prosecutions have often been accompanied by hate campaigns and
threats, as was the case for
Hrant Dink, who was prosecuted three times for "denigrating
Turkishness",[163]
and murdered in 2007. Later, photographs of the assassin being honored
as a hero while in police custody, posing in front of the
Turkish flag with grinning policemen,[164]
gave the academic community still more cause for pause with regard to
engaging the Armenian issue.[165]
The leading lawyer behind the prosecutions,
Kemal Kerinçsiz, is accused of plotting to overthrow the government
as being a member of the alleged
Ergenekon network.
In 1973 Turkey recalled its ambassador to France to protest the
Genocide monument erected in
Marseilles "to the memory of the 1.5 million Armenian victims of the
genocide ordered by the Turkish rulers in 1915".[166]
In 1982, the
Israeli
Foreign Ministry attempted to prevent an international conference on
genocide, held in
Tel
Aviv, from including any mention of the Armenian Genocide. Several
reports suggested that Turkey had warned that
Turkish Jews might face "reprisals", if the conference permitted
Armenian participation.[167]
This charge was "categorically denied" by Turkey;[168]
the Israeli Foreign Ministry supported Turkey in this protestation that
there had been no threats against Jews, suggesting that its misgivings
as to the genocide conference were based on considerations "vital to the
Jewish nation".[169]
In the same year (1982), the
Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C. (ITS) was
established by a $3 million grant from the Turkish Government. Israel
Charny identifies ITS and some of its foremost deniers of the Armenian
genocide, such as
Stanford Shaw,
Heath W. Lowry, and
Justin McCarthy, as the Turkish government's principal agency in USA
for promoting research on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, but also denial
of the Armenian Genocide.[170]
A 1989 U.S. Senate proposal to recognize the Armenian Genocide stoked
the ire of Turkey. The proposal occurred in the context of the
publication of internal U.S. documents which laid out a State Department
official's eyewitness report that "thousands and thousands of Armenians,
mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered", in the
last days of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey responded by blocking
United States Navy visits to Turkey and suspending some US military
training facilities on Turkish territory. The American scholar who
assembled the US archive documents for publication went into hiding
after a series of anonymous threats.[171]
In 1990, psychologist
Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to
the United States, questioning his inclusion of references to the
Armenian Genocide in one of his books. The ambassador inadvertently
included a draft of the letter, presented by scholar
Heath W. Lowry, advising the ambassador on how to prevent mention of
the Armenian Genocide in scholarly works.[172]
In 1996, Lowry was named to a chair at
Princeton University that had been financed by the Turkish
government, sparking a debate on ethics in scholarship.[118][173]
In 1993,
Ragıp Zarakolu a Turkish human rights activist published the Turkish
translation of the book called History of the Genocide written by
Yves Ternon. The book was the first to be published in Turkey that
openly acknowledged the event in 1915 as
Genocide. Soon after its publication, he started to receive threats
and eventually in 1994 the publishing firm of Ragıp Zorakolu was the
target of a serious bomb attack.[174]
During a February 2005 interview with
Das Magazin, novelist
Orhan Pamuk made statements implicating Turkey in massacres against
Armenians and persecution of the Kurds, declaring: "Thirty thousand
Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but
me dares to talk about it". Subjected to a
hate campaign, he left Turkey, before returning in 2005 to defend
his right to
freedom of speech: "What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915
was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a
taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past".[175]
However, when asked about his speech on CNN TURK television, Pamuk
stated that "I did not estimate the number of killed Armenians, I did
not use the word genocide, I did say Armenians were killed, but I did
not say Armenians were killed by Turks".[176]
Lawyers of two Turkish ultranationalist professional associations led by
Kemal Kerinçsiz then brought criminal charges against Pamuk.[177]
However, on January 23, 2006 the charges of "insulting Turkishness" were
dropped (for formal reasons without finding it necessary to judge on the
essence of the case), a move welcomed by the EU. That the charges had
been brought at all was still a matter of contention for European
politicians.
According to some newly discovered documents that belonged to the
interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, more than 970,000 Ottoman
Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through
1916. These documents have been published in a recent book titled The
Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha (aka "Talat Pasha's Black Book")
written by the Turkish journalist
Murat Bardakçı. The book is a collection of documents and records
that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary
architect of the Armenian deportations. The documents were given to Mr.
Bardakçı by Mr Talat's widow, Hayriye Talat Bafralı, in 1983. According
to the documents, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire
before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. The number plunged to 284,157 two years
later in 1917.[178]
After the meeting with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Turkey's PM
announced that the Turkish Government might order the expulsion of all
illegal Armenian immigrants from Turkey. The statement came after recent
US House Committee and Swedish Parliament resolutions over the Armenian
Genocide affirmation. He repeated the statement in a BBC interview
immediately afterwards, declaring that there were 100,000 illegal
Armenian citizens living in Turkey and that:
If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back to
their country because they are not my citizens. I don't have to keep
them in my country.[179][180]
The answer to Erdoğan came from the Armenian Prime Minister; he said
that this kind of threat reminded Armenians of the Armenian Genocide and
neither did they improve relations between the two countries. The exact
number of illegal Armenians in Turkey is unknown, but the estimation is
only 12,000 – 13,000
[181] contrary to number used by the Turkish prime minister.
Armenia and
the Genocide
Armenia has been involved in a protracted ethnic-territorial
conflict with
Azerbaijan, a
Turkic state, since Azerbaijan became independent from the Soviet
Union in 1991. The conflict has featured several pogroms, massacres, and
waves of
ethnic cleansing, by both sides. Some foreign policy observers and
historians have suggested that Armenia and the Armenian diaspora have
sought to portray the modern conflict as a continuation of the Armenian
Genocide, in order to influence modern policy-making in the region.[80][182]:232–3
According to
Thomas Ambrosio, the Armenian Genocide furnishes "a reserve of
public sympathy and moral legitimacy that translates into significant
political influence… to elicit congressional support for anti-Azerbaijan
policies".[182]
The rhetoric leading up to the onset of the conflict, which unfolded
in the context of several pogroms of Armenians, was dominated by
references to the Armenian Genocide, including fears that it would be,
or was in the course of being, repeated.[183][184]
During the conflict, the Azeri and Armenian governments regularly
accused each other of genocidal intent, although these claims have been
treated skeptically by outside observers.[80]:232–3
The worldwide recognition of the Genocide is a core aspect of
Armenia's foreign policy and overarching grand strategy.[185]
Recognition of the Genocide
Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Resolution, April 24,
1998"Today we commemorate the anniversary of what has been
called the first genocide of the 20th century, and we salute the
memory of the Armenian victims of this crime against humanity".[12]
Armenian genocide monument in
Larnaca,
Cyprus .Cyprus was among the first countries to
recognise the genocide
As a response to the continuing denial of the Armenian Genocide by
the Turkish State, many activists among
Armenian Diaspora communities have pushed for formal recognition of
the Armenian genocide from various governments around the world. 20
countries and 42 U.S.
states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide
as a bona fide historical event. On March 4, 2010, a US
congressional panel narrowly voted that the incident was indeed
genocide; within minutes the Turkish government issued a statement
critical of "this resolution which accuses the Turkish nation of a crime
it has not committed". The
Armenian Assembly of America (AAA) and the single largest
organisation with the AAA the
Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) have as their main
lobbying agenda to press Congress and the President of the United States
for an increase of economic aid for Armenia (already the second largest
per capita after Israel) and the reduction economic and military
assistance for Turkey. The efforts also include reaffirmation of a
genocide by Ottoman Turkey in 1915.[186]
Despite his previous public recognition and support of Genocide
bills, as well as the election campaign promises to formally recognize
the Armenian Genocide,[187]
the U.S. President, Barack Obama, although repeating that his views on
the issue have not changed, has thus far abstained from using the term
'genocide'.[188]
On April 24 commemoration speeches President Obama has yet referred to
the Armenian Genocide only by the Armenian synonym Metz Eghern ("Mec
Eġeṙn").
Cultural loss
The premeditated destruction of objects of Armenian cultural,
religious, historical and communal heritage was yet another key purpose
of both the genocide itself and the post-genocidal campaign of denial.
Armenian churches and monasteries were destroyed or changed into
mosques, Armenian cemeteries flattened, and, in several cities (e.g.
Van), Armenian quarters were demolished.[189]
Aside from the deaths, Armenians lost their wealth and property
without compensation.[190]
Businesses and farms were lost, and all schools, churches, hospitals,
orphanages, monasteries, and graveyards became Turkish state property.[190]
In January 1916, the Ottoman Minister of Commerce and Agriculture issued
a decree ordering all financial institutions operating within the
empire's borders to turn over Armenian assets to the government.[191]
It is recorded that as much as 6 million Turkish gold pounds were seized
along with real property, cash, bank deposits, and jewelry.[191]
The assets were then funneled to European banks, including
Deutsche and
Dresdner banks.[191]
After the end of World War I, Genocide survivors tried to return and
reclaim their former homes and assets, but were driven out by the
Ankara Government.[190]
In 1914, the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople presented a list of
the Armenian holy sites under his supervision. The list contained 2,549
religious places of which 200 were monasteries while 1,600 were
churches. In 1974 UNESCO stated that after 1923, out of 913 Armenian
historical monuments left in Eastern Turkey, 464 have vanished
completely, 252 are in ruins, and 197 are in need of repair (in stable
conditions).[192][193]
Armenian Genocide reparations
The grounds of the International Law
The United Nations Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to
Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights and
International Humanitarian Law provide in part, that reparation may be
claimed individually and where appropriate collectively, by the direct
victims of violations of human rights and international humanitarian
law, the immediate family, dependants or other persons or groups of
persons closely connected with the direct victims.[194]
According to Henry Theriault, while current members of Turkish society
cannot be blamed morally for the destruction of Armenians, present-day
Republic of Turkey, as
successor state to the Ottoman Empire and as beneficiary of the
wealth and land expropriations brought forth through the genocide, is
responsible for reparations.[195]
Particularly important are Principles 9 and 12 that state, that civil
claims relating to reparations for gross violations of human rights and
international humanitarian law shall not be subject to statutes of
limitations (article 9), and that restitution shall be provided to
re-establish the situation that existed prior to the violations of human
rights or international humanitarian law. The restitution requires,
inter alia – return to one's place of residence and restoration of
property.[194][196]
Professor of International Law of
Geneva School of Diplomacy (J.D. – Harvard, Dr.phil. – Göttingen),
former Secretary of the
UN Human Rights Committee and former Chief of Petitions at the
Office of the
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr. Alfred de Zayas stated,
that because of the continuing character of the crime of genocide in
factual and legal terms, the remedy of restitution has not been
foreclosed. Thus the survivors of the genocide against the Armenians,
both individually and collectively, have standing to advance a claim for
restitution. Whenever possible complete restitution or restoration to
the previous condition should be granted. But where is not possible,
relevant compensation may be substituted as a remedy.
[197]
In an article published in
European Journal of International Law, Vahagn Avedian, rather
leaving the limitations of the UN Genocide Convention, emphasizes the
applicability of the then and now prevailing international laws, e.g.
the
Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, more specifically the
Martens Clause, pertaining to the protection of civilian population,
but also existing international laws on unlawful confiscation etc. Thus,
the actions of the Turkish governments (the Ottoman, the insurgent
nationalist movement as well as the succeeding republic), should be
viewed from the perspective of Internationally Wrongful Acts. Avedian
argues that:
the Republic not only failed to stop doing the wrongful acts of
its predecessor, but it also continued the very internationally
wrongful acts committed by the Young Turk government. Thus, the
insurgent National Movement, which later became the Republic,
made itself responsible for not only its own wrongful acts but
also those of its predecessor, including the act of genocide
committed in 1915–1916.
[198]
Sèvres Treaty
Although there are different opinions on the legitimacy of the Treaty
of Sèvres and its relativity to reparation claims, there are specialists
who[who?]
claim that some of its elements retain the force of law. In particular,
the fixing of the proper borders of an Armenian state was undertaken
pursuant to the treaty and determined by a binding arbitral award,
regardless of whether the treaty was ultimately ratified. The
committee process determining the arbitral award was agreed to by the
parties and, according to international law, the resulting
determination has legal force regardless of the ultimate fate of the
treaty.[195]
Lawsuits
In July 2004, after
California Legislature passed the
Armenian Genocide Insurance Act, descendants of Armenian Genocide
victims settled a case for about 2,400
life insurance policies from
New York Life written on Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire.[199]
Around 1918, the Turkish government attempted to recover for the people
it had killed with the argument that there are no identifiable heirs to
the policy holders. The settlement provided $20 million, of which $11
million was for heirs of the Genocide victims.[199]
Commemoration
Memorials
Over 135 memorials, spread across 25 countries, commemorate the
Armenian Genocide.[200]
In 1965, the 50th anniversary of the genocide, a
24-hour mass protest was initiated in
Yerevan
demanding recognition of the Armenian Genocide by Soviet authorities.
The memorial was completed two years later, at
Tsitsernakaberd above the
Hrazdan
gorge in Yerevan. The 44 metres (144 ft)
stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. Twelve slabs are
positioned in a circle, representing 12 lost provinces in present day
Turkey. At the center of the circle there is an
eternal flame. Each April 24, hundreds of thousands of people walk
to the genocide monument and lay flowers around the eternal flame.
Another memorial, in
Alfortville, France, near Paris, was bombed on May 3, 1984, by a
hit-team headed by
Grey Wolves member
Abdullah Çatlı and paid by the
Turkish intelligence agency (MİT).[201]
Representation in popular culture
The earliest example of the Armenian genocide on art was a medal
issued in
St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering.
It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still
raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been
commissioned to commemorate the event.[202]
Several eyewitness accounts of the events were published, notably
those of Swedish missionary
Alma Johansson and U.S. Ambassador
Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic
Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while
stationed in the Ottoman Empire. Years later, having returned to
Germany, Wegner was imprisoned for opposing Nazism,[203]
and his books were
burnt by the Nazis.[204]
Probably the best known literary work on the Armenian Genocide is
Franz Werfel's 1933
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It was a bestseller that became
particularly popular among the youth of the Jewish ghettos during the
Nazi era.[44]:302–4
Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 novel
Bluebeard features the Armenian Genocide as an underlying theme.
Other novels incorporating the Armenian Genocide include
Louis de Berniéres' Birds without Wings,
Edgar Hilsenrath's German-language
The Story of the Last Thought, and Polish
Stefan Żeromski's 1925
The Spring to Come. A story in Edward Saint-Ivan's 2006
anthology "The Black Knight's God" includes a fictional survivor of the
Armenian Genocide.
The first film about the Armenian Genocide appeared in 1919, a
Hollywood production titled
Ravished Armenia. It resonated with acclaimed director
Atom Egoyan, influencing his 2002
Ararat. There are also references in
Elia Kazan's
America, America and
Henri Verneuil's
Mayrig.
At the
Berlin Film Festival of 2007 Italian directors
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani presented another film about the events,
based on Antonia Arslan's book,
La Masseria Delle Allodole (The Farm of the Larks).[205]
Richard Kalinoski's play, Beast on the Moon, is about two
Armenian Genocide survivors.
The paintings of Armenian-American
Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of
Abstract Expressionism, are considered to have been informed by the
suffering and loss of the period.[206]
In 1915, at age 10, Gorky fled his native
Van and escaped to Russian-Armenia with his mother and three
sisters, only to have his mother die of starvation in Yerevan in 1919.
His two The Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a
photograph with his mother taken in Van.
In 1975, famous French-Armenian singer
Charles Aznavour recorded the song "Ils
sont tombés" ("They Fell"), dedicated to the memory of Armenian
Genocide victims.[207]
American composer and singer
Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his collaborations
with Armenian composer
Ara Gevorgyan. The song "Adana", named for the province of
a 1909 pogrom of the Armenian people, tells the story of the
Armenian Genocide. "Adana" has been translated into 17 languages and
recorded by singers around the world.[208]
The American band
System of a Down, composed of four descendants of Armenian Genocide
survivors, has promoted awareness of the Armenian Genocide through its
lyrics, including
P.L.U.C.K. and in concerts.[209]
In late 2003,
Diamanda Galás released the album Defixiones, Will and Testament:
Orders from the Dead, an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian,
Assyrian and Greek victims of the genocide in Turkey. "The performance
is an angry meditation on genocide and the politically cooperative
denial of it, in particular the Turkish and American denial of the
Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides from 1914 to 1923".[210]
Images from
the genocide
- Armenian Refugees
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An Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field
"within sight of help and safety at Aleppo".
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Armenian genocide survivors discovered in Salt and sent to
Jerusalem in April 1918.
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Near East relief a common sight among the Armenian refugees
in Syria
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Near East Relief 5,000 children from Karput en route on
donkey back and foot