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Armenian Genocide
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Armenian Genocide (In Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանութիւն ("Hayots Tseghaspanoutyoun"), Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı) — also known as the Armenian Holocaust, Great Calamity (Մեծ Եղեռն "Mets Yegern") or the Armenian Massacres of 1915 — refers to the systematic slaughter and fatal deportation of hundreds of thousands to over a million Armenians as well as the intentional and irreversible ruination of their economic and cultural life environments under the government of the Committee of Union and Progress during the First World War from 1915 to 1918 in the Ottoman Empire.
The Armenian Genocide is widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide of the twentieth century.[1][2] Under the pretext of disloyalty, the Ottoman government charged that Armenians were siding with the Russian Empire and stipulated that the deportations were born out of the necessity to preserve national security.
The general date given to the beginning of the genocide is April 24, 1915 when Turkish authorities ordered the arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals in the capital of Constantinople, most of whom were killed. Deportations subsequently began in May, when the Turkish military was utilized to uproot Armenians from their homes, and force them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to concentration camps established in what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender and widespread cases of rape and sexual abuse against women and children were commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is said to be the second-most studied case of genocide.[3]
The successor to the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey does not accept the deaths as the results of a systematic plan to destroy the Armenians.[4] In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty-one countries have officially recognized it as genocide as most Western scholars and historians accept this view.[2] The majority of the survivors and their descendants are what now comprise the bulk of the Armenian Diaspora.[5]
Prelude
Life under Ottoman rule
Following the fall of Constantinopolis in 1453 to the Turks and subsequent Ottoman growth in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had consolidated an area which stretched from Eastern Anatolia to Eastern Europe. Although much of the Armenian population in the empire was dispersed throughout the six vilayets under the millet system, there were Armenians living in other western regions such as Cilicia and urban cities including Constantinople and Smyrna where many rose to prominent positions in finance and business.
In accordance to the dhimmi system Armenians, as Christians, living under the Islamic laws which governed the Ottoman Empire were guaranteed limited freedoms such as the right to worship but were, in effect, treated as second-class citizens.
Christians and Jews were not considered equals to Muslims and were therefore subject to numerous legal restrictions and humiliating practices: testimony against Muslims by them was inadmissible in courts, they were forbidden to carry weapons and to ride atop horses, their children were subject to the Devshirmeh system, their houses could not overlook those of Muslims', the ringing of church bells or construction of houses of worship could not disturb Muslims along with numerous other circumscriptions.[6] Violating these statutes and thus the dhimmi agreement, would result in punishment carried out by Ottoman authorities ranging from paying fines to the execution of the offender. In the nineteenth century, frustration with these restrictions lead many of the Ottoman Empire's minorities to protest for greater freedom; however, Muslims authorities were reluctant to give them more power and refused to accede to their demands.[7]
The three major Christian European powers, Great Britain, France and Russia (known as the Great Powers), took issue with the plight of the minorities and increasingly pressured the Ottoman government (also known as the Sublime Porte) to extend equal rights to all its citizens. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government implemented the Tanzimat reforms to help improve the situation of minorities although they were largely ineffective. By the late 1870s, Greece and several countries of the Balkans, frustrated with the prevailing conditions, had, often with the help of the Powers, broken free of Ottoman rule. Armenians, for the most, remained dormant during these years, earning them the title of millet-i sadıka or the "loyal millet."[8]
Reform implementation, 1860s - 1880s
In the mid-1860s to early 1870s, Armenians began to ask for better treatment from the Ottoman government. After amassing the signatures of peasants from eastern Anatolia, the Armenian Communal Council had petitioned to the Ottoman government to redress the issues that the peasants complained about: "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."[9] The Ottoman government considered these grievances and promised to punish those responsible.
Following the violent suppression of Christians in the uprisings in Bosnia-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.[10] Under growing pressure, the government declared itself a constitutional monarchy (which was almost immediately dissolved) 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.[11]
After the conclusion of the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War, Armenians began to look more towards Tsarist Russia as the 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, that stipulated that Russian forces occupying the Armenian provinces would only withdraw with the full implementation of Ottoman reforms.[12] Great Britain was troubled with Russia holding on to so much Ottoman territory and forced it to enter into new negotiations with the convening of the Congress of Berlin on June 13, 1878. Armenians also entered into these negotiations and stated that they sought autonomy, not independence from the Ottoman Empire.[13] 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 to periodically inform the Great Powers of the progress of the reforms.
The Hamidian Massacres, 1894-1896
Since 1876, the Ottoman government at the time was 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 their claims 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 he wished."[14] As Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions (often as a result of over-taxation) in Armenian populated towns, such as the Sasun Resistance in 1894, these regiments were increasingly used to deal with the Armenians by way of oppression and massacre. Armenians successfully fought off the regiments and brought the excesses to the attention of the Great Powers in 1895 who subsequently condemned the Porte.[15]
The Powers forced Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to curtail the powers of the Hamidiye in October 1895 but 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 Turkish police units converged towards the rally and violently broke it up.[16] Soon, massacres by Turks and Kurds against Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian populated provinces of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Harput, Sivas, Trebizond 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 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians.[17]
Although Hamid was never directly implicated for ordering the massacres, he was suspected for their tacit approval and for not acting upon to end them.[18] Frustrated with European indifference to the massacres, Armenians from the Dashnaktsutiun political 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."[19] While the Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms, these never came into fruition due to conflicting political and economical interests.
Revolution and the Balkan Wars
The Young Turk Revolution, 1908
On July 24, 1908, Armenians hopes for equality in the empire brightened once more when a coup de etat staged by officers in the Turkish Third Army based in Salonika, removed Hamid II from power and restored the country back 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 persistent calls for European intervention.[20] In 1902, during a congress of the Young Turks held in Paris, the heads of the liberal wing, Sabahheddin Bey and Ahmed Riza, partially persuaded the nationalists to include in their objectives to ensure some rights to all the minorities of the empire.
Among the numerous factions of the Young Turks also included the political organization Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Originally a secret society made up of army officers based in Salonika, the CUP proliferated amongst military circles as more army mutinies took place throughout the empire. In 1908, elements of the Third Army and the Second Army Corps declared their opposition to the Sultan and threatened the Sultan to march on to 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.[21]
The Adana Massacre, 1909
Armenian hopes for equality were quickly dashed in 1909 when armed military units rose up against the CUP. The counterrevolution began on April 13, 1909 and was largely supported by Muslim theological students known as softas who wished to revert the country back to its Islamic governance. Riots and fighting soon broke out between the units and the CUP until the government was able to put down the uprisings and a court martial was established to try its leaders.
In late March, rumors had spread to the Armenian populated region of Adana on the Mediterranean Sea that a counterrevolution had succeeded in pushing the CUP out.[22] Seizing upon this notion, many Muslims who had opposed the overthrow of the Sultan in 1908 struck out against Adana's Armenian population, who had supported the revolution. Turks in Adana resented the Armenians since they were poor and the Armenians "were the richest and most prosperous class in the region. In Adana, Armenians had attained a high standard of living. In every field, they were ahead of the Turks."[23] They further resented the fact that Armenians were being given broader rights and took advantage of the revolution by massacring Armenians in the towns and cities of the provinces. Mobs armed with sticks, clubs and pistols roved around Adana killing Armenians and many Turkish soldiers took their side or did not help quell to the violence.[24]
In the end, between 15,000 to 20,000 Armenians had been killed in the course of what was called the "Adana Holocaust."[25] Many Armenians who had supported the Young Turk Revolution were thus disillusioned by the level violence that had been exacted against them and felt betrayed by the regime.[26]
The Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917
- See also: Caucasus Campaign
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers.
Assuming the Caucasus front would have a distracting effect on Russia by diverting Russian forces from the Polish and Galician, the war minister Enver Pasha wanted to encircle the Russian Caucasus Army between Sarikamis and Ardahan[27]. He had great chances of success if all the three wings of the Third Army had reached their objectives on time. The 10th army corps, during its march from Olti to Sarikamish, suffered a delay of 24 hours in the Barduz Pass, due to the "4th battalion of the Armenian volunteers"[28]. This delay enabled the "Russian Caucasus Army" to concentrate a sufficient force around Sarikamish[28]. His forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and many more of his men froze to death in the retreat.
Returning to Istanbul, Enver largely blamed the Armenians living in the region for actively siding with the Russians.[29]
Labor battalions, February 25
- Further information: Labour battalions
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 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 too would ultimately be executed.[30]
Transferring Armenian conscripts from active field (armed) to passive logistic section (non-armed) was an important aspect of the complex and still debated issue regarding the Ottoman Armenian community. Based on a chipper reported in "The Memoirs of Naim Bey", Armenian authors say that the extermination of the Armenians in these battalions was part of a premeditated strategy on behalf of the Committee of Union and Progress, where many of these Armenian recruits were executed by Ottoman squads known as chetes.[31]
Van Resistance, April 20
- Further information: Van Resistance
On April 19, 1915, Jevdet demanded that the city of Van furnish him 4,000 soldiers immediately under the pretexts of conscription. However, it was clear that his goals were to massacre the able bodied men of Van so as there would be no defenders, as he had done in the villages under the pretexts of arms searches, which had turned into massacres. [32] The Armenians offered five hundred soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest to buy time, however, Djevdet accused Armenians of "rebellion," and spoke of 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."
On April 20, 1915, the armed conflict of the Van Resistance began as an Armenian women who wanted to enter the city, and two Armenian men that came to help which were later shot dead by Ottoman Army. The Armenian defenders protecting 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 able bodied riflemen who were supplied with 300 rifles and 1,000 pistols and antique weapons. The conflicted lasted until the General Yudenich came to rescue them [33].
Rounding of Armenian notables, April 24
- Further information: Armenian notables deported from the Ottoman capital in 1915
By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the country'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 Istanbul. [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]."[34]
Naval operations in the Dardanelles Campaign aiming to open the straits [of the Dardanelles] began with initial scouting on February 19, 1915, the first attack with the Anglo-French task force, including the British battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth, bombarded opening the straits [of the Dardanelles]. The biggest assault to Istanbul the "Battle of Gallipoli", April 25, 1915, took place to capture the Ottoman capital and provide a secure sea route for military and agricultural trade with the Russians. On the night of April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government rounded up and imprisoned an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals.[35]
Legislation, May 29
- Further information: Tehcir Law
In May 1915, Mehmed Talat 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 Talat Pasha called "the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the country." However, Talat 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 ("Tehcir Law"), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security.[36] The "Tehcir 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.[37]
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 [38]
Process and camps of deportation
- See also: Armenian casualties of deportations
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.[39][40][41] 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."[42]
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.[43] By August 1915, The New York Times reported 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."[44]
Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves.[43] 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.[43]
It is believed that 25 major concentration camps existed, under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hands of Talat Pasha.[45] The majority of the camps were situated near modern Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, and some were only temporary transit camps.[45] Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for mass graves; these sites were vacated by Fall 1915.[45] Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.[45]
Though nearly all the camps, including the primary sites, were open air, the remainder of the mass killing in minor camps was not limited to direct killings, but also to mass burning,[46] poisoning[47] and drowning.[48]
The Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa)
While there was an official 'special organization' founded in December 1911 by the Ottoman government, a second organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was founded by the lttihad ve Terraki.[50] This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit.[51]
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.[52] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison.[citation needed] 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.[53] Vehib, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human species.” [54]
Foreign corroboration and reaction
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 fifth column."[55] 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."[56]
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.[57] The organization was championed by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau's eyewitness accounts of the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized much support for ACRNE.[58]
The U.S. mission in the Ottoman Empire
The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire, including locations in Edirne, Elazığ, Samsun, İzmir, Trabzon, Van, Constantinople, and another in the Syrian town of Aleppo. The United States was officially a neutral party until it joined the Allies in 1917. As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many consular officials reported back to the ambassador on what they were witnessing. One such report came in September 1915 from the American consul in Kharput, Leslie Davis, who described his discovery of the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into several ravines near Lake Göeljuk, later referring to it as the "slaughterhouse province".[59]
![The United States contributed a significant amount of aid to the Armenians during the Armenian Genocide. Shown here is a poster for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East vowing that "they [the Armenians] "shall not perish."](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:They_Shall_Not_Perish.png)
Similar reports began to reach Morgenthau from Aleppo and Van, prompting him to raise the issue with Talaat and Enver in person. As he quoted to them the testimonies of the consulate officials, both justified the deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that the complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had overtaken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians. In his memoirs, Morgenthau later suggested that, "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…"[60]
In addition to the consulates, there were also several Protestant missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions, including Van and Kharput. Many missionaries vividly described the brutal methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority.[61]
The events were reported daily in newspapers and literary journals around the world.[62] Many Americans spoke out against the Genocide, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, rabbi Stephen Wise, William Jennings Bryan, and Alice Stone Blackwell. The American Near East Relief Committee helped donate over $110 million to the Armenians.[63] In the United States and the United Kingdom, children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and to "remember the starving Armenians".[64]
Allied forces in the Middle East
On the Middle Eastern front, the British military engaged Ottoman forces in southern Syria and Mesopotamia. British diplomat Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account of 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…[65]
Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts, British politician Viscount Bryce and historian Arnold J. 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. In 1916, they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. Although the book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers, Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification prior to its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated of the tome, "…the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question."[66] Other professors, including Herbert Fisher of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, affirmed the same conclusion.[67]
Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative holocaust" and noted that "the clearance of race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be… There is no reason to 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."[68]
The 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.
Among the most famous persons to document the massacres was German military medic Armin T. Wegner. Wegner defied state censorship in taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians being deported and subsequently starving in northern Syrian camps.[69]
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."[70]
Germany's diplomatic mission was led by Ambassador Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (and later Count Paul Wolff Metternich). Like Morgenthau, von Wangenheim received many disturbing messages from consul officials around the Ottoman Empire. 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.[71] In June 1915, von Wangenheim sent a cable to Berlin reporting that Talat had admitted 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."[72]
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."[73]
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".[74] 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.[75]
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."[76] 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 Germany's chancellor in Berlin. His final report noted that fewer than 100,000 Armenians were left alive in the Ottoman Empire; the rest had been exterminated (German: ausgerottet).[77] Scheubner-Richter also detailed the methods of the Ottoman government, noting its use of the Special Organization and other bureaucratized instruments of genocide.
Some Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians, as the German naval attaché in Constantinople said to U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau;
"I have lived in Turkey the larger part of my life," he told me, "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."[78]
In a genocide conference 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.[79]
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 in the areas they advanced through.[80] In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of Erzerum led the Russians to retaliate against the Ottoman IIIrd Army whom they held responsible for the massacres, destroying it in its entirety.[81]
Tribunals
Domestic courts-martial
Domestic courts-martial were designed by Sultan Mehmed VI to punish the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in Turkish:"Ittihat Terakki" for the Empire's ill-conceived involvement in 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 established 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 Talat Pasha and Ismail Enver, generally refers to the prominent triumvirate who had fled the Empire anticipating the Sultan's wrath for the Ottoman Empire's involvement in World War I. At the trials in Istanbul in 1919 Three Pashas of those responsible for the genocide were sentenced to death in absentia. The courts-martial officially disbanded the CUP, which had actively ruled the Ottoman Empire for ten years. All the assets of the organization were transferred to the treasury, and the assets of those found guilty were moved to "teceddüt firkasi". According to verdicts handed down by the court, all members except for the Three Pashas were transferred to jails in Bekiraga.
International trials
Following the Armistice of Mudros the preliminary Peace Conference in Paris established "The Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions" in January 1919, which was chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Lansing. Following 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) recognized the Democratic Republic of Armenia and 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".[3] 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."
The Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were transfered to Malta, where they were held for some three years, while searches were made of archives in Istanbul, London, Paris and Washington to investigate their actions.[82] The Inter-allied tribunal attempt demanded by the Treaty of Sèvres never solidified.
Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian
- See also: Operation Nemesis
The "Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian" was the sensationalized trial of the assassination of former Grand Vizier Talat Pasha by Soghomon Tehlirian under Operation Nemesis. The event happened in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin, Germany in broad daylight and in the presence of many witnesses on March 15, 1921. "Operation Nemesis" was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation codename for the covert operation in the 1920s to assassinate the masterminds of the Armenian Genocide. It is named after the Greek goddess of divine retribution, Nemesis.
The trial 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". He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing).
Armenian deaths, 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 perished between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 300,000 (per the modern Turkish state) to 1,500,000 (per modern Armenia,[83] Argentina,[84] 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 1915-1916 alone.[85]
Influence of the Armenian Genocide on Adolf Hitler
The Armenian Genocide is often speculated to have influenced Adolf Hitler, owing to his various references to the Ottoman killings of Armenians.[86] The extent of Hitler's knowledge of the Armenian Genocide is unclear, though he did refer to their destruction several times.[87] The most notable quote attributed to Hitler on the Armenians is excerpted from an August 1939 military conference, prior to the invasion of Poland:
| “ | I have issued the command — and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?[88] | ” |
There are numerous accounts of Hitler speaking in regard to the Armenians, with at least two similar versions of the 1939 speech coming from the German High Command archives. In 1931, for example, two years prior to his ascension as Germany's leader, Hitler noted in an interview that "everywhere people are awaiting a new world order. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy… remember the extermination of the Armenians."[89] In 1943, during the height of his attempts to exterminate the Jews in Europe, Hitler demanded of Hungarian regent Admiral Miklós Horthy that he deport the Jews from the country: "Nations which did not get rid of the Jews perished. One of the most famous examples of this was the downfall of a people who were so proud — the Persians, who now lead a pitiful existence as Armenians."[90]
ICTJ View
In 2002, the International Center for Transitional Justice was asked by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission to provide a report on the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the controversy. The ICTJ ruled that the aghed was a genocide but that Turkey was not liable for the event. The ICTJ report can be viewed at the Groong website. [9]
Academic views
University of Minnesota Associate Professor Eric D. Weitz has recently placed the Armenian Genocide in the broader context of several twentieth-century genocides in Europe and Asia.[91] Hebrew University scholar Yehuda Bauer suggests of the Armenian Genocide, "This is the closest parallel to the Holocaust."[92] 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.[93]
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."[94] Lucy Dawidowicz also alludes to these earlier massacres as at least as significant as WWI 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.
—Lucy Dawidowicz, [95]
Law professor Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" in 1943, has stated that he did so "because it happened so many times… First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action."[96] 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 1915-1916."[97] Among the organizations affirming this conclusion are the International Center for Transitional Justice, the International Association of Genocide Scholars,[98] and the United Nations' Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.[99][97] In 2007, The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity produced a letter signed by 53 Nobel Laureates re-affirming the Genocide Scholars' conclusion that the 1915 killings of Armenians constituted genocide.[100][101]
While some consider denial to be a form of hate speech or politically-minded historical revisionism,[10] a small minority of western academics in the field of Ottoman history have expressed doubts as to the genocidal character of the events.[102][103][104] While these dissenting opinions are far more common among residents of modern Turkey, some academics have established reputations for having adopted the viewpoint of the Turkish state. Justin A. McCarthy of the University of Louisville, for instance, has regularly contended that the events do not constitute genocide; in 1998, the government of Turkey awarded him with the Order of Merit for his efforts.[105]
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",[106] he later came to believe that the term "genocide" was distinctly inaccurate, because the "tremendous massacres"[107] were not "a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government."[108] This opinion has been joined by Guenter Lewy.[109]
Academic opinions within the Republic of Turkey are often at odds with international consensus, this may stem from the fact that to acknowledge the Armenian genocide in Turkey carries with it a risk of prosecution by the State. Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faced harassment and criminal prosecution for stating that "a million Armenians were killed in these lands".[110][111]
Similarly, Hrant Dink, the ethnic Armenian chief editor of the Agos newspaper in Turkey, was prosecuted by the Turkish state three times for "denigrating Turkishness", for his having criticized the Turkish state's denial of the Armenian Genocide.[112] In 2007, he was gunned down by a Turkish nationalist.[113] Leaked photographs of the assassin apparently being revered as a national hero while in police custody, posing in front of the Turkish flag with grinning policemen,[114] gave the academic community still more pause in regard to engaging the Armenian issue.[115]
Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye'or has suggested, "The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad."[116] Ye'or contends that the Islamic concepts of dhimmitude and jihad were among the "principles and values" that led to the Armenian Genocide.[117] This perspective is challenged by Fà'iz el-Ghusein, a Bedouin Arab witness of the Armenian persecution, whose 1918 treatise on the events 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, who deal with the empire as they please; it 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."[118]
The Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide
The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of Armenians during the "relocation" or "deportation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide." This point has been contended 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 as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."[119][120][121] 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.[122] The website of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey currently features a section entitled Archive Documents about the Atrocities and Genocide Inflicted upon Turks by Armenians, suggesting that the Turks of Anatolia experienced a genocide at the hands of the Armenians.
The website of the Turkish General Staff also offers many of its own publications intended to bolster denial of the Armenian Genocide. One such example defines the Armenians as "an incapable, parasite and greedy nation that can live only at another nation's expense."[123]
Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically-demonstrated "tolerance of Turkish people"[124] itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military document leverages 11th century history to disprove the Armenian Genocide: "It was the Seljuk 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."[124] 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 instils 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.[125]
Public prosecutors have utilized Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting "insulting Turkishness" to silence some Turkish intellectuals who spoke of atrocities endured by Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.[126] Turkish state officials say that no one is currently incarcerated for expressing their ideas, and that the law may soon be amended.[127] The modern Turkish government continues to protest the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries.
Open University of Israel scholar Yair Auron, in his The Banality of Denial, has addressed the various means employed by the Turkish government to obscure the reality of the Armenian Genocide:
Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, denial of this genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has continued from 1915 to present… Out of political expediency, other governments, including that of the United States and Israel, have aided and abetted Turkey in its rewriting of history.
In the 1960s, efforts were made to influence journalists, teachers, and public officials by telling "the other side of the story." Foreign scholars were encouraged to revise the record of the Genocide, presenting an account largely blaming the Armenians or, in another version, wartime conditions… The Turkish government has also attempted to exclude any mention of the Genocide in textbooks and to prevent its inclusion in Holocaust and human rights curricula.
The Turkish government has attempted to disrupt academic conferences and public discussions of the genocide, notably a conference in Tel Aviv in 1982, with demands backed up with threats to the safety of Jews in Turkey…
Since the 1980s, the Turkish government has supported the establishment of "institutes" affiliated with respected universities, whose apparent purpose is to further research on Turkish history and culture, but which also tend to act in ways that further denial. The volume and extent