Although the Islam-based wing currently governing the country—with Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) at its head—has gained popularity by casting itself as a more benign alternative to the authoritarian and militarist tendencies of the secular Kemalist leadership, in its actions and even its views, it has increasingly come to resemble its adversary: initiating repressive measures against the opposition, upholding and in some cases expanding limitations on free speech and freedom of the press (imprisoning no fewer than seventy-six journalists), and continuing to restrict the use of the Kurdish language and limit the extent of Kurdish political representation in the country. Like the secular Kemalists before it, the Erdogan government also disapproves of anyone using the term “genocide” to describe the widespread slaughter of Armenians that occurred in 1915 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor to the modern Turkish state.
-------
The Young Turks' Crime
Against Humanity
The Armenian Genocide and
Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire.
By Taner Akçam.
Princeton. 483 pp. $39.50
Buy this book
About the Author
Holly Case
Holly Case teaches history
at Cornell University and is the author of Between States: The Transylvanian
Question and...
Also by the Author
Safety Net: On Thomas
Bernhard and Siegfried Unseld (Books & Arts, Biography, Fiction, Letters,
Publishing Industry)
In his writing and life,
Thomas Bernhard led a charge in the opposite direction. His publisher always
broke his fall.
Holly Case
Blind Spot: On Christa
Wolf (Fiction, History, Books and the Arts)
A postwar German
novelist’s complicated legacy.
Holly
Case
----------
What exactly happened to the Armenians, and why are so
many Turks still sensitive about the issue? According to a number of Turkish
scholars, including Türkkaya Ataöv, a professor emeritus at the University of
Ankara, Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were armed and fighting actively
in World War I alongside the empire’s enemies in the Entente, and so posed a
threat to a state that was already on the defensive. Their fate cannot count as
genocide because it was decided by a “civil war.” In talks he has given on
college campuses and to audiences around the world, Ataöv generally does not offer
any figures to establish how many Armenians lost their lives in this “civil
war,” except to say that of the 235 who were removed from Istanbul, just three
of them died, one of natural causes and two at the hands of thugs who were
later tried and executed for their crime. Ataöv’s is an especially extreme
version of denialism. Other Turkish scholars have conceded that the Armenians
suffered great losses, reaching even into the hundreds of thousands, though
many argue that the massacres were the work of bandits or marauding Kurds
rather than Ottoman Turkish officials operating under orders from the
government.
Internationally, a growing number of scholars agree that
the fate of the empire’s Armenians was not determined by civil war but instead
amounted to a genocide. Just after the start of World War I, the Ottomans
suffered a catastrophic defeat by the Russians in the battle of Sarikamis, with
some Armenians fighting alongside the Russians. Afterward, most of the
Armenians living in the eastern borderlands of the Ottoman Empire were rounded
up, placed in camps, and deported to various locations throughout Anatolia and
the Levant—men, women and children alike who in the course of these
deportations suffered expropriation, starvation, rape, abduction and massacre
at the hands of groups with ties to the Ottoman army and government. In the
accounts by these scholars, the number of Armenian dead generally ranges from
about 1 million to 1.5 million.
There are many apparent paradoxes in the history of what
happened in 1915, and they nourish the ongoing ambivalence about whether the
Turkish state’s treatment of the Armenians was criminal. For instance, several
of the perpetrators were tried by Ottoman authorities over the period from 1919
to 1922, and some were even executed. Around the same time, the Great Powers
(primarily Britain) initiated a separate investigation, but the suspects,
detained on the island of Malta, were not prosecuted and were ultimately
allowed to go free. There were also Armenian nationalists who, as World War I
came to an end, downplayed the number of dead and emphasized Armenian military
engagement on the side of the Entente (including Russia). They sought to
position themselves to claim that enough Armenians had survived and done their
bit in the war to merit being granted an independent, or at least autonomous,
Armenian state.
Turkish scholars remain largely intransigent on the
events of 1915 and the genocide question, but the desire of the Armenians for
their own state (which would have included parts of what is now northeastern
Turkey) is likely not the primary reason: most Armenians no longer harbor such
aspirations, and most Turks don’t fear Armenia’s expansion at the expense of
Turkey. Instead, what very likely underpins some Turkish denialism is a
different issue related to the fate of the Armenians during World War I: an
ongoing anxiety about demographics and national security in a state that has
been engaged in a decades-long conflict with its Muslim Kurdish minority,
during which more than 40,000 people (mostly Kurds) have been killed.
International scholars who write about the Armenian genocide don’t foreground
the Kurdish issue because it is not their primary concern, while in the work of
many Turkish scholars, if the fate of the Armenians is mentioned at all in
connection with the Kurdish minority, it is to blame the massacres on the Kurds.
In any case, neither of Turkey’s two right wings has thus far sought to
neutralize the underlying anxiety about demographics by addressing its late
Ottoman origins.
Many had hoped the situation would be otherwise in a
Turkey governed by Erdogan’s AKP, and it seems that Taner Akçam, author of The
Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity and one of the few Turks who speaks openly
about the Armenian genocide, still does. Some observers reasoned in the wake of
the AKP’s meteoric rise during the first decade of this century that if Erdogan
could shift the focus of Turkish nationalism away from the secular Kemalist
legacy and toward an emphasis on Turkey’s Islamic heritage, the state might
also make peace with its Muslim Kurds. But Akçam’s optimism regarding current
trends in Turkish politics is likely based less on embracing Islam and more on
the belief that secularism offers no guarantee that the more shameful aspects
of the Turkish past will not be repeated. He has vehemently attacked those who
suggest that the secularists represent the left in Turkey—including his own
brother, Cahit Akçam, who spent eight years in prison for his left-wing
activism in the 1980s. After Erdogan’s party won a 2010 referendum with nearly
60 percent of the vote, Cahit declared in the socialist daily BirGün (One Day)
that the results were a clear indicator that the other 40 percent of the
electorate was leftist. In a heated exchange conducted via the Turkish press,
Taner argued that not everyone opposed to the AKP was on the left, and that
“leftists” were not above genocide, citing the example of Serbia’s Slobodan
Miloševic. The same could happen in Turkey, in his view. The original Turkish
edition of Akçam’s book, published in 2008 under the title The Armenian
Question Is Solved: Policies Toward the Armenians During the War Years
According to Ottoman Documents, was dedicated to the late Hrant Dink, a
Turkish-Armenian journalist and editor of the weekly newspaper Agos. In 2005,
Dink was charged with “denigrating Turkishness” for speaking openly about the
“Armenian genocide” and tried under Article 301, a law that had been added to
the Turkish penal code that year. In January 2007, he was assassinated by a
young Turkish nationalist.
Though it remains unclear who orchestrated Dink’s murder,
in the preface to the English edition of his new book, Akçam leaves little
doubt about whom he holds responsible for his friend’s death. Dink’s name,
along with Akçam’s own and the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s, was found on a “hit
list” allegedly compiled by “the ultranationalist terror organization” known as
Ergenekon. The list was seized in a police raid conducted by the Erdogan
government in February 2009. A few hundred suspected members of
Ergenekon—mostly military officers of the Kemalist old guard—are now on trial,
a development that some have characterized as the AKP’s attempt to crack down
on its secular-nationalist opposition in the Turkish military. Akçam has openly
applauded the move, however: he was among the 300 intellectuals to sign a
declaration of support for the investigation, which praised the government for
catching “one of the arms of the octopus”—meaning the Turkish shadow state—and
urged it to go after “the rest of the arms and the body” in the interest of “our
democracy and future.”
Akçam seems to hope that the Erdogan government’s
investigative zeal can prompt a re-evaluation of the Turkish position on the
Armenian genocide. “With the disappearance of the Armenian Genocide and other
mass violence from public discourse,” he writes, “a prevailing mind-set that
makes future mass crimes possible has also been granted tacit support. Today,
Turkish society is confronting the source of all its democracy and human rights
issues.... Everything—institutions, mentalities, belief systems, creeds,
culture, and even communication—is open to question. The time has come—in fact,
it is passing—for the social sciences to contribute to the development of
democracy and civic culture in Turkey.” Buried in a footnote describing the
“indignities” that scholars researching the genocide have endured when seeking
permission to view archival material is Akçam’s assertion that such indignities
are now a thing of the past. This spirit of optimism pervades his book, down to
its final sentence, which notes the “surge of democratization” that makes
recognition of the truth about Turkey’s history more likely. Perhaps by
asserting this, Akçam hopes to make it so.
* * *
Although Turkey’s political spectrum is dominated by two
right wings, there are still leftists in Turkey and their roots run fairly
deep. As a young adult, Akçam himself was an avid Marxist imprisoned several
times for his political activism, which ultimately resulted in a nine-year
sentence for publishing on the Kurdish issue. He escaped from prison in 1977,
making his way to Germany. Since 2000, he has lived in the United States and
now teaches at Clark University, where he holds an endowed professorship in
Armenian genocide studies. In an interview with this author in November 2010,
Akçam said that although German scholars considered him bold for deciding to
work on the persecution of the Armenians during World War I, he was caught off
guard by the reaction of other progressive Turkish intellectuals to his work.
Of all the issues that needed to be addressed in Turkey, they wondered,
including the Kurdish question, why single out something that happened to a
now-insignificant minority, and so long ago? But by the late 1980s, Akçam was
growing increasingly disenchanted with the pro-Kurdish left in Turkey. When the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—which has led an armed struggle against the
Turkish state’s repression of the Kurds—assassinated several intellectuals in
Europe, some from its own ranks, Akçam says he began to perceive Stalinist
tendencies in the movement’s rejection of democracy and human rights. The
alienation was mutual: “The main experience that I had was shock from my end,
and isolation and disinterest from my Turkish friends,” Akçam recalls.
Yet the disinterest of some soon became the rage of many.
Following the publication in 2006 of his book A Shameful Act: The Armenian
Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Akçam received threats
from Turkish nationalist groups and was subjected to various other forms of
official and unofficial harassment and humiliation. “For many Turkish
intellectuals,” he wrote in 2007, just months after Hrant Dink’s assassination,
“freedom of speech has become a struggle in North America as well as in our
native country. What is happening to me now could happen to any scholar who
dissents from the official state version of history.”
Perhaps because of his experience, Akçam has remained as
devoted to answering the question of why Turks don’t want to hear about the
genocide as he is to describing the horrific events of 1915. Ironically, when
he was doing his doctoral research in the 1990s, it was illegal in Turkey to
write about the Kurdish question, but legal to use the word “genocide” to
describe what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War
I. That changed around a decade later with Article 301. “On the one hand, there
is lack of interest and indifference and, on the other hand, the response is
one of aggression and hostility,” Akçam wrote in 2004. “The logic used when
answering allegations of ‘genocide,’ ‘massacre’ and ‘expulsion’ is invariably
exculpatory. We can summarize this logic as, ‘Nothing has happened, but the
others are guilty.’”
To explain the Turks’ sensitivity, Akçam has drawn on the
work of the German-Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias. In Studien über die
Deutschen (1989), Elias set out to discover which elements of the “German
national character” that emerged in the course of the nation’s history had made
Nazism possible. His analysis emphasized as especially formative the German
experience of humiliation and defeat during World War I. The story Akçam tells
is similarly one of the “shocks and traumas,” “violations of honor” and
“humiliations” endured by the Ottoman state as it was repeatedly battered by
severe losses of territory and prestige: in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, after
which hundreds of thousands of destitute Muslim refugees fled into Anatolia; in
the negotiations for the economic and political partition of Anatolia by the
Great Powers in 1914; and finally, following the outbreak of World War I, with
the disastrous battle of Sarikamis against czarist Russia, during which tens of
thousands of Ottoman soldiers froze to death. The response of the secular Young
Turk regime was to deport 1.2 million Armenians away from the areas where they
were most densely settled, near the Russian border, to the Anatolian interior
and to present-day Syria and Iraq. In the course of the deportations, most were
killed or died of starvation or disease. Of those who survived, most of whom
were children, the majority were forcibly assimilated into Muslim households
and effectively ceased to be Armenians.
Akçam does not seek a “smoking gun” here, or definitive
proof of the genocide laid bare in a single document, but instead bases his
argument on the hundreds of documents of different types that offer small
fragments of this larger story. These include proceedings of the same postwar
military tribunals that had set out to try and punish several individuals who
had taken part in the genocide; press coverage of the trials; Ottoman interior
ministry records; documents from the Armenian patriarchate in Jerusalem; and
Ottoman parliamentary proceedings and memoirs. Drawing on this combination of
sources, Akçam fashions a scatterplot that can compensate for the gaping holes
in the historical record.
Some of these holes are the result of the evasive tactics
employed by the Young Turk leadership at the time to cover its trail. Akçam
refers to the regime’s “dual-track mechanism” of issuing orders for the
deportation of Armenians through official channels and ordering massacres
through unwritten or more secretive channels, such as private telegraph lines,
telegrams to be destroyed after reading, and special emissaries sent to the
provincial authorities to relay their instructions in person. Another reason
for the gaps in the documentary record is the Turkish Republic’s lassitude with
regard to preserving historical documents. Throughout the interwar period and
up through the late 1980s, the state turned over hundreds of years’ worth of
archival material to a paper and cellulose manufacturer to be recycled.
Starting in the 1990s, the General Directorate of the
Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive published a number of volumes of Ottoman
documents relating to the “Armenian question” that were cast as definitive. Not
surprisingly, the compilations reinforced the Turkish state’s official version
of what happened to the Armenians during World War I. Still, Akçam argues, the
belief that Ottoman documents are either nonexistent, unavailable or misleading
is “wrongheaded”: despite the elisions and politicized publications, there is
enough material to disprove the official version of the events of 1915.
* * *
What the record shows is a government intent on
preserving the Ottoman state at any price. Akçam’s analysis does not challenge
the common assertion that the policy of the Young Turk government regarding the
Armenians was informed primarily by perceived threats to national security, but
he does point out that those threats were not real. While there were certainly
armed gangs of deserters who engaged in banditry in the first months of the
war, not all of them were Armenians (some were Muslims), and the majority of
Armenians presented no threat to the state. Nonetheless, the Ottoman military
leadership became convinced of the necessity to “punish” and “mercilessly
extirpate, down to the last man, all traitors.”
During the early months of the war, it was not primarily
Armenians but rather Greeks who were seen as treacherous and targeted for
deportation or even massacre. The persecution of the country’s Greek
communities came to an end only in November 1914, when Greek Prime Minister
Eleftherios Venizelos threatened reciprocal action against the Turks in Greece.
For Akçam, the persecution of the Greeks in Turkey is an important component of
the history of the Armenian genocide, because it relates to a key feature of
the Young Turks’ program: their desire to create an ethnically homogeneous
Turkish state.
Akçam shows how the Young Turk leadership developed and
implemented a demographic policy stating that no more than 5 to 10 percent of
the population in a given area could be non-Turkish. To that end, it took
censuses and requested frequent updates on population ratios from provincial
authorities. When it learned, following the first wave of deportations, that
some areas still had Armenian populations constituting much more than 5 to 10
percent, it initiated a second wave of deportations and massacres until the
numbers matched. “The language of numbers is very clear,” Akçam concludes. “The
mathematical reduction of [the Armenians’] numbers by systematic massacre was
monitored through a constant stream of official requests for the latest
population statistics.”
Another element of the demographic policy was
accommodating Muslim refugees who had fled to the country en masse after the
Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and during the early months of World War I. They too
were part of the government’s calculus, especially regarding the status of
property and other assets expropriated from Greeks and Armenians following the
deportations and massacres of those populations. Akçam suggests that the short
period (two months) between when certain Greek villages were emptied out and when
Muslim refugees were settled in their place is evidence that the decision to
conduct the exchange had been made in advance and was a piece of a larger plan.
But for the most part, Akçam doesn’t think it’s necessary
to demonstrate long-term intent and sophisticated planning on the part of the
regime: he is confident in asserting that the genocide emerged from a series of
contingent events. It helps that historians of the Holocaust have offered
models for the kind of work that Akçam is undertaking in his new book, tracing
the links between the deportation and resettlement and the Final Solution, and
demonstrating how the latter was a plan that emerged as the Germans moved
eastward into areas with sizable Jewish populations following the invasion of
the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Not for the first time, work on the
Armenian genocide is self-consciously following trends in Holocaust
scholarship, such that Akçam describes what happened as “the cumulative outcome
of a series of increasingly radical decisions, each triggering the next in a
cascading sequence of events.”
Where Akçam’s account does part ways with some of the
literature on the Holocaust is in its acceptance of a particularly expansive
definition of the term “genocide” that includes “cultural genocide.” Raphael
Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide” and played an important role in shaping
its legal definition after World War II, thought the term’s meaning should
encompass forced assimilation, or “the imposition of the national pattern of the
oppressor.” The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide ultimately dropped “cultural genocide” from its language, but
Akçam is intent on reviving it on the grounds that limited settlement, the
forced marriages of adolescent Armenian girls to Muslim men, and other forms of
assimilation are “inseparable structural components” of the genocide. These
aims and practices and actual physical annihilation must therefore be
considered in tandem.
This is why Akçam writes at such length about forced
conversions to Islam, as well as the “cold-blooded calculation” regarding the
potential for assimilation that informed several changes in government policy
on conversion, the disparate treatment of orphaned Armenian children of various
ages, and the government’s decision to close down foreign missionary schools
and hospitals. If the regime thought a conversion would stick and result in
assimilation into the majority Muslim community, it allowed the convert to
remain unmolested; otherwise, even conversion did not save a person from
deportation or massacre. If a child was under 10 and a girl, for example, she
was placed with a Muslim family; older boys were targeted for extermination.
And because foreign missionary schools tended to instill national feeling in
Armenian children, they too had to be shut down.
Akçam dedicates a long chapter to arguing point by point
against a range of common assertions in the official Turkish narrative of the
events of 1915, declaring them “baseless.” Even the trials of those who had
been involved in the killing of Armenians did not center on the violence, Akçam
writes, but instead on who had looted Armenian property that the state had
intended for its own coffers or for redistribution to Muslim refugees. He
concludes that, “in light of the available documents, these events cannot be
defined in any fashion other than that of genocide.” Coming from Akçam, this is
hardly an unexpected conclusion. What may have surprised some progressive
intellectuals in Turkey yet again is his suggestion that the present Turkish
government is more open to coming to terms with the country’s past—including
all of its elisions and manipulations around the Armenian genocide—than the
secular nationalists have been.
Akçam is aware that much of the scholarly and public
discussion about applying the “genocide” label to the events of 1915 has been
prompted by “political demands—particularly in the international arena.” Some
of the debates surrounding Turkey’s possible accession to the European Union,
for example, have centered on whether or not the country should be required to
recognize the Armenian genocide as a precondition. In 2007, a US congressional
resolution to formally acknowledge the genocide was tabled under pressure from
President George W. Bush in the interest of not upsetting the strategic
alliance between the United States and Turkey. (“We all deeply regret the
tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915,” Bush said in a
statement. “This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass
killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally
in NATO and in the global war on terror.”) Early last year, France passed a
bill making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide. Meanwhile, many Turks
wonder why the world beyond their borders is fixated on events that took place
almost a hundred years ago, as though they were the sole defining feature of a
country with a strong and growing economy and which has positioned itself as a
new power broker in the Middle East.
* * *
Politics weigh heavily on discussions of what happened in
the Ottoman Empire during World War I, but it is still unclear if Turkey’s two
right wings will ever diverge on the question of whether or not a genocide
actually occurred—and, if so, what the implications might be. Akçam argues that
the Young Turks wanted to create an ethnically homogeneous Turkish state and
that such thinking is part of a “prevailing mind-set that makes future mass
crimes possible.” If he is right, then it’s hard to imagine any official
re-evaluation of the events of 1915, given that both of the country’s right
wings have until now appeared equally troubled by the fact that more than 15
percent of Turkey’s population considers itself Kurdish rather than Turkish,
and that many Kurds dream of having autonomy within the Turkish republic, if
not a state of their own.
Recently initiated negotiations between Erdogan and the
jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan have given many Turks and Kurds hope that a
political compromise could be imminent. If so, an alteration of the “prevailing
mindset” on the Kurdish issue might eventually influence official thinking on
the Armenian genocide. But Akçam suggests, in accordance with the German model
of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), that it would
have to work the other way around: deal with the past and you won’t be doomed
to repeat it.
That’s because for Akçam, recognition of the Armenian
genocide is not so much a political or legal issue as it is a moral one. Turkey
has a “moral responsibility” to acknowledge the harm done to the Armenians as a
crime—if not expressly a genocide—and “to undo, through indemnification, as much
as possible of the damage it created.” As a result, Akçam argues, the issue is
at bottom a domestic affair for Turkey. Hrant Dink said as much during his
lifetime, explaining that international pressure made both the official
narrative and societal views about 1915 more entrenched. Following Dink’s
murder, thousands demonstrated in Istanbul in a display of solidarity with the
victim, some wearing masks with an image of his face. In January 2012, on the
fifth anniversary of his death, and following the announcement of what many
considered an unsatisfying verdict on the investigation of the interests behind
his assassination, tens of thousands marched again with banners bearing the
slogan “We are all Hrant, we are all Armenian.” Dink’s view that the resolution
of the controversies related to 1915 has to come from within Turkey has since
been echoed not only by Akçam, but also by Cem Özdemir, the former EU
parliamentary representative and current Green Party leader from Germany, who
is the son of a gastarbeiter (guest worker) from Turkey. To date, neither of
Turkey’s two right wings has recognized the wrong, yet who but the Turkish
government ultimately can? After all, Akçam lives in the United States, Özdemir
in Germany, and Hrant Dink is dead.
In 2011, Marc Edward Hoffman reviewed Turkey, Islam,
Nationalism, and Modernity, Carter Vaughn Findley’s history of the country from
1789 to 2007.
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