The Turkish government may not want to admit it, but the
murder and removal of millions of Armenians was genocide.
Genocide is not the murder of people but the murder of a
people.
In his first publication using the term he had coined,
the lawyer Raphael Lemkin explained, “The practice of extermination of nations
and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders [the Nazis] is called by the
author ‘genocide,’ a term deriving from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and
the Latin cide (by way of analogy, see homicide, fratricide).
” As difficult as
it is to discern, intentionality is key as the starting point, and death is the
result of the intention to eliminate or render impotent. Genocide, thus, is
“ethnically inspired violence” but should be distinguished from ethnic
cleansing, which may entail killing but more immediately involves displacement
and deportation, the physical moving of a distinct population.
The genocidal elimination need not be total, but it
should render the “people” impotent, politically and possibly culturally. Few
modern mass killings or even genocides have resulted in the total liquidation
of a people, and both the Armenian and Jewish genocides resulted in new states
being formed and populated with survivors and their descendants.
But the mass of Armenians never returned to the historic
homeland in Anatolia that they had inhabited for three thousand years, and the
Jews, while hardly totally erased, never reconstituted the vibrant Yiddish
culture that they had evolved over many centuries in Central and Eastern
Europe. Those genocides had results; they were genocidal in the physical,
political, and cultural senses.
In both historical and more publicistic writing, the term
“genocide” has been used rather promiscuously to apply to mass repression of
political opponents, real or imagined. When the Genocide Convention was being
debated at the United Nations in the late 1940s, the Soviet representatives
strenuously held out against extending the term to political killings, which
would of necessity have included Stalin’s purges, the millions lost in
dekulakization, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the deadly settlement of Kazakhs, and
the deportations of North Caucasians and other peoples during World War II. The
American delegates also resisted any language in the convention that might be
turned toward examination of racial segregation and the violence perpetrated
against African Americans during the era of Jim Crow. In the interests of
unanimity, political, social, and economic groups were not included in the
protections of the convention that was adopted by the United Nations on
December 9, 1948.
Reversing an older image of ethnic violence as bubbling up from the
masses below, the initiative and initiation of the Armenian Genocide came from
within the highest levels of the state.
Although on moral grounds one form of mass killing is as
reprehensible as another, the framers of the convention may have done
historians and political scientists a favor by limiting the definition. In
article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide (December 9, 1948), “genocide means any of the following
acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic,
racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to
another group.” A capacious definition, the UN’s conception has become standard
and widely accepted, even as it is contested.
Because mass killings vary so greatly in origin,
perpetrator, intention, scale, and intended outcome, no explanation can cover
all or even most of the cases. Too many dependent variables make it impossible
to come up with the principal causal factors…During the Irish Famine of
1845-1852, the Ukraine famine of 1932-1933 the Bengal Famine of 1943, and the
Chinese Famine of 1958-1961, governments were culpable in the deaths of
millions. It is understandable that such horrific occurrences should be thought
of as genocidal in both scope and intention, given that the foreseeable
consequences of state policy resulted in mass death. But since they were not
directed at the extermination of a definite ethnic, religious, or cultural
group, a different set of explanations is required, as is necessary for the
Great Purges, the Gulag, and the ethnic cleansing of the “small peoples” of the
Soviet Union. The value of the term “genocide” in the public sphere may be
moral condemnation, but for historians and social scientists its salience
stems, not simply from establishing a category, but from the explanatory
potential of that category. Historians must ask the questions “when genocide?”
and “why genocide?”
How Many Armenians?
The principal architect of the Armenian deportations,
Minister of Interior Talat Paşa, compiled his own record book calculating the
number and location of the Ottoman Armenians. Not trusting the official Ottoman
count of 1,300,000, Talat estimated that the more accurate number was
1,500,000. This number fell between the official Ottoman figure of 1,251,785,
and the figure given by the Armenian patriarchate of 1,915,858. The demographic
historian Fuat Dündar holds that 1,500,000 is the best and most reliable number
of Ottoman Armenians on the eve of the Genocide that we have.
150423-suny-armenia-embed
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Dündar calculates that about 281,000 Armenians were
permitted to remain in Anatolia and Rumelia…along with some 75,000 Catholic and
Protestant Armenians, artisans, families of soldiers, and some 50,000 converted
women and children. He estimates that around 300,000 Armenians survived the
deportation and the settlement areas. Another 255,000 fled abroad, primarily to
Russia. He concludes that 836,000 Ottoman Armenians survived the Genocide and
by the end of the war in 1918 approximately 664,000 had perished. The historian
Taner Akçam also uses the numbers given in Talat’s “black book,” where the
minister of interior counted 924,158 Armenians deported. Since Talat had not included
more than a dozen locations in his calculations, Akçam estimates the total
number of Armenians deported to have been closer to 1,200,000, a figure that
corresponds to the early estimates of Arnold Toynbee (1,200,000) and Johannes
Lepsius (1,300,000). Historian Raymond Kévorkian has used the statistics
gathered by the Armenian patriarchate of Istanbul, now housed in the St. James
Monastery in Jerusalem, and estimates that there were just under 2,000,000
Armenians in the Ottoman lands on the eve of World War I. His detailed account
in The Armenian Genocide, A Complete History concludes that 850,000 Armenians
were deported in 1915—1916, of whom 300,000 had perished by the winter of
1915-1916; 500,000 survived until the last round of massacres in the winter and
spring of 1916.
Further losses occurred in the half decade after the war
when Armenians fought the nationalist Turks and were driven out of Cilicia,
Izmir, and elsewhere. The twentieth century had not yet witnessed such a
colossal loss of life directed at a particular people by a government. Mass
killing of this magnitude made the unthinkable thinkable, and the political
engineers that emerged from the Great War were able to calculate higher human
costs as their population policies reshaped whole societies.
Why Genocide?
The purpose of the Armenian Genocide was to eliminate the
perceived threat of the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire by reducing their
numbers and scattering them in isolated, distant places. The destruction was
carried out in three different but related ways: dispersion, massacre, and
assimilation by conversion to Islam. A perfectly rational (and rationalist)
explanation, then, for the Genocide appears to be adequate: a strategic goal to
secure the empire by elimination of an existential threat to the state and the
Turkish (or Islamic) people. But before the strategic goal and the rational
choices of instruments to be used can be considered, it is necessary to explain
how the existential threat was imagined; how the Armenian and Assyrian enemy
was historically and culturally constructed; and what cognitive and emotional
processes shaped the affective disposition of the perpetrators that compelled
them to carry out massive uprooting and murder of specifically targeted peoples
and to believe that such actions were justified.
The Young Turks, led by army officers and reform-minded
intellectuals, first came to power in 1908. In January 1913, a splinter group
led by the most radical Young Turks—Enver, Talaat, and Djemal—carried out a
coup d’etat against their more moderate opponents. It would be under these
“Three Pashas” that the Genocide was carried out during a moment of radical
disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. In their mind, the state was threatened
by both the Great Powers and the non-Turkic peoples who had long inhabited it
(not only by Balkan Christians, Armenians, and Greeks, but also by Muslim
Kurds, Albanians, and Arabs). Their nation within that empire was still in the
process of being imagined, effectively neither Ottoman, Islamic, nor ethnically
Turkish. Nation lay in the future, and the turn of the 20th century was a
period of intense and passionate debate about the nature of Turkish national
formation. How would the community be conceived: as a nation of ethnic Turks,
with Turks defined as a race or a linguistic group; or as a supranation of
Ottomans of various religions, ethnicities, and languages, perhaps with Turks
(however defined) as the dominant group; or in the minds of some, as a
pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic community that stretched into the Caucasus and
Central Asia or into the Arab lands to include people of the same linguistic
family or religion? What was clear to those Young Turks who eventually won the
political contest by 1914 was that Turks would dominate in one way or another,
and that this imperial community would not be one of civic equality. It would,
in other words, neither be an ethnically homogeneous nation-state like the
paradigmatic states of Western Europe nor a multinational state of diverse
peoples equal under the law. It would remain an empire with some peoples
dominant over others. For one of the most radical of the Turkish nationalists,
Ziya Gökalp, “The people is like a garden. We are supposed to be its gardeners!
First the bad shoots are to be cut. And then the scion is to be grafted.”
But the Young Turks, however Ottomanist they were in
their inception, became over time national imperialists prepared to take the
most desperate and drastic measures to homogenize their state while promoting
some peoples over others and annihilating still others…While an anti-Armenian
disposition existed and grew more virulent within the Ottoman elite long before
the First World War, the war not only presented an opportunity for carrying out
the most revolutionary program against the Armenians, but provided the
particular conjuncture that convinced the Young Turk triumvirate to deploy
ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Armenians. The moment at which
disposition became action occurred after the outbreak of war when the leaders’
fear that their rule was in peril focused on the Armenians as the wedge that
the Russians and other powers could use to pry apart their empire. The
European-imposed reform program of 1914 was the immediate manifestation of the
Ottomans’ fears that their sovereignty over their realm was being compromised
and that the European support of the Armenians presented a danger to their
state’s future.
Had there been no First World War there would have been
no genocide, not only because there would have been no “fog of war” to cover up
the events but because the radical sense of endangerment among Turks would not
have been as acute. Without the war there would have been less motivation for a
revolutionary solution and more political opportunities for negotiation and
compromise.
Instability and social disintegration, the invasion of
the Russians and the British, and the defection of some Armenians to the
Russian side moved the leaders of the Ottoman state to embark on the most
vicious form of securitization and social engineering: the massive deportation
and massacre of hundreds of thousands of their Armenian and Assyrian subjects.
Ziya Gökalp, who like so many others saw the Genocide as necessary or even
forced on the Ottomans, could with confidence write, “There was no Armenian
massacre, there was a Turkish-Armenian arrangement. They stabbed us in the
back, we stabbed them back.”
Reversing an older image of ethnic violence as bubbling
up from the masses below, the initiative and initiation of the Armenian
Genocide came from within the highest levels of the state. The decisions,
permission, and encouragement of a few in power provoked and stoked emotional
resonance below. It turns out that a few killers can cause enormous
destruction. Thugs, sadists, fanatics, and opportunists can with modern
weaponry (or even with axes, clubs, and daggers) slaughter thousands with
little more than acquiescence from the surrounding population. They in turn can
inspire or let loose the rage of thousands of others who will carry out even
greater destruction. Genocide in particular is an event of mass killing, with
massive numbers of victims but not necessarily of massive numbers of killers.
The thugs, set loose by the political elite, create a climate of violence that
radicalizes a population, renders political moderates less relevant, and
convinces people of the need to support the more extremist leaders. The context
of war, with its added burdens and accompanying social disintegration, hardens
hostile group identities. Added to that, thugs and ordinary people use the
opportunities offered by state-permitted lawlessness to settle other accounts
with neighbors, take revenge, or simply grab what they can.
Some of the killers in 1915 simply obeyed orders; others
were motivated by much more mundane feelings than duty or considered
ideological preferences. Social and economic inequalities when combined with
ethnic and religious distinctions bred resentment toward those who received
more than they deserved from those who had received less. Fear of the other and
the future, anger at what had been done to oneself and one’s compatriots,
simple ambition and careerism all could be found among those who murdered
Armenians. Fear, anger, and resentment escalated into hatred, the emotion that
saw the other as the essential cause of one’s own misery. Hatred required that
the other be eliminated. Violence then begat violence and counter-violence.
Killing became familiar and justifiable for reasons of self-defense.
The Armenian Genocide, along with the killing of Assyrians
and the expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks, laid the ground for the more
homogeneous nation-state that arose from the ashes of the empire. Like many
other states, including Australia, Israel, and the United States, the emergence
of the Republic of Turkey involved the removal and subordination of native
peoples who had lived on its territory prior to its founding. The connection
between ethnic cleansing or genocide and the legitimacy of the national state
underlies the desperate efforts to deny or distort the history of the nation
and the state’s genesis. Coming to terms with that history, on the other hand,
can have the salutary effect of questioning continued policies of ethnic
homogenization and the refusal to recognize the claims and rights of those
peoples, minorities, or diasporas—Aborigines, native Americans, Kurds,
Palestinians, Assyrians, or Armenians—who refuse to disappear.
Excerpted from “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere
Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny. Copyright ©
2015 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
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