Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide was the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, especially the deaths of large numbers (Armenians say 1.5 million) Armenians deported from Anatolia during World War I. Turkey (which in 1923 became the successor state to the Ottoman Empire) has denied its responsibility, suggesting that genocide did not occur. Turkey says it was a confusing period where many people were killed because of political uprisings.

Background

Following victory over Persia at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, the Ottoman Empire extended its rule over western Armenia. In 1555 Armenia was divided between the Shahs of Persia and the Sultans of Turkey.

In traditional Ottoman society the Armenians were defined, as were other Christians and the Jews, as a dhimmi millet, a non-Muslim religious community of the empire. Their actual treatment by the state varied to some extent with the military fortunes of the empire, the religious passions of its elites, and the encroachment upon their land by Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus as well as by Kurdish pastoralists. Normally dhimmis were free to practice their religion, but they were distinctively inferior to Muslims in status. In the nineteenth century the Armenians challenged the traditional hierarchy of Ottoman society as they became better educated, wealthier, and more urban. In response—despite attempts at reforms—the empire became more repressive toward Armenians, who more than any other Christian minority bore the brunt of persecution

In the 19th century, Russia, after victories over Persia in 1828 and over Turkey in 1829, acquired the right to organize the immigration of Armenians into the Caucasus with the aim of developing the territories. Under Russia, the number of Armenians in the area now represented by present-day Soviet Armenia increased from 46,000 in 1827 to 511,000 in 1897. Thus by joining Russia, Eastern Armenia became the home of the national survival of the Armenian people. The fate of Western Armenia was different. The organized massacres of 1894-96 and 1909 and the genocide of 1915 completely depopulated Western Armenia.

Conflict between Turks and Armenians resulted from dissimilar cultural elements and social organization. By the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman authorities justified their attacks on Armenians by accusing them of being "revolutionaries, terrorists, and troublemakers acting on behalf of Russia or other foreign powers." Even with the demise of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the conflict between Turks and Armenians remained unresolved, resulting in contemporary Armenian terrorist attacks on Turkish targets.

Kurds

The Turks often used Muslim Kurds as intermediary oppressors between themselves and the Christian Armenians. Less firmly Islamic Kurds, however, often aided persecuted Armenians, and at times when the Kurds themselves were oppressed, Kurdish-Armenian solidarity emerged. The complex history of Turkish-Kurdish-Armenian relations culminated in Kurdish complicity in the genocide committed against the Armenians during World War I. Thereafter, Kurds and Kurdish independence movements became the chief targets of Turkish policies attempting to Turkify all Anatolia.

Armenian nationalists

Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, Russians occupied the six Armenian vilayets, and Armenian nationalism was stimulated. In 1880, a revolutionary organization known as the Defenders of the Fatherland was organized in Erzurum. A few years later, in 1885, the Armenakan society was organized, and in 1887 the Hunchagian Party appeared. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktzutun) was formed in 1890.

The Armenians expected outside assistance in their efforts to break away from Ottoman rule and were led to carry out a number of rash terror actions, including bombing and assassinations. The Russians therefore discouraged the Armenian liberation movement from establishing an independent Armenia on the southern borders of Russia. But the Russian government also took active steps to prevent the massacres of Armenians by Sultan Abdul Hamid.

When Sultan Abdul Hamid II came to power in 1876, he steered a course of political and social repression and technological modernization. But the Empire was the "sick man of Europe" and nationalist revolts among Christian minorities led to the loss of Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania and large parts of Bulgaria, which comprised 40% of the territory. Some 400,000 Muslim refugees were expelled; the Empire became more Muslim and harted of Christians intensified. The old program of using Christian minorities to speed the modernization process had failed. The Empire was bankrupt and the Christians wanted autonomy, not participation.

In August and September 1894, a series of massacres occurred in the vicinity of Sassun as a result of an uprising that was put down with ferocity by Kurdish irregular cavalry (Hamidieh regiments). The massacres soon spread, and in October and November 1895 there were pogroms at Trabzon, Erzurum, Bitlis, Kurun, Maras, and elsewhere. The essential cause of the massacres lay in the failure of the European powers to secure the reforms envisaged by the Treaty of Berlin for the Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In August 1896 after an attack on the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople a massacre of Armenians occurred in the Ottoman capital; 4,000 to 6,000 Armenians were killed. By the end of 1896 over 80,000 Armenians lad dead in the eastern provinces.

It is still not clear what role he and his regime played in the massacres of 1894-1896, but massacres set off large-scale protests, especially in the United States and Britain. The protests forced Sultan Abdul-Hamid II to appoint an investigating commission, joined by British, French, and Russian delegates, which produced a minor reform program. Despite his policy of ruthless repression, the sultan could not halt the military and political disintegration of his regime, and he was replaced in 1908 by the political revolution of the Young Turks, who sought to address the Ottoman crisis with new and radical ideas.

Young Turks

The Young Turks had an entirely new approach. They did not want modernity, they wanted a Pan-Islamic empire based on Turks and other Muslim ethnic groups. Christians, especially Greeks and Armenians were distrusted; large numbers emigrated. By April, 1909, there were massacres at Adana and other places of Lesser Armenia, sparked by peaceful demonstrations that inflamed nationalist Turks. Intermittent attacks took place in the following years, against the background of the disintegration of the empire. When the Armenians threatened to add to the losses the Young Turks drew the line, began advocating a xenophobic and chauvinistic brand of nationalism that sought to create a new empire based on Islam and Turkish ethnicity. This new empire, stretching from Anatolia to western China, would exclude minorities unless they became Turks by nationality and Muslims by religion. The Armenians would rather die than give up their Christian religion; the Young Turks found willing allies in Kurdish elelments in Anatolia who had long been hostile to the Armenians. Armenians grew closer to Russia, the Orthodox Christian nation that seemed best poised to protect them. The people in eastern Armenia were protected by the Russians and by 1919 had their own nation. The 3 million people in western Armenia were under Turkish control and they were the victims.

World War I

The Young Turk "Ittihad ve Terrake Djemieti" [Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP] took the opportunity afforded by the war with Russia to solve its "Armenian question." The Empire was at war with Russia, with military action in and near Armenia. The Armenians were seen as allies of the Russians, and could not be trusted with weapons. At end of 1914, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman forces were disarmed; many were killed. In April 1915 hundreds of writers, journalists, and artists were arrested, exiled, and murdered. In June, 1915, as western powers threatened to punish those who committed atrocities against the Armenians, the government escalated its attacks and decided to forcibly remove all the Armenians living in eastern Armenia, near the Russian border--the Armenian homeland for many centuries. The deportation was the height of cruelty, in western Armenia, Cilicia, and surrounding regions, followed. The long lines of Armenian deportees were set upon again and again by Turkish and Kurdish villagers who in many cases had been incited and were led by specially designated killing squads, that Armenians belive were organized at the highest levels of the government. Those Armenians who escaped massacre and reached the camps in Syria were very likely to perish of hunger, dehydration, or exposure on the way. Between 1915 and the armistice in 1918, some one million Armenians, out of a population of two million, were killed. Between 1919 and 1923, as Mustafa Kemal rallied the Turks against continuing foreign occupation, a half million more Armenians perished. Thus between 1915 and 1923, approximately one half to three quarters of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was destroyed.

Diplomatic response

The Allied Powers, at war with the Otooman Empire, expressed outraged at the mass-murder of the Armenians. They pledged retribution against the perpetrators and support for an independent Armenian republic. On May 24, 1915, the Allies referred to the genocide as a "crime against humanity and civilization," and warned that they would hold Turkish officials "who have participated in the massacres personally responsible." In May 1918, a small and vulnerable Armenian Republic was founded in the Caucasus and expanded into parts of Ottoman Armenia as the Turkish army withdrew from the region; it ws later taken over by the Societ Union. When the Paris Peace Conference convened in January 1919, one of its first decisions was that Armenia should be "completely severed from the Turkish Empire."

Postwar

The Treaty of Sèvres, Aug. 10, 1920, provided for an independent Armenia. However, the situation was drastically changed by Turkish military assaults and the establishment of a Soviet republic in Yerevan, Armenia, in late 1920. A treaty imposed on Armenia by Turkey on December 3 reduced Soviet Armenia to the province of Yerevan. It finally became independent in 1991.

Memory

Historical work on the genocide has been almost entirely pro-Armenian or pro-Turkish and therefore implicated in a political conflict still unresolved today. Armenian historians seek to exorcise the trauma experienced by earlier generations, to pass on the memory of this trauma, and to present the genocide of the Armenians as the founding element of contemporary Armenian identity. For Turkish historians, supporting the national republican myth is essential to preserving Turkish national unity, though the case of outside historians who support the Turkish case is hard to understand. Dissident historians in Turkey are trying to reclaim the Armenians as part of Ottoman and Turkish history and acknowledge the wrongs done to the Armenians as a condition for reconciliation with them on the basis of confidence in Turkish national unity.

Diplomacy

Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Caucasus became a new field for Turkish foreign policy, and in this region relations with Armenia became the most critical and sensitive challenge. Despite the extreme negative historical legacy of the genocide, Turkey tried to establish a new basis for relations with Armenia, and there were some positive steps taken in this direction under the presidency of Levon Ter-Petrosian in Armenia. Disputes over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh became the decisive factor in bilateral relations, as predominantly Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh protested control by the Muslim Republic of Azerbaijan, which had Turkey's support. During the presidency of Ter-Petrosian's successor, Robert Kocharian, aside from the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, diaspora communities gained influence, which led to the genocide issue again becoming an important element in bilateral relations. Despite Kocharian's early hawkish rhetoric, during the second term of his presidency a détente arose in relations between the two countries, and the Turkish-Armenian Peace Commission founded in 2001 was a significant step in the direction of better relations.

Internationally, twenty-one countries have recognized the tragedy as genocide, as have 32 U.S. states.. This has been a problem in the Turkish-Armenian relationship, as well as the relationship with Israel, which is a close ally of Turkey, and the U.S., which has a very large an active Armenian population of Armenian descent, and tries to be friends with both Turkey (a NATO ally), and Armenia.

In 2007 a proposal to denounce the genocide was heatedly debated in the U.S. Congress, with the State Department and White House warning that passage would seriously damage relations between the U.S. and Turkey.

Bibliography

• Andreopoulos, George J., ed. Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. 1994. 265 pp. Compares Armenia with Cambodia, East Timor and Kurdistan.
• Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (2005), scholarly history of the wartime massacres; 344 pages excerpt and text search
• Bloxham, Donald. "Rethinking the Armenian Genocide." History Today 2005 55(6): 28-30. Issn: 0018-2753 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. "Patterns of Twentieth Century Genocides: the Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan Cases." Journal of Genocide Research 2004 6(4): 487-522. Issn: 1462-3528 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (1995)
• Hovannisian, Richard G. ed. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (1988)
• Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2004), ch 5 and 6
• Panossian, Razmik. The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars. 2006. 442 pp.
• Papazian, Bertha S. The Tragedy of Armenia: A Brief Study and Interpretation (1919) full text online

World responses

• Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. "Down in Turkey, far away': Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany," Journal of Modern History Volume 79, Number 1, March 2007, pp 80-111
• Auron, Yair. The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide (2005)
• Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (2003), 475 pp
• Hovannis1an, Richard G. "The Allies and Armenia, 1915-18." Journal of Contemporary History 1968 3(1): 145-168. Issn: 0022-0094 Fulltext: in Jstor
• Peterson, Merrill D. "Starving Armenians": America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1930 and After. 2004. 199 pp.
• Peroomian, Rubina. Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience (1993), focus on work of Armenian authors: Zabel Esayan (1878-1943), Suren Partevian (1876-1921), Aram Andonian (1875-1952), and Hakob Oshakan (1883-1948).
• Severance, Gordon and Diana Severance. Against the Gates of Hell: The Life & Times of Henry Perry, a Christian Missionary in a Moslem World (2003)
• Winter, Jay, ed. America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (2004), 325pp

Primary sources

• Kirakossian, Arman J. ed. The Armenian Massacres, 1894-1896: U.S. Media Testimony (2004), 317 pp
• Miller, Donald E. and Miller, Lorna Touryan, eds. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. 1993. 242 pp.
• Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1916) 736 pages. full text online
• older books, full text online
• online documents and commentary from Armenian forum
• books favorable to Armenia position