It is generally acknowledged that historians devote special and considerable attention to the fateful challenges that confront peoples, or the tragedies that certain nations experience and whose calamities they endure. A given historian often becomes renowned because he chronicled a decisive era considered a historical turning point in the life of human society. Whenever the Roman Empire is discussed, for instance, "Edward Gibbon" and his book "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" are mentioned, because Gibbon's book furnishes[?] the reader with an abundance of documented information supported by logical argument and objective analysis of the factors that contributed to the radical transformations the Roman society underwent, which in turn led to its dissolution and decline. This is what made his book occupy an elevated place among all those concerned with Roman history. Yet if Rome was fortunate enough to have a historian like Gibbon to chronicle its crises with scientific precision, the Middle East, though it has faced (and still faces) crises no less severe than those Rome faced, has not granted its historians the freedom of objective thought and inquiry that would enable them to apply scientific methodologies to historical questions without submitting to preconceived hypotheses dictated by the authorities or promoted by certain cultural or religious circles, on the understanding that the pioneering aim of the work should be to do justice to historical truths, rather than to please this authority or that.

Since the massacre of 1915, numerous books have appeared dealing with the rise, development, and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, most of them written by Western and Eastern specialists concerned with the political, economic, national, social, and even cultural crises of the Ottomans. Yet we have not until now found a single book that addresses the Turkish national ideology that developed with the beginning of the twentieth century, from which arose an ethnic-religious racism that incited the Ottoman Turks to change their view of the minorities and to alter their stance toward them, and consequently to embark upon the mass liquidation of these minorities. There is no one who has chronicled the massacres that took the lives of more than two million Armenians and half a million Syriacs, apart from a few Armenian writers. Nor is there anyone who defines with scientific precision the general context of the world and Middle Eastern events that preceded or coincided with the massacres, and the extent of the role those events played in inciting the liquidation of the Syriacs, who had been renowned since the dawn of Christianity for their concern with cultural and scientific matters. It was for the sake of disseminating and developing these matters that they built universities (Gundeshapur, Edessa, Nisibis, Ras al-Ayn, and Lafat[?]) that taught and disseminated Greek and Syriac sciences that contributed greatly to the development and advancement of the Byzantine, Persian, Arab, and Ottoman peoples.

It is true that Christianity is a common denominator between the Syriacs and the Armenians, yet the Syriacs had no political ambition, and they did not demand the establishment of a homeland for themselves. Rather, they were content to be citizens who abided by the laws of the societies in which they lived. Throughout their long history the Syriacs had opened themselves to all the peoples of those societies, whether pagan, Christian, or Muslim, interacted with them, and worked toward their advancement. For this reason, the matter of the massacres the Syriacs were subjected to remains a riddle deserving of serious inquiry.

Whether or not the mass massacres to which the Armenians and Syriacs were subjected were related to the political or national affairs of this country or that, historians and researchers may not disregard them, because they remain, in their essence, a matter that concerns all of humanity, including those who committed them. For those who undertook the killing and destruction are, in essence, human beings like those who were exterminated, and they did not turn into killers except under a political and social system whose ideology conferred absolute ideal attributes upon the model Ottoman citizen and his values and ideas, while stripping the others (the Armenian and Syriac minorities) of their human values and ideals in preparation for their annihilation. The national ideology of the Ottoman Turks had formed a cultural and psychological environment that made the Ottoman individual grow up on the absoluteness of his national personality[?] and its purity, loftiness, distinctiveness, and superiority. This ideology had dominated the political, social, educational, cultural, and religious institutions of the society to the point that the Ottoman person was nothing but an echo of it. In other words, the ideology had taken tyrannical hold of the Ottoman person and became the one that thought and acted and legislated, so that the Ottoman individual became an instrument in the hands of the ruling ideology.

Therefore, the massacres the Ottomans undertook ought to be studied from a historical and ideological perspective, and all of this has nothing to do with the essence of the Ottoman individual. For he is, in essence, no different from the Armenian or the Syriac. The difference lies in the ideological framework that determines a person's vision of himself and of the other, because when a person undertakes a positive or negative act, he sets out from intellectual (ideological) premises that stand in the place of absolute convictions for him, convictions whose credibility and legitimacy he never doubts, to the point that he is unable to think or to act except through their justification, rationalization, and legitimization. Extermination is an act that a racist ideology necessitated and justified in advance, before human hands carried it out. Hence we see the necessity of undertaking a comprehensive scientific critique of such ideologies, which deprive a person of scientific thinking and of openness to others, and of accepting them even if they differ from him in their politics, religion, nationality, and culture.

When we insist on defining the historical framework of the massacre of 1915, we set out from the principle that the massacre is a purely historical phenomenon. And when we study it as a historical phenomenon, we are thereby able to determine responsibility without falling into the labyrinths of abstraction and generalization practiced by some of the writers who addressed the massacre. For example, some of the Arabic books that chronicled the massacres of the Syriacs that occurred in 1915 contented themselves, in general, with describing the massacres and the manner of their execution in isolation from the general historical context. So the events, despite their tragedy and hideousness, appear almost as a series of arbitrary, gratuitous incidents that seldom find any logical or rational justification, because the chroniclers of those events contented themselves with depicting the event in itself without explaining its backgrounds and motives or identifying the factors that incited its occurrence, which are purely historical factors. For this reason, the aim, or the political, national, and strategic purpose, behind those massacres was obscured for them, and for their readers.

Any historical event must issue from a particular group with its own historical circumstances, and the involvement of any group in any historical act or event must be conditioned by a set of factors and must have certain justifications, and consequently, those in charge of the event must aim to achieve some goal. This is how we ought to look at history so that we may understand its mechanisms and its purposes. When the historical event is studied from a scientific perspective, the reader and the student can then understand the event as a historical phenomenon, that is, a phenomenon that arises in a place and a time, is subject to certain conditions, represents a group with a certain policy, and aims to achieve a certain purpose within a certain historical stage. For the historical event to be understood, we must look at it as a part of a whole, and when we understand the nature of the historical stage and its general tendencies, we are then able to understand scientifically what happened in history.

Although history is a discipline focused on the study of the past, it is always directed toward the human being in the present. The historian illuminates the obscurity, ambiguity, and confusion that may have surrounded historical events so as to provide us, in the present, with a clear and lucid picture free of the illusions that have clung to people's minds. In other words, the historian's principal task is not confined to placing us in scientific contact with the past so that we may understand how it was formed and its constituents and tendencies alone, but extends to demonstrating the extent to which the influences of that past continue in our present and their effect on our lives now. When we possess a scientific, critical view of history, we have thereby examined the past with detachment and objectivity, and we have acquired the boldness to criticize the past, to free ourselves from the complex of inferiority and boastfulness, and to open ourselves creatively to the possibilities of the present and the future.

Some of the results of this scientific view of history have been applied, to a certain extent, to the massacres of 1915 that took the lives of more than a million Armenians and roughly a quarter of a million Syriacs. The reader may find an abundance of information about the Armenian question written by Western pens or by Armenian researchers. What is regrettable in the matter is that, until now, there is not a single objective book that addresses the massacres to which the Syriacs were subjected. And when Armenian researchers address the subject of the massacres of 1915, no one mentions the massacres to which the Syriacs were subjected, despite the two massacres' coincidence and interlocking[?]. It is as though the massacres had become the exclusive preserve of one particular group and not another. This study, for all its importance, remains a modest attempt whose concern is to acquaint the reader with the political, national, and cultural backgrounds that took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century and gradually paved the way for the massacre. As for the principal aim of this study, it is to deepen the scientific awareness of the history that accompanied the massacre of 1915 and to root it firmly.

Genocide

One cannot conceive of the gravity of genocide and its weight. It has been described as "the darkest page in contemporary history." It is so hideous and terrible that we can scarcely believe the numbers of the victims. The human massacres carried out by Sultan Abdul Hamid (1842–1918) against the Armenians and the Christians between the years 1894 and 1896, which took the lives of more than two hundred thousand people, were the first true encounter of Western writers and historians with the barbarity of the Ottoman government. These massacres are regarded as a trial (rehearsal) for the play of genocide carried out by the government of (the Young Turks) in 1915. These writers did not fail to respond to this terrifying shock; eyewitnesses, diplomats, newspaper correspondents, and humanitarian missions from several countries wrote hundreds of articles, short stories, and books, all of which depicted the brutality and the horror, but without there being any adequate scientific analysis addressing what took place.

Its True Causes

In 1909 another massacre occurred in Adana that claimed the lives of thirty thousand people. Here too, as before, the written reactions were repeated, expressing nothing but sorrow and grief.

The Turkish authorities organized the deportation operation and planned the massacres of the Christians in order to protect themselves from the "Armenian problem," and with a view to creating a new homogeneous order. Through killing and extermination, the government of the "Young Turks" was able to remove the Armenians and most of the Syriacs from the Ottoman Empire, to destroy the historical authenticity of these two peoples, and to distort the national structure and religious character of the region. As for the exiled generation, it concentrated its energies, and still does, on binding up the wounds of these massacres, on organizing schools, building churches, and working to create a national cultural foundation to revive the heritage and to attempt to limit assimilation and integration into the new societies.

Our aim in this study is to raise three questions: What happened? Why did it happen? And what have we learned from the "Armenian problem"? Perhaps it may shed light on some other cases.