The Genocide

Some historians say that the cause of the genocide of the Armenians was Armenian provocation; others say that the cause may lie in the very engine of Armenian-Turkish relations, that is, in the "Committee of Union and Progress." Or it may have been due to the political and military catastrophe that befell the Ottoman state between 1908 and 1915, which isolated the Armenians and brought Turkish nationalism to the fore. The truth is that the new experiment in nationalism did not merely change Turkish identity; it changed the way the Armenian character was perceived and drew attention to the supposed danger of the Christian minorities. It transformed them from the loyal and faithful into the threatening and alien. From this standpoint we may say that the political catastrophe that struck the Ottoman Empire and the new ideology of the "Young Turk" movement were together the cause of the separation of the Armenians, the Syriacs, and the other minorities from the Turks, and thus of the preparation for their extermination.

Many intellectuals and those concerned with the modern Turkish era agree that the Committee of Union and Progress, which led the revolution of 1908 against Sultan Abdülhamid and which ruled Turkey between 1908 and 1918, amounted to a catastrophe for the Christian minorities, and that it was responsible for the deportations (the "drives") that led to the genocide of 1915.

At the beginning of 1915 the Unionist government set about carrying out the plan to exterminate the Armenians by way of two preliminary stages that would give it a completely free hand in wiping Armenia out of existence. "In the first stage it is necessary to render all Armenian soldiers utterly powerless, and in the second stage all Armenians must be stripped of their weapons in every city, large or small. For before Armenia is slaughtered, it must be left without protection." When it had finished with these two stages, it was able to begin the second, essential stage, and after it to reach the final stage: the pursuit of the leading Armenian thinkers and officials who might be a source of trouble.

The Labor Battalions

The fate of the Armenians, the Syriacs, and Christians in general became clear in February 1915, when the Turkish army stripped the Christian soldiers of their weapons, their military ranks, and their means of transport, and formed them into labor-service columns (the corvée battalions), which were forced to pave roads, build bridges, and lay railway lines. The army then carried out its government's orders to kill every one of them. The government began to disarm the Christian civilians on the pretext of demanding a fixed quantity of weapons from each community, and many were arrested on charges of concealing arms or of conspiring against the safety of the state. On April 24, 1915, the government arrested the leadership [?] of the people, the clergy, the intellectuals, and the Armenian politicians, then exiled them into the interior of Anatolia, where they were liquidated.

The Deportations

When the effective Christian political, administrative, and intellectual force had disappeared and the Christians were left without protection, the second step in carrying out the plan of genocide began: the deportation (the "drives"). This step was coordinated between Talaat Pasha, the Turkish minister of the interior, who was responsible for the civilians, and Enver Pasha, the Turkish minister of defense, who was responsible for the labor columns. In May 1915 Talaat Pasha decided to deport the Armenians who "could not be trusted" from their regions and to resettle them in the region of the Syrian desert and Mesopotamia (the cities of Deir ez-Zor and Ras al-Ayn being two of the killing centers), forgetting that the majority of the Syriac Orthodox lived in the provinces of Mesopotamia, such as Diyarbakır, Mardin, Urfa, and Kharput, and that harm might befall them as a result. He promised that all their properties and belongings would be safeguarded and preserved until their return. Perhaps the best source explaining what happened is the famous historian Arnold Toynbee, who says:

The men would hurry to the government building the moment they heard the crier calling for them to present themselves in person at the government house. There, without being given any reason, they would be thrown into prison for several days, then taken outside the city barefoot, bound to one another with ropes. At the first opportunity that arose on their long march, the soldiers would take the men aside and slaughter them. Then they would seize the children and women, abuse them shamefully, and take possession of whatever they had.

Apart from the towns or provinces of Bitlis, Muş, and Sasun, whose entire populations were exterminated, the surviving children and women were deported in caravans that walked from one town to another, where they became the prey of special gangs whose organization was supervised by the official authorities of the Turkish interior ministry (the "Fiftieth Army" [?] or the "militia"), or else they were exposed to attack by Kurdish and Turkish peasants.

The aim of these massacres was to humiliate the Armenians, to keep only 10% of them alive, and to work to remove that tiny proportion permanently from the Ottoman Empire. Naturally, famine and disease took their share of the victims, adding to the enormity of the tragedy. As a result, more than a million Armenians perished, according to the statistics of the Human Rights Association at the United Nations, along with more than a quarter of a million Syriacs (272,000 souls), of whom 96,000 were martyred in the district of Mardin alone.

In cases of massacre and genocide, estimates of the number of victims vary. Some minimize the number [?], and some inflate it. The truth is that there is no way to determine it exactly; but if we take the estimates of the United Nations [?] and add to them more than a quarter of a million Syriacs and the rest of the Christian minorities who were killed or died of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, or disease, we can grasp the sheer horror of the catastrophe that afflicted the Christian people as a whole. Aram Andonian [?] wrote the following:

Many of the Armenian victims—men, women, and children—perished in the three massacres that took place in 1916. The first was at Ras al-Ayn, where more than 70,000 people were killed; the second at Intilli [?], where more than 50,000 who were working on the digging of the Baghdad tunnel were done away with; and the third, the most terrifying and hideous, occurred in the city of Deir ez-Zor, where Zeki Bey killed more than 200,000 souls. Those who remained alive were driven, from the regions of Cilicia and other stations, into the Syrian desert, where they met people from the six Armenian regions and from the towns of the Black Sea coast. The gathering was of women and children under the age of seven only, for everyone above that age had been executed.

The "Young Turk" government replaced the Armenians and Syriacs with Kurds and Turks, and altered all the monuments of civilization and the names of the churches and monasteries. As for the Syriacs, the war claimed the lives of about a quarter of a million of them across the various dioceses, leaving behind a great number of orphans and widows and shaking most of the important Syriac dioceses—indeed, wiping some of them out because of the emigration of their people to the ends of the earth. Many churches and historic monasteries in Mesopotamia were destroyed—monasteries that in ages past had played an important role in spreading civilization and culture. The precious Syriac manuscripts, the priceless relics, and the famous libraries were scattered, and a gloomy atmosphere was created in the life of the Syriacs wherever they were. The Syriacs, as a community and as individuals, lost their possessions in movable and immovable property, and so the geographic unity of the community was broken up by the political divisions that came as the inevitable outcome of colonial schemes. It is true that a new revival arose in the lands of Syria and Lebanon through the reconstitution of Syriac dioceses in each of them, but it came at the expense of other Syriac dioceses that vanished from existence.

The Pan-Turanian Turkish General Congress called for "the unification of the eastern and western branches of the Turkish race," and in it was laid the plan to wipe Armenia out of existence by emptying it of its people and linking [?] Turkey with Azerbaijan and the rest of the states of Turkic origin, from Mongolia to the Caucasus.

Talaat Pasha, the Turkish minister of the interior, says the following in one of his telegrams to the Ottoman governor in Aleppo:

Although a decision was issued some time ago to exterminate the Armenian element, circumstances have not been favorable for carrying out this sacred project. But now, with the removal of all obstacles, the time has come. We call upon you to divest yourselves of any feeling of pity or mercy toward their heartrending condition, and we ask you to work diligently to eliminate them and to erase the very name of the Armenians.

But the Ottoman government, at that time, gave no justification or reason that drove it to kill the Syriacs, so much so that it appears the Committee of Union and Progress was ready to erase any trace or mention of the existence of both the Syriacs and the Armenians together, as though it were a deliberate act. This is what drives us to wonder... why?

This is what "Bernard Lewis" reiterated, recalling the Armenian uprising in the second half of the nineteenth century, when he says:

The Armenians posed grave dangers to the government. For while the Turks might accept withdrawal from the lands of the Arabs, the Bulgars, Albania [?], and Greece, and settle within their geographic borders, they would never permit the establishment of an Armenian state on their frontier. For Armenian independence would mean the tearing apart of the Turkish state, since the Armenians were spread throughout Asiatic Turkey, from the lands of the Caucasus to the shores of the Mediterranean—that is, in the very heart of the Turkish homeland.

For "Bernard Lewis," the Armenians were a Christian minority living in Turkey. Unfortunately for them, they were distributed—as a people and as a land—on both sides of the Russo-Turkish border, where other peoples were also found who had their own national premises and aspirations to establish independent states. The nineteenth century and the early twentieth were marked by the fact that nationalist tendencies and the idea of independence were the central concern of all the minorities—Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Bulgars, and others.

The Armenians, however, doubtless knew that the establishment of an independent Armenian state would be a blow to the Ottoman state on one hand and another blow to the Armenians living in Turkish territory on the other, and that this would create the impression that they were armed like the Turks and enjoyed strength and influence. The truth is that the Armenians were not united under the banner of a single party, and they certainly did not possess the military strength either to invade the Turks or to defend themselves. Armenian national feeling matched Turkish national feeling; Turkish nationalism had not yet been formulated by the teachings of Mustafa Kemal, but it existed in the teachings of "Ziya Gökalp," who is considered the father of Turkish nationalism, and it wavered somewhat between Islam and Ottomanism.

What were the constituents and boundaries that the Armenians gave to their nationalism such that it should differ from other nationalisms and become the deadly danger to the "Young Turk" government?

Turkey held that the establishment of an independent Armenian state would be an obstacle to achieving the unity of the peoples who spoke the Turkish language, and thus a principal obstacle to the realization of the Turks' greatest dream: linking Asia Minor with Central Asia in a single state. But the question remains: did the Turks' fear of the Armenians begin through the Armenians' movements and their capacity? Or from other sources, among them their wretched condition and their attachment to the new Turkish nationalism?

When the revolution of 1908 broke out against Sultan Abdülhamid, the two Armenian parties, the "Hunchak" and the "Dashnak," were on good terms with the new regime. The Armenians rejoiced at the army's victory, because the collapse of the rule of Sultan Abdülhamid—who had carried out the massacres of 1894–1896—and the reform of the constitution were the utmost of their wishes, especially for the Dashnak party. To say that the Armenians constituted the deadly danger to the Ottoman Empire at that time is a claim without truth. So what happened to make them appear as a mortal threat or a deadly danger?

Many things occurred that led to the severing of relations between the new Turkish era and the Armenians after they had grown strained. The Armenians blamed the Ottoman government for the Adana massacre of 1909, in which nearly thirty thousand people were killed, and they lost their sense of security as a result of Kurdish settlement on their lands. For the Kurdish migrants had seized the lands of the Armenians who had been killed in the massacres of 1895 or who had fled. And when the Armenians returned and demanded that the Kurds return the land to its owners, the Kurds refused. Disputes began that the French vice-consul in "Van" described as a veritable war between the two peoples. Add to this many problems that the Turkish government dealt with harshly and brutally.

The Armenian response was to ask the Ottoman government to allow them greater intervention in internal decisions and to work to protect them from Kurdish settlement. When the government paid no attention to these demands, the Armenian leaders exploited the Russo-Turkish disputes and encouraged Russia, the traditional enemy of the Ottoman Empire, to open the file of the "Armenian problem." Under the enticement of expanding its influence and the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 to end eastern settlement, Russia intervened. In February 1912 all the parties reached agreement on the appointment of a European inspector to regulate relations and communications. One cannot imagine the extent of the humiliation and rage the Turkish nationalists displayed toward this interventionist proposal. What is astonishing is that when voting began on the choice between separation from Turkey and Russian occupation, the leaders of the Dashnak party did not vote for separation. On this "Davison" wrote:

The problem stemmed from the very constitutional origin of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians did not believe that Russia would grant them more freedom; on the contrary, they believed that a complete break from Turkey was impossible, both tribally and geographically.

Relations between the Turkish government and the Armenians grew critical between 1908 and 1915, when the Turkish regime could no longer bear any military defeat or accept the independence of any of the minorities. Turkey's loss of the European provinces and the Turks' retreat to Anatolia did not merely isolate the minorities; it led to the elimination of national-religious pluralism in the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Turkish nationalism.

The Ottomans' sense of an Armenian threat grew when other nationalities took the initiative in demanding their independence from the Ottoman state. In early December 1908—that is, only three months after the uprising of the new era—Bulgaria declared its complete independence. On December 6 of the same year, Austria annexed the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1911 Italy occupied Libya. In the following year the Balkan governments formally cut Turkey off from Europe. Out of a total of about 1,153,000 square miles of the Ottoman state's area, and out of a population of 24 million, Turkey lost more than 424,000 square miles and nearly five million people. By early 1913 Turkey had lost all the European regions except for a small area to protect the Istanbul strait.

The success of the Christian Balkans and Greece in separating from the Ottoman state had left the Armenians the last Christian minority still under Ottoman rule. During the nineteenth century this minority had achieved progress on every level—cultural, social, political, and economic. In an age called "the age of the Armenian renaissance," Turkey spoke the Turkish language but thought in Armenian. Some have observed that this cultural movement was one of the factors that contributed to the massacres of 1894–1896 under the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid. Sultan Abdülhamid consented to the massacre not in order to exterminate the Armenians and Christians, but to teach them a lesson, to keep them in the places chosen for them within the "millet system," to quell their zeal—especially that of the Armenians—and to restore and refurbish the old order.

The Armenians took advantage of the coming of the "Young Turk" movement and its focus on renewal and keeping pace with the times, regarding it as a new opportunity to invest their strength in the new authority. But the Turkish state regarded the Armenians' aptitude for progressivism and their readiness for openness and equality as a threat to the "Young Turk" system. It also regarded the continuity of the Armenians in their social renaissance as a challenge to Turkish and Islamic dominance. Add to this that the loss of provinces and population that struck the Turkish government isolated the Armenians and exposed their political and national intentions to view.

"Bernard Lewis" observed that the Turkish government was preparing to bring about a radical, extreme change in national identity and ideology in order to create a Turkish nationalism to replace Ottomanism. Here Lewis says:

The Turks are a people who speak the Turkish language and live in Turkey. At first glance the idea is not taken to have any innovative revolutionary content. And yet the introduction of this idea in Turkey and its acceptance by the Turkish people to establish their identity and homeland is one of the principal causes of the revolutions of the modern age, which entailed change in the traditional social, cultural, and political aspects of the past.

It appears that the extermination of the Armenians and Syriacs and their deportation from Turkey were among the outcomes of the Turkish national revolution and a stage in the development of its nationalism.

To be continued: Turkish nationalism — "Turanism"