Resolution Evolution An essay by Nick
The evolution of quasi-legal resolutions,? in various state and national legislatures or court systems around the world, of genocide committed by the Ottoman government against its Armenian citizens during (and after) the First World War has been an interesting, if curious, phenomenon. Of course, the passing of a resolution has no legal force and certainly does not demonstrate historical veracity as one cannot legislate the direction or flow of historical events in retrospect. What resolutions do, however, is to attempt to achieve a perception of events in order to increase the visibility and importance of a community, achieve a specific political goal or to gain some sort of compensation. Resolutions of the kind relating to the Armenian Genocide? serve to enhance the status and importance of the Armenian community in a cultural environment where victimhood is a badge of honour. The fact that so many of these highly dubious documents have passed through national and state legislatures is a tribute the tight knit, affluent and highly clannish nature of the Armenian diasporas. In short, over many years they have shown themselves adept and manipulating the sympathies and resources of their hosts in order to further their own financial, political or cultural agendas.
The content of the resolutions or affirmations that have passed? through legislative systems can be viewed in a number of internet web sites or publications and they make for interesting reading. While organisation is clearly evident from the beginning the evolution of the format and content is quite informative as it demonstrates a growing level of co-ordination and an increasing level of orthodoxy as the years have progressed. From the start certain central claims have been made (1,500,000 dead for example) but enthusiasm and zealotry made for the production of some quite startling facts? ” in other words, although everybody was trying to sing from the same hymn sheet the chorus was somewhat ragged
One of the earliest resolutions passed through the California State Assembly on April 15th 1968 and related specifically the establishment of the Armenian Martyrs Monument in Montebello, California. However, it is not until terrorist campaigns conducted against Turkish individuals and institutions got underway in the early 1970s that the flow of resolutions began increase. The reasons for this should be obvious. Although terrorism conducted against Turks was carried out by a variety of disgruntled or ill individuals and by a variety of politically radical and extremist Armenian groups, they presented the mainstream Armenian communities around the world, and particularly in North America, with both an opportunity and a problem. High profile terrorist atrocities served to bring Armenians' sense of grievance to the wider public around the world- this was a great opportunity. The problem was that the 1970s and 1980s was a period that was almost defined by a terrorist driven crisis directed primarily against western targets and western values and tied up in Cold War issues. All of these terrorist groups were left wing and extremist in outlook and all had support from the Soviet Union, one of its dependencies or one of its third world proxies. The numerous Palestinian factions are an obvious example but to this we can add the IRA, the Red Brigades, Bhader-Mienhoff, Sandero Luminoso, the Japanese Red army, the PKK and so on; all high profile, anti western and ruthless.
Into this complex political mix comes the Armenian terrorist, in various formats revisiting the terrorism of the Armenian radicals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The majority of people in the west viewed the Armenian terrorists with the same jaundiced eye that they viewed all the other terrorists. This time round, unlike the problem of the Near East? in the late 1800s and early 1900s the Armenians had no rationale, no viable agenda¦¦.no value.
What were they murdering and mutilating for? There were no oppressed Armenians in Turkey. There was no land or people to liberate. Their philosophy was nihilistic and hate driven; an opportunity for publicity, but also a problem. How could the mainstream Armenian community ” whose leaders rarely unequivocally condemned the terrorists, benefit from the publicity without tarnishing the carefully nurtured aura of innocence? Part of the answer must have been in the campaign for legal? recognition.
From the outset, the most consistent and uniform claim was the casualty figure- 1,500,000 ” a figure that can not be changed since it is inscribed in stone, quite literally, on the Martyrs Monument. Apart from this, things did vary, probably due to over enthusiasm. Some of the embellishments are quite amazing, for example, part of the April 4, 1980 New York State Assembly resolution claims in one section:
The land (Armenia) became a vital trade route between East and West and was coveted by the Persians, the Medes, the Mongolians, the Russians, the Greeks, the Romans and the Arabs; however, the Christian Armenians were able to peacefully coexist with invading armies until the birth of the Ottoman nation, when the Turks established dominion over an empire stretching some one thousand five hundred miles from Vienna to the Caucusus Mountains; and
WHEREAS, The Turks could neither tolerate nor integrate the independent Armenians, who spoke their own language and practised their own religion¦¦¦..? and so on in similar vein for another twenty sections.
Clearly, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the relevant time periods and regions will know that this is quite simply arrant nonsense and is laced with a racist subtext of the kind that obscures much of what is written about Turkish history. One would have hoped that an august body of legislators would know better.
"The first genocide of the 20th century"
Hereros, possibly from the period in question
Governor Dukakis, in his proclamation of February 19th, 1986 says that the Armenian genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century..? Leaving aside the fact that such arbitrary chronological parameters are meaningless devices intended to merely take out of context and frame a particular event, he seems to be unaware of the extermination of the Herero people carried out by German colonial forces in South West Africa between 1904 and 1907; about 75% -80% of Hereros were exterminated by direct orders of the German colonial commander Von Trotha. Possibly the reason for Governor Dukakis' oversight may have something to do with the fact that he did not have a Herero constituency to pander
The March 26, 1990 resolution by the Oklahoma State Legislature introduce a slightly different and rather interesting variation on the theme; it compares the deportations? of Armenian with Oklahoma's own Trail of Tears,? presumably suggesting that the authorities in Oklahoma and in the Federal government were guilty of their own genocide prior to that magical chronological cut off point on January 1st 1900. It is also a little unclear as to casualty numbers, straying from scripted 1,500,000 and only referring to As many as one million Armenians may have died on this death march from lack of water and food¦? and goes on to observe that the number of Armenians killed at the hands of the Turks will never be known, but estimates as high as one million eight hundred thousand have been quoted..? Quite.
Peter Torigian, Mayor of Peabody, Massachusetts, comes up with an interesting spin in his proclamation on April 24th , 1990 when, while referring to the 1,500,000 victims of genocide says that the Armenians were deported to Der-El-Zor on foot during which time more than 1,000,000 died or were killed. It is about this time (late 1980s early 1990s) that we see the message evolving to include direct reference to the Nazis and the Jewish Holocaust; Torigian refers to Armenians at Der-El-Zor being held in concentration camps¦¦¦that resemble those of the Holocaust of World War II.? Also, in a number of resolutions from this period and onwards references are made to Hitler's quotation from a speech at Obersalzburg referring to the Armenians ” a quote that probably was never uttered and is often even misquoted.
Poochigian's Law
By the mid 1980s Armenian terrorism was a spent force but the process of accumulating resolutions had acquired and independent force of its own and continued with a much greater degree of conformity ” by 2000 they appear to working from a standard text in some cases. For example, from the Main Joint Resolution June 3rd, 2001, we find reference to:
.. atrocities committed against the Armenians¦..including the torture , starvation and murder of 1,500,000 Armenians, death marches into the Syrian desert and the exile of more than 500,000 innocent people?
This section is repeated almost verbatim in the California State Resolution of the 10th April 2003 and with minor changes in the New York State Legislature resolution of April 19th 2002. The resolutions from Main and California also both use the now almost obligatory reference to Adolph Hitler's quotation and they also use the identical quotation from Ambassador Morgenthau in which he states, among other things, that previous massacres in history are insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.? All the stops are clearly being pulled out in order to put across an emotive, tailored message that will appeal to people's historical misconceptions and ignorance. Armenians are unique; their suffering is unique and preceded that of the Jews.
This last California resolution is particularly interesting as it carries the mark of Senator Poochigian, a lawyer and law maker of some repute in California ” apparently.
Senator Chuck Poochigian
Senator Poochigian has made the next logical step beyond resolutions and has formulated a law. The law he has formulated, however, is significantly different in form and scope from his resolutions. Firstly, it is limited in scope as it applies only to the area of insurance claims held by Armenians in Ottoman lands, their heirs and beneficiaries. It is modeled directly on a law covering insurance claims of Jews in German occupied Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. Promulgation of law in this area is a logical progression and appears to have been running, in this instance, in conjunction with attempts made by a number of Californian Armenians, supported by Armenian community groups, to cash in on insurance policies they either held or felt that they were entitled to benefit from and which date from the late 1800s and early 1900s. According to an article in The Fresno Bee in September, 2000 the value of these lost? insurance policies could run to as much as $3 billion.. Poochigian's Law was formulated specifically to aid these claims.
Poochigian's Law is really quite fascinating and is remarkable because of the difference in tone, scope and definition when compared to all the resolutions on the subject of the Armenian Genocide- even the California resolution drafted by Poochigian himself. No mention of numbers here. The definition of genocide? in the context of the law is so wide as to be meaningless in any real sense and the definition of who exactly is a victims? of the Armenian genocide? is quite spectacular!
The first section of the law sets out its perameters:
Section (a) The Legislature recognises that during the period from 1915 to 1923 many persons of Armenian ancestry residing in the historic homeland then situated in the Ottoman Empire were victims of massacre, torture, starvation, death marches and exile. This period is known as the Armenian Genocide.?
This is innocuous stuff ” the number 1,500,000 (always given in numerical form in resolutions for greater impact) is substituded for the word many?. This could apply to anybody who had the misfortune to live in the region including Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Jews and Greeks since all were subjected to starvation, expulsions, disease and massacre by someone. In fact, Armenians and Russians perpetrated atrocities and massacres of their own on Muslim communities before, during and after the relocation of Armenians occurred. However, at this point he restricts himself to Armenians.
The bill goes on to state that many Armenians and their descendants live in California and deserve an expeditious resolution to their claims because they have suffered enough. In fact, any further delay would represent an ?undue, unreasonable and unjust hardship on Armenian Genocide victims and their heirs.?
It is Poochigian's definition of who is an Armenian Genocide victim that is most amazing of all. In Section 2) subsection 1) the bill states the following:
Armenian Genocide Victim? means any person of Armenian or other ancestry living in the Ottoman Empire during the period of 1915 to 1923, inclusive, who died, was deported, or escaped to avoid persecution during that period.?
One hardly needs to highlight any part of this definition; it is amazing in both in its scope and its departure from the many resolutions passed through state and national legislatures. Why could this be? The answer is quite simple- a resolution is meaningless and free of political and monetary costs because its victims are Turks who, as yet, are only a small and relatively insignificant minority with little lobbying power. A law on the other hand, can be tested in court therefore it was necessary to frame the law as broadly as possible in order to ensure that challenges over facts and figures did not risk the outcome. This law is an admission that the basic facts to be found in every Armenian Genocide Resolution are unsafe.
According to the definitions in this law ” anyone (literally anyone) who was living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and wasn't living there in 1923 is an Armenian Genocide Victim ” a Turk who died of influenza, a Kurd who fell of his horse, a Greek who left to live in Greece, and Armenian who had a stroke on his sofa in Istanbul or a British POW who died of typhus¦¦. Anyone. Using constructions like this we could produce all sorts of ridiculous scenarios ” Sudeten Germans expelled by the Czechoslovak government after WWII because they collaborated with the Nazis could conceivably claim to have been victims of a genocide.? In fact, some are demanding apologies and even recompense!
How successful has the law been? Well, not very successful so far, in spite of the majestic breadth of its vision. Have any Armenian individuals, suffering or otherwise, benefited from a just and speedy resolution of the claims? Well, no; not exactly. What has happened has been a class action suit, settle out of court between Armenians and New York Life. What about that estimated £3 billion The Fresno Bee mentioned? Well, not really. What actually happened- as reported by the Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News (!) ” was that New York Life agreed to donate £3 million to Armenian civic organisations. New York Life avoids going to court and incurring costs and possible embarrassment and gains praise and a considerable amount of business from a wealthy, clannish and grateful community. The Armenian lobby gets to tick a box and something they will try to portray as an endorsement of their position. Everyone is a winner- until you scratch the surface and have a look at it.
Poochigian's Law contains no reference to numbers of dead in any way substituting instead the word many? because the Armenian lobbyists know that they can not prove their statistics. The law makes no reference to Hitler or his words because such references are not provable. The law contains no preamble portraying Turks as worse than such legendry despoilers of civilisation as the Mongols of popular western myth because such references are demonstrably false and clearly racist. The law does not make reference to the first Genocide of the 20th century? because this is as false as it meaningless. This law does not refer to the Armenian Genocide as being similar in ratio? to the Jewish Holocaust as the two experiences are qualitatively and demonstrably different.
In short, Poochigian's Law is a pale shadow of the genocide resolution because it cannot risk the light of day.
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Adolph Hitler and the Armenians? An essay by Nick
Much is made of an alleged connection between the Armenian Genocide? and the Jewish Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s. The claim made by Armenian lobby groups is that the Armenian Genocide? was a prototype that the Nazis used to plan and justify their own genocidal policies against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other social or racial undesirables. To this end a quotation of Hitler's, supposedly made just prior to the invasion of Poland, has been brought into play and has been exhaustively used ever since. The veracity of this particular quotation has been extensively studied since it first made its appearance in its role as a comparator between Armenian and Jewish experiences in the Congressional Records of the US Congress in April 1984. A brief resume is useful here ” the quotation in its accurate form is:
I have issued the command ” I'll have anybody who utters one word of criticism executed by a firing squad ” that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness ” for the present only in the East ” with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians??
This quotation was supposed to have come from a harangue Hitler gave his generals just prior to the invasion of Poland in August 1939. Hitler ordered that no notes were to be taken at this meetings so all reports or quotations? are merely jottings made afterwards from memory or surreptitious notes taken at the time. In either event, it is obvious that accuracy is not guaranteed. However, there are three versions of minutes? for this meeting only one of which mentions Armenians. The version which mentions Armenians was not entered as evidence at the Nuremberg trials as it was considered unreliable. William Shirer, the journalist and author, observes that it was felt that this particular version had been altered by persons unknown and for reasons that were not clear. He did point out that it may have been said, because given our knowledge of Hitler's tendency to range from subject to subject when excited, it did ring true.? He was of course talking of tone rather than content as Hitler was prone to lecture on any subject from diet to opera, biology to philosophy or history to economics and even the concept of the Aryan Jesus at the drop of a hat whether he knew something about the subject or not. Clearly then, this quotation, if accurate, refers to the prosecution of a war against the Poles and is an exhortation to the generals to carry the war forward without regard to humanitarian considerations. It does not refer to the Jews or other groups; it does not refer to the Final Solution in either an ideological or planning context; it does not refer to the rationale for the Final Solution or the means of explaining it. This was a part of a speech given to regular army generals not party activists. The best we can say about this quotation is that it is of doubtful provenance. So why then is it utilised by Armenian Lobbyists so vehemently? In what format is it utilised? And what, if anything, does it actually signify?
Clearly the intention of the quote is to make a link between the Armenian and Jewish experiences. In and of itself it has so significance. However, once a connection is made in people's minds between the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide? the possibility of any rational discussion of the Armenian situation becomes an impossibility without accusations of racism and Genocide Denial? which have become among the principal shibboleths of modern western society, particularly in the US. The actual context of the quote is irrelevant to the issue of the Armenians therefore a new context must be constructed. This new context, and its purpose, becomes evident if one looks at the form this quotation is presented and the metamorphosis it has undergone. To pick a number of short examples from the April 1984 Congressional Record that are typical and illustrative:
Senator Rudy Boschowitz. When Hitler first proposed his final solution, he was told that the world would never permit such a mass murder. Hitler silenced his advisers by asking: ˜Who remembers the Armenians?'?
Congressman Les Aspin. ¦When Adolph Hitler was planning the elimination of the Jewish people, he is reported to have said, ˜Who remembers the Armenians?'
Congressman Edward Boland. The silence with which the community of nations greeted the decimation of the Armenian people may have emboldened those who would later perpetrate similar acts. It certainly had an effect on Hitler who while planning the extermination of millions of Jews was asked how the world would respond to a program of mass murder. In reply Hitler said, Who remembers the Armenians??
Congressman Richard Lehman. Questioned by an aide about his policy of Jewish genocide, Hitler said: ˜Who, after all, now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?'?
Congressman Henry Waxman. ¦This first genocide of our century served as a precedent for the holocaust of World War II when more than 6 million people were destroyed by a government leader who responded: ˜Whoever cared about the Armenians?' when it was suggested that world opinion would not allow the Nazis to get away with their attempt to eliminate the Jewish people?
One has to realize that these examples are actually typical of the versions being presented, that they are completely different in form and content from the original and produce an entirely different thrust from the original. These are not simply errors since any half competent Congressional researcher would have ” should have ” been able to identify and correct them. They have been simply fed into the system in order to make a link that does not exist and can not be demonstrated in order to give an ideological view ” that of the Armenian Genocide?” the aura of sanctity that inclusion in the Congressional Record bestows.
This process continues to the present day even though the doubtful provenance of the quotation is now clearly known. The California Senate Joint Resolution of April 10, 2003, introduced and, presumably, drafted by Senator Poochigian, continues the theme:
WHERAS, Adolph Hitler, in persuading his army commanders on the eve of World War II that the merciless persecution and killing of Poles, Jews, and other peoples would bring no retribution, declared, ˜Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians'.?
It is clear that this misuse is not simply an error but an active misrepresentation; in other words, it is a lie.
In spite of the fact that this misrepresentation is exposed it continues to enjoy currency. It may be more useful, therefore, to approach the origins of Nazi genocide from a different angle. Rather than endlessly spin around a discredited quotation from a dubious source it may be useful to take a brief look at the origins of Nazi ideology in terms of race, relative racial value and the flow of history and try to ascertain who and what influenced it. This is not difficult.
We know that Hitler, though a voracious reader, did not like detail. He left the detail of ideology to others; he was a broad brush? man. We do not know specifically all the books that he read but we can identify a few and we can certainly tie the growth of his philosophy into its proper context. Hitler, and other Nazis at all levels, wrote millions of words in the form of pamphlets, articles and books; they gave interviews and speeches by the score. Scholars have pored over these words and sifted through them in order to try and determine exactly what made Hitler and the Nazis tick and, while we can never know exactly what lies in men's hearts, the one thing we can say is that we know what the aetiology of Nazi thinking on race and the flow of history was. We know that, apart from a couple of cryptic references to Armenians nearly a decade apart the Armenians do not appear even as a brief blip on the radar; they are not a part of the calculation; they simply can not be factored in.
The origins of Nazi ideology are firmly anchored in German myth and folk history and in the Eugenics movement of Western Europe and particularly North America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A favourite Nazi saying, first coined by Fritz Lenz was that National Socialism is nothing if not applied biology.? It goes without saying that American and European eugenicists did not advocate the wholesale slaughter of Jews and other racially subnormal? groups. However, the language and tone adopted did not make this transition surprising. In a book called The Passing of the Great Race? the American eugenicist Madison Grant wrote Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community.? Adolph Hitler read this book and was sufficiently inspired by it to write a letter to Grant in which he praised the book saying that it was his bible.? Hitler also wrote to the American Eugenics Society's President Whitney in the early 1930s expressing similar sentiments. Here we have definitive proof of a link between an outside influence and the evolution of Hitler's ideas on a range of pertinent subjects. Early Nazi laws on race and the sterilization of the mentally unfit were introduced so rapidly after the Nazi accession to power simply because they were modeled on laws already in practice in the US thus saving time that would have been spent drafting brand new laws. Close ties between American and German eugenicists continued right up to the time the US entered the war. In 1928, Harry H. Laughlin, the Assistant Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories addressed the IFEO in Munich saying laws alone were not adequate and had to be applied along with other supportive instruments including eugenic education, marriage restrictions and other measures. Most importantly he stressed the need for the prohibition of procreation for certain members of degenerate tribes. He closed his address saying that ?The racial hygienist as a biologist regards the development of eugenic sterilization as the effort of the state organism? to get rid of the burden of its degenerate members.? Nazi race policies were widely accepted in international eugenics circles, and though at the more extreme end, were not considered beyond the pale. Clarence G. Campbell, the senior representative of the American eugenics movement in Berlin said in a lecture (published in 1936) that It is from a synthesis of the work of all men that the leader of the German nation, ably supported by the Minister of the Interior, Dr. Frick, and guided by the nation's anthropologists, its eugenicists, and its social philosophers, has been able to construct a comprehensive policy of population development and improvement that promises to be epochal in racial history. It sets the pattern which other nations and other racial groups must follow, if they do not wish to fall behind in their racial accomplishment, and in their prospect for survival.? It was the job of various Nazi controlled institutes and agencies to define those who fell into the category of the unfit? but a fair idea of who would qualify can be gained from the American eugenicist and journalist who traveled through Nazi Europe in the early days of the war.; he observed that race and race ideology underpinned the whole philosophy of the Nazis- concluding that We can not intelligently evaluate the Third Reich unless we understand this basic attitude of mind.?
The last word on this matter can be left to Eugene Fischer, a key Nazi eugenicist and ideologist who had close academic and financial connections to the mainstream of the US eugenics movement ” When a people wants, somehow or other, to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements¦..The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I do reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people.?
Through all of this ideological and policy development, the Armenians simply do not figure. After a brief period where their status was somewhat ambiguous they were accepted as Aryans, through the insistence of another major Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg, to the degree that they were permitted to enroll Armenian units in the German armed forces which saw action particularly on the eastern front where mass murder was carried out at its most intense and brutal level.
Race, and relative racial value, was therefore the key to Nazi thought. For any comparison between the Armenian experience in the Ottoman Empire and the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Europe to be valid then race must obviously be a common factor. No less a luminary than Vahakn Dadrian himself, an Armenian academic who has made a career promoting an Armenian Genocide?, admits that race simply was not a factor in the thinking of the Ottoman government when deciding how to manage the problems with Armenians. Quite the reverse in fact ” he says that not only was there a marked absence of racism, but a pronounced effort to mingle Armenian blood with the gene pool of the new homogenised Turkish nation.? In this he echoes a similar sentiment expressed by Ambassador Morgenthau who said The most beautiful and healthy Armenian girls could be taken, forcibly converted to Mohammedanism, and made the wives or concubines of devout followers of the Prophet. Their children would automatically become Moslems and so strengthen the empire, as the Janissaries had strengthened it formerly. These Armenian girls represent a high type of womanhood and the Young Turks, in their crude and intuitive way, recognized that the mingling of their blood with the Turkish population would exert a eugenic influence on the whole.? These are extraordinary statements ” Dadrian's delivered in measured academic tone, Morgenthau's in the tone of a propaganda polemic but both expressing the same bizarre sentiments that nurtured the roots of Armenian nationalism and later of Nazism. It was Armenians and their European and American supporters, not Turks, who harboured thoughts of nationalism based on race. This should not be surprising since nationalism of the type that broke up the Ottoman Empire was nurtured in Western Europe and America from where so many young Armenians received education, information, support and encouragement. It is ironic that another major casualty of this brand of nationalism was a great Christian, European power ” the Austro-Hungarian Empire which, like the Ottoman Empire, was pre-nationalist and multi-ethnic in nature.
Much is made of the ideology of Pan Turanism promoted by the likes of Ziya Gokalp and supported by, among others, Enver Pasha. The effect of Pan Turanism, especially as a rationalization for genocide? is, like many things, grossly over-exaggerated while racial definitions for nationalism amongst Armenians are simply ignored. Critics of the Ottoman Empire constantly say that the empire was backward and outside the orbit of western intellectual achievement. Those few Turks who argued for a Pan Turanist policy, and this is the irony, tended to be amongst those who had been educated abroad or heavily influenced by foreign political philosophy. In spite of this, Pan Turanism was cultural and linguistic rather than racial. However, even amongst mainstream Armenian nationalists the racial component is clearly evident.
One of the inherent problems of Armenian nationalism from the very start was the simple fact that Armenians constituted a minority in every province of the Ottoman Empire ” nowhere were they in a majority in spite of the fact that they laid claim to almost half of Anatolia on the basis of ancestral and racial right. How then does one rationalize the establishment of a state that is defined by ethnicity (race) if that ethnic group is a minority? There are only two ways of realizing this aim; either governance through a system of apartheid or by social engineering through forced demographic changes. Armenians used both of these approaches. They claimed that Turks had proved themselves incapable of fair and civilized governance while taking the opportunity at the beginning of World War I (and in previous conflicts) to execute pogroms against and expulsions of Muslims during a series of defections to Russia and in the activities of Armenian rebel groups which made the Armenians ungovernable. They also explained away the acknowledged shortfall in population by saying that, according to Boghos Nubar Pasha for example, Armenians had the necessary qualities? to live as an autonomous nation (which would not be in doubt) but that they also constituted the most active and hardworking element of the population.? He goes on to refer to statistics as being merely numerical? in nature but that what should be evaluated was the fact that The proportions devised from these figures would certainly favour Armenians if these different peoples were counted according to their level of culture and economy¦¦¦Consequently, the Armenians will always constitute the essential element in that country, from the intellectual, economic and historical points of view.? This is simply a claim made on the basis of racial superiority and ancestral right and can not be disguised as anything else.
In discussions with Lord Bryce, in July 1915, in preparing a strategy to promote Armenian nationalist aspirations to the British parliament it was agreed that talk of relative values of the different races should be postponed to a later date and that emphasis should be given to massacres ” for obvious reasons. But they did discuss the fact that all foreign observers who had studied the issue agreed that Armenians were bestowed with an extraordinary strength to rebuild and were superior to the rest.? It was also noted by Bryce that after the establishment of Armenia the Armenian population would double in twenty years ” presumably because of the fecundity and industry of a superior race, while the Turks and other Moslems would remain static because of their race and due to their cultural practices such as polygamy (!). During this period Armenia would be governed as a protectorate of a civilized power (preferably America) in what is clearly an outline for demographic engineering. One has to ask who is kidding whom here.
Armenians make fairly frequent reference to the fact? that because so many Germans served in the Ottoman Empire during the war and then subsequently in the Nazi administration or German army that there must have been a causal link between the Armenian Genocide? and the Jewish Holocaust. But they have never been able to demonstrate that any of those who served in the Near East or the Caucusus in World War I had any influence whatsoever on the formulation of Nazi philosophy or the aetiology of Nazi thinking on race ” as has been clearly demonstrated above. In fact, American social, eugenics and medical thinkers had the major impact on the development on Nazi thought in its initial stages but no one refers to it and no one would seriously suggest that the US was the inspiration for the Jewish Holocaust. The American philosophies of Manifest Destiny? was a major inspiration behind the practical possibilities of Lebensraum and Hitler admired the British ability to control India with so few British administrators. No one would blame the Americans or British for planting the seeds of the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union in Hitler's mind. Yet this is precisely the logic being applied to the Turks on the basis of the most fleeting and flimsy pieces of evidence.? Armenian lobbyists have tried hard to insinuate themselves into the Holocaust framework by implying mechanical similarities between the Armenian Genocide? and the Nazis by referring to the fact that some Turks, for example, who were involved in atrocities against Armenians, were also medical doctors and have suggested that medical experiments were conducted ” presumably the precursor of Mengele. Others have referred to concentration camps knowing that this has become a loaded term with very specific meaning. There has even been allusion to the use of gas chambers in converted steam rooms in bath houses or the use of caves as natural gas chambers in the Syrian desert. None of this has stood up to scrutiny in any real sense which is precisely the reason that Armenian groups keep coming back to this one doubtful reference by Hitler.
There is no question that Armenians suffered a terrible tragedy in Anatolia during the Great War. There can be no question that Armenians were the victims of massacre and atrocity. But one must also acknowledge that many Armenian? regions were in open revolt and were supporting the enemy ” some even before the Ottoman Empire was involved in hostilities. An interesting case in point here is the fact that the province of Sivas ” never invaded by outside forces during the war ” still experienced a net loss in the Muslim population of 180,000 (15%). This is a significant number and can not be accounted for by migration since all adjacent areas also experienced a net loss. This is clearly the effects of major social upheaval, conflict and disease. The net losses of Muslims in Van and Bitlis, where the Russians did penetrate and where the proportion of Armenians in the population was highest, was 62% and 42% respectively ” staggering numbers. The simple chronological fact that the major city of the east, Van, fell to Armenian insurgents before being handed over to the Russians and before the order to relocate the Armenians was issued can not be denied. That these revolts were undoubtedly a major problem for the government, even if one restricts oneself to Armenian accounts, is clear. That atrocities were committed by Armenian rebels on Muslim populations is also clear. Even reports by pro Armenian missionaries mention the cleansing of Muslims from their homes and the high levels of mortality. It has to be said that these references are almost incidental or even accidental ” they certainly do not seem to be important to those who are reporting them. An account by an American missionary, a Mrs. Knapp, from the Bryce report ( May, 1915 from Van) observes that the missionaries had thrust upon them? the care of Turkish refugees from areas where Russo-Armenian volunteers were ?cleaning out.? She observed that while the missionaries tried to help, their Armenian assistants found the task distasteful? and only two of them, who had no employment? were available for this onerous task. The missionaries' prejudices are also clear in the following observation: The effect on its followers of the religion of Islam was never more strongly contrasted with Christianity. While the Armenian refugees had been mutually helpful and self-sacrificing, these Moslems showed themselves absolutely selfish, callous and indifferent to each other's suffering. Where the Armenians had been cheery and hopeful, and had clung to life with wonderful vitality, the Moslems, with no faith in God and no hope of a future life, bereft now of hope in this life, died like flies of the prevailing dysentery from lack of stamina and the will to live.? Efforts were made to get the Russian commander to provide some flocks of sheep so that the Turkish refugees could be sent away ” which is eventually what happened, after which, there is no further reference to them. In spite of the descriptions of Turkish depredations and atrocities against Armenians mentioned by Mrs. Knapp in the rest of her account, a telegram from a Mikael Varandian in Tiflis to Boghos Nubar in Paris dated June the 3rd, 1915 says that Van was conquered by the insurgents, after battles lasting one month. The victorious Russian army is in Van. In spite of the continuous bombing, the Armenian districts have suffered little damage. There are two interesting observations to be made from this telegram: Firstly the use of the word insurgent? ” an admission that there was a revolt ” and secondly the comment on the lack of damage to the Armenian quarters which would seem to contradict the observations made by other outsiders who talk of the dreadful conditions Armenians suffered during the fighting. What is being described here is not genocide but an inter-communal war and a foreign invasion. What is also demonstrated by the missionary references is the severe bias of the reporting.
To compare the handling, or in many instances the mishandling, of the Armenian revolts and collaboration with Russia with the clear progression of thought over several decades that was the prelude to genocide in Europe under the Nazis and the cold, cynical and mechanistic way that genocide was carried out to the bitter end is simply ridiculous. The continued use, in the absence of any actual evidence, of a quote by Adolph Hitler that is of doubtful provenance in a form that has been changed in order to make its impact greater is fundamentally dishonest.
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Oiling The Wheels & Exchanging Hostages An essay by Nick
Malta Detainees and Other Tales
The status of the Turkish detainees in Malta after the First World War is somewhat misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. The initial point is that the Turks held in Malta were never actually acquitted? since no court was ever convened and no charges were ever brought against them. There were accusations certainly but actual charges were never laid against the detained Turks since the quality of evidence available to the British was so poor. Armenians make much of the observation that geopolitical and imperial considerations blunted the vigour with which the British pursued the prosecution case against the detained Turks and also claim that the Turks were simply traded for British prisoners held by the Turkish Republican forces. The former observation is inaccurate and the latter is an oversimplification- two usual tactics of Armenian lobbyists. The issue of commercial interests in Turkey, mainly that of oil, is also often cited as a crucial factor in the general failure of war crimes prosecutions A simple look at the chronology of events might serve to clarify the problem:
1918, Oct. 30. Armistice between Turkey and Britain at Mudros.
British Navy controls Turkish waters and allied troops take possession of key positions. French General Franchet d'Esperay enters Constantinople at the head of his troops mounted on a white horse, emulating Fatih, the Conqueror.
1918, November 1, British forces occupy the city of Mosul.
1919, Jan. 18, Peace Conference opens in Paris
1919, March 16, Allied military officially occupies Constantinople although they have actually been in place since November 1918. British troop numbers in the region initially exceeded one million men but by this time were about 350,000.
1919, May. 15, Greek forces land at Smyrna.
1919, May, 28, the British, unhappy with the progress of Ottoman courts martial process removed from Turkish custody and deported to Mudros and Malta, 68 Turks accused of war time atrocities to join others already detained.
1920, March 16, Allies officially take military control of Constantinople.
1920, May 11, Mustapha Kemal sentenced to death in absentia by Sultan's government.
1920, June 10, Treaty of Sevres presented to Ottoman government.
1920, June 22- July 9, Greek armies advance into Anatolia and capture Bursa.
1921, July 10, after initially being halted Greeks continue offensive and capture Eskishehir
1921, August 23- September 13, battle of Sakarya. Greek armies comprehensively defeated by Ataturk.
1921, October 20, Treaty of Angora between Nationalist government and France.
1922, August 26- September 9, Greeks mount counter offensive but are beaten and Smyrna falls to Nationalist forces.
1922, Oct 3-11, Opening of Mudanya Conference and agreement of armistice between Allies and Turkish Nationalists¦¦..November 20th, Lausanne Peace Conference opens.
1923, July 24th- Lausanne Peace Conference concludes with a treaty.
1923, October 2, Allies evacuate Constantinople and Nationalist forces take possession.
1926, June 5, Agreement on Mosul between Turkey, Britain and Irak.
As one can see from this simplified chronology, the British and their various allies (French and Greek) were in complete control of events in Constantinople and western Anatolia for about two years and eleven months- from the de-facto occupation of Constantinople until the Greek defeat at Sakarya. The British in particular, due to the pro Greek/ pro Armenian and anti Turkish leanings of Lloyd George were pursuing a vigorous policy to dismember the Turkish homeland of Anatolia while the French were striving to carve out their own share in Cilicia. The British were actively supporting the Greek invasion of western Anatolia and were fully behind the dream of setting up a new Greek empire in Asia Minor because it fitted in with their imperial world view at that time. The idea that the British were following a separate imperial agenda, or were thinking of exchanging Turkish detainees for British prisoners held by the Nationalists can not be a serious proposition prior to the battle of Sakarya. Up until the Greek defeat at Sakarya the British were still betting on their Greek clients as the best means of pursuing their strategic objectives.
It is true that the British were greatly concerned with what they perceived to have been neglect of, or crimes against British POWs, but they were also very concerned with prosecuting Turks for crimes against Christians. Up until this point the British, finding it impossible to find evidence against Turkish detainees that would stand up in court, were leaning more towards the concept of a collective punishment of all Turks that involved the dismemberment of the whole country- something that had been on the books since 1915 anyway. The allies, in spite of the fact that they had full access to Ottoman archives, were in control of Ottoman provinces to which Armenians were relocated and were in communication with the US State Department (which should have had masses of evidence provided by the diligent work of Morgenthau and his various employees) were unable to produce evidence that was viable in a British court. It was not until after the Greeks were soundly beaten, in retreat and had been exposed as mass murderers themselves that the Anatolia policy of the British government became untenable and the prospect of prisoner exchanges became possible, indeed desirable. In fact, the behaviour of Greek forces (supported by Armenian and Greek irregulars) was appalling and did considerable damage to the image of Greece in Britain and undermined British confidence in Greece's ability to administer the territory it aspired to. In short, British prosecutors had nearly three years to produce evidence that would stand up in court and were unable to do so.
It was true that a legal technicality made it difficult to prosecute governments for actions taken against their own citizens, but Britain had gone some considerable way to circumventing this by devising the concept of a crime against humanity? back in 1915 when the first accusations were made against the Ottoman government of crimes against Armenians. The legalistic framework should have been in place.
British concerns over the oil fields of Iraq (especially Mosul) were irrelevant to the issue of British POWs and the Turks detained in Malta since they already had possession of the oil fields having held them since the capitulation of Turkish forces on October 30th 1918. The Turkish Nationalists had already accepted the loss of significant territories with the publication and ratification of the National Pact. The Nationalists were less interested in the commercial potential of regions than they were in the idea of cultural or national integrity. One should not forget that the Mosul region was the only part of the National Pact Ataturk was unable to secure. When the issue of Mosul was finally settled the Turks accepted a one-off indemnity payment of a mere £500,000! It is hard to understand just how the issue of oil concessions could be any part of American strategic and economic thinking either- and much is made of the US unwillingness to press the Turks and support Armenian ambitions in this respect. It seems typical of much of the Armenian argument concerning the genocide? and its consequences that factors relied upon are simple incorrect or irrelevant. This is one of the factors cited by George Horton in a book he published in 1926 with the pithy title of The Blight of Asia?; Mosul and the freedom to give us a chance in the scramble for oil has been the subject of all the negotiations (at Lausanne)¦.Peace and civilisation may be talked about in public, but in private there is talk of oil, because territories where the future concessionaires will be at pains to insure their rights, are at stake.? Now this would have been perfectly true but the Turks would not have been involved in this aspect of discussions other than as spectators since, as has already been pointed out, they did not hold any oil producing assets of significance. It hard to believe that Horton would not have known this since, as the inside cover of the book states, he was For Thirty years Consul and Consul General of the United States in the Near East.? Of course this book, and many others like it, is simply a polemic that is aimed at condemning Turks and promoting Christian? values at the expense of fact.. In the foreword of the book the intent is made clear- high ideals are more than oil and railroads, and the Turks should not be accepted into the society of decent nations until they show sincere repentance for their crimes.? The crimes of others against Muslims are simple never acknowledged. It is from polemics and propaganda tracts like this that the concessions for oil myth derives. That this approach continues is regrettable and undeniable; this book, along with others of the same ilk have recently been republished by a company specialising in the republication of classic books? under the editorship of (and there should be no surprises here) of an individual called Ara Sarafian.
Armenians are correct in pointing out that war time would have been the most opportune time to exterminate a troublesome minority. The question remains that if this was the aim, why didn't it happen? Why are there so many Armenian survivors when famine, disease, the elements and warfare all conspired together to kill so many Muslims? 18% of the total Muslim population of Anatolia was dead by the end of the Turkish War of Independence, victims of nearly a decade of conflict. In regions where conflict with Armenians was worst, there too, Muslim mortality was worse: Van- 62%, Erzerum-31%, Bitlis-42%, Diyarbakir-26%, Konya-27%, Sivas-15% and so on. Independent estimates of Armenian mortality for Anatolia vary from 13% to 40%- it is hard to be precise since Armenians left the region and settled elsewhere. Muslims remained not having anywhere else to go. In any event, these figures are fully in accordance with losses amongst the Muslim populations which should not be surprising since the same conditions were endured by all communities. The fact is that there is a curious concordance here in terms of casualties suffered which should, for any reasonable person, be a cause for thought. British (and American) representatives in the east were clear observers of Armenian atrocities against Muslims and had remarkably little bitterness towards Turks who held them prisoner in spite of their tribulations because they, for the most part, understood the circumstances. The most vituperative anti Turkish reports come from the armchair observers like Morgenthau, Lepsius, Stuermer, Horton and so on who had little to base their observations? on other than carefully edited and selected reports and personal prejudice.
It is observed that authors such as Stuermer provide considerable evidence of genocide- but this doubtful since the title of his book Two War Years in Constantinople? gives the game away. He spent two years in Constantinople and did as much travelling and investigation as Morgenthau and Lepsius- none of whom left the Constantinople area during the years in question. The assumption that as a German (and an ally of Turkey), Stuermer would be pro Turkish is as erroneous as the suggestion that the British did not prosecute the Malta Turks because of the vestiges of 19th century pro-Ottoman sympathies. The simple facts are that once the war started all bets were off and everything was up for grabs- the Germans being as keen as anyone to make profit from the Turks. The Germans were not particularly pro Turkish and always had their own imperial, economic and strategic interests in Asia Minor and the Caucusus as a priority.
There is also the inevitable and predictable comparison with the Jews of Germany observing that they were, like the Armenians of Turkey, the financial and productive backbone of the economy- this simply isn't true. Jews in Germany were relatively prosperous but they certainly were not the backbone of the economy and they certainly never enjoyed the favoured status that Armenians enjoyed in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike the Jews of Germany, Armenian communities were in open revolt against the government and were providing aid and support to the enemy. Unlike the Jews of Germany, the Armenians were playing on the sympathies of outsiders to inflate their importance in political and cultural terms to achieve goals they could not otherwise have entertained. The Jews of Germany, for the most part, wanted to be integrated as German citizens; the Armenians of the Ottoman empire perceived the themselves to be superior to the Turks and deserving of special considerations¦¦..There can be no comparison.
The constant use of republished and clearly racist and biased sources in support of mythology has little relation to reality and is merely testament to the dishonest basis for the genocide proposition.
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Telling a Good Story An essay by Nick
I
Armenians, and their friends, have been promoting the idea of the Armenian genocide, in one form or another for at least ninety years. The story has fitted perfectly with a broader assault against the Turks that has gone on since the Philhellenic romantics got the bit between their teeth at the start of the Greek War of Independence and went on to encompass a whole range of anti Turkish stories through the Bulgarian Horrors? to the Pontic Genocide? and the Destruction of Smyrna.? The story has been heart rending, dramatic and, above all, hugely fictionalised. More than a glorification of the history of the suffering endured by resilient and noble peoples at the hands of brutal and primitive oppressors, this has been the glorification of selective pieces of history and carefully nurtured myths ” a glori-fictation of history in effect.
All nations have national myths, usually surrounding their ancestry, conception and birth. Some nations have aberrational myths that focus on divine rights and depend on grotesque suffering. The fact is, that in modern times at least, the details of the arguments between the Turks and the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and Armenians interests nobody except those involved. The general public, in America or France for example, is not remotely interested in the details of 500 years under the Ottoman yoke? in Greece or Bulgaria or the Armenian Genocide? any more. However, in spite of the lack of interest, the repeated telling of a story has contributed to the poisoning of the groundwater in terms of Turkey's relationship with western countries and bubbles to the surface in films like Midnight Express? and in sentiments that if expressed about any other ethnic group would produce outrage. This has been particularly evident in the USA when the issue of alliance or aid arises or in Europe over Turkey's EU membership. The same old stories of the Turks and Islam come tumbling out. The Turkish Republic is described as a country whose parents were barbarians and whose midwives were war and genocide. It is a good story; a dramatic story; a compelling story that trips of the pen. But it is just a story. The Turks have been forced to defend themselves in academic, even legalistic terms in the face of accusations and distortions. Unfortunately, people are bored by legalistic arguments and prefer the entertainment of a good story. Once a good story has been fixed in the mind it mingles with prejudice and half facts that masquerade as historical knowledge and is very difficult to shift. But these incomplete conceptions affect the decisions that are made in our world and our time because we live in countries that have politicians who are populists and are driven by sound- bytes and sentimentality.
However, a modern Turkish Republic whelped by genocide, is not so far from the truth ” and it is a story that should be told with conviction and purpose. Between 1783 and 1913 it is estimated that 5-7 million Muslims became refugees, at least 3.8 million of them from territories acquired by Russia, and poured into the Ottoman Empire. (1) This is even before the Great War charnel house is accounted for. These refugees had a profound impact on the Ottoman Empire's demographic make up and the memory of them significantly affects events even today but it is a store of memory held mainly in Turkey and, as yet, has little resonance in the West. Within these bald statistics are between 5 and 7 million tragic, heart rending stories. The early phase of these forced migrations was of little interest to people in the west. Western interest was only sparked by the onset of the Greek uprisings in the early part of the 1800s and subsequent literary yearnings of the philhellenic romantics and the messianic imperatives of religious Christian fundamentalists.
The early part of the 1800s was characterised by Russian meddling in the Ottoman Empire that, generally speaking, alarmed western countries. By 1820 the situation in the Morea (southern Greece) was increasingly fragile and uprisings, spurred on by Russian agents, broke out in March, 1821. George Finlay, one of the pre-eminent historians of the Greek War for independence (and a man very sympathetic to the Greeks) said that in April, 1821 the Muslim population of Greece (the Morea) was upwards of twenty thousand? and before two months had elapsed the greater part were slain-men, women, and children were murdered on their own hearths without mercy or remorse.? (2) This was done coldly, cynically and viscously to people who had been neighbours for centuries. Not only that, when Finlay travelled in the region some years later, locals would proudly point out the scenes of these atrocities and brag about their participation in them. Finlay then goes on to describe a liturgy of butchery against Muslims. He also says that in hundreds of villages where Muslim families were exterminated the bodies of men, women and children were thrown into some outhouse, which was set on fire, because no Orthodox Christian would demean himself so far as to dig a grave for the carcase of an infidel.? He adds to this, in a footnote, that on one occasion he witnessed the digging out of the bones of several victims, well known in the district,? as the locals were preparing to rebuild the house in which they had been murdered. (3)
In the town of Vrachori, Greeks burned the Turkish and Jewish quarters and tortured the Jews to collect money and jewels who were then killed. The Greeks then turned on the Turks and men, women and children were slain in cold blood? in what Finlay says were circumstances of atrocious cruelty.? (4)
It was not until the general massacre of Muslims in Greece had begun were there any reprisals in Constantinople ” and these were of selected individuals who were either involved in plotting with Greek insurrectionists and Russian agents or those who were in positions of authority over the Greeks, the best known of whom was Patriarch Gregorios.
Then followed the massacre of Trepoliza where, according to Colonel Raybaud, a French artillery officer serving with the Greeks, women and children were frequently tortured before they were murdered.? He went on to report that after the Greeks had been in possession of the city for forty-eight hours, they deliberately collected together about two thousand persons of every age and sex, but principally women and children, and led them to a ravine in the nearest mountain, where they murdered every soul.? Many young women were taken off as slaves but few male children were spared.? General Gordon, a British eye-witness, estimated when reviewing the aftermath, that about eight thousand Muslims had been slaughtered. All of this was prior to limited pogroms against Christians in the Smyrna area (a direct response to the massacre at Trepoliza) and prior to the much written about and exaggerated massacres on Chios. Thus was set the pattern that was to be followed for the next hundred years. (5)
The Greek pattern was replicated almost exactly in Bulgaria when in the 1870s Bulgarian massacres of Muslims precipitated reprisals that where grossly reported in Europe and used for political purposes by politicians like Gladstone who made great capital out of the Bulgarian Horrors? Again, the instigator here was Russia and again the result was massacre and expulsions of the Muslim population. When Bulgaria became independent, the area it covered had been a multi-ethnic region with almost half the population being Muslims- some of whom had already experienced expulsion from the Crimea at the hands of Russia. During the war of 1877-78, some seventeen months of fighting resulted in the expulsion of one and a half million Muslims and the deaths from exposure, disease, starvation and massacre of 500,000. Following this the Turks of Bulgaria experienced phases of oppression and deportation up until the fall of communism, but particularly during and just after the Balkan wars. During the first part of World War I, the Ottoman government was still trying to settle about 500,000 surviving refugees from the Balkan wars but roughly 27% of Muslims from Ottoman Europe had died as a result of the Balkan wars ” some 600,000 people. (6)
In some regions Muslims were now a cowed minority while in others, they had ceased to exist by the close of matters after World War I. And everywhere was the systematic destruction of all visible remains of Muslim presence. In Salonica, for example, as soon as population exchanges with Turkey had been agreed the city government decided to demolish the city's minarets and mosques and the work was put out to tender. One journalist wrote One after the other, the symbols of a barbarous religion fall crashing to the ground¦.The forest of white minarets is thinning out. The red fezzes are leaving, the yashmaks vanish.? (7) In Salonica even Ottoman built baths and markets were demolished. And so on. All over the Balkans the pattern was the same. People seemed to think that by erasing the physical evidence of the Ottoman past they could make history disappear ¦so that it could be rewritten. Nothing like this was ever carried out by Ottoman authorities.
In Europe, where the involvement of westerners was considerable, it is possible to find the truth if one is prepared to look because there was some honesty to be found.
Even a man like Chedo Myatocich, Serbian ambassador to both London and Constantinople was able to admit in 1913 that it is political interest that has caused us (the nations of the Balkans) to describe the Turks as cruel Asiatic tyrants, unnameable to European civilisation. An impartial history would show that the Turks are rather Europeans than Asiatics and that they are not cruel tyrants, but a nation that loves justice and freedom and that possesses virtues and qualities deserving of recognition and respect.? (8) Leaving aside the implied criticism of what it means to be an Asiatic? his point is clear and has an eerily contemporary relevance.
In Russia and the Caucasus however, things were considerably different in that the Russians were not the provocateurs but the direct agents of genocide. It is also an area where western observers were few, sources of information limited and, to complicate matters, the regions where Armenians and other Christian minorities had most involvement. Matters in Chechnya and Dhagestan continue to fester today directly because Russia's grotesque efforts at combined policies of forced assimilation, expulsion, internal exile and murder have been spectacularly unsuccessful.
II
One of the most crucial problems in analysing the evolution of the Armenian crisis in Anatolia and the Caucasus has been the fictionalisation of history. This is a region and a people where fact and story telling have become inextricably combined. If one wants to get a feel for the Armenian Genocide? one is better served by reading a novel on the subject, or one of the dramatised biographies, than the dense pseudo-scientific treatises that are regularly churned out by the genocide industry. A.H. Hartunian's dramatised biography Neither to Laugh nor to Weep? is a good example. Another is the collaborative novel written by Hacikyan and Soucy A Summer Without Dawn ” An Armenian Epic? and published in 1991. It isn't a particularly good novel and it abounds with clichés. However it does cover the salient components of the myth ” the meetings between Morgenthau and Talaat, complete with the conversations explaining the government's policy of genocide as reported in Morgenthau's book, and early in chapter I the often repeated myth that it was said that around 300,000 Christians had been killed? in massacres ordered by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II in 1894 ” all of this in order to set the scene. The novel contains all the familiar themes (and contradictions) of innocent Armenian victims and valiant Armenian freedom fighters; Armenian orphans raised as Muslims never to know their Armenian birthright; women forced into sexual slavery; bad Turks and (a few) good Turks; manipulated and misled Kurds ” the agents of genocide and, of course, the wholesale government sponsored massacre of Armenians and eventual salvation in America. The epilogue briefly covers the war crimes? trials in Istanbul, the betrayal of the Armenians by the allies and the establishment of the Republic.
A ripping yarn. (9)
But stories are not constrained by fact and one does not need to understand the roots of a problem to soak up the message ” the tree is visible, the roots are not. The roots are to be found in Russia and in Russia's expansion into the Caucuses; with their frequent resulting wars against the region's inhabitants and the Persian and Ottoman empires. The Russians first sought to subvert local populations to their cause whether they were Christian, Muslim or animist. The pattern was a cascade of trade, bribery, division, assault, occupation and then expulsion, deportation and genocide.
A Russian civil servant called Platon Zubov tried to formalise this hitherto ad hoc policy in 1834 in a book called A Picture of the Caucasian Region and Neighbouring Lands Belonging to Russia.? Zubov's thesis involved the subversion of mountain tribes by stimulating a demand amongst their women for luxury goods. These goods were to be offered by Christian missionaries who would combine trade with conversion and propaganda to primitives who would then see the benefits of Russification. Lowland inhabitants would remain in their homes served by the Russian government and ministered to by the Orthodox Church. Mountain peoples would be sent to inner Russia and would be replaced by Russian settlers. Native language, religion and culture would eventually die out. Clearly a naïve plan because the peoples of the region would hardly appreciate benefits of deportation and cultural extinction. The initial parts of Zubov's thesis were never implemented with enthusiasm or efficacy, but the latter parts certainly were. (10)
One of the earlier attempts to co-opt the Armenian population in the frontier zones with the Ottoman Empire occurred in 1829. On the 11th of January 1829 Field Marshall Paskievitch wrote, in a dispatch to the Emperor, We can defeat the enemy by the help of our troops; we can only retain our conquests by inspiring confidence in the population.? He was referring to the Armenians in this instance who as a result, according to the contemporary writer John F. Baddely (one of the few westerners to write about this period and region) were utterly compromised with their Muhamadan neighbours.? When the Russians eventually withdrew from Turkish territory, some 90,000 Armenians went with them.(11) This is also the period where we start to see the mythologizing of the Armenian struggle for freedom. Khattchur Abovian, an influential writer and ideologue, considered by many to be the father of modern Armenian literature, was born between 1804 and 1810 in Erivan, which was then part of Persia. He was an eye-witness to the Russo-Persian war of 1827-28 and saw the absorbtion of his homeland by Russia. He wrote what is described as an important historical novel ” The Woes of Armenia? ” as a result. In the book, he tells how joyous the Armenians were at the prospects of having a Christian? power to rule their country¦and describes the ravages that had taken place in the homeland that the reader wonders if any other country has suffered as much as Armenia¦¦Abovian made an emotional appeal to his countrymen to be mindful of the sorrows of their native land and to mourn its martyrs. He drew the mind and heart of his readers toward their fatherland and, in doing so, awakened in them the desire for revolution.? (12)
General Alexei Yermolov wrote to the Tsar in 1818: he "would find no peace as long as a single Chechen remained alive" because "by their example they could inspire a rebellious spirit and love of freedom among even the most faithful subjects of the Empire."
The defeat of both Persia and Turkey during this period left Russia with a free hand for many years to follow and was characterised by brutality, especially in the conquest of Chechnya. In Chechnya, the Russian general Yermolov campaigned with real barbarity saying when questioned about his tactics out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of Russians from destruction and thousands of Muslims from treason.? Villages with their inhabitants were regularly destroyed and captured women were distributed among Russian officers as winter entertainment. Following Yermolov, Veliaminov tried the same tactics against the Circassians where he resorted to deliberate brutality and scorched earth without success. For a time there was stalemate in the Caucusus and Circassians were said by Prince Kochubey (to an American writer) to be like the American Indians untameable and uncivilized¦.and¦extermination only would keep them quiet.? (13) Ultimately, this was to be their fate. Baddely said of this time it would be unfair to the natives to forget that, time after time, from their earliest contact with the northern invaders down to the last shameful act of conquest, the wholesale expatriation of the western tribes in 1864, we come upon evidence of Russia's unjust and even treacherous dealing with them, and this though we are perforce confined to Russian sources for our information.? The same is, of course, true of other nationalities; the Karbadians were destroyed by Yermolov and finished off by plague so that barely 10,000 of them remained by 1834 ” Russia's policy can be encapsulated by Yermolov's dictate to destroy auls [villages], hang hostages, and slaughter women and children? (14)
Ultimately, by 1864, some 1,2000,000 Abkhaz and Circassian people were expelled to the Ottoman Empire 400,000 of them dying in the process. (15) The Russians burned villages, destroyed livestock and burned crops thus, according to a British diplomatic report, obliging them to fly.? It goes on to say As the Russians gain ground on the coast, the natives are not allowed to remain there on any terms, but are compelled either to transfer themselves to the plains of Kouban or emigrate to Turkey¦¦..The Ubikh and Fighett tribes are fast embarking for Trebizond. In fact, after their land had been laid waste by fire and sword, emigration to Turkey is the only alternative allowed to these mountaineers who refuse to transfer themselves to the Kouban steppes¦¦¦Most of the Abkhaz have been plundered of everything by the Russians before embarking and have barely been allowed to bring with them the strict necessities of life for a short period. In many villages¦.their houses have been wantonly burnt by the Cossak soldiery and their cattle and other property forcibly taken away or sold under compulsion to Russian traders at a nominal price.?
And in another report The Russian government has now acquired the territory of that brave and devoted race who have only prized one thing more than country ” liberty, or at least the life that is free from the domination of a foreign foe. They are flying the shores immortalized by their defence and seeking asylum in a neighbouring empire. In short, Circassia is gone¦¦? (16) One has to ask ” does any of this sound familiar?
Mortality was very high. Many drowned in the Black Sea as they had been embarked upon boats that were simply unseaworthy and crowded to capacity. To this day, there is a folk memory among the descendants of some of these people that they should not eat fish because their ancestors were, themselves food for fishes.
Many died of murder, disease, starvation and exposure on the overland trip to Turkey and many succumbed after they had reached safety. For example, a tug, arriving at the Dardanelles in tow of two ships laden with 1,300 Circassians from Samsoon. The original number shipped was 1,800 and during the voyage, which lasted 35 days, 670 died from disease, exhaustion, hunger and, above all, from horrible crowding.?
In 1865 some 5,000 Chechen and Ingush families were forced to flee to Turkey. This was a typical occurrence and the pattern was repeated after the Russo-Turkish war of 1876-8. In fact, by Royal Decree of 31st May 1880, the entire Abkhazian people were officially declared guilty of treason and those that had not already fled were exiled to eastern and northern provinces of Russia. Large swathes of central Abkhazia were almost completely depopulated. (17) And in 1895 in The Memorandum on the Colonisation in the Sukhumi District? drawn up by one Colonel Brakker there is the statement:?It is desirable to save as much free land as possible for the settlement of exclusively native Russian people.? Some Abkhaz endured and the supply of Russian settlers was limited ” according to statistics collated in 1918 the population of Abkhazia was 21.4% Abkhaz, 42.1% Georgians, 11.7% Russians, 11.7% Greeks, 10.2% Armenians and 2.9% other nationalities. (18) In the province of Erivan, roughly now modern Armenia, the population was predominately Muslim. By 1827 the majority was Armenian. And so the pattern continued. (19)
The pattern of manipulation of Armenians by Russia in order to further their Caucasian and Anatolian goals, and the apparent willingness of Armenians to co-operate continued unabated with the Russians being frustrated only by the restraints put on them by the western powers and the Armenians by their inability to control Russian ambitions. As Louise Nalbandian puts it The Armenians had always nurtured the thought of freedom during the centuries of foreign domination, but now they believed they could move effectively against it. Even after the great disappointment at the Congress of Berlin, this hope for a brighter future did not die.? (20) During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-88 the Tiflis based Armenian newspaper Mushak said, as Russian troops marched into Turkey, If Turkey vanishes from the face of the earth as a nation, the Armenians of Turkey must try every means to join Russia.? (21) And from Armenian intellectuals such as Mikael Nalbandian, Rafael Patkanian (aka Kamar Katiba) and Hakob Melik-Hakobian (aka Raffi) came works of popular literature that all aimed at the encouragement of armed force against the Ottoman government.? Greek and Bulgarian revolutionary experiences encouraged the setting up of guerrilla bands on the back of Russian support. Groups in Russia sought to stir up unrest amongst Armenians in Turkey by encouraging them to emulate the Greeks and Bulgarians by producing brochures with romanticised accounts of revolt with titles such as Bulgar Avazakapet (Chief of the Bulgarian Brigands) and Sarkavag? (Deacon) (22) Beyond the romantic literary output was, of course, the more sinister terroristic byproduct. Armenian revolutionaries were, by the early 1890s, involved in military and incendiary operations aimed at destabilising the Ottoman Empire ” men were sent across the border for military actions against Kurds since it was believed that such encounters would attract the attention of the European Powers¦..and to collect information about the condition of the people and the possibilities of uprising: preparing men in Russian Transcaucasia for possible future armed combat on Turkish soil; and smuggling arms into Turkey through the Persian frontier.? (23) All of this is prior to incidents that produced major uproar in western countries such as the Kum Kapi riots (1890), the riots at Bab Ali (1895) and the Ottoman Bank attack (1896) and most importantly, the 1896 uprising in Van . It is interesting that in the matter of arms smuggling into eastern Anatolia in this period the Armenians were very clever in exploiting the political dynamics of the area and the mutual suspicions of Russians, Armenians, Persians, Turks and Kurds ” the Dashnaks set up an arms factory in 1891 in Tabriz. This arms factory was an assembly plant ” or what we call today a screwdriver plant?” skilled men from the Tula arms factory in Russia, using equipment from the government armoury in Tiflis, manufactured components for modern arms and ammunition. These components were then transported to Tabriz for assembly and then stored in various arsenals for use by guerrilla forces in Turkey. The Turks knew about this but were able to do little due to limitations placed on their scope for action by international borders. (24) Into this developing environment of hostility and terror in the heartland of the Ottoman Empire came the millions of refugees and survivors of massacre, disease and human calamity from the Caucusus, the Balkans and Greece.
In the context of all this human misery the deportation of Armenians in WWI was small beer. In the context of a war of national survival it is surprising that the government resorted to deportation and not genocide (as the Imperial Russian Government actually did) and it is hardly surprising, given the recent nature of the sufferings of Muslims and the incendiary and racist nature of Armenian propaganda that the local responses to the proximity of Russian armies and the actions of Armenian irregulars was so extreme. As Rafael de Nogales, an artillery officer with the Ottoman army put it ” after the war started almost all Armenian officers and men of the Third Army joined the Russians soon to return burning hamlets and mercilessly putting to the knife all the peaceful Mussulman villagers that fell into their hands. The altogether unjustifiable desertion of the Armenian troops, united to the outrages they committed afterwards, on their return, in the sectors of Bash-Kaleh, Serai and Bayacet, did not fail to alarm the Turks and rouse their fear lest the rest of the Armenian population in the frontier provinces of Van and Erzerum revolt likewise, and attack them with the sword.? (25)
The difference between Muslim and Armenian experiences lay only in the fact that there was no vociferous lobby in America or Western Europe campaigning on their behalf; there was no missionary investment in the souls of the Greek Muslims, Bulgarian Turks, the Crimean Tartars, the Chechen, the Ingush, the Abkhaz, the Circassians and the numerous other small nations and tribes who suffered and, in some instances, no longer exist. Double standards were even more entrenched then than they are today and a similar pattern unfolded after the Greeks invaded Anatolia in pursuit of a neo-Byzantine imperial dream in 1919. When George Horton, Christian missionary in Smyrna and a Turcophobe of no small distinction (author of The Blight of Asia?), asked a Greek about reports of wholesale massacres carried out by Greeks against Turks in Western Anatolia during 1921-22, the answer that he got was that Greek actions were modeled after the punitive expeditions carried out by U.S. forces in the Philippines between 1899-1905. (26)
It should be noted that there are some estimates that put the direct and indirect mortality among Filipinos due to American military action at about 200,000. Mr. Horton's Greek advisor would certainly have been familiar with the purpose and format of U.S. operations in the Philippines but the comparisons seem to have prompted no further comment. In the context of the Philippines, non Christian Filipinos were referred to, in official texts, as wild? thus reducing them to the level of beasts. (27) This was a sentiment that would have been integral to Horton's view of the Muslim Turks. He even compares the policy of laying waste to the land carried out by the Greeks as being similar to Sherman's march to the sea during the American Civil War, and therefore justifiable. (28) The British historian Arnold Toynbee was considerably more blunt. He dedicated an entire chapter (in his book The Western Question of Greece and Turkey?) to this disgraceful episode. He simply called the chapter A War of Extermination.? and powerfully validates his testimony as a witness saying I was for some weeks in intimate contact with Greek soldiers and civilians then engaged in atrocities upon Turkish peasants, and with the survivors of their victims whom the Ottoman Red Crescent was attempting to rescue.? and I personally questioned a number of survivors from groups of Turkish villages around Fistikli about the temper of the Greek chettes during their operations. They all agreed that they were not in a state of fury or excitement. They plundered first and killed afterwards, and they sang at their work, even when they got to the killing. It was the exhilaration of a cat who has caught a mouse to play with.? (29) This last comment having an uncanny similarity with events in the Morea a century earlier and at the start of our story.
So there we have it. When Armenians talk of the First Genocide of the 20th Century? they are talking meaningless rhetoric. When Greeks talk about a Pontic Genocide there are simply trying to slip stream behind the Armenians who are, themselves, aping the Jewish Holocaust for national, political and financial gain. No one, beyond specialised academics, has yet seriously looked at the suffering of Muslims in Balkans and Caucasus during this period and no one has bothered to write the novel; no one is interested in producing a biographical masterpiece or an epic film. Until then Turks must continue to confront a history produced by ideologues that are fundamentally dishonest in their aims and disingenuous in their arguments. When commenting on the Russian atrocity in the Caucasus, Baddely condemned them on Christian and moral grounds but he was aware of the actions of other countries, including his own, that criticism would invariably be muted because, as he put it¦..?let it be emphatically repeated that, while individually any man may have the right to condemn it, collectively, as nations, it is a case of glass houses all round.? (30) We are long past the point where Armenians and Greeks should have realised, and accepted publicly, that they, themselves, are sitting in a very exposed and obvious glass house.
Bibliography - Telling A Good Story
Quartet, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922? Cambridge University Press, 2000. pp 115-116.
Finlay, George. The Greek Revolution and the Reign of King Otto? Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1877. p 139.
Ibid. p 162.
Ibid. p 163
Ibid. pp 245-276
Karpat K.H. The Turks of Bulgaria: The History, Culture, and Political Fate of a Minority? The Isis Press, Istanbul, 1990. pp 159-163 and McCarthy, Justin, Death and Exile-The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821- 1922? The Darwin Press Inc, Princeton, New Jersey, 1995. pp 59- 108
Mazower, Mark. Salonica-City of Ghosts? Harper Collins Publishers, London. 2004. pp. 351-352
Ozal, Turgut Turkey in Europe and Europe in Turkey? K. Rustem & Brother, Nicosia, N.Cyprus. 1991. p 208.
Hajikyan, Agop. J. & Soucy, Jean-Yves A Summer Without Dawn- An Armenian Epic? Saqi Books, London, English language edition, 2000.
Broxur, Marie Bennigsen (ed) The North Caucusus Barrier- The Russian Advance Towards The Muslim World), Hurst & Co, London. 1996. pp 8- 11.
Baddely, John E. The Russian Conquest of the Caucusus? Longmans, Green & Co 1908 rebublished Curzon Press, London 1999. pp 223-224.
Nalbandian, Louise The Armenian Revolutionary Movement? University of California Press, Berkely and Los Angeles, 1963. pp38-39.
Broxur, pp46-48.
Baddely, p. 33. and 147-148.
McCarthy, pp 23-58.
Broxur,pp 62-111.
Broxur, pp 62-111
Chervonnya, Svetlana Conflict in the Caucusus- Georgia, Abkhazia and the Russian Shadow? Gothic Image Publications, Gastonbury, UK. 1994 (translation from Abkhazia-1992: Post Communisticheskaya Vendaya? Mosgorpechat 1993, Moskva), pp 15-24.
McCarthy, p 31.
Nalbandian, p 54.
Ibid. p 53
Ibid. p141.
Ibid. p 146.
Ibid. pp 173-175.
De Nogales, Rafael Four Years Beneath the Crescent?, Charles Schribner & Sons, London, London. 1926. p 45.
Horton, George The Blight of Asia? 1926. reprint Sterndale Classics, London. 2003. p 60.
Rafael, Vincente L. White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of the Phillipines? from Cultures of United States Imperialism? eds Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Pp185-218.
Horton. P 61.
Toynbee, Arnold J. The Western Question of Greece and Turkey? Constable and Company Ltd, London, Bombay, Sydney, 1923. pp259-319.
Baddely, p 168.
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