Was there genocide in early 20th century Armenia?

The Boston Phoenix
20-May-2005

Dear Cecil:

I keep hearing about the Armenian genocide that happened early in the
20th century. The Turkish have done a good job of denial, and there
doesn’t seem to be that much public recognition of the deed. So,
what’s the real scoop–genocide or not? –monkeykarma, via e-mail

Cecil replies:

It tells you something about human nature and the century just
past that the typical response to this question is: What Armenian
genocide? Hardly anyone remembers this appalling crime, even though
at a million-plus deaths it was the first modern holocaust, ranking
eighth on the list of high-volume butcherings 1900-’87 compiled by
genocide historian R. J. Rummel. Few can even tell you where Armenia
is. (The traditional Armenian homeland covers the modern republic
of Armenia plus some of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, but the killings
were confined to Turkey and other parts of the old Ottoman empire.)
It’s not like the murders were conducted in secret or were over before
anybody noticed–on the contrary, they spanned 30 years and received
sustained worldwide publicity. So why the amnesia? Turkey’s adamant
refusal to acknowledge the massacres is part of it, but equally
important is the West’s agreement to forget.

The story of the Armenian extermination has filled books and resists
easy summary. Suffice it to say that successive Ottoman and Turkish
governments using the machinery of state organized a campaign of
ethnic cleansing in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian men,
women, and children were shot, beheaded, burned alive, or otherwise
done away with. Thousands more succumbed to starvation or disease,
and still more were driven into exile.

What had the Armenians done to deserve all this? Not much–their
main offense was to be a Christian minority in a crumbling Islamic
empire. Like another much-persecuted Middle Eastern ethnic group whose
sufferings are better known, the Armenians had an ancient language
and culture plus a reputation for clannishness and a knack for
finance, and they became the target of a similar type of unreasoning
bigotry. After years of low-level harassment by the Ottoman regime,
the first large-scale killings took place from 1894 through 1896,
when by conservative estimate 200,000 Armenians died, half murdered
by Ottoman forces and the balance dying in the subsequent chaos. The
“starving Armenians” became a cause celebre among European and
U.S. humanitarians. (Sixty years later your columnist’s guilt-tripping
great aunts were still admonishing their young relations to eat
their veggies because the starving Armenians didn’t have any.) To
no avail–the British government found the Ottomans a useful ally
against the Russians and refused to impose sanctions.

When a 1908 revolt by the Young Turks, secular modernizers with a
support base in the Turkish army, forced the Ottoman sultan to cede
power to a constitutional government, the Armenians thought they might
get a break, but the new nationalist leaders proved no more tolerant
than the old religious ones. A massacre of 15,000 to 25,000 Armenians
in 1909 set the table for the main event during World War I. Blaming
the supposedly disloyal Christian minority for an early defeat by the
Russians, the Turkish government starting in 1915 rounded up Armenians
throughout the country, murdered vast numbers outright and deported the
rest, with many dying on forced marches or in refugee camps. The brutal
work was carried out by an elaborate bureaucracy that some historians
consider a model for the extermination program of the Nazis. Add in
a couple of additional massacres in the early 1920s and the Armenian
death toll for 1915-1922 totals a million to a million and a half.

For a time after the war it seemed that the surviving Armenians
would get a homeland protected by an American mandate, but resurgent
U.S. isolationism doomed the effort. (Russian Armenia wound up as
a Maryland-sized republic in the Soviet Union; it’s now the site of
present-day Armenia.) Attempts to try the Ottoman officials responsible
for atrocities came to little. In the 1923 Lausanne treaty, the Western
powers abandoned the Armenians in return for commercial guarantees
from Turkey, where the no-longer-so-young Turks under Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk had consolidated their power. Though Congress never ratified
the treaty, the U.S. made its peace with the Kemal government and
Turkey has been a reliable ally in a volatile part of the world
ever since. For that reason the U.S. has remained largely silent in
the face of Turkish insistence that the Armenian genocide is a myth,
was the Armenians’ fault, etc. (One difficulty in researching this
topic now is that much of what’s written about it is the work of
Armenian or Turkish partisans and so of uncertain reliability. For
this column I’ve relied on The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
and America’s Response by Peter Balakian, a persuasive 2003 account
by an Armenian-American university professor.) One understands the
political realities; still, it’s creepy that a million deaths could
be expunged from human memory so thoroughly that 90 years later barely
anyone would know.