The events of a century ago still make many in Turkey bristle
REPRESENTATIVES OF AMERICA’S government have not always minced their words about the fate that befell Armenians in 1915. At the time, Henry Morgenthau Sr, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, called it “a campaign of race extermination”. Joe Biden is set to describe the killing and mass deportation of Armenians as “genocide”. That is not unprecedented—the last sitting president to use the term was Ronald Reagan in 1981—but it is rare enough to be noteworthy. Mr Biden is sure to anger Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Why are events from over a century ago still so bitterly contested?
When the Ottoman Empire (out of which modern-day Turkey emerged) entered the first world war in 1914, there were approximately 2m Armenians, a traditionally Christian ethnic group, living within its borders. Many fought for the Muslim empire, but some also enrolled in the Russian army, which bloodied the Ottomans in the east. High-ranking members of the ruling party blamed Armenians for the loss of an important battle the following year against Russia at Sarikamis, now in north-eastern Turkey. Armenian intellectuals, artists and politicians, including deputies in the Ottoman parliament, were arrested and many were later killed. The Ottoman authorities ordered the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians to Syria, claiming that Armenian revolutionaries had been helping the Russians. The conditions of their forced march were so harsh that few could have survived, and raids by Kurdish and Turkish armed bands further lessened their chances. Many historians believe that secret orders were given to ensure that they perished. Of the few who made it across Syria’s desert, many were put in concentration camps along the Euphrates or simply massacred.
Turkey claims that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died of hunger and disease as they were being deported, and that their deaths were the result of wartime conditions that many other Ottoman subjects had to endure. The descendants of those who died insist that they numbered as many as 1.5m, and were the victims of a deliberate campaign of murder that ought properly be called a genocide.
Most historians of mass killing, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, agree. The UN convention on genocide gives a broad definition of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” whether through killing or “inflicting…conditions of life” designed to bring about their destruction. It is easy to see how this would describe the treatment of the Armenians.
Turkey maintains that although the deaths may have been a tragedy, they did not amount to genocide. (Its government does however refer to other similar events, such as the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak Muslims in Srebrenica, as genocide.) When America’s House of Representatives voted to call it such in 2019, Mr Erdogan was indignant that a country “stained by genocide, slavery and exploitation” should lecture Turkey. Mr Erdogan once claimed that “there have been no massacres and no slaughters in our history.” Turks who contradict the official version of events have in the past suffered terrible consequences. The penal code criminalises “insulting” the Turkish state, a provision that has been used to prosecute those who suggest that Turkish actions constitute genocide. And in 2007 a newspaper editor was shot dead by a nationalist teenager for publishing articles decrying the Ottoman’s actions as genocide, including one suggesting that the adopted daughter of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was an Armenian whose father was killed in 1915. An Istanbul court this year ruled that members of the security forces had been involved.
Turkey’s refusal to condemn or take any responsibility for the horror creates difficulties for foreign governments. Turkey is a NATO member, and a partner to the West in both strategic matters and on issues such as refugees. Some Western governments argue disingenuously that there is insufficient evidence of mens rea, the intention to commit a crime, to meet the definition.
Despite that, 30 countries (including France and Germany) have called it a genocide. So, too, have Pope Francis and the European Parliament. Mr Biden’s willingness to do the same is striking, but perhaps less than it would have been had his former boss, Barack Obama, done so in office. Ten years ago recognition would have been a huge blow to relatively cordial relations with a key ally. Today America and Turkey are at odds over a number of regional conflicts and Turkey’s defence co-operation with Russia. Rather than spark a new crisis, Mr Biden’s words will probably only aggravate a chronic one. Expect Turkey again to protest its innocence, and the bitter dispute over whether the Ottomans committed genocide to continue.