A CENTURY OF GENOCIDE, 1915-2009
Martin Shaw
Open Democracy
-genocide-1915-2009
April 22 2009
The Ottoman-era massacres of the Armenians also belong to a century of
"mass-death" episodes forged in war, state rivalry, ethnic targeting
and expulsion, says Martin Shaw. 23 – 04 – 2009
When Armenian leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul) were massacred
on 24 April 1915, it was the signal for killings and deportations
of Armenians across eastern Anatolia, then the heartland of the
Ottoman empire and the core territory of what was in 1923 to become
the Republic of Turkey.
The historian Donald Bloxham summarises what happened to the
Armenians. They were, he said:
"either killed in situ, which was the fate of many of the men and
male youths, or deported to the deserts of modern-day Iraq or Syria
in the south. Along these deportation routes they were subjected
to massive and repeated depredations – rape, kidnap, mutilation,
outright killing, and death from exposure, starvation, and thirst –
at the hands of Ottoman Gendarmes, Turkish and Kurdish irregulars,
and local tribespeople. The Ottoman army was also involved in
massacres. The kidnapped and other surviving women, and many orphans,
were then subject to enforced conversions to Islam … ."
Together with deportations of Armenians from Cicilia and western
Anatolia, "these events comprise the Armenian genocide. Approximately
one million Ottoman Armenians died, half of the pre-war population
and two-thirds of those deported" (see The Great Game of Genocide:
Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians
[Oxford University Press, 2005]).
The campaign of destruction was instigated by the leaders of the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government, which had been
formed out of the Young Turk movement. It led to what Armenians call
the "great catastrophe" – the end of the Armenian society that had
existed in Anatolia for thousands of years, and the dispersal of most
of the survivors.
These depredations took place amid the great war of 1914-18, in
which the Ottomans were allied to Germany against Britain, France
and Russia, and Turkish leaders saw Armenians as a fifth column for
Russia. But unlike other events of this period, only the Armenian
genocide is a live political issue today. The Ottoman empire did not
survive its defeat in the war, but the genocide was a step towards
the consolidation of the modern Turkish state. Although the new
Turkey tried some of the CUP leaders after the war, campaigns against
non-Turkish minorities continued under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal
(Ataturk), the revered father of the secular Turkish republic.
Even now the Turkish state and most Turkish institutions continue
to deny that the Armenians suffered genocide: as recently as 2004,
novelist Orhan Pamuk was imprisoned and in 2007, journalist Hrant
Dink was murdered for acknowledging this crime.
In recent decades, organisations of the Armenian diaspora have
mounted a powerful campaign for genocide recognition, linking
the destruction of the Armenians in the first world war to the
holocaust of Jews in the second. The European parliament and many
national legislatures (including the United States congress) have
now recognised the genocide; although US presidents, mindful of the
strategic importance of Turkey, have so far refused. Barack Obama,
who voiced support for recognition as a senator, could well become
the first to do so, as Taner Akcam – a rare Turkish historian of the
genocide – has argued he should. More important, an increasingly number
of Turkish intellectuals have urged Turkey to apologise for 1915,
and the government has also developed a more conciliatory attitude,
moving to normalise relations with (post-Soviet) Armenia.
Contextualising genocide
That the genocide remains politically potent after almost a century
should not be surprising. Historical wrongs powerfully influence
national memories, and as Turkish leaders are finally beginning to
recognise, sustained denial only compounds the harm. Yet it would
be wrong to take this political morality tale as the end of the
matter. This is also because the campaign to recognise the Armenian
genocide as one of the most terrible such episodes risks skewing our
understanding of genocide, both then and now.
The destruction of the Armenians was undoubtedly one of the largest,
most murderous genocides in history, and it is fully justified
to compare it to the Nazi holocaust and Rwanda. Yet none of these
"mega-genocides" (as Mark Levene has called them) were stand-alone
events. Rather they were the most concentrated and totally murderous
among many episodes of mass death in their times. There were other
victims of Ottoman and Turkish genocide – mainly Greeks and other
Christians but also, especially later, Kurds; and there were other
perpetrators in the same historical period, and other victims.
Indeed, as Donald Bloxham argues in his seminal study, the Armenian
genocide was the climax of a whole period in which, as the Ottoman
empire declined and eventually collapsed, new nation-states sought to
establish themselves by establishing ethnic homogeneity – and therefore
expelling, and sometimes killing, members of ethnic groups that they
didn’t want in their new states. The southeastern European version
of the "great game" was not just a system of rivalry among states and
empires, but a system of conflicting ethnic expulsions and genocide.
To recognise this wider picture should not detract from the particular
depths of the violence against the Armenians. Contextualising does
not mean condoning; nor does it mean buying the false balancing of
the deniers, who say in effect that since Turks and Muslims were
also killed and expelled (and they were, by Armenians, Greeks,
Russians and other Christian Slavs, as well as by the Ottoman
state), then why so much fuss about the Armenian victims? It is
important to recognise the differences between the largest-scale,
most murderous campaigns, such as the Ottomans’ against the Armenians,
and the smaller-scale or less murderous campaigns and more isolated
massacres, carried out by other parties. Yet all belong with the scope
of genocide – classically defined as the deliberate destruction of
a social group. The destruction of the Armenians was the largest,
most ruthless, concentrated genocide during a series of wars in the
region where many parties developed, at times, genocidal aims.
At the same time, this should not be seen as a purely "near-eastern"
and Balkan problem.
The great game involved the rivalry of the European empires (including
Britain, France and Germany), and was part of the European system that
led to two world wars. In the second world war, the extent of genocide
was even greater than in the first; but to view this in terms of the
holocaust alone – its vast scale notwithstanding – would again be
to skew the historical picture, just as if the genocide of the first
world war only in terms of the Armenians.
The Nazis attacked, expelled and killed many groups, not just the
Jews, although the latter were singled out with special murderousness
in the later stages. Hitler’s empire involved a generally genocidal
plan to expel undesirable Jews, Gypsies and Slavs and install German
settlers in conquered eastern territories, and Germany’s allies all
had their own genocidal plans to expel out-groups (see Mark Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe [Penguin, 2008]).
At the same time the Soviets also pursued similar policies against
groups like the Volga Germans and Chechens who were seen as unreliable,
and developed their own master-plan to murderously expel whole
populations, mainly but not only Germans, while redividing Europe
at the end of the war. Stalin had no gas-chambers, but he competed
with Hitler in genocide, and even the post-war Czechoslovak and
Polish governments had their policies of revenge expulsions against
Germans. Overall half a million German civilians may have died
as about 12 million were forced to moved in 1945-49. Nor were the
western allies innocent – Roosevelt and Churchill condoned the Soviet,
Czechoslovak and Polish moves.
To recognise this larger picture does not minimise the holocaust
of the Jews. Rather it shows that Nazi violence was not a terrible
historical accident, but the culmination of the European system of
the 19th and 20th centuries, and the catalyst for a wider pattern of
genocide (see Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State
[IB Tauris, two volumes, 2005]).
Genocide today
This larger perspective is particularly necessary to establish the
full present-day significance of the Armenian anniversary. Genocide
was squeezed out of the Euro-Atlantic core of the international
system after 1945, so that it now happens mainly on the "periphery",
practiced by smaller states, armies and paramilitaries, mainly through
policies of ethnic expulsion ("cleansing") of varying durations and
degrees of murderousness. In the early 1990s, it reappeared on the
edges of Europe – in Yugoslavia, and in the Caucasus, where Armenian
and Azeri nationalists destroyed each other’s communities in the
conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh (see Thomas de Waal, "The Caucasus:
a region in pieces", 8 January 2009).
The historian Dirk Moses has suggested that the history of colonialism
gave rise to repeated "genocidal moments" (see A Dirk Moses ed.,
Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern
Resistance in World History [Berghahn, 2008]). Something similar is
true of parts of the "post-colonial" world today. There are still some
large-scale genocidal campaigns, like that of the Sudanese regime
against the non-Arab people of Darfur. But more commonly, genocide
rears its head quite locally, and sometimes briefly: as for example
in January 2008 in Kenya, when opposition-linked militia attacked
the Kikuyu, presumed supporters of the election-stealing government,
killing over 1,000 and terrorising half a million from their homes in
the Rift valley; and in August 2008 in South Ossetia, where Ossetian
militias sought revenge for Georgia’s attack by murdering and driving
thousands of Georgian villagers from their homes.
In both these cases, genocidal violence was carried out by local
paramilitaries, not central states. It was eventually brought under
control by their political sponsors, as the Kenyan opposition sought
to share power through international mediation and the Russian regime
concluded that it had taught Georgia enough of a lesson.
Being concerned about genocide is not just about preventing
mega-genocides: such episodes are by definition rare. It is also about
stopping smaller-scale genocidal campaigns and genocidal massacres,
which if unstopped may to lead to mega-genocides. 1915 was after all
preceded by smaller-scale, less coordinated massacres of Armenians
in the 1890s and 1900s, and by other massacres and expulsions in the
Balkans in the same period. The 1994 Rwanda genocide was preceded
by other massacres of Tutsis from 1959 onwards and the Burundian
genocide (against Hutus) in 1972. Not all localised episodes threaten
to lead to mega-genocides. But to prevent "another Armenia" requires
being concerned about every ethnic massacre and expulsion, and about
stopping the wars and political violence that produce them.
Martin Shaw is a historical sociologist of war and global politics, and
professor of international relations and politics at the University of
Sussex. His books include The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War
and Its Crisis in Iraq (Polity, 2005) and What is Genocide? (Polity,
2007). His website is here