Opinion Editorials, VA
April 29 2005
Calling a Crime by its Name; America and the Armenian Genocide
Sean Gannon
Regrettably, the United States has once again allowed the April 24th
commemorations of the Armenian Genocide to pass without calling the
crime by its name. On that date in 1915, 250 Armenian leaders and
intellectuals were
deported from Constantinople and subsequently tortured and killed,
the beginning of a campaign which resulted in up to one and a half
million Armenian Ottoman subjects dead and a further one million in
exile. While Turkish threats to cancel lucrative defence contracts
and curb use of military airbases kept Bill Clinton onside, it was
rumoured that President Bush would use this year’s 90th
anniversary to end U.S. appeasement of Ankara by recognizing these
deaths as genocide. Sadly, such speculation appears to have been
unfounded.
Turkey, of course, strenuously rejects the genocide charge and
accuses Armenia, and in particular America’s sizeable Armenian
community, of wilfully disseminating an inaccurate picture of what
happened in the World War I period and why. And to be fair, there is
an element of truth in Ankara’s claim that the situation in Anatolia
in 1915 was not as clear cut as is generally presented today.
For instance, it is rarely acknowledged that the rise of Armenian
nationalism in the 19th century led to enormous tensions between
Armenians and their Ottoman overlords with the result that many took
sides against the Empire in 1828, 1854 and 1877. It is also
infrequently admitted that although 250,000 Armenians were
conscripted into the Ottoman armies during World War I, another
150,000, out of
a sense of religious affinity with the Orthodox Slavs and in the hope
that a Russian victory would lead to an independent Armenian state,
volunteered to serve in the Czarist forces while a further 50,000
joined various guerrilla groups such as the Dashnaks and the Huchnaks
who openly sided with Nicholas II against the Central Powers. And
seldom spoken of is the fact that about 200,000
Moslems, Greeks and Jews died directly at their hands.
But while it is then perhaps understandable that the Ottomans came to
view the Armenians as a fifth column within the Empire, there was no
justification for their
response to this perceived problem. Aside from the fact that the
treasonable tendencies of a substantial minority can never be used to
justify the wholesale slaughter of the substantial majority, it is
clear from non-partisan sources that the massacres and deportations
of Armenian civilians began before the rampages by Armenian regular
and irregular forces through Anatolia. As David Fromkin,
who studied German sources for his acclaimed book on the period
writes; “There are historians today who continue to support the claim
of Enver and Talaat that the Ottoman rulers acted only after Armenia
had risen against them. But observers at the time who were by no
means anti-Turk reported that such was not the case. German officers
stationed there agreed that the area was quiet until the deportations
began.”
In any case, Ankara continues to deny that a substantial majority of
Armenians were actually murdered during the War. While some Turkish
historians go so far
as to allow that up to 600,000 Armenians died during the period in
question, the semi-official Turkish Historical Society maintains that
the figure is closer to 300,000 and that, of these, only 10,000 were
massacred, the remainder dying of the starvation and disease which is
the inevitable accompaniment of war. It further claims that these
10,000 were killed, not as the result of any master plan to rid the
Empire of a turbulent minority, but in the heat of battle and more
often than not by non-Turkish Kurds.
But it is a matter of historical record that there existed the
“Special Organization,” an official department of the Central
Government which oversaw the activities of Einsatzgruppen-style
killing squads which, in the words of one American diplomat,
travelled around Anatolia “massacring men, women and children and
burning their homes. Babies were shot in their mothers’ arms, small
children were horribly mutilated, women were stripped and beaten.”
Furthermore, Turkey’s claim that the Kurds were primarily responsible
for the killing is disingenuous in the extreme. For a start, the mass
murder of Armenians
by Ottoman Turks was not unprecedented, having occurred between 1894
and 1896 and again in 1909. Certainly Kurds were involved in the
events of 1915-1923 but they were consciously co-opted by Enver Pasha
for the purpose of
massacring Armenians in the knowledge that their historic blood
enemies would lose no opportunity to avenge ancient and
not-so-ancient grudges. Therefore, the army command in Constantinople
was fully culpable for the anti-Armenian
activities of its Kurdish battalions.
In addition, Turkey’s drawing of a distinction between those who died
directly at the hands of the Ottomans and indirectly from starvation,
exposure and disease
is entirely unsustainable. With no provisions made for clothing, food
or shelter, the anticipated outcome of the forced deportations of
Armenians into the Syrian deserts was obviously death. Indeed, Talaat
Pasha termed them “marches to eternity” and his meaning was
manifestly clear to his appalled Austrian and German allies who went
to great lengths to distance themselves from the policy.
To say that the Armenians who died during the deportations were not
deliberately killed by the Ottomans is akin to claiming that no
intentional Jewish deaths occurred during ‘relocation to the East’
during the Second World War or on the ‘death marches’ to the West
which followed the Russian advances in 1944 and
1945.
So, by any international standard, the events of 1915-1923
constituted genocide, the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians in
this period conforming to the accepted 1948 U.N. definition in having
being “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” An American
acknowledgement of this fact is long overdue and, with U.S./Turkish
relations in the doldrums since the invasion of Iraq, President Bush
has for once little to lose by extending it.