Assembly of Turkish American Associations
May 31 2005
The Armenian Issue Revisited
An Armenian and Muslim Tragedy? Yes! Genocide? No! By Bruce Fein
I. Both Armenians and Muslims in Eastern Anatolia under the Ottoman
Empire experienced harrowing casualties and gripping privations
during World War I.
Hundreds of thousands perished. Most were innocent. All deserve pity
and respect. Their known and unknown graves testify to President John
F. Kennedy’s lament that “Life is unfair.” An Armenian tombstone is
worth a Muslim tombstone, and vice versa. No race, religious, or
ethnic group stands above or below another in the cathedral of
humanity. To paraphrase Shakespeare in “The Merchant of Venice,” Hath
not everyone eyes? hath not everyone hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the
same weapons, subject to the same diseases healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer…If you prick
anyone, does he not bleed? if you tickle him, does he not laugh? if
you poison him, does he not die?
These sentiments must be emphasized before entering into the
longstanding dispute over allegations of Armenian genocide at the
hands of the Ottoman Turks during World War I and its aftermath.
Genocide is a word bristling with passion and moral depravity. It
typically evokes images of Jews dying like cattle in Nazi cyanide
chambers in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, Dacau, and other extermination
camps. It is customarily confined in national laws and international
covenants to the mass killing or repression of a racial, religious,
or ethnic group with the intent of partial or total extermination.
Thus, to accuse Turks of Armenian genocide is grave business, and
should thus be appraised with scrupulous care for historical
accuracy. To do less would not only be unjust to the accused, but to
vitiate the arresting meaning that genocide should enjoy in the tale
of unspeakable human horrors.
It cannot be repeated enough that to discredit the Armenian genocide
allegation is not to deny that Armenian deaths and suffering during
the war should evoke tears in all but the stone-hearted. The same is
true for the even greater number of contemporaneous Turkish deaths
and privations. No effort should be spared to avoid transforming an
impartial inquest into the genocide allegations to poisonous
recriminations over whether Armenians or Turks as a group were more
or less culpable or victimized. Healing and reconciliation is made of
more magnanimous and compassionate stuff.
In sum, disprove Armenian genocide is not to belittle the atrocities
and brutalities that World War I inflicted on the Armenian people of
Eastern Anatolia.
I. Sympathy for All, Malice Towards None “War is hell,” lamented
steely Union General William Tecumseh Sherman during the American
Civil War. The frightful carnage of World War I confirmed and
fortified that vivid definition.
The deep pain that wrenches any group victimized by massacres and
unforgiving privation in wartime, however, frequently distorts or
imbalances recollections. That phenomenon found epigrammatic
expression in United States Senator Hiram Johnson’s World War I quip
that truth is the first casualty of war. It is customary among
nations at war to manipulate the reporting of events to blacken the
enemy and to valorize their own and allied forces. In other words,
World War I was no exception, about which more anon.
II. The Armenian Genocide Accusation
The Ottoman Turks are accused of planning and executing a scheme to
exterminate its Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia beginning on
or about April 24, 1915 by relocating them hundreds of miles to the
Southwest and away from the Russian war front and massacring those
who resisted. The mass relocation (often mischaracterized as
“deportation”) exposed the Armenians to mass killings by marauding
Kurds and other Muslims and deaths from malnutrition, starvation, and
disease. After World War I concluded, the Ottoman Turks are said to
have continued their Armenian genocide during the Turkish War of
Independence concluded in 1922.
The number of alleged Armenian casualties began at approximately
600,000, but soon inflated to 2 million. The entire pre-war Armenian
population in Eastern Anatolia is best estimated at 1.3 to 1.5
million.
A. Was there an intent to exterminate Ottoman Armenians in whole or
in part?
The evidence seems exceptionally thin. The Government’s relocation
decree was a wartime measure inspired by national self-preservation,
neither aimed at Armenians generally (those outside sensitive war
territory were left undisturbed) nor with the goal of death by
relocation hardships and hazards. The Ottoman government issued
unambiguous orders to protect and feed Armenians during their
relocation ordeal, but were unable because of war emergencies on
three fronts and war shortages affecting the entire population to
insure their proper execution. The key decree provided:
“When those of Armenians resident in the aforementioned towns and
villages who have to be moved are transferred to their places of
settlement and are on the road, their comfort must be assured and
their lives and property protected; after their arrival their food
should be paid for out of Refugees’ Appropriations until they are
definitively settled in their new homes. Property and land should be
distributed to them in accordance with their previous financial
situation as well as current needs; and for those among them needing
further help, the government should build houses, provide cultivators
and artisans with seed, tools, and equipment.”
“This order is entirely intended against the extension of the
Armenian Revolutionary Committees; therefore do not execute it in
such a manner that might cause the mutual massacre of Muslims and
Armenians.”
(Do you believe that anything comparable has been issued by Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic to his troops in Kosovo?)
The Ottoman government prosecuted more than one thousand soldiers and
civilians for disobedience. Further, approximately 200,000 Ottoman
Armenians who were relocated to Syria lived without menace through
the remainder of the war.
Relocation of populations suspected of disloyalty was a customary war
measure both at the time of World War I and through at least World
War II. Czarist Russia had employed it against Crimean Tatars and
other ethnic Turks even in peacetime and without evidence of
treasonous plotting. The United States relocated 120,000 citizens and
resident aliens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War
despite the glaring absence of sabotage or anti-patriotic sentiments
or designs. Indeed, the Congress of the United States acknowledged
the injustice in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which awarded the
victims or their survivors $20,000 each.
In sum, the mass wartime relocation of Ottoman Armenians from the
Eastern front was no pretext for genocide. That conclusion is
fortified by the mountains of evidence showing that an alarming
percentage of Armenians were treasonous and allied with the Triple
Entente, especially Russia. Tens of thousands defected from the
Ottoman army or evaded conscription to serve with Russia. Countless
more remained in Eastern Anatolia to conduct sabotage behind Ottoman
lines and to massacre Turks, including civilians. Their leaders
openly called for revolt, and boasted at post-World War I peace
conferences that Ottoman Armenians had fought shoulder-to-shoulder
with the victorious powers. Exemplary was a proclamation issued by an
Armenian representative in the Ottoman parliament for Van, Papazyan.
He trumpeted: “The volunteer Armenian regiments in the Caucasus
should prepare themselves for battle, serve as advance units for the
Russian armies to help them capture the key positions in the
districts where the Armenians live, and advance into Anatolia,
joining the Armenian units already there.”
The Big Five victors -Great Britain, France, the United States,
Italy, and Japan acknowledged the enormous wartime service of Ottoman
Armenians, and Armenia was recognized as a victor nation at the Paris
Peace Conference and sister conclaves charring the post-war map.
Armenians were rewarded for their treason against the Ottoman Empire
in the short-lived Treaty of Sevres of 1920 (soon superceded by the
1923 Treaty of Lausanne). It created an independent Armenian state
carved from large swaths of Ottoman territory although they were a
distinct population minority and had always been so throughout the
centuries of Ottoman rule. The Treaty thus turned President Woodrow
Wilson’s self-determination gospel in his Fourteen Points on its
head.
The Ottoman government thus had overwhelming evidence to suspect the
loyalty of its Armenian population. And its relocation orders
responded to a dire, not a contrived, war emergency. It was fighting
on three fronts. The capital, Istanbul, was threatened by the
Gallipoli campaign. Russia was occupying portions of Eastern
Anatolia, encouraging Armenian defections, and aiding Armenian
sabotage. In sum, the mass relocation of Armenians was clearly an
imperative war measure; it did not pivot on imaginary dangers
contrived by Ottoman rulers to exterminate Armenians.
The genocide allegation is further discredited by Great Britain’s
unavailing attempt to prove Ottoman officials of war crimes. It
occupied Ottoman territory, including Istanbul, under the 1918 Mudros
Armistice. Under section 230 of the Treaty of Sevres, Ottoman
officials were subject to prosecution for war crimes like genocide.
Great Britain had access to Ottoman archives, but found no evidence
of Armenian genocide. Scores of Ottoman Turks were detained on Malta,
nonetheless, under suspicion of complicity in Armenian massacres or
worse. But all were released in 1922 for want of evidence. The
British spent endless months searching hither and yon for evidence of
international criminality- even enlisting the assistance of the
United State yet came up with nothing that could withstand the test
of truth. Rumor, hearsay, and polemics from anti-Turk sources was the
most that could be assembled, none of which would be admissible in
any fair-minded enterprise to discover facts and to assign legal
responsibility.
None of this is to deny that approximately 600,000 Ottoman Armenians
perished during World War I and its aftermath. But Muslims died in
even greater numbers (approximately 2.5 million in Eastern Anatolia)
from Armenian and Russian massacres and wartime privations as severe
as that experienced by relocated Armenians. When Armenians held the
opportunity, they massacred Turks without mercy, as in Van, Erzurum,
and Adana. The war ignited a cycle of violence between both groups,
one fighting for revolutionary objectives and the other to retain
their homeland intact. Both were spurred to implacability by the
gruesome experience that the loser could expect no clemency.
The horrifying scale of the violence and retaliatory violence,
however, were acts of private individuals or official wrongdoers. The
Ottoman government discouraged and punished the crimes within the
limits of its shrinking capacity. Fighting for its life on three
fronts, it devoted the lion’s share of its resources and manpower to
staving off death, not to local law enforcement.
The emptiness of the Armenian genocide case is further demonstrated
by the resort of proponents to reliance on incontestable falsehoods
or forged documents. The Talat Pasha fabrications are emblematic.
According to Armenians, he sent telegrams expounding an Ottoman
policy to massacre its Armenian population that were discovered by
British forces commanded by General Allenby when they captured Aleppo
in 1918. Samples were published in Paris in 1920 by an Armenian
author, Aram Andonian. They were also introduced at the Berlin trial
of the assassin of Talat Pasha, and then accepted as authentic.
The British Foreign Office then conducted an official investigation
that showed that the telegrams had not been discovered by the army
but had been produced by an Armenian group based in Paris. A
meticulous examination of the documents revealed glaring
discrepancies with the customary form, script, and phraseology of
Ottoman administrative decrees, and pronounced as bogus as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Donation of Constantine.
Ditto for a quote attributed to Adolph Hitler calculated to liken the
Armenians in World War I to the Holocaust victims and to arouse anger
towards the Republic of Turkey. Purportedly delivered on August 22,
1939, while the Nazi invasion of Poland impended, Hitler allegedly
declared: “Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my
Death Head units, with the order to kill without mercy all men,
women, and children of the Polish race or language. Who still talks
nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians.”
Armenian genocide exponents point to the statement as evidence that
it served as the model for Hitler’s sister plan to exterminate Poles,
Jews, and others. Twenty-two Members of Congress on or about April
24, 1984 in the Congressional Record enlisted Hitler’s hideous
reference to Armenian extermination as justification for supporting
Armenian Martyrs’ Day remembrances. As Princeton Professor Heath W.
Lowry elaborates in a booklet, “The U.S. Congress and Adolph Hitler
on the Armenians,” it seems virtually certain that the statement was
never made. The Nuremburg tribunal refused to accept it as evidence
because of flimsy proof of authenticity.
The gospel for many Armenian genocide enthusiasts is Ambassador Henry
Morgenthau’s 1918 book, Ambassador’s Morgenthau’s Story. It brims
with assertions that incriminate the Ottoman Turks in genocide.
Professor Lowry, however, convincingly demonstrates in his monograph,
“The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” that his book is
more propaganda, invention, exaggeration, and hyperbole than a
reliable portrait of motivations and events.
According to some Armenian circles, celebrated founder of the
Republic of Turkey, Atatürk, confessed “Ottoman state responsibility
for the Armenian genocide.” That attribution is flatly false, as
proven in an extended essay, “A ‘Statement’ Wrongly Attributed to
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,” by Türkkaya Ataöv.
Why would Armenian genocide theorists repeatedly uncurtain
demonstrative falsehoods as evidence if the truth would prove their
case? Does proof of the Holocaust rest on such imaginary
inventiveness? A long array of individuals have been found guilty of
participation in Hitler’s genocide in courts of law hedged by rules
to insure the reliability of verdicts. Adolph Eichmann’s trial and
conviction in an Israeli court and the Nuremburg trials before an
international body of jurists are illustrative. Not a single Ottoman
Turk, in contrast, has every been found guilty of Armenian genocide
or its equivalent in a genuine court of law, although the victorious
powers in World War I enjoyed both the incentive and opportunity to
do so if incriminating evidence existed.
The United Nations Economic and Social Council Sub-Commission on the
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities examined
the truthfulness of an Armenian genocide charge leveled by Special
Rapporteur, Mr. Benjamin Whitaker, in his submission, “Study of
Genocide,” during its thirty-eighth session at the U.N. Office in
Geneva from August 5-30, 1985. The Sub-Commission after meticulous
debate refused to endorse the indictment for lack of convincing
evidence, as amplified by attendee and Professor Dr. Ataöv of Ankara
University in his publication, “WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN GENEVA: The
Truth About the ‘Whitaker Report’.”
B. If the evidence is so demonstratively faulty, what explains a
widespread credence given to the Armenian genocide allegation in the
United States?
As Napoleon once derisively observed, history is a fable mutually
agreed upon. It is not Euclidean geometry. Some bias invariably is
smuggled in by the most objective historians; others view history as
a manipulable weapon either to fight an adversary, or to gain a
political, economic, or sister material advantage, or to satisfy a
psychological or emotional need.
History most resembles truth when competing versions of events do
battle in the marketplace of ideas with equally talented contestants
and before an impartial audience with no personal or vested interest
in the outcome. That is why the adversarial system of justice in the
United States is the hallmark of its legal system and a beacon to the
world.
The Armenian genocide allegation for long decades was earmarked by an
absence of both historical rigor and scrupulous regard for reliable
evidence and truth. The Ottoman Empire generally received bad reviews
in the West for centuries, in part because of its predominant Muslim
creed and military conquests in Europe. It was a declared enemy of
Britain, France, and Russia during World War I, and a de facto enemy
of the United States. Thus, when the Armenian genocide allegation
initially surfaced, the West was predisposed towards acceptance that
would reinforce their stereotypical and pejorative view of Turks that
had been inculcated for centuries. The reliability of obviously
biased sources was generally ignored. Further, the Republic of Turkey
created in 1923 was not anxious to defend its Ottoman predecessor
which it had opposed for humiliating capitulations to World War I
victors and its palsied government. Atatürk was seeking a new,
secular, and democratic dispensation and distance from the Ottoman
legacy.
Armenians in the United States were also more vocal, politically
active and sophisticated, numerous, and wealthy than Turks. The
Armenian lobby has skillfully and forcefully marketed the Armenian
genocide allegation in the corridors of power, in the media, and in
public school curricula. They had been relatively unchallenged until
some opposing giants in the field of Turkish studies appeared on the
scene to discredit and deflate the charge by fastidious research and
a richer understanding of the circumstances of frightful Armenian
World War I casualties. Professor of History at the University of
Louisville, Justin McCarthy, and Princeton Professor Heath Lowry
stand at the top of the list. Professor McCarthy’s 1995 book, Death
and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, is a
landmark. Turkish Americans have also organized to present facts and
views about the Armenian genocide allegation and other issues central
to United States-Turkish relations. But the intellectual playing
field remains sharply tilted in favor of the Armenians. Since public
officials with no foreign policy responsibilities confront no
electoral or other penalty for echoing the Armenian story, they
generally acquiesce to gain or to solidify their standing among them.
The consequence has been not only bad and biased history unbecoming
an evenhanded search for truth, but a gratuitous irritant in the
relations between Turkey and the United States. The former was a
steadfast ally throughout the Cold War, and Turkey remains a
cornerstone of NATO and Middle East peace. It is also a strong
barrier against religious fundamentalism, and an unflagging partner
in fighting international terrorism and drug trafficking. Turkey is
also geostrategically indispensable to exporting oil and gas from
Central Asia to the West through pipelines without reliance on the
Russian Federation, Iran, Afghanistan or other dicey economic
partners.
Finally, endorsing the false Armenian genocide indictment may
embolden Armenian terrorist organizations (for example, the Armenian
Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) to kill and mutilate
Turks, as they did a few decades ago in assassinating scores of
Turkish diplomats and bombing buildings both in the United States and
elsewhere. They have been relatively dormant in recent years, but to
risk a resurgence from intoxication with a fortified Armenian
genocide brew would be reckless.
III. Conclusion
The Armenian genocide accusation fails for want of proof. It attempts
to paint the deaths and privations of World War I in prime colors,
when the authentic article is chiaroscuro. Both Muslims and Armenians
suffered horribly and neither displayed a morality superior to the
other. Continuing to hurl the incendiary charge of genocide on the
Turkish doorstep obstructs the quest for amity between Armenia and
the Republic of Turkey and warmer relations between Armenians and
Turks generally.
Isn’t it time to let the genocide allegation fade away and to join
hands in commemorating the losses of both communities during World
War I and its aftermath?
Letter from Mr. E. Vartanian, an Armenian-American Volunteer in the
Russian Service, to His Brother-in-law in Egypt; Dated 9th /22nd
July,1915, and Published in the Armenian Journal “Houssaper,” of
Cairo.
” We have been here three days. Some of us are going to be sent to
Erivan; the rest of us are starting in two days for Van.
The enthusiasm here is very great. There are already 20,000
volunteers at the front, and they are trying to increase the number
to 30,000. Each district we occupy is placed under Armenian
administration, and an Armenian post is running from Igdir to Van.
The Russian Government is showing great goodwill towards the
Armenians and doing everything in its power for the liberation of
Turkish Armenia.
When we disembarked at Archangel the Government gave us every
possible assistance. It even undertook the transport of our baggage,
and gave us free passes, second class, to Petrograd.
At Petrograd we received an equally hearty welcome, and the Governor
of the city presented each of us with a medal in token of his
sympathy. The Armenian colony put us up in the best hotels,
entertained us at the best restaurants, and could not make enough of
us. This lasted for five days, and then we continued our journey,
again at the Government’s expense, to Tiflis.
Everywhere on the way the population received us with cheers and
offerings of flowers. Just as we were leaving Archa gel, a young
Russian lady came with flowers and offered one to eaeh of us. I also
saw a quite poor man who was so moved by the speech in Russian that
one of our comrades had made, that he came and put his tobacco into
the pipe of a comrade standing next to me, and kept nothing for
himself but a bare half-pipeful. A third, an old man, was so moved by
the speech that he began to cry and nearly made off, but a little
while after I saw him standing in front of the carriage window and,
with a shaking hand, holding out a hard-boiled egg to our comrade the
chemist Roupen Stepanian. Probably it was his one meal for the day.
And so at every step we found ourselves in the midst of affecting
scenes. At Petrograd Railway Station the crowd was enormous. There
was an Armenian lady there who offered each of us a rose. There were
boys and young men who wept because they could not come with us. At
Rostov a young Russian joined our ranks. He was caught more than once
by his parents at the stations further down the line, but he always
succeeded in escaping them and reioining us. We have christened him
Stepan.
When we arrived at Tiflis, we marched singing to the offices of the
Central Armenian Bureau, with our flag unfurled in front of us, and
the people marched on either side of us in such a crowd that the
trams were forced to stop running.
That is enough for to-day. My next letter shall be written from
Armenia itself..
Please say nothing to my sister about this resolution that I have
taken. I hope, of course, that she would know how to sacrifice her
affection for her brother to her love for the nation and for
liberty.. I should curse any of my relations who lament my
resolution; they would have committed treason against the nation.
There are five of us brothers; was it not imperative that at least
one of us should devote himself to the cause of a national
emancipation ? Let us keep up our courage, realise the urgency of the
moment and do our duty. ”
Author is an attorney and Adjunct Scholar of ATAA.
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