THE ECONOMIST GUNNING FOR THE G-WORD
April 16 2015
The complexities of calling mass killing genocide
Apr 18th 2015 |
Add this article to your reading list by clicking this button
Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide. By
Thomas de Waal. Oxford University Press; 298 pages; £18.99.
ON APRIL 24th millions of Armenians around the world will commemorate
the centenary of the mass killing of their forebears by Ottoman
forces. A growing number of historians say it was genocide.
“The central facts of the story are straightforward,” says Thomas de
Waal, a Russophile scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, an American think-tank, in the introduction to his objective
and meticulously researched account of the Armenian tragedy and how it
has played out in modern times. “The Armenians were an ancient people,
whose homeland was centred in what is now eastern Turkey.” In 1913,
there were up to 2m of them in the Ottoman empire. At the start
of the first world war, the Ottoman government ordered their mass
deportation. A few years later, Mr de Waal writes, there was barely
one-tenth of that number in Turkey. The rest had been exiled or killed.
A plethora of academic tomes, memoirs and novels about the genocide
exist, including Turkish government-sponsored propaganda purporting
to prove that most of the Armenians died of hunger and disease
during their forced march to the Syrian desert in 1915. Mr de Waal
navigates through some of these. Yet, unlike many, he does not set
about legislating history. Rather he offers the wider context in which
what Armenians call Meds Yeghern, or the “great crime”, unfolded. (He
uses the term “great catastrophe”, which has riled many.)
Abdul Hamid II, who became the Ottoman sultan in 1876, was consumed
with paranoia as he watched his empire shrink. He accused his Armenian
subjects of plotting with the great powers to truncate it further and
unleashed a first wave of pogroms, which claimed nearly 100,000 lives.
Armenian revolutionaries retaliated by killing Ottoman officials and
siding with “Uncle Christian” (Russia) as it gobbled up chunks of
eastern Anatolia. (The Armenian relationship with Russia is a constant
thread.) Decades later a different group of Armenian “revolutionaries”
embarked on a revenge killing spree of Turkish diplomats from Vienna
to Sydney.
Mr de Waal’s biggest contribution is his overview of the interlocking
phases of Turkish and Armenian history after 1915. Trenchant and
colourful anecdotes abound, along with some surprising facts. The
Ottomans were the earliest to recognise the first and short-lived
Republic of Armenia in June 1918 (it collapsed two years later
under Soviet pressure). Three months afterwards the Ottoman military
commander, Halil Pasha, who personally directed massacres of Armenians
and Assyrian Christians in the eastern provinces, met the Armenian
interior minister in the capital, Yerevan. “The two men had fought
a battle to the death in Van in 1915”, yet they “kissed each other
warmly like friends.”
Turkey was again among the first to recognise the fledgling Republic
of Armenia when it broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991. But
before diplomatic ties were formally established Armenia went to
war against Turkey’s ally, Azerbaijan, over Nagorno-Karabakh, a
mainly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. (Mr de Waal’s book about that
conflict, “Black Garden”, is an important complement to this one.)
Turkey sealed its border with Armenia and so it has remained, leaving
the tiny landlocked nation ever more dependent on Russia.
Swiss-brokered interventions collapsed when Turkey, buckling under
Azerbaijani pressure, shelved an agreement from 2009 that would have
established diplomatic ties and reopened the border. The author’s vivid
description of the backroom dealings that went on helps explain why.
Mr de Waal reluctantly concludes that the killings do come under
the United Nations Convention on Genocide. He believes the “G-word”
(this last term was coined by a Turkish diplomat) has become “both
legalistic and over-emotional”. It obstructs “the understanding of the
historical rights and wrongs…as much as it illuminates them”. But
according to Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor killed in
2007 by a young ultranationalist, Turkey’s main problem is not whether
it should deny or acknowledge that what happened amounted to genocide,
but what its people comprehend. That is true, but only up to a point.
Turkey has recently begun making conciliatory gestures to the
Armenians. That would never have happened had the world, and especially
America’s Congress, not held the possible charge of “genocide” over it.