The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
April 16, 2015 Thursday
Turkey must set record straight over genocide
PAUL MONK – Paul Monk is an author, former senior intelligence analyst
and commentator on public and international affairs. His new book is
Opinions and Reflections: A Free Mind at Work 1990-2015.
Australia should help push for a truth and reconciliation process that
acknowledges Turkey’s ethnic cleansing in WWI.
One of the strangest holdovers from the disasters of the 20th century
is the refusal of the Turkish government to acknowledge the genocides
of Armenians and Assyrians that were perpetrated under the Young Turks
a century ago this year.
Many governments, including our own, hesitate to call a spade a spade
for fear of offending the Turkish government, but the Pope has
recently called Turkey on the matter. As Eugene Rogan observes in his
newly published study The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the
Middle East 1914-1920, massive killing took place at the hands of the
Turkish authorities of a nature and on a scale that made it genocide
by any other name.
The Young Turks who had come to power just before World War I and in
the wake of war in the Balkans that had displaced many Muslims engaged
in what has recently been termed “ethnic cleansing”, in an effort to
stabilise their domain. Hundreds of thousands of Greek Christians were
expelled from Ottoman territories before and during the First World
War. This was to climax in the Greek war against Turkey, the downfall
of the Ottoman Empire and the expulsion of the Greeks from Smyrna in
1922.
The expulsion of the Greeks was ethnic cleansing but it wasn’t
genocide. What happened to the Armenians and Assyrians in 1915-16 is
another matter. They were deported wholesale from within their
homelands and, in the process, either starved or slaughtered in very
large numbers. The lowest estimates for Armenian dead are in the order
of 800,000 and run as high as 1.5 million, while an estimated 250,000
Assyrians were also massacred. Pope Francis drew attention to this in
the current Islamic State context.
The Ottoman Empire in 1915 was threatened on three fronts by enemy
assault. The Russians were pressing an attack from the Caucasus, the
British were thrusting north from Basra in Mesopotamia, and
Anglo-French naval and land forces were striking at the Dardanelles
and threatening Constantinople. Many Armenians openly hoped the Allies
would bring down the Ottoman Empire so they could be released from
bondage and have their own country.
Clearly these circumstances exacerbated long-standing ethnic and
religious tensions between Muslim Turks and their Armenian and other
Christian subjects. The Young Turks viewed the Armenians as a bigger
threat than the Greeks largely because an Armenian nation state would
have to be carved out of core Turkish territory, where Greece existed
as a separate nation (that had won its independence from the Ottomans
a century before). The genocidal response, however, was shocking and
cannot be glossed over any longer merely because the contemporary
Turkish authorities object to it being pointed out.
Two key events precipitated the genocide: an uprising in the eastern
Anatolian city of Van (in the heart of ancient Armenia) beginning on
April 20, 1915, and the decision by the Turkish authorities on April
24 to “decapitate” the ethnic Armenian leadership. More than 200
Armenian political, intellectual and religious figures were arrested
in Constantinople. Van was strategically located close to the borders
with Russia and Persia and its Armenian population, having suffered
pogroms at Turkish and Kurdish hands for many years, actively sought
Russian support. The Turkish government, for its part, feared the
large Armenian population in the capital would side with the Allies if
things went badly in the Dardanelles.
The response to the Armenian uprising by the Turkish governor of Van,
Cevdet Pasha, was to order the killing of all Armenian males over the
age of 12. That was the beginning of the murderous policy that over
the following 12 months was to generate wholesale deportations and
killings. Mehmed Talat Pasha, one of the ruling triumvirate of Young
Turks, submitted a bill to the Ottoman Council of Ministers on May 26,
1915, called the Deportation Law calling for for the wholesale
deportation of the Armenian population from eastern Anatolia, with
only three to five days’ notice.
Alongside the public law, the Young Turks issued secret orders to the
governors of the provinces of Anatolia that the Armenians were to be
exterminated. Governors who demanded written instructions or who
dissented were dismissed or even assassinated. Enver Pasha’s secret
intelligence service mobilised killing squads. Armenian villages were
surrounded, the men separated from the women and children and then
executed, while the women and children were sent on forced death
marches. To all this there is abundant first-hand testimony -Turkish,
Armenian and foreign.
There is nothing peculiarly Turkish or Muslim about the horrors
perpetrated. But the killing of well over 1 million Armenian and
Assyrian Christians in 1915-16 was perpetrated by the Muslim Turkish
government. Good relations with the current Muslim Turkish government
cannot be based on pretending none of this happened, but must be based
on honesty about the horrors committed in the name of empire and
religion, with a view to preventing or at least prosecuting such
crimes in future.
Let’s be clear that setting this record straight is not a matter of
launching accusations against the state of Turkey in 2015, any more
than setting the record straight about the atrocities of World War II
makes accusations against today’s governments or citizens of Germany
and Japan. Admission, at long last, that these terrible things
happened would not make the present Turkish nation or government look
bad.
What makes them look bad is their refusal to confess that the Young
Turks presided over that genocidal ethnic cleansing. Dealing with the
authoritarian government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan on such a matter is
unlikely to be rewarding. What we could do, in this country, however,
which has numerous citizens of both Turkish and Armenian (as well as
Greek) ethnic origin is to orchestrate a truth and reconciliation
process in which realities can at last be acknowledged and a better
future created – here, if not over there.