Author: Andres-Papazian

The Pappas Post
April 18 2015

While Remembering and Commemorating the Armenian Genocide, Let’s Not
Forget the Greeks and Assyrians

By Lou Ureneck on April 18, 2015

Armenians and others around the world this month are marking the
centennial of the genocide that left hundreds of thousands of
Armenians dead early in the last century. The date April 24 is
typically picked as the centennial day since it was on that day in
1915 that Turkish authorities rounded up Armenian intellectuals and
leaders in Constantinople and murdered them.

It was the first step in a much broader slaughter. The Armenian
centennial is getting the attention it deserves from sources as
diverse as Pope Francis and Kim Kardashian. The Pope courageously used
the word “genocide” in a mass this past weekend, and the Lord’s Prayer
was sung in Armenian at the Vatican. Kim Kardashian, whose grandfather
was an Armenian immigrant, traveled to the Republic of Armenia with
her husband Kayne West, who put on an impromptu concert.

These events are good and an important

What few people know is that the Armenian Genocide was a horrible
event that occurred within the context of a wider religious cleansing
across Asia Minor that lasted ten years and included Armenians, Greeks
and Assyrians. They were all Christians, and they were subjects of the
Ottoman Empire.

The religious cleansing was actually the first in modern times, and it
fit the pattern of genocides that would follow in the terrible century
ahead. It’s worth noting that the Nazis in following decades were
transfixed by the events that had occurred in Turkey in those
nightmarish years of mass killings and deadly deportations.

The Armenians in many way bore the worst of the slaughter, but ethnic
Greeks and Assyrians also were slaughtered in similar ways — and for
the same reason: They were scapegoats in a crumbling empire that saw
Christians as a dangerous and potentially treasonous population inside
the country. There was a strong nationalistic impulse to create a
“Turkey for the Turks,” and that meant a homogeneous population based
on Turkishness and the Moslem faith.

Christians had long been second-class citizens in the Ottoman Empire,
long before the genocide, and they had been subject to pogrom-like
actions. But the systematic uprooting of Christians began about 1912
following the First Balkan War, in which Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria
defeated the Ottomans and the city of Salonika passed to the Greeks.

It was the nation of Greece that had been part of the alliance that
defeated the Ottomans, but it was ethnic Greek subjects of the Ottoman
Empire who paid a price in harassment, killing and forced departures.
Tens of thousands of ethnic Greeks were forced from their homes along
the west (Aegean) coast of Turkey and many were killed.

This had the silent encouragement of Turkey’s military ally, Germany.
Virulent propaganda spread images of Christians threatening Islam;
hatred was fomented between the faiths.One of the witnesses to the
killing was the American consul general in Smyrna, George Horton.
Smyrna was a prosperous city on the Aegean, and Horton had been posted
there to look after American interests. He documented the killing and
reported it back to the State Department. Smyrna itself, after WWI,
would itself be destroyed in the religious hatred directed toward
Christians.

The Armenian genocide is typically bracketed by 1915-1916, during
World War I. And for sure, this is when most of the killing took
place. Armenian civilians were marched out of their towns and cities
and segregated by sex and age. Men were killed immediately; women and
children were marched long distances until they dropped form disease,
thirst or starvation. The first-hand accounts of these treks are
numerous and collected in letters, cables and reports in libraries
though the world.

After WWI, the British made an attempt to bring the Ottoman mass
killers to justice, but the effort faltered as Britain’s grasp on the
situation inside Turkey faltered. A nationalist movement arose, and
the forces of religious hatred were again unleashed. The killing of
Christians was renewed with Ottoman Greeks as well as Armenians being
shot and marched to their deaths. American and British consuls
diplomats in the region provided a first-hand account of the killing.

The situation was worsened when the Allied Powers and the United
States invited the nation of Greece to occupy Smyrna, a mostly Greek
city inside Turkey, to forestall a landing by the Italians who wanted
to seize the city as the spoils of war. The powers sent Greece to
Smyrna, but when war broke out between the army of Greece and the
Nationalist army of Turkey, they did next to nothing to support it.

As a consequence, more Christians — people who were Ottoman subjects —
were murdered in towns and cities from the Black Sea to the south
coast of Turkey. By the end of 1922, about three millions Christians
had been killed in the decade-long religious cleansing that operated
essentially under two Turkish governments.

The final catastrophe was the Turkish army’s occupation of Smyrna, a
prosperous and cosmopolitan city of a half million people. The city
was burned, and countless numbers of civilians slaughtered on the
city’s streets and in their homes. The occupation of Smyrna was, in an
important sense, the last episode of the genocide. It was also a
marker of the end of the Ottoman Empire. After Smyrna, a new order
arose, led by Turkey’s brilliant, ruthless and secular leader Mustafa
Kemal, later called Ataturk.

So, as we commemorate the Armenian genocide, and give it the
historical standing and label it deserves, let us not forget that many
hundreds of thousands of others perished in the 20th Century’s first
genocide.

Editor’s note: Lou Ureneck is a professor at Boston University and
author of the forthcoming book, “The Great Fire: One American’s
Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century’s First Genocide.” It
can now be pre-ordered here.

From: A. Papazian

USA
The tragedy of 1915 still in the skin of young Armenians of Los Angeles

“Since we are children, we are told about the genocide, then I think
about every day, it makes me sad,” said Edward Papikian. Like his
comrade Pilibos Armenian College in Los Angeles, he is preparing to
commemorate the centenary of the massacres of the Ottoman Empire
against its people.

“I want everyone to know what happened. There were 1.5 million
Armenians massacred, my great-grandparents were deported, it wants
Turkey to recognize the genocide, pardon, “adds Nancy Bosnian, another
high school student of this school of so-called” Little Armenia “the
City of Angels.

On April 24, nearly 170,000 members of the Armenian community of Los
Angeles, one of the largest in the world, will march to mark the
centenary of what they see as the beginning of the genocide of their
people by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

Turkey recognizes about 500,000 victims in deportation, but denies
systematic planning and the term genocide.

Derhovaginian Patil, a professor at the School Pilibo, April 13, 2015
in Los Angeles (AFP / FREDERIC J. BROWN)

“We feel the pain of our ancestors, the pain of what they have
experienced in our skin even though we were not there,” adds Patil
Derhovaginian, a professor of Pilibos school, 34 years old.

The two year old daughter and a half Patil also take to the streets
with his parents: “She has a golden life here but must understand that
once a year, it is important to remember.”

Tigran, dance teacher, 22, repeated in the cultural center adjacent to
the school Pilibos choreography entitled “100 Years of wounds still
raw.”

“I think there is no better way to express the impact the massacre had
on my people that through dance,” he says.

Promised land –

For these young people born or grew up in the Californian metropolis
Armenian identity is everything.

“We are still a family. When there is an Armenian somewhere we know,
“said Nancy.

“When I travel, I look for Armenian churches, I listen to see if I can
hear my tongue,” added Silva Atsilatsyan, brunette with long brown
hair 25, who works in an insurance company.

Of schoolchildren drawings commemorating the Armenian Genocide, the
Armenian Pilibos School April 13, 2015 in Los Angeles (AFP / FREDERIC
J. BROWN)

All say speak an Armenian home. “The language is important, it opens
the door to reading, writing, it allows you to watch programs in
Armenian, understand the prayers, songs …” explains Vakan Manukian,
a student of 17 years the Pilibos school, with black hair and high
stature.

If he says cherish America, “for what this country where everyone can
live in safety gave to my family,” he has only Armenian friends and
plans to marry with a woman sharing his legacy.

Levon Ananyan, 14, sees no paradox “Armenia existed 3,000 years ago,
not America.”

Many of these young people have never met Turks but consider that the
problems between the two peoples are primarily political, not
personal.

“My grandfather told me about Turks who helped them escape the
massacres,” recalls John Yakhszyan, a student of Pilibos school.

“I know that there are Turks who still deny (genocide) but I work with
a Turkish woman and sometimes she apologizes, she said she would like
his government admits,” added Silva, with long brown hair .

Edward Papikian the Armenian College in Los Angeles Pilibos, April 13,
2015 (AFP / FREDERIC J. BROWN)

For her, like many of his peers, Armenia is a paradise, a promised
land. “I made a class trip there and when I saw for the first time
Mount Ararat, I burst into tears.”

In this month of April highly symbolic, the images of the Armenian
original reality TV star Kim Kardashian and her husband, singer Kanye
West in Yerevan have been around the world.

Silva applauded with both hands, “it just made the most important
thing in his life. We needed a celebrity to support our cause here in
America. ”

AFP

Sunday, April 19, 2015,
Stéphane © armenews.com

From: A. Papazian

CTV News Canada
April 19 2015

Thousands attend Toronto rally marking 100 years since Armenian genocide

Thousands of people gathered in downtown Toronto Sunday, for a rally
marking 100 years since the Ottoman-era killing of an estimated 1.5
million Armenians.

The killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks around the time of the First
World War is considered by many historians to be the first genocide of
the 20th century. Turkey, however, insists the death toll has been
exaggerated, and that the dead were victims of civil war and unrest in
the region.

On Sunday, approximately one dozen Turkish protesters staged a
counter-demonstration at Queen’s Park, waving Turkish flags, but not
interrupting the rally that started shortly after 1 p.m.

Many in attendance, including Defence Minister Jason Kenney, Ontario
Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory, appeared to
support the event. Police estimate that approximately 2,000 people
gathered at Queen’s Park.

From: A. Papazian

Egypt Independent
April 19 2015

Armenian Egyptians commemorate 100th anniversary of Armenian genocide

Al-Masry Al-Youm

Hundreds of Armenian Egyptians have commemorated the 100th anniversary
of the Armenian genocide, perpetrated by the Ottoman government on the
territory of the present-day Republic of Turkey. The total number of
people killed in the massacres, which began in April 2015, has been
estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million.

The Armenian community prepared an exhibition, held at the Armenian
Houssaper Club in Cairo, which included items brought to Egypt by
their ancestors, as they fled from the massacres. The exhibition was
divided into four sections, depicting the regions most affected by the
massacres, namely Urfa, Gaziantep, Van and Kayseri.

“We thank Egypt for sheltering our ancestors,” says Garin Garibian
adding that the Armenian community still waits for Turkey to recognize
the genocide, “a massacre of a million and a half Armenians since
1915.”

“The European Union’s recognition of the Armenian genocide is major
step,” she added.

Nanoor Sohrabian recounts how Ottoman soldiers tortured and killed her
ancestors. “They raped the women, as they were trying to escape,” she
said. “We will never forget that al-Azhar issued a fatwa 100 years
ago, prohibiting those acts, because they violate Islam.”

“What Turkey did was no different than what ISIS is doing now in the
name of religion,” she said, urging Egypt to recognize the genocide.

Armin Mazloumian, the supervisor of the committee commemorating the
genocide, said there are nearly 8,000 Armenians currently living in
Egypt. The community had as many as 60,000 members in the 1950s, but a
large number of Armenians have since emigrated to other countries.

“After the migration, we have formed the Armenian Diaspora in America,
Australia and the Arab countries,” she explained. “Armenians worldwide
have their own schools and churches.”

Mohamed Refaat Imam, head of the History Department of of Damanhur
University, said the first massacres began in 1894 and lasted until
1896, claiming the lives of 300,000 Armenians. The second wave of
killings took place in April 1909 in Adana under the Union and
Progress Committee, when 30,000 Armenians were killed, whereas the
third phase occurred during World War I, when a million and a half
Armenians died.

He said Turkey continues to refuse to recognize the massacres. “The EU
recognition of the genocide means Turkey is not accepted in Europe,”
he said. “However, I do not expect international sanctions, as United
States has strong ties with Turkey and seeks an alliance with Saudi
Arabia and Iran.”

Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm

From: A. Papazian

GLENDALE ADVENTIST EVENT COMMEMORATES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Glendale News Press, CA
April 17 2015

By Mark Kellam, [email protected]

April 17, 2015 | 11:59 a.m.

More than 300 people attended a ceremony commemorating the Armenian
Genocide on Wednesday at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.

The event included speakers as well as an art exhibit.

One of the speakers was Ramella Markarian, vice president of business
development at the hospital.

“As individuals and as nations, we do not have the power to rewind
history.. we cannot restore life to the thousands of Bosnians,
Rwandans, Jewish and Armenians who were ruthlessly massacred, but we
do have the power to unite and strive to prevent future genocides,”
she said in her prepared speech.

“Let us use this day of remembrance as an opportunity to raise
awareness, to unite, to pray and to reflect and collectively strive
to ensure that such horrific events never, ever happen again.”

,0,2423012.story

From: A. Papazian

WAR OF WORDS RAGES AS ARMENIANS BATTLE FOR GENOCIDE RECOGNITION

The China Post
April 17 2015

By Mariam Harutyunyan ,AFP
April 18, 2015, 12:00 am TWN

YEREVAN, Armenia — Mass killings? Mutual bloodletting? Genocide? The
hundreds of thousands of dead have been silent for a century, but
generations on, Armenians are still battling to get the World War I
slaying of their ancestors recognized as a genocide.

As Armenians around the world gear up to mark 100 years since the start
of the slaughter on April 24, the struggle to get the world — and
above all Turkey — to use the term “genocide” remains deeply divisive.

To Armenians the word represents definitive proof of their ancestors’
horrific suffering at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World
War I, but for Ankara the violence was perpetrated by all sides and
describing the events as “genocide” is a red line it cannot cross.

Trapped somewhere in the middle is an international community, notably
the United States, under pressure from Armenia’s large diaspora but
worried about upsetting a rising Turkey.

“For Armenians the word ‘genocide’ encapsulates what happened to their
forefathers in 1915 and also elevates the Armenian experience to the
level of that of the Holocaust,” said Thomas De Waal, an expert on the
region at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“Precisely for the same reason, official Turkey has always rejected the
term, on the grounds that it equates the behavior of their grandparents
with the Nazis and also out of paranoia that the application of the
word could lead to legal claims against Turkey.”

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were systematically
killed between 1915 and 1917 by Ottoman authorities as their empire —
the precursor to modern Turkey — crumbled.

Turkey rejects the claims, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians
and as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against
their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

Rise of a Movement

For some 30 years after the killings no one thought of calling the
massacres of Armenians a genocide — because the term itself did
not exist.

Up until then, Armenians referred to the tragedy simply as the “Great
Catastrophe” — or Medz Yeghern in Armenian.

Coined only in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the word
“genocide” became codified in law in the 1948 United Nations Genocide
Convention, which defined it as “acts committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The start of the clamor for recognition came later in 1965 as Armenians
around the world marked the 50th anniversary of the killings.

In Armenia itself — then a republic of the Soviet Union —
discussing any official acceptance of the genocide was a taboo but
an unprecedented protest that saw some 100,000 take to the streets
forced the Kremlin to start reevaluating its position.

“It was like a genie was let out of the bottle,” Rolan Manucharyan,
a physics professor who took part in the 1965 demonstration in downtown
Yerevan, told AFP.

The 1980s then saw a surge in the international movement for
recognition, mainly fueled by the Armenian community in the U.S.,
with outbursts of violence as radical groups killed Turkish officials.

So far, Armenia says 22 countries — prominently France, with its
large Armenian community — have recognized the genocide.

Last Sunday Pope Francis became the latest international figure to
wade into the controversy as he used the term “genocide” to describe
the killings, sparking a furious reaction from Turkey.

For American presidents the issue has always been a thorny one.

Ronald Reagan used the term in the early 1980s but since then the
commanders-in-chief in Washington have shied away.

Barack Obama — who pledged before he won the presidency to recognize
the genocide — has sidestepped the contentious term by using the
Armenian term Medz Yeghern.

Return of Land?

The fallout from the massacres still shapes the region with official
ties between Turkey and Armenia frozen.

Part of the fear in Ankara over the push for genocide recognition is
that it could see Armenians lay claim to land in eastern Turkey.

“The term ‘genocide’ is not just an academic concept but also a
legal one. It means that a crime was committed and suggests that
there should be punishment and compensation,” said Ruben Safrastyan,
the director of Yerevan’s Institute of Oriental Studies.

At present Armenia has no official territorial claims against Turkey
but in 2013 prosecutor general Aghvan Hovsepyan sparked fury in Ankara
by saying Armenians should have their “lost territories” returned.

But despite the dreams of some Armenians to reclaim their land,
analysts said few outside the community seriously think there will
be any move to retake the land.

“It would be very difficult for any Armenian political leader to say
that Armenia has no territorial claims to Turkey,” Svante Cornell
from the Washington-based Central Asia-Caucasus Institute told AFP.

“But Western politicians don’t take seriously” the possibility of a
land dispute.

As the 100th anniversary of the killings approaches, the struggle
for official recognition is as intense as ever.

And the burden of what happened — and getting recognition for it —
still weighs heavily over Armenia and Armenians around the world.

“The pain forces us to constantly look back into the past,” said
Armenian author Ruben Hovsepyan, whose mother fled the killings as
a child.

“It does not allow us to fully build our future as we use up so
much national energy and potential on forcing Turkey to recognize
the genocide.”

From: A. Papazian

STEINMEIER AVOIDS LABEL FOR MASSACRES OF ARMENIANS

Europe Online Magazine
April 18 2015

Europe
17.04.2015

Tallinn/Berlin (dpa) – German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier
on Friday refused to label as genocide the massacres of Armenians in
the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

“Past atrocities cannot be reduced to a single word or to the dispute
over a word,” Steinmeier said during a visit to the Estonian capital
Tallinn.

Controversy over the issue has risen sharply as Armenians worldwide are
getting ready to commemorate the 100th anniversary next week of what
they call the systematic extermination of their people by the Ottomans.

Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, vehemently objects
to the term genocide. The Turkish government last week accused European
Parliament members of showing “religious and cultural fanaticism”
by passing a resolution that urges Ankara to recognize the death of
as many as 1.5 million Armenians as genocide.

Steinmeier pointed out that discussions are ongoing on a declaration
that the German parliament plans to issue on April 24, the official
commemoration day.

A draft of the declaration, seen by dpa, does not contain the term
genocide. Instead, it says that the “annihilation of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire during World War I was the biggest and most momentous
catastrophe in the history of the Armenian people.”

The draft declaration calls upon Turkey to “no longer deny the facts.”

Prominent lawmakers from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat
party have criticised the government for bowing to Turkey’s interests.

The Bundestag plans to finalize the draft during committee hearings
scheduled for February 24.

From: A. Papazian

ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, GO AHEAD AND OFFEND TURKEY

Assyrian International News Agency AINA
April 16 2015

By Peter Balakian
Los Angeles Times
Posted 2015-04-16 02:43 GMT

A friend once sent me a Christmas card with a handwritten greeting:
“May your genocide be recognized this holiday season.” It still makes
me laugh out loud, because it captures something about the absurd
and profound impasse between Turkey and the Armenian people.

One hundred years ago this month, the Ottoman Empire began carrying
out a systematic plan to exterminate its minority Armenian population.

Between 1 million and 1.5 million people were killed or died of
starvation. Yet the Turkish government won’t admit this historical
fact. It spends a fortune annually to stop scholarly and cultural
events about the genocide, even going so far as to pay former Sen.

Richard Gephardt’s Gephardt Group more than $1 million each year
to lobby against congressional resolutions on the genocide. Turkey
has threatened several times, most recently in 2007, to close Turkish
missile bases to U.S. airplanes if Congress passes a simple non-binding
statement acknowledging the events of 1915 as genocide.

And its tactics work; the resolution, which had the votes to pass,
was killed at the State Department’s behest.

The United States isn’t the only target of this censorship effort. At
their government’s prompting, Turkish diasporan organizations in 2009
mounted a campaign to stop the Toronto school board from including
the Armenian genocide in a human rights curriculum. In 2010, Ankara
succeeded in pressuring the Rwandan government to scrap a presentation
on the Armenian genocide at a panel on genocide at the United Nations.

In 2012, the Turkish government was successful in demanding that
the British government order the Tate Gallery to remove the word
“genocide” from the wall text of an Arshile Gorky exhibit.

Substitute “Jews” for “Armenians” and “German government” for “Turkish
government” and you can imagine the ensuing moral outrage. The Armenian
community has been waiting a century for the international community
to stand up to Turkey. It shouldn’t have to wait any longer.

The word “recognition” hovers over the history of the Armenian
genocide like a hawk. It’s a defining word that embodies an ethical
basis for accountability after a human rights crime. The issue of
recognition is not an abstraction, or a rhetorical game. The “R-word”
is about responsibility, social justice and repair in the aftermath
of one of the most extensive human rights crimes of the modern era:
the crime that was instrumental in Raphael Lemkin’s coining the very
word and concept of genocide.

When Lemkin was asked in February 1949, just after the U.N. Genocide
Convention was ratified, why he became interested in genocide, he
answered, “Because it happened so many times. It happened to the
Armenians. And after — the Armenians got a very rough deal at the
Versailles conference because the criminals who were found guilty
weren’t punished.” Lemkin was not only noting the importance of the
event but also pointing out that it’s ethically harmful to commit
such a crime with impunity.

Denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide because it strives
to kill the memory of the event; denial seeks to demonize the victims
and rehabilitate the perpetrators; denial creates what the psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton has called “a morally counterfeit universe for the
survivors and their legacy.”

In December, after North Korea organized a hacking operation against
Sony Pictures to stop the release of “The Interview,” President Obama
spoke out against the use of threats by foreign powers to inhibit
free speech in the United States.

“We cannot have a society where some dictator someplace can start
imposing censorship here in the United States,” he said, “because
if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical
movie, imagine what they’ll do when they see a documentary that they
don’t like, or news reports that they don’t like — or even worse,
imagine if producers or distributors or others start engaging in
self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities
of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”

Obama has gone further than any other president in confronting Turkish
leaders by asking them to deal with the events of 1915 honestly,
as he did in 2009 when he visited Turkey. But he should heed his own
wisdom and stop self-censoring.

The president understands clearly that what happened to the
Armenians is genocide. In 2008, before his election, he stated,
“My firmly held conviction [is] that the Armenian genocide is not
an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a
widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
evidence.” The president should follow the example of Pope Francis
who, in acknowledging the historical significance of the Armenian
genocide on Sunday, refused to be intimidated by Turkish government
bullying and cajoling.

The Turkish government, for its part, should stop interfering with
cultural events and intellectual freedom in democratic societies. And
it should listen to many of its own ethically committed citizens who
work hard for truth in Turkey. The Turkish scholar and journalist
Cengiz Aktar spoke for many of his citizens when he wrote, “The
Armenian genocide is the Great Catastrophe of Anatolia, and the mother
of all taboos in this land. Its curse will continue to haunt us as long
as we fail to talk about, recognize, understand and reckon with it.”

Removing the curse won’t require magic. All that’s necessary is
moral leadership.

From: A. Papazian

‘THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS,’ BY EUGENE ROGAN

New York Times
April 16 2015

By BRUCE CLARKAPRIL 16, 2015

In November 1914, the world’s only great Muslim empire was drawn into
a life-or-death struggle against three historically Christian powers
— Britain, France and Russia. All parties made frantic calculations
about the likely intertwining of religion and strategy. The playing
out, and surprise overturning, of these calculations informs every
page of Eugene Rogan’s intricately worked but very readable account
of the Ottoman theocracy’s demise.

As Rogan explains in “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the
Middle East,” the Christian nations of the Triple Entente had millions
of Muslim subjects, who might in their view be open to seduction by
the Ottoman sultan, especially if he seemed to be prevailing in the
war. The Ottomans, for their part, were in alliance with two other
European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Paradoxically,
the Teutons urged the sultan to use his role as caliph and proclaim an
Islamic holy war. One factor was that, as a newcomer to the imperial
game, Germany had relatively few Muslim subjects and less to lose if
the card of jihad were played. The Ottomans, meanwhile, feared the
influence of foes, especially Russia, over their own Christian subjects
— including the Greeks and Armenians, who formed a substantial and
economically important minority in both the empire’s capital and the
Anatolian heartland.

In the end, nothing went as expected, because global conflict overturns
all predictions. But the very existence of those religion-based
calculations had consequences, many of them tragic.

Rogan’s narrative shifts from the Aegean to the Caucasus to Arabia
as he traces those consequences, and shows how they led, ultimately,
to the Ottoman Empire’s defeat and collapse.

Defeat and collapse are not the same thing, and Rogan, a history
lecturer at Oxford University and the author of “The Arabs,” carefully
distinguishes them. The defeat that the empire suffered in 1918
was not total, and left some of the sultan’s -forces intact. One of
his adversaries, Russia, was by then engulfed by revolution and had
bowed out of the war, letting Turkish forces recoup lost ground. The
final collapse of the Ottoman order was -neither an instant result of
the 1918 armistice, nor, on Rogan’s reading, an inevitable one. But
for a power whose strong point was military excellence rather than
commercial or technological prowess, the defeat was painful enough.

Continue reading the main story

In the Ottomans’ confrontation with Britain, there were several
early -surprises. Instead of the sultan winning over London’s Muslim
subjects, it was the British who profited by breaking the Turks’ hold
over certain Muslims, especially the descendants of the Prophet who
controlled Arabia. With fair success, and some spectacular setbacks,
Britain also managed to deploy its own colonial troops, whether Hindu
or Muslim, against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia.

But when the Ottomans defended their Anatolian heartland, they showed
an iron will that the British underestimated. In the disastrous
British-led assault on the Dardanelles straits, and the subsequent
landing at Gallipoli, it was not the Ottoman imperium that began
crumbling but the British one, as Australian, New Zealand and Irish
soldiers became embittered by the incompetence of the power they
served.

Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Using personal histories to leaven what might otherwise have been a
heavy diet of places, names and dates, Rogan neatly links the Turks’
costly success at the Dardanelles with the dreadful events that
unfolded about 1,000 miles away, on the eastern edge of present-day
Turkey. In this, the centenary year of the horrors suffered by the
Ottoman Armenians, many readers will turn immediately to those events
to see how Rogan negotiates the contesting versions.

It is not in question that from April 1915 onward, Armenian subjects
of the Ottoman Empire died horribly in enormous numbers. The American
administration, which for diplomatic reasons still balks at using
the word genocide, accepts that as many as 1.5 million perished. It
is on record that in May 1915, a law was passed calling for the
“relocation” of the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia;
nor does anybody seriously question that this became a death march
whose victims were killed by their guards, attacked by others or
perished from exhaustion and starvation.

But there is a more contentious charge, and in a few succinct lines,
Rogan affirms it. He agrees that in addition to ordering a vast,
brutal internal deportation, the Committee of Union of Progress,
the shadowy institution that was directing the Ottoman war effort,
issued unwritten orders for the mass murder of the deportees.

Secret, oral orders are hard to prove or disprove, but Rogan accepts
the case for their existence made by the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam.

This book uses words like “annihilation” and “massacre” more often than
“genocide” but does not avoid the g-word. As he explains in a footnote,
Rogan employs the term genocide in support of the “courageous efforts”
of Turkish historians and writers to “force an honest reckoning with
Turkey’s past.”

At the same time, the book makes many of the arguments that qualified
defenders of the Ottoman record point to: for example, that in winter
1914 and spring 1915, there was fierce fighting in eastern Anatolia
between Turks and Armenians; sometimes the Armenians fought alone,
and sometimes with Russian help. In Istanbul, at the same time,
Turkish officialdom’s fear of an “enemy within” was running high
because local Armenians were suspected of favoring Britain’s plans
to advance on the city.

All that provides some psychological background to the drive against
the Armenian population. So too does the huge Turkish loss of life,
from cold and disease as well as bullets, during and after the Russian
victory at Sarakamis in December 1914. But Rogan does not for a moment
suggest that this amounts to a moral justification of the horrors the
Armenians endured. To stress, as some Turkish versions of the story
do, that this was a period involving tragic suffering on all sides
is valid as far as it goes, but it is not an adequate statement. It
is to Rogan’s credit that he acknowledges this.

Still, a moral assessment of the treatment of the Armenians is not the
main purpose of this book, which promises a more Ottoman-centric vision
of a conflict that is often described through the eyes of British
generals and strategists. That promise is only partly fulfilled. In
what is a manageably sized book, Rogan feels he must spend several
pages on the motives of the Ottomans’ adversaries, especially Britain;
that limits the space he can devote to bringing the Ottoman side of
the story to life.

Some gripping sections describe the -British-led advance on
Jerusalem in late 1917, leading to the holy city’s capture in time
for Christmas. This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it
well, making clear both the stiffness of the Turkish defense and the
ingenuity of Britain’s -tactics.

The book explains how, with the experience of an imperial power at
its height, the British used dynastic rivalries to rally the Muslims
of Arabia and the Levant against their Turkish overlords. In doing so
they established the principle that in the 20th century, ethnicity
and nationalism (in this case, Arab nationalism) would often trump
religious bonds, even in lands where faith was zealous. Only in the
early 21st century is that trend being reversed, as competing versions
of Islamism vow to tear down the borders that were drawn a century ago.

THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS

The Great War in the Middle East

By Eugene Rogan

Illustrated. 485 pp. Basic Books. $32.

Bruce Clark, who writes about religion, history and society for
The Economist, is the author of “Twice a Stranger,” a study of the
Turkish-Greek population exchange.

From: A. Papazian

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT’S RESOLUTION TO HAVE GLOBAL CONSEQUENCES – DAVID BABAYAN

08:36 * 17.04.15

David Babayan, Spokesman for the President of the Nagorno-Karabakh
Republic (NKR), believes that the European Parliament’s resolution is
a significant victory in the process of international recognition of
the Armenian Genocide – a moral and, to an extent, political victory.

“Of course, it will have global consequences and influence on Turkey’s
policy. I think the international community may alter its approaches,”
Mr Babayan said.

From: A. Papazian