Lessons of the Armenian Genocide and Western Responsibility – Then and Now
ZNet
February 15, 2008
By Paul Saba
The speed with which President Bush rushed to pressure Congress late
last year to abandon a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide of
1915 was hardly a surprise. Maintaining good relations with Turkey – a
key ally in the `war on terror’ – means realpolitik will trump
historical memory every time for this administration. What was dismaying
(if hardly surprising) was the almost equal speed with which
Congressional Democrats capitulated to the President’s pressure.
This time, as on so many prior occasions, a focus on Turkey’s
responsibility for the genocide obscured the extent to which the
European powers – Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Russia – played
a prominent role in what happened to the Armenians during World War I. A
recent book[1] by the British scholar Donald Bloxham sheds new light on
their role in the Armenian tragedy and, in the process, provides
valuable insights into the historical roots of contemporary developments
in Iraq and Palestine.
The Armenian Genocide
In 1915-16, in the middle of the First World War, the Turkish government
determined to rid itself of what it perceived to be a troublesome ethnic
and religious minority – the 3,000 year old Armenian community. The
process began with extensive ethnic cleansing or forced collective
displacement followed by direct physical annihilation. In the end,
approximately one million Armenians – half of the pre-war population –
died. As Bloxham explains, while the Ottoman government bears criminal,
legal responsibility for the genocide, historical and moral
responsibility extends to the European powers as well. Why is this so?
To begin with, the Great Powers repeatedly interfered in Ottoman
internal affairs in a manner that profoundly disrupted the Empire,
exacerbated its economic and political crises and intensified
inter-ethnic and religious rivalries. The progressive decline of the
Ottoman Empire over the course of the 19th Century made it a focus of
acute inter-imperialist rivalry as each European power sought to take
advantage of Ottoman difficulties to its own benefit. At the same time,
external and internal structural stresses and the dissemination of
Western ideas led to the growth of nationalism and independence
movements amongst the Empire’s many oppressed ethnic and religious
minority groups, including the Armenians, thereby further destabilizing
the Empire.
When it suited their own geopolitical interests, the European Powers
cynically championed the rights of these oppressed minorities; when it
did not, their sufferings were studiously ignored. This practice created
an increasingly more deadly dynamic – European pressure on the Ottomans
for reforms to the benefit of minority communities raised minority hopes
while fueling Ottoman hostility and suspicion of them and their foreign
`benefactors.’ Appeals by minority representatives – including the
Armenians – to foreign powers for assistance in their plight convinced
Ottoman authorities that these communities were dangerous and disloyal
threats to the integrity of the Empire.
The `Young Turk’ revolt (directed by the Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP)) that deposed the last Ottoman Sultan in 1908 brought to power a
new leadership which favored an Empire reconstructed in accordance with
late 19th century Western European norms. That is to say, the CUP was
guided by a nationalism which was authoritarian, statist and
ethnocentric. The Armenians, concentrated on the Empire’s sensitive
northern border with Russia and already viewed with suspicion, were
perceived as a vital threat to this process. The outbreak of World War I
provided the perfect opportunity for the new government to implement an
aggressive `nation-building’ agenda predicated upon ethnic homogeneity
and national territorial integrity.
From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide
CUP Armenian policy over the course of the War unfolded through a
process of what Bloxham call `cumulative administrative radicalization.’
What began as limited repressive measures at the regional level expanded
into a nationwide program which ultimately culminated in an intentional
policy of general killing and death by attrition.
In May 1915, a decision was made at the highest CUP and government
levels to systematically round up and deport all Armenians from Anatolia
and Cilicia. That there was a genocidal intent behind the deportations
can be seen in the fact that the Armenians were not being sent to places
of possible settlement but to inhospitable desert regions. By mid-June,
the CUP leadership resolved to use the cover of the war to finish for
good the Empire’s `internal enemies’ and a policy of mass extermination
was implemented.
The resulting death of one million Armenians was not some `regrettable
byproduct’ of wartime social dislocation as has been repeatedly argued
by the Turkish government and its academic apologists around the world.
Rather it was deliberate, premeditated policy, one with far-reaching
consequences. It was, says Bloxham, `the emblematic and central violence
of Ottoman Turkey’s transition into a modernizing nation state.’
If, by their prior meddling in Ottoman affairs, the European Powers had
fostered the social conditions out of which the genocide developed,
their response (or rather should we say non-response) to the crime
itself demonstrated that geopolitical concerns not humanitarian
considerations would continue to dictate Western policy. While the
massacres were occurring, Turkey’s allies, particularly Germany, either
looked the other way or sought to justify them as `military necessity.’
The German officer in charge of the Ottoman navy, Admiral Wilhelm
Souchon for example, wrote `it will be salvation for Turkey when it has
done away with the last Armenian; it will be rid then of subversive
blood-suckers.'[2]
Turkey’s adversaries – primarily Britain and France – adopted a policy
that, as Bloxham remarks, anticipated the one that would be followed in
World War II during the Nazi extermination of the Jews. The fate of the
Armenians was tied to an Allied victory and everything should be
subordinated to achieving that end. Nothing would be done to aid the
Armenians in their immediate crisis.
From Non-Intervention to Non-Recognition
Unfortunately for Turkey, it had chosen the wrong side in the War. The
aftermath of Turkish defeat was the collapse of the CUP government, the
ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal (`Attaturk’) and the birth of the Turkish
Republic in 1923. The new regime consolidated itself under auspicious
circumstances. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had dramatically
transformed international relations; the West was intent on containing
the infant Soviet Republic and Turkey’s strategic location on Russia’s
southern flank offered the promise of a bulwark against the spread of
the `communist bacillus’ into Asia and the Middle East.
As a result, the European powers and the United States resolved to come
to terms with Kemel and his Republic. Its sovereignty and territorial
integrity was recognized and its remaining minority communities,
including the Armenians – now clamoring for self-determination – were
expected to sideline their ethnic and nationalist aspirations. As a
result, even though there was substantial continuity between the old CUP
regime that had authorized the genocide and Kemal’s government, there
would be no war crime trials for the guilty parties. To justify these
alliances, the unfortunate history of wartime atrocities had to be swept
under the rug. All the European powers went along with this decision. In
this regard, the role of the US government is singularly instructive.
US policy toward Turkey was dictated by a combination of concerns:
anti-Bolshevism, the need for regional and national stability and a
desire to promote American economic interests in the Middle East.
Turkey’s rebellious minority groups were seen by the US government as a
threat to these long-term geopolitical objectives. In the end,
non-recognition of the genocide and acquiescence to forced assimilation
of Turkey’s remaining Armenian and Kurdish populations became US policy.
As the US High Commissioner to Turkey from 1919 to 1927, Admiral Mark L.
Bristol put it, he `could see greater calamities to the world than for
the Turks to come in here and clean out of Constantinople all of these
Levantines of different nationalities, the Greeks and Armenians, and
start to build up again without these people.'[3]
Current US policies toward Turkey, including the on-going refusal to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide may be formulated in more elegant
language, but in their indifference to the continuing plight of Turkey’s
Kurdish and Armenian populations, they are no less reprehensible.
The Great Powers `Legitimate’ Ethnic Cleansing
Many accounts of the Armenian genocide view it primarily as a precedent
for the Nazi extermination campaign waged against European Jewry. While
there are significant similarities as well as clear differences between
the two crimes, the more enduring legacy of what happened to the Ottoman
Armenians in 1915-16 is rather the mass physical displacement they
suffered before and after World War I and the way this ethnic cleansing
was legitimated in the postwar peace settlements.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Armenians were subject to
numerous attempts by Turkish authorities to displace them from their
traditional homelands. In this they were not alone – far from it. Ethnic
cleansing had been going on in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire for
decades. In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, for example,
some 400,000 Muslims were made refugees, expelled from the newly
`liberated’ lands and sent to Anatolia. But these events, like the
rounding up and deportation of the Armenians during World War I, lacked
all sanction in international law. At the peace conferences organized by
the victorious allies at the War’s end, however, ethnic cleansing would
become legitimate. Here state boundaries in the Middle East would be
drawn and redrawn with scant regard for the rights or desires of
indigenous communities and what were euphemistically called `population
transfers’ would gain international acceptance.
Perhaps the best known of the post-World War I peace conferences is the
one held at Versailles in 1919, where a draconian settlement was imposed
on a defeated Germany. But for historians of the Middle East, the key
conferences were San Remo and Lausanne. At San Remo in 1920, Britain
received a mandate over Palestine as well as the Ottoman provinces of
Basra, Baghdad and Mosul from which was cobbled together the new state
of Iraq. In similar fashion, France was granted control of Syria and
present-day Lebanon. Both arrangements were later confirmed by the
League of Nations. At Lausanne in 1922-23, the Great Powers decided the
appropriate boundaries of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey and, acceding to
Turkish pressure, denied the claims of Armenians and Kurds for
independence and their own states.
But even more infamously, Lausanne legitimated the Turkish goal of an
ethnically homogenous nation-state by authorizing a large scale
`population exchange’ between Turkey and Greece. According to the terms
of the settlement, each country would forcibly expel a troublesome
ethnic/religious minority. Thus, under appalling conditions and with a
significant death toll on both sides, close to two million people – over
1.25 million Greeks and a half a million Turks – were forcibly made
refugees. Ethnic cleansing was now sanctioned by international treaty; a
dangerous precedent had been set.
Iraq and its Kurdish Population
The lessons of the Armenian tragedy are of far more than mere historical
interest. They have immediate relevance for understanding the roots of a
number of current conflicts in the Middle East. Both the dispute
between Israel and the Palestinians and war and internal disunity in
Iraq reflect the continuing legacy of foreign intervention and
state-building by imperialist dictat that has plagued this region for so
long. Both are in large part the product of the same international
system of Great Power interference that initially contributed to and
later sought to deny the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians.
As noted earlier, Iraq was the artificial creation of the post-World War
I settlement conferences which carved up portions of the former Ottoman
Empire to the benefit of Britain and France. By imposing a Sunni
minority upon a majority Shia population and strengthening traditional
clientist forms of allegiance, Britain’s efforts at state-making in Iraq
under the League of Nations’ mandate undermined prospects for democracy
and contributed to the chronic instability of the new nation.
Because Britain wanted control over the valuable oil reserves of Mosul,
it insisted on the province’s incorporation into an Arab Iraq,
notwithstanding its large Kurdish population. Having previously
encouraged Kurdish demands for an independent state as a bargaining
weapon against Turkey, Britain and the other great powers now sought to
discourage Kurdish aspirations throughout the region. This was easier
said than done and the `Kurdish question’ has bedeviled Iraqi
governments ever since.
The presence of a large Kurdish minority in Iraq has proven problematic
for three reasons. First, the Kurds have consistently demanded a degree
of autonomy if not outright independence in their traditional homelands.
Second, the brutal efforts of successive Iraqi regimes to suppress and
forcibly assimilate the Kurdish population have been a failure. Finally,
the Great Powers have repeatedly used the `Kurdish problem’ and
Arab-Kurdish disputes to meddle in Iraqi internal affairs (in the same
fashion that they had exploited Armenian suffering at Turkish hands to
interfere in Ottoman affairs).
The United States in particular has repeatedly attempted to use the
Iraqi Kurds to further its own policies in Iraq and in the Middle East
in general. In the early 1970s, when the US was supporting the Shah of
Iran in his conflict with Iraq, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
secretly channeled $16 million of military aid to the Iraqi Kurds to
encourage an uprising. When the Shah was overthrown and an Islamic
republic under Ayatollah Khomeini established, however, the US shifted
its support to Iraq and now opposed the Kurdish insurgency it had
previously fostered. In 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, the U.S. and other
Western Powers extensively supplied Saddam Hussein’s regime with
weapons, including chemical weapons. In 1988, these weapons were used in
gas attacks on rebellious Kurdish villages which were accused of aiding
Iran.
But after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990 US policy toward Iraq and
Saddam Hussein again abruptly changed. Suddenly, the plight of the Iraqi
Kurds was `rediscovered.’ Toward the end of the first Persian Gulf War,
George Bush Sr. encouraged a revolt of the Kurds in northern Iraq. Once
the rebellion broke out, however, the U.S. abandoned the
insurrectionists, fearing that their success would result in a break-up
of the Iraqi state, a result which could strengthen the hand of Iran in
the region.
The situation of the Iraqi Kurds today, now under American occupation,
remains uncertain. Viewed as the community most favorable to the US
presence, the Kurds initially enjoyed a privileged position. They were
permitted to dictate critical terms in the new Iraqi constitution,
afforded significant regional autonomy and, perhaps most importantly,
promised rights to oil development there. However, as the occupation’s
need for a strong and effective central government in Iraq has become
increasingly urgent, US policy again appears to be shifting against the
Kurds. This change is being facilitated by strong pressure from Turkey
which fears a strong Kurdish community in Iraq will inspire and energize
its own Kurdish minority.
Once again, Kurdish rights will have to take a back seat to the needs of
Western imperialism, this time in the interests of the `war on terror.’
The Tragedy of Palestine
The Palestinian tragedy is a product of the same international system
which repeatedly redrew the map of the Middle East for the benefit of
imperialism. Twice Palestine was betrayed – first, in the peace
conferences following World War I when it was wrested from the Ottomans
only to be turned over to the British Empire, and then, after World War
II, when it was partitioned over the protests of the local Arab
population. Through partition and at the expense of the Arabs, Europe
sought both to atone for a crime committed by Europeans against
Europeans (European Jewry) and to further rid itself of the remnants of
an ethnic and religious minority that it had never been able to
successful assimilate.
In the Palestinian case too, if artificial state-making over the
objections of the local inhabitants was one face of imperialism, ethnic
cleansing was the other. The forced expulsion of Palestinians from their
land which accompanied Israel’s successful military actions in the war
of 1948 drew inspiration and a sense of covert legitimacy from the
involuntary `population exchanges’ authorized by the victors at
Lausanne. And the continuing acquiescence of the West – including and
most prominently the United States – to the denial of Palestinian
self-determination and genuine nationhood is a logical continuation of
policies that subordinate the interests of minority communities in the
region to Great Power politics. Such is the logic of imperialism.
Today the Israeli government, which constantly invokes the Holocaust to
justify its own war against the Palestinians is compelled, by its close
economic, political and military alliance with Turkey, to support the
latter’s continuing denial of the Armenian genocide. Contemporary
political realities, so the rationale goes, must take precedence over
historical memory. In this manner, both the Jewish and the Armenian dead
are dishonored in the service of two regimes, each seeking to hide its
crimes, past and present, from the light of day.
Taking Responsibility
For many Americans, the on-going conflicts in the Middle East, with the
exception of our own `war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, are little
more than, in Bloxham’s words, `murky interplay between barbarous
orientals.'[4] The United States’ own contribution, as one of the
leading imperialist powers, to these conflicts and the resulting death
and suffering it has caused is all too often unknown or denied.
The debate in the United States over recognition of the Armenian
genocide is likewise all too often exclusively focused on Turkey’s need
to acknowledge its past. Missing is any demand that the international
context in which Turkish crimes was initially facilitated, then
overlooked and finally repeatedly denied by the world’s leading powers,
including the United States, also be recognized. For international human
rights activists, this latter demand is ultimately the more important one.
NOTES:
[1] Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide. Imperialism, Nationalism
and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press,
2005).
[2] Ibid, p. 116.
[3] Ibid, p. 196.
[4] Ibid., p. 25.
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