THE 1915 ARMENIAN AND ASSYRIAN GENOCIDES:
Posted: Thursday, February 09, 2012 at 05:01 PM UTC
Inconvenient Precedents for the Arab Spring Revolutions by Ranbir
Singh – Hindu Human Rights Group. February 09, 2012.
It was in a speech of 22 August 1939 that Hitler urged his volk to
slaughter without mercy men, women and children of the inferior Slavic
race as he planned to invade Poland. He ended this speech with these
chilling words:
“Who, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Of course it was not just the Armenians who have been forgotten. The
Assyrian nation were also prime targets of the Ottoman policy to
deliberately exterminate ancient Christian nations of the Middle East.
It has often been cited as a template for the very Holocaust
perpetrated by the Nazis in which six million Jews were deliberately
wiped out in the name of racial purity. What makes it more poignant
as that there is one other very inconvenient fact that is ignored
in all this. For years we have been fed information that Israelis
an apartheid state and that the Zionists foisted their unwelcome
colonialist intentions on the Palestinian natives. But if we look back
to the very genesis of the Zionist project we find Jewish pioneers
from Europe making arable land and small communities in what was
desert and malaria infested marsh sparsely inhabited by nomadic
Bedouin. This land was bought legally from the Ottoman authorities
but nevertheless alarmed the sublime Porte enough for the caliphate to
deliberately settle Circassians, Egyptians and Crimean Tatars in the
region. Sultan Abdulhamid II candidly admitted that this was because
he did not want Palestine to become a “Second Armenia”.
The question of recognising the Armenian genocide has become the
subject of recent high level diplomatic conflict between France
and Turkey. France has made it a crime for anyone to deny that the
Armenian genocide took place, something which modern secular Turkey
continues to do so officially. For its part Turkey has accused France
of having committed genocide on the natives in its colonisation of
Algeria. There is once again a deep poignancy to all this. It was
to France that Ataturk had turned in his efforts to make Turkey a
secular, modern and civilised nation. The French Revolution was his
model and he prided himself on being a product of the Enlightenment.
But just as France had suppressed diversity in the ideal of creating
a common citizenship so too did a secular Turkey impose a homogenous
ethnic identity on what remained of the previous Ottoman Empire. Kurds
were denied the very right to be Kurdish and were pejoratively termed
‘Mountain Turks’. Was this so different from Algerian schoolchildren
reading history books which began with “Our ancestors the Gauls”? Now
when the Arab revolutions broke throughout 2011 there was optimistic
yet naïve talk that the new governments would steer their states
towards the much vaunted Turkish model which apparently emphasised
secularism and democracy. To say that this was clutching at straws is
an understatement. In any case it is apparent now that the new states
will have strict Salafi style governments to replace the pro-western
despotisms which by contrast may indeed have been ‘Salafist’ but were
anything but moderate and secular. Just as the National Party in South
Africa did not actually invent apartheid in 1948, but merely codified
the racial segregation and discrimination against non-whites which
had been practised and even extended by the ‘liberal’ government of
Jan Smuts into a statist ideological framework, the Salafi regimes
already have had much of their work done for them by dictators such
as Mubarak under whom official discrimination against minorities and
rampant anti-Semitism was rife. Calling the Salafi parties moderate
will not change this reality one iota.
To return to the relevance of Turkey how actually secular was it?
Ataturk salvaged the remnants of the Ottoman state in order to build
modern Turkey and in doing so united all Muslims against the Christian
enemy. The sultan had actively used pan-Islamic sentiment to court
Kurdish support in the First World War and in the genocide against
Armenians and Assyrians. Kurdish chieftans had seized Armenian land
after the deportations and genocide of 1915 and were easily persuaded
by Turkish nationalists to join with them as fellow Muslims in a
common resistance to wiping out the Armenians. In May 1919 the Grand
Vizier Ferit Pasha sent Mustafa Kemal to Kurdistan where he appealed
to the population using the self-styled title “saviour of Kurdistan”.
He championed the cause of the Khilafat in his appeal to Islamic
sentiment to expel the kuffar from sacred Muslim land in which he
stressed the Ottoman fraternity that bound Kurds and Turks together.
Appeal to the Turkish nation was not even on his lips here or in the
Erzurman Congress of July and August 1919. Turkish officers commanded
Kurdish soldiers in order to defeat the armies of Christian Georgia.
These same largely Kurdish armies helped liberate Anatolia for the
Turks against the imperialist aspirations of Greece. But as the war
progressed Kurdish aspirations were crushed. On 1 November 1922 Kemal
declared that the new Turkish state had been created. The Treaty
of Lausanne of 24 June 1923 carved up Kurdistan and established the
borders of modern Turkey. Kurds were said to be equal partners with
Turks in this new state.
It was only after the establishment of the republic that ethnic
identities of Kurds, Laz and Circassians were suppressed in favour
of the surrogate faith of Turkish nationalism which was to replace a
state based on Islam. Turkish national and racial identity is still
extolled with schools, barracks and public buildings prominently
extolling slogans such as “What a joy it is to be able to call oneself
a Turk”, “A Turk is worth the whole universe” and that Turks are
“the most valiant and noble race on earth”. Republican secular Turkey
continues to deny the very historical fact of the Armenian genocide by
the Islamic empire of the Uthmani Khilafat. In ‘Hitler’s Apocalypse’
Robert Wistrich of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has elaborated
on how Kemal merely extended the nationalistic trends which were
evident even under the caliphate:
“The Turkish government’s objective was to destroy the Christian
Armenian population inside Turkey, which was deemed to be actively
seeking full independence or autonomy. Previously regarded as a
constituent dhimmi millet (a non-Muslim religious community in
the Ottoman Empire) the Armenians found themselves stereotyped as
an ‘alien nationality’, especially after the modernising rulers
of Turkey adopted the new ideology of Pan-Turkism. This was a
xenophobic nationalism intended to underpin their dreams of a new
empire stretching from Anatolia to western China, based on Islam
and Turkish ethnicity. The Armenian nation, with its ancient ethnic
culture and Christian religion, stood in the way of the homogenising
nationalism embraced by the young Turks.”
The Turkish-speaking Christians of Karaman were held to be Greek and
hence expelled to Greece. But they spoke no Greek at all, only used
Greek script to write their mother tongue. When one realises that the
“Turks” expelled in turn from Greece actually spoke only Greek which
they wrote in Arabic script, it was in fact a forcible exchange of
Muslim and Greek Orthodox Christian populations, since Arabs, Kurds,
Bosniaks and Albanians could be accepted as Turks because they are
Muslims. Hardly secular for a supposedly secular state. Indeed Turk
continued to equal Muslim, and non-Muslims are not considered to be
Turks. President Suleyman Demeril put it so succinctly in 1995:
“We are all – barring non-Muslims – owners of this land.”
That same logic was used to brutally suppress any hints of Kurdish
identity as Ataturk crushed this minority throughout his premiership.
Kurds were forcibly Turkified and forbidden from speaking their own
language. In disturbing echoes of Australia’s Stolen Generation,
children were deliberately removed from Kurdish families in order to
remove the inferior racial and cultural strains. Again the genocide
of Christian minorities by both the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate’s
successor state of modern Turkey is instructive here. Between 1925 and
1928 about a million Kurds were deported and thousands died en route.
While the survivors were dispersed throughout Anatolia in order to
make Turkification easier, ethnic Turks were settled to dilute Kurdish
demographics in Kurdistan. Turkish language was of course enforced
throughout the country, especially on the Kurds. In 1927 in Bihandus,
Lebanon, the Hoyboun (Independence) Congress brought together Kurdish
nationalist groups who in desperation made overtures to the Armenians.
Indeed Vahan Papazyan from the Armenian nationalist Dashrak Party
attended the conference.Turkey sensed a Kurdish-Armenian conspiracy
and in 1930 persuaded Iran to cut off aid to the Kurdish revolt around
Mount Ararat. Kurdish villages suffered aerial bombardment for months
and yet again thousands were killed by the Turkish military. In August
1930 Prime Minister Ismet Pasha triumphantly announced:
“Only the Turkish nation is entitled to claim ethnic and national
rights in this country. No other element has any such right.”
Minister of Justice Mahmut Esat Bozhurt was even more forthright:
“We live in a country called Turkey, the freest country in the world.
As your deputy, I feel I can express my real convictions without
reserve: I believe that the Turk must be only lord, the only master
of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish stock can have
only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.”
In 1937 and 1938 the last Kurdish resistance was snuffed out in
Dersim. In disturbing echoes of the Armenian genocide, Kurds were
burnt alive in barns, caves and forests. Women and girls committed
mass suicide. Kurdish identity was now subsumed under the unconvincing
label of “Mountain Turks”. Turks were a civilised and valiant people
who had attained victory over a savage and backward enemy, an inferior
race against whom Turkish nationalism could assert itself; the Kurds.
Savage repression followed with even the faintest stirrings of
Kurdishness being crushed. For example, in June 1967 the nationalist
journal Otuken carried an uncompromisingly venomous piece by one
Nihaz Atsiz :
“If they want to carry on speaking a primitive language with
vocabularies of only four or five thousand words, if they want to
create their own state and publish what they like, let them go and
do it somewhere else. We Turks have shed rivers of blood to take
possession of these lands; we had to uproot Georgians, Armenians
and Byzantine Greeks….let them go off wherever they want, to Iran,
to Pakistan, to India, or to join Barzani. Let them ask the United
Nations to find them a homeland in Africa. The Turkish race is very
patient, but when it is really angered it is like a roaring lion and
nothing can stop it. Let them ask the Armenians who we are, and let
them draw the appropriate conclusions.”
Colonel Alpan Turkes enjoyed huge influence with his calls for
pan-Turanianism. In 1965 he formed Milliyetci Harekat Partisi
(Nationalist Action Party) or MHP to defend Turkey against the twin
threats of communism and Kurdish separatism. After 1967 the MHP
organised paramilitary units known as Bozkurt (Grey Wolves) to murder
and intimidate left-wing Turkish and Kurdish students. The party only
gained two seats in parliament but exerted much wider influence with
its extreme views that the Kurds had to either accept assimilation
as Turks, or face physical annihilation. Only in 2002Turkey did
make grudging reforms in allowing Kurdish language broadcasting
and education. Lack of major changes meant that violent resistance
to Turkish rule continued. Kurdish politicians who have tried to
use the existing parliamentary mechanisms to elicit change suffer
harassment by the state, including jailing and assassination.Turkey
still does not exactly encourage ethnic diversity. Many Turks are of
Albanian descent but outwardly conform as Turks. Albanian-speaking
Muslim Kosovar refugees in the 1990s were treated as outsiders. Even
the late prime minister Turgut Ozal suffered taunts from Turkish
ultra-nationalists due to his part-Kurdish origins. In Turkey the
unskilled workers operate closed shop trade unions that exclude
marginal and minority groups such as the Roma Gypsies.
Even the limited secularisation by Kemalism has been rolled back.
Since the time of Ismet Inonu, Islam has made a comeback in Turkey.
The military is regarded as the stalwart of Kemalist secularism and the
most devoted disciple of Ataturk’s legacy. Yet after the coup of 1980
the ruling military junta made religious lessons compulsory in order
to counter the influence of the Left. Ozal’s Motherland Party had a
strong Islamic element within it. Even the pro-Islamic leader Erbekan,
leader of the National Salvation Party and later the Welfare Party,
was a virulent Turkish nationalist who wanted all of Cyprus occupied
by Turkey.
As it happens there can be no doubt that even the much vaunted Turkish
model is not going to be exported to former Ottoman colonies. Indeed
even within Turkey the Kemalist system is fast ditching its secularism
while retaining its nationalist core. Now the Arab Spring has brought
Salafi forces into dominance who seem intent on following the Pakistani
model of regression. Of course this failed state has been bolstered
not just by western aid but has become a vassal of Saudi Arabia For
some years where along with other Third World guest workers Pakistanis
toil in jobs which until 1962 would have been the preserve of black
slaves and which still offer them few rights.Pakistan’s largest city
of Karachi is rife with ethnic conflict between the country’s main
ethnic groups of Sindhis, Punjabis, Pathans and Muhajirs. The Baluch
have had their aspirations crushed right from inception in their
native homeland. Failing to become full members of the Arab master
race the leaders of Pakistan retain attachment to the language of
Urdu while feeling it necessary to disown or downplay the majority
language which is often their own mother tongue of Punjabi.
Similarly we can expect to see the native inhabitants of the
Maghreb known variously as Berber or Kabyle suppressed in favour of
Arabisation which has been carried out since the departure of the
French colonialists.Pakistan also offers another sinister precedent
which again brings us back to the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians
in 1915. At independence the area which is now Pakistan was about
twenty per cent Hindu and Sikh. Where are these communities now? They
barely make up one per cent of the population. Along with much larger
Christian communities and the microscopic Kailash people extinction of
these once vibrant non-Muslim minorities is within sight as western
democracies once again avert their gaze from inconvenient facts. Of
course one does not even need to look at Pakistan. Witness how half
of Iraq’s Christians have fled, many into Syria where the imminent
fall of the Assad regime does not bode well for minority Christian,
Shia and the dictator’s very own Alawite community. The Assyrians of
Iraq have faced the unrelenting and uncompromising hatred of the state
since they were machine gunned by the regular army and massacred in
pogroms by Arabs and Kurds in 1933 whipped up by King Faisal’s prime
minister, the pan-Arabist Rashid Ali. While Saddam Hussain gassed
the Kurds, there were elements among the Kurdish ‘freedom fighters’
who vented their own genocidal hatred against the Assyrians in their
midst. Therefore to blame the genocide of ancient Middle Eastern
nations on simply Turkish nationalism is missing the point and is
inaccurate. Does it explain the demographic catastrophe suffered by
Maronite and other Christians who once formed the majority population
in Lebanon? Or the present situation of Iraqi Christians, the half
century of slavery and genocide against southern Sudanese, the grim
future faced by Copts in Egypt? Ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation,
rape and conversion to Islam at the point of the gun and dagger will
become more commonplace. Again the precedent of Pakistan is relevant.
At partition Mahatma Gandhi urged Hindus and Sikhs to remain in the
new state of Pakistan. The result was that they were driven out,
raped, slaughtered or forcibly converted. The same will happen to
those minority groups in the post-revolution Arab nations. Simply
averting our gaze will not change this. While an earlier generation
of Jews from Iraq, Egypt, Libya and former French North Africa found
sanctuary in Israel where will the Christian minorities go? To a
Europe that has become increasingly secularised and simultaneously
xenophobic as it loses its cultural moorings while its economies fail?
To America where seemingly sympathetic voices on the Republican right
also garner populist support through anti-immigrant rhetoric? Hence
why I have said newly independent South Sudan may offer a way out.
This may be decried as unrealistic but is it any more unrealistic than
expecting the Salafi regimes to be ‘moderate’? Again averting our
gaze will not change the fact that we are not seeing the emergence
of democracy in these states but the growth of a lumpen flotsam
element which through occasional suppression (along of course with
collaboration and co-opting) by ‘secular’ pro-western despots has made
them experienced, nastier and more determined in their dystopianism
than ever.
As with Pakistan western democracies have funded the very radical
Islamic forces which now threaten the precarious existence which
minorities lived under what remained dhimmitude, subject as they were
to arbitrary powers of the state and lack of equality before the law.
In 1945 America offered a Europe devastated by war financial help in
return for democratic governments. This Marshall Plan was aid with
strings unapologetically attached. Yet now after years of funding
despots, America and Europe think that the victorious Salafi and
Wahhabi forces can be feted by what are effectively bribes for good
behaviour. As the present trials of American NGO employees in Cairo
demonstrations this would be a disastrous miscalculation. The Salafis
do not see it as aid or assistance. They at least recognise it for what
it is; a modern updated version of the jizya tax. When will western
democracies similarly open their eyes and realise that they face an
‘Armenian’ scenario in the aftermath of the Arab Spring? After all
Saudi funded imperialism of the Maghreb will not settle on remaining
south of the Mediterranean. Will this ‘Armenian’ lesson come too late
for us? As the late Oriana Fallaci wrote in ‘The Force of Reason’on
her native Italy:
“Those coasts where still today you can see the remains of the
watchtowers used for spotting their arrival and warning the towns and
villages. And where still resounds the echo of the scream which today
is used as a mockery but at the time was a cry of terror and despair:
“Mamma, li turchi! Mother, the Turks!”.
But it is this next quote by her which should inspire us with
confidence and courage in the face of the present adversity against
those forces who would strive to take away the freedoms which we take
for granted but were only achieved after centuries of struggle:
“The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead,
your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.”
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