THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND FOREIGN POLICY
Author(s):Michelle Tusan
Source:Phi Kappa Phi Forum. 94.2 (Summer 2014): p16.
Document Type:Article
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi
Full Text:
The notion of honor in foreign affairs runs deep in the American
psyche, even if recent controversial tactics such as prisoner torture
in Abu Ghraib and secret drone attacks in Pakistan contradict the
ideal for some. This high-minded U.S. ambition derives from the
country’s Anglo-American heritage and the belief that with power comes
responsibility. The principle, however, often fails in practice. Why?
This article analyzes one reason: the very genesis of the lofty
impulse.
British precursors
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The beginning of U.S. military, political, and financial clout dated
to the end of World War I, with the armistice in November 1918 and
the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. U.S. influence grew after
it helped Allied forces, spearheaded by Britain, France and Russia,
defeat Germany and Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. Fresh from
victory, a growing economy, and a perception of its elevated rank in
the postwar order, the U.S. lent money and offered advice to devastated
countries across Europe. This abetment created an opportunity for
America to challenge Britain as the new global hegemon.
But the U.S. did not completely throw off the British mantle. Instead,
leaders including President Woodrow Wilson remained influenced by the
aims that had guided Britain’s internationalism during the height
of its dominance in the 19th century. Part of that inheritance was
the insistence that honor and responsibility inform geopolitics. In
other words, WWI, which commenced 100 years ago this summer, became
the initial test for America to act abroad on its values.
During the war, the killing of more than 1 million Armenian civilians
by the Ottoman Empire outraged the West) Europe’s Great Powers declared
it a “crime against humanity.” This first large-scale extermination
of a people in the 20th century demanded a legal and humanitarian
response.
Outrage over the Armenian Genocide of 1915 did not come out of
nowhere. Antecedents traced to 19th-century Great Power politics, when
Britain had asserted its prerogative as a defender of minority rights.
(2) The outcry over the “Bulgarian Atrocities” of May 1876, when
Ottoman soldiers killed thousands of civilians on the eve of the
Russo-Turkish War, set the standard for Britain’s burgeoning duty to
protect persecuted minorities. (3) The 1878 Treaty of Berlin that ended
the conflict made Britain the primary protector of Christian minorities
in the predominantly Muslim Ottoman Empire. Nations such as Russia
and France joining with Britain in the Concert of Europe understood
that a social conscience was integral to transnational governance. (4)
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For Britain this mandate loomed especially large. The slaughter
of 200,000 Armenians in a series of massacres committed in the
mid-1890s under the despotic rule of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II
further crystalized the imperative of what the London Times called a
“humanitarian crusade” on behalf of Armenians. (5) Former British
Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone invoked the “language of humanity,
justice and wisdom” (6) and used the Berlin treaty to galvanize
public and private advocacy organizations on a quest for justice for
minority Eastern Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire and
belonging, many experts contended, to a religion that shared a common
origin with the Church of England. (7) Religious and secular groups
alike accepted the charge, raising money and conducting outreach.
Thus, the 1890s Armenian massacres further confirmed Britain’s role as
enforcer of humanitarian principles codified in international law in
the late 1870s as well as in popular consciousness. (8) The campaign
appealed to the compassionate disposition to stop “the hugest and
foulest crimes that have ever stained the pages of human history” (9)
This righteous indignation would resurface during the 1909 bloodshed
at Adana, when an estimated 25,000 Armenian Christians perished at the
hands of Ottoman Turks. (10) The successful rebellion of Bulgaria,
Greece and Serbia, all with large minority Christian populations,
against Ottoman rule emboldened prominent politicians to establish
the British Armenia Committee in 1913 to lobby for the enforcement of
minority protections in the Ottoman Empire. (11) Turkey’s decision in
November 1914 to join WWI on the side of Germany put Allied pledges
to Christian minorities in sharp relief. By this time, Britain was
recognized as the primary watchdog of minority interests in the
Middle East.
Diplomatic endeavors
Indeed, the butchering of more than 1 million Armenian civilians by
Ottoman Turks in 1915-16 renewed calls to honor this commitment on both
sides of the Atlantic. Reports of the Allied invasion of the Ottoman
Empire at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, were followed by news of the
arrest of more than 200 Armenian intellectuals and religious leaders
on unnamed charges by the Ottoman government. (12) Such transgressions
transformed for some activists what one commentator initially called a
“war against German militarism” into “a war of liberation” for “small
nationalities” throughout Europe and Asia. (13) Viscount James Bryce,
a well-regarded British statesman known for his advocacy of Armenian
causes, cabled The New York Times: “All civilized nations able to
assist the Armenians today should know that the need is still extremely
urgent. … [T]his requires worldwide assistance for feeding, clothing,
housing and repatriation.” (14)
Viscount Bryce, who also had long sat in the House of Commons, set to
work on a document that made the defense of minority civilians during
wartime a matter of honor for the international community Issued as a
Parliamentary Blue Book in October 1916, his 733-page volume offered
compelling evidence of concurrent annihilation throughout Anatolia
(Asia Minor). Bryce attributed this pattern to an “exceedingly
systematic” policy by the Ottoman Turks to eliminate Armenians and
other Christian minorities from the Ottoman Empire.” Citing examples
of “pious and humane” officials and “Moslems who tried to save their
Christian neighbors,” Bryce maintained that “there is nothing in the
precepts of Islam which justifies this slaughter.” (16) These findings,
commissioned by the British government, brought together for the
first time the proof and arguments that would shape the definition
of genocide. (17)
U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau witnessed
Armenian brutalities firsthand. He echoed Bryce, lamenting that
the Armenians were being “pitilessly de-stroyed.” (18) Bryce, a
respected former ambassador to the U.S. and named a member of the
International Court of Justice at The Hague in 1914, set the pace. (19)
These two diplomats published disturbing and verified accounts that
had wide audiences and a tremendous effect on public opinion. (20)
The Armenian barbarities cried out for a universal humanitarian
response, the authors argued. This “matter of vital import to the
honour of humanity and the good faith and wellbeing of the world,”
as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it, constituted an “outrage on
civilization without historical parallel in the world.” (21) Morgenthau
put the matter more bluntly in a confrontation with the Turkish elite:
“You are making a terrible mistake.” (22)
Raised stakes
So the U.S. enlisted with the British in pressing for investigations.
Divided public opinion in the U.S. over the war delayed President
Wilson’s decision to enter it until April 6, 1917. However, his
longstanding endorsement of British objectives was well-known, despite
his initial public platform of neutrality, and extended to the aid
of persecuted Ottoman Christians. He buoyed self-determination for
minorities in his “14 Points” from early 1918. Wilson, who reputedly
kept a portrait of former British Prime Minister Gladstone on his desk,
supported autonomy for Ottoman minorities in Point 12; it proclaimed
that “nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured
an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity
of autonomous development. … ” (23)
Humanitarian, civic, church, and missionary organizations attested
that the Armenian bloodbath constituted what Bryce had labeled a
premeditated, politically motivated offense. International channels
recognized it as what today would be called state-sponsored terror. A
joint European declaration issued on May 24, 1915, accused Turkey of
crimes “against humanity and civilization,” marking the first use of
the term in relation to mass atrocity against civilians. (24) The U.S.
immediately was made privy to this declaration, which raised the
stakes for the U.S. and Britain by making it a matter of honor to do
something to prosecute the guilty. As Bryce’s Blue Book concluded,
“the Young Turkish Ministers and their associates at Constantinople
are directly and personally responsible, from beginning to end,
for the gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915.” (25)
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Troublesome prosecutions
The Allies, especially spurred by Britain, sought legal redress
for war crimes after combat ended. (26) They made the Ottoman Empire
aware that because it had sided with Germany, in peace negotiations it
would be liable for wrongs committed against minorities during the war.
After the signing of the Armistice with the Ottoman Empire in late
1918 at Mudros, the press confidently affirmed that the prosecution of
“those responsible for the massacres would come as a matter of course”
because the Ottoman Empire feared harsher if unspecified measures
“imposed by the Allies.” (27)
This warning proved cogent. (28) The Allies made the Ottoman War Crimes
Tribunals, a series of courts-martial set up to prosecute Turkish
officials for the Armenian massacres, a condition of the peace. (29)
By spring 1919, the Ottoman bureaucracy, under British persistence,
had arrested more than 100 high-profile suspects including government
ministers and military officers. (30) Trials began in early 1919 and
disbanded in July 1922. (31)
Three minor officials were executed for “crimes against humanity,”
a term deployed by British representatives and Ottoman prosecutors
in reference to the proceedings. (32) Over the next three years, at
least 63 additional cases came to trial involving 200 suspects, but
only a fraction were convicted, and the majority of those sentences
were never served. (33)
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What explains the limited punishment? The failure to prosecute fully
key figures in the Armenian Genocide came in part from the problem of
translating the rhetoric of honor and responsibility into action. The
glacial pace of the Ottoman peace settlement, still four years away,
diminished the moral posturing. Military swagger abated with the
drawing down of troops in Anatolia; by summer 1919, Britain reduced
its contingent there from 1 million to 320,000, making it difficult
for the Allies to force their will on Ottoman leadership. (34) Also,
the U.S. preferred not to form an international body to try war
crimes because it worried about foreign entanglements and, therefore,
left the task to the British. (35) Finally, and most importantly,
the Ottoman War Crimes Tribunals did not fall under the jurisdiction
of any one Allied country or the new League of Nations. In fact, the
Ottoman command, in the words of statesman Grand Vizier Damad Fetid
Pasha, convinced the British that it was not “inclined to diminish the
guilt of the authors of this great tragedy.” (36) Ottoman authorities
set up their own regional judiciaries, which were both inadequate
and incompetent.”
This travesty provoked the Times of London to ask why those “accused
of the gravest offenses” were not tried when the evidence was fresh
in 1919. (38)
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But it was too late. Following through with the maze of prosecutions
meant balancing a commitment to human rights with concerns over what
the Allies could and could not do in the early days of an unstable
peace. The Treaty of Lausanne that ended hostilities once and for
all replaced the ill-fated Treaty of Sevres in July 1923. The rise of
Turkish nationalism threatened British pull in the region and stymied
peace negotiations. Ideological resolve faltered as neither Britain
nor the U.S. pushed the redresses forward. Doing the honorable thing
would have required taking on the burden of overseeing trials that
had become a matter of internal Turkish politics and, therefore, might
have resulted in further fomenting nationalist anger over the Allied
hold in the Middle East. These dilemmas exposed the tension between
an honorable foreign policy and sobering geopolitical realities–and
ultimately undermined promises to defend human rights. The prosecution
of perpetrators of the first genocide of the 20th century largely
came to naught.
Later instances
Only when the Allies took the reins at Nuremburg after World War
II did the first successful prosecution of crimes against humanity
ensue: against Germany for the Holocaust. Why did it take so long for
the U.S. to take the lead and do the honorable thing: pursue those
inflicting unthinkable cruelties on civilians during wartime? Three
possible explanations emerge. First, the U.S. was slow to embrace
the British philosophy that humanitarianism and geopolitics align
in foreign policy. Second, the U.S., safeguarding its image,
didn’t want to look like a bully, appear intolerant, or inflame
Muslim/ Christian enmity at home and abroad by supporting minority
victims of state-sponsored violence. Third, the U.S. distrusted
international institutions attempting to enforce human rights norms
and, although ambivalent about coming to the fore, struggled with
ceding decision-making and sovereignty to them.
America has ramped up its efforts on human rights and humanitarian
interventions in recent decades. In 1988 it passed the Genocide
Convention Implementation Act, which makes the deliberate killing of
a national, racial, political, cultural, or ethnic group a punishable
crime under U.S. law. (39) Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and successor John Kerry have reiterated that America’s
foreign policy will confront such injustice; the risk of violating
national sovereignty takes a back seat to the exigency to stop human
suffering. Indeed, the increasing acceptance in the U.S. of the
doctrine of “responsibility to protect” populations from any and all
crimes against humanity (e.g., genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing)
surfaces in debates about whether or not to intercede in, for instance,
Syria. (40) The relatively recent appointment of Samantha Power,
an outspoken advocate of using U.S. intervention to stop genocide,
as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations supports this trend.
These honorable sentiments come from an age-old strand of
Anglo-American foreign policy that could find new life as the
international community reflects on the 100th anniversary of the start
of WWI and the first large-scale genocide of the 20th century. As the
Armenian case and the genocides that have followed in its wake remind
us, there is little room for timidity in the long road to realizing
the humanitarian ideal.
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For works cited, go online to
Michelle Tusan, Professor of History at University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, her Phi Kappa Phi chapter, specializes in the history of
Europe, empire, gender and human rights. Her most recent article,
“Crimes Against Humanity’: Human Rights, the British Empire and
the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide,” appeared in
February in The American Historical Review. She is the author of Smyrna
‘s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East
(University of California Press, 2012) and Women Making News: Gender
and Journalism in Modern Britain (University of Illinois Press,
2005). Email her at [email protected].
Tusan, Michelle
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) Tusan, Michelle. “The Armenian
Genocide and Foreign Policy.” Phi Kappa Phi Forum 94.2 (2014):
16+. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.
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