The definition
History
The Times Literary Supplement (London)
September 17, 2004
Page 13
Book Review
Peter Balakian
“The Burning Tigris”
The Armenian genocide
474pp. Heinemann. 0 434 00816 8
US: HarperCollins. 0 060 19840 0
By Andrew Mango
It is easy to understand the anger and anguish of Armenian
nationalists. They gaze at their terra irredenta, historic Armenia
which lies almost entirely within the borders of the republic of
Turkey, and which is dotted with the ruins of monuments bearing
witness to the high culture of Armenian kingdoms before the Turkish
conquest from the eleventh century onward. But there are no irredenti
– no unredeemed Armenians – in historic Armenia or elsewhere in Asia
Minor. Nor are there any prospects of a reconquista. The population
of the small landlocked Armenian republic in the southern Caucasus has
fallen from over three million at the time of the dissolution of the
Soviet Union to an estimated two million today. One-fifth of the
territory of the neighbouring republic of Azerbaijan, which the
Armenians have occupied, lies largely empty after the flight of close
on one million of its Azeri inhabitants. There are not enough
Armenians to hold on to recent conquests, let alone to people their
terra irredenta in Turkey. Why have things come to such a sorry pass?
In his campaigning book, Peter Balakian seeks to persuade liberal
Americans in general, and members of the United States Congress in
particular, that the Turks alone are to blame, and that, for reasons
of realpolitik, the Christian West has failed to bring their crimes
home to them. In Balakian’s account, Muslim Turks have always
oppressed Christian Armenians. Oppression turned to unprovoked
massacre in the 1890s in the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and
peaked in genocide when the Young Turks deported the Armenians from
Asia Minor in 1915 during the First World War. It was, he argues, the
first genocide of the twentieth century and a model for the Jewish
Holocaust. The historical record does not support Balakian’s thesis.
For eight centuries – from 1071 when the Seljuk Turks defeated the
Byzantines at Manzikert, in historic Armenia, to the congress of
Berlin in 1878 when the Armenian Question entered the agenda of
international diplomacy – the Armenians lived as a self-governing
religious community perfectly integrated into the mosaic of Ottoman
society. They provided the Ottoman State with most of its craftsmen –
from humble farriers to imperial architects, from potters to
jewellers, and in modern times, mechanics, train drivers and
dentists. Not only did many, if not most, of them adopt Turkish as
their mother tongue, but in a rare linguistic phenomenon, the grammar
of the Armenian language was affected by Turkish morphology. The
Armenian contribution to Turkish culture was immense: they set up the
first modern Turkish theatre, they published books in Turkish, they
devised Turkish translations for new Western terms and concepts, they
were prominent in Turkish music, both as composers and performers.
Like other non-Muslim communities, the Armenians were among the main
beneficiaries of the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms which
proclaimed the equality of the Sultan’s subjects, regardless of
creed. The prosperity which the Tanzimat brought in its train drew the
Armenians from their harsh homeland on the eastern Anatolian plateau
to the great commercial centres of the Empire – to Trabzon, Istanbul,
Izmir and the market towns of Asia Minor, where, together with the
Greeks, they accounted for the bulk of a new middle class. The
Armenians had always been renowned as merchants and bankers; under the
Tanzimat many became senior civil servants. Right up to 1914 there
were Armenian ambassadors and Cabinet ministers serving the Ottoman
State. Balakian does not mention them. Of course, the Armenians had
grievances, particularly in the mountainous areas of eastern Anatolia,
where they were subject to the depredations of Kurdish tribes and of
destitute Circassian refugees, not to mention venal Ottoman
officials. But most Muslims were much worse off.
As a result of Armenian emigration and the immigration of Muslim
refugees fleeing from successive Russian advances in the Caucasus,
Muslims came to outnumber the Armenians by a large margin in historic
Armenia. There were prosperous Armenian communities everywhere, but
they were not in the majority in a single province. This posed the
biggest problem for Armenian nationalists, when they began to agitate
for autonomous government. In his celebrated essay, “Minorities,” Elie
Kedourie described how ideas originating in the West destroyed the
Armenian community in Asia Minor and the Jewish community in Iraq. In
the case of the Armenians, these ideas came through two channels –
from the Russian Empire where Armenian nationalism was born in the
revolutionary ferment opposition to the rule of the Tsars, and from
American missionaries whose schools produced the unintended effect of
alienating the Armenians from their Ottoman environment. Kedourie
relates how Armenian nationalist terrorism was the pretext for the
anti-Armenian pogroms of the 1890s – the first major inter-communal
clash between Muslims and Armenians, who had earlier been known to the
Ottomans as “the faithful nation.” Even if one disregards the
exaggerated figures put out by Armenian nationalists, and reduces the
number of people killed to the more likely figure of 20,000″30,000,
the pogroms were bad enough. But worse was to follow.
It was the decision of the Young Turks to enter the Great War on the
side of Germany against Russia and the other Allies that sealed the
fate of the Armenians. By 1914 there were roughly as many Armenians in
the Russian as in the Ottoman Empire. Torn between two warring sides,
the Armenians were bound to prefer the Christian Russians. One can
argue about the extent of the threat posed by Armenian irregulars to
the Ottoman army, which was trying to contain a Russian advance in
eastern Anatolia in 1915. In the words of the American military
historian Edward Erickson, “It is beyond doubt that the actuality of
Armenian revolts in the key cities astride the major eastern roads and
railroads posed a significant military problem in the real sense.”
But it is hard to argue that the problem justified the decision of
Enver Pasha and the other Young Turk leaders to deport almost the
entire Armenian population of Asia Minor (outside Izmir and, of
course, Istanbul). The Young Turks issued a sheaf of orders and
regulations which, in theory, were meant to ensure the humane
evacuation and transport of deportees. But as Erickson points out,
“Enver Pasha’s plans hinged on non-existent capabilities that
guaranteed inevitable failure.” An earlier military historian, Gwynne
Dyer, wrote: “I believe that historians will come to see [the Young
Turk leaders] not so much as evil men but as desperate, frightened
unsophisticated men struggling to keep their nation afloat in a crisis
far graver than they had anticipated, reacting to events rather than
creating them, and not fully realizing the extent of the horrors they
had set in motion.”
The horrors involved, according to the careful calculations by the
American historical demographer Justin McCarthy (whom Balakian does
not mention), the loss of some 580,000 Armenian lives from all causes
– massacre, starvation and disease. The fact that Muslim losses were
much greater in the same theatre of operations does nothing to detract
from the extent of the Armenian tragedy. Was it a genocide” Bernard
Lewis was sued in a French court for saying sensibly that it all
depends on the definition of genocide. But, whatever the definition,
Balakian’s insistent comparison with the Jewish Holocaust is
misleading. The Turkish Armenians perished in the course of “a
desperate struggle between two nations for the possession of a single
homeland,” in Professor Lewis’s words. For the Turks, Lewis wrote,
“the Armenian movement was the deadliest of all threats;” to yield to
it “would have meant not the truncation, but the dissolution of the
Turkish state.” The Jews posed no such threat to the
Germans. Religious fanaticism was a factor in the Armenian tragedy,
racism was not. There is a much closer parallel with the eviction of
Circassians and other Muslim mountaineers from Russian Caucasus in the
nineteenth century. The figures are of the same order as those
relating to the Armenians: some 1.2 million Muslim Caucasians left
their Russian-conquered homeland; 800,000 of them lived to settle in
Ottoman domains.
“The Burning Tigris” fits in with the campaign waged by Armenian
nationalists to persuade Western parliaments to recognize the Armenian
genocide. It is not a work of historical research, but an advocate’s
impassioned plea, relying at times on discredited evidence, such as
the forged telegrams attributed to the Ottoman interior minister,
Talat Pasha, which were produced at the trial of his assassin in
Berlin. Some of Balakian’s assertions would make any serious Ottoman
historian’s hair stand on end. Like other similar books, it is replete
with selective quotations from contemporary observers. Turkish
historians have drawn from many of the same sources for material to
rebut Armenian accusations. It would be better if, rather than ask
parliaments to pass historical judgments, historians from all sides
came together to research the horrors of the war on the Ottomans’
eastern front. But it is better to lobby parliaments than to
assassinate Turkish diplomats, as happened in a previous campaign by
genocide-avengers, which Peter Balakian, to his credit, regrets. At
present, Armenian nationalists refuse to engage in a dialogue with
Turkish historians unless there is preliminary recognition of their
genocide claim. Refusal is in their eyes tantamount to the crime of
Holocaust denial. But acceptance would be a denial of the freedom of
historical research, not to say of free speech.
Andrew Mango is Research Associate at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London. His books include “Ataturk”
(1999), and “Turkey: A delicately poised ally” (1975).
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress