TURKS WERE GIVING DEATH WARRANT TO A WHOLE RACE – NY TIMES OVERVIEW ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
15:18 * 02.12.14
On the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the
declining Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The
others — some 1.5 million — were killed in what historians consider
a genocide.
As David Fromkin put it in his widely praised history of World War I
and its aftermath, “A Peace to End All Peace”: “Rape and beating were
commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through
mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of
thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed .”
The man who invented the word “genocide”– Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer
of Polish-Jewish origin — was moved to investigate the attempt to
eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians.
He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi
Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe.”
But to Turks, what happened in 1915 was, at most, just one more messy
piece of a very messy war that spelled the end of a once-powerful
empire. They reject the conclusions of historians and the term
genocide, saying there was no premeditation in the deaths, no
systematic attempt to destroy a people. Indeed, in Turkey today it
remains a crime — “insulting Turkishness” — to even raise the issue
of what happened to the Armenians.
In the United States, a powerful Armenian community centered in
Los Angeles has been pressing for years for Congress to condemn the
Armenian genocide. Turkey, which cut military ties to France over a
similar action, has reacted with angry threats. A bill to that effect
nearly passed in the fall of 2007, gaining a majority of co-sponsors
and passing a committee vote. But the Bush administration, noting that
Turkey is a critical ally — more than 70 per cent of the military
air supplies for Iraq go through the Incirlik airbase there —
pressed for the bill to be withdrawn, and it was.
The roots of the genocide lie in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The empire’s ruler was also the caliph, or leader of the Islamic
community. Minority religious communities, like the Christian
Armenians, were allowed to maintain their religious, social and legal
structures, but were often subject to extra taxes or other measures.
Concentrated largely in eastern Anatolia, many of them merchants and
industrialists, Armenians, historians say, appeared markedly better
off in many ways than their Turkish neighbors, largely small peasants
or ill-paid government functionaries and soldiers.
At the turn of the 20th Century, the once far-flung Ottoman empire was
crumbling at the edges, beset by revolts among Christian subjects to
the north — vast swaths of territory were lost in the Balkan Wars
of 1912-13 — and the subject of coffee house grumbling among Arab
nationalist intellectuals in Damascus and elsewhere.
The Young Turk movement of ambitious, discontented junior army officers
seized power in 1908, determined to modernize, strengthen and “Turkify”
the empire. They were led by what became an all-powerful triumvirate
sometimes referred to as the Three Pashas.
In March of 1914, the Young Turks entered World War I on the side
of Germany. They attacked to the east, hoping to capture the city of
Baku in what would be a disastrous campaign against Russian forces in
the Caucuses. They were soundly defeated at the battle of Sarikemish.
Armenians in the area were blamed for siding with the Russians and
the Young Turks began a campaign to portray the Armenians as a kind
of fifth column, a threat to the state. Indeed, there were Armenian
nationalists who acted as guerrillas and cooperated with the Russians.
They briefly seized the city of Van in the spring of 1915.
Armenians mark the date April 24, 1915, when several hundred Armenian
intellectuals were rounded up, arrested and later executed as the start
of the Armenian genocide and it is generally said to have extended
to 1917. However, there were also massacres of Armenians in 1894,
1895, 1896, 1909, and a reprise between 1920 and 1923.
The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
has compiled figures by province and district that show there were
2,133,190 Armenians in the empire in 1914 and only about 387,800
by 1922.
Writing at the time of the early series of massacres, The New York
Times suggested there was already a “policy of extermination directed
against the Christians of Asia Minor.”
The Young Turks, who called themselves the Committee of Unity and
Progress, launched a set of measures against the Armenians, including
a law authorizing the military and government to deport anyone they
“sensed” was a security threat.
A later law allowed the confiscation of abandoned Armenian property.
Armenians were ordered to turn in any weapons that they owned to the
authorities. Those in the army were disarmed and transferred into
labor battalions where they were either killed or worked to death.
There were executions into mass graves, and death marches of men,
women and children across the Syrian desert to concentration camps
with many dying along the way of exhaustion, exposure and starvation.
Much of this was quite well documented at the time by Western
diplomats, missionaries and others, creating widespread wartime outrage
against the Turks in the West. Although its ally, Germany, was silent
at the time, in later years documents have surfaced from ranking German
diplomats and military officers expressing horror at what was going on.
Some historians, however, while acknowledging the widespread deaths,
say what happened does not technically fit the definition of genocide
largely because they do not feel there is evidence that it was
well-planned in advance.
The New York Times covered the issue extensively — 145 articles in
1915 alone by one count — with headlines like “Appeal to
Turkey to Stop Massacres.” The Times described the actions against
the Armenians as “systematic,” “authorized, and “organized by the
government.”
The American ambassador, Henry Morganthau Sr., was also outspoken. In
his memoirs, the ambassador would write: “When the Turkish authorities
gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving
the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and
in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to
conceal the fact.”
Following the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Three
Pashas fled to Germany, where they were given protection. But the
Armenian underground formed a group called Operation Nemesis to hunt
them down. On March 15, 1921, one of the pashas was shot dead on a
street in Berlin in broad daylight in front of witnesses. The gunman
pled temporary insanity brought on by the mass killings and a jury
took only a little over an hour to acquit him. It was the defense
evidence at this trial that drew the interest of Mr. Lemkin, the
coiner of “genocide.”