British Response to the Genocide of Armenians
Prof. Michelle Tusan, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
This is an abridged version of Michelle Tusan’s “‘Crimes against
Humanity’: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the
Response to the Armenian Genocide.” which appeared in the “American
Historical Review” (Volume 119, Issue 1, February 2014). Ms. Tusan is
a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she teaches
modern British history. Her latest book, Smyrna’s Ashes:
Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East, was
published by the University of California Press in 2012.–Editor.
In early 1919, British Solicitor General Sir Ernest Pollock faced the
monumental question of how to prosecute those responsible for “crimes
against humanity” committed against minority Christians in the Ottoman
Empire during World War I. “I think that a British Empire war tribunal
should do it,” he argued to fellow Allied jurists. Although the notion
of international justice was not new, initiating war crimes tribunals
for perpetrators of wartime civilian massacres as a prosecutable
offense had no precedent.
Attempts to bring Turkish war criminals to justice for what would come
to be known as the Armenian Genocide had their roots in imperial
politics and humanitarian intervention. The response to the massacres
of Ottoman Christian minorities in the late nineteenth century and the
1915 genocide in Armenia can be situated in the infrastructure and
ideological commitments of the British Empire. Contemporary reactions
to, and the subsequent politicization of, the Armenian question were
part of an imperial framework that eventually undermined attempts to
document, prosecute, and memorialize the genocide. The script that
still shapes contemporary understanding of the first large-scale
genocide of the twentieth century relied on Britain’s positioning of
itself as a global empire and an arbiter of international justice. At
the same time, Britain looked to manage imperial concerns as a
Christian power that ruled diverse Islamic peoples. This positioning
became increasingly problematic after World War I, during the attempt
to prosecute Ottoman Turkey for “crimes against humanity” in a period
of rising nationalism and growing unrest in the British Empire at the
dawn of new media. To understand why the so-called forgotten genocide
emerged as an early test case of human rights justice, we must go back
to this imperial story.
The approach of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide
has drawn historians back to the moment when geopolitics and human
rights first converged around the Armenian issue. In the face of an
influential denialist contingent, early scholarship was focused on
marshaling evidence to prove that the massacres that killed more than
one million Armenian civilians during World War I constituted
genocide. More recently, scholars have moved away from the question of
culpability and denial in order to better understand the Armenian
Genocide as an event, a project that Ronald Grigor Suny has described
as addressing the “important issues of interpretation and
explanation.” Here the well-studied American response and the
reactions of other European imperial powers, most notably Russia,
Germany, and France, have demonstrated the extent of global engagement
with the issue of war crimes in general and the Armenian case in
particular. Another body of work has used the Armenian case to study
genocide and war crimes as a particular problem of the twentieth
century. Using the massacres of Armenian civilians in the Ottoman
Empire during World War I as a starting point for genocide studies has
offered historians and policymakers a broader frame within which to
consider the rise of the practice of state-sanctioned mass murder.
Together this scholarship has created a space to study the response to
the Armenian Genocide beyond the familiar story of Turkish nationalism
and the failure of Great Power diplomacy and U.S. intervention,
enabling us to consider how the ideologies and institutions of the
British Empire contributed to the evolution of human rights justice.
Taking a long view of the Armenian Genocide as an event embedded in
powerfully contingent cultural and political processes, not unlike the
Holocaust, historicizes genocide as more than a perennial problem of
modernity, world war, and ethnic conflict. Such considerations have
made comparative and individual studies of genocide, from the Armenian
case to Bosnia to Rwanda, part of the history of modern human rights.
To include the Armenian Genocide in this narrative requires a shift in
our thinking about origins. In order to understand the response to the
Armenian massacres as rooted in nineteenth-century imperial politics,
we must consider the multiple sites of origin of the human rights
story, broadening the focus beyond debates over human rights as
belonging to either the Enlightenment or the political activism of the
1970s. The role of Humanitarianism and human rights should not be
considered separate, unrelated subjects of study. In the case of the
Armenian Genocide, this means reading “crimes against humanity” as an
early category of human rights justice with its basis in humanitarian
ideals and imperial institutions that defined premeditated massacres
against civilians as a morally reprehensible and prosecutable offense.
An imperial reading of human rights also requires that we reevaluate
the British Empire, an institution more associated with the violation
of human rights than with their advocacy. Possibly for these reasons,
historians of nineteenth-century Britain, with some notable
exceptions, have stood on the sidelines in these debates, ceding the
history of human rights and humanitarian intervention to others. The
increasingly urgent need to understand the response to genocide has
called historians to more fully participate in the current
conversation about human rights by exploring its roots in
nineteenth-century humanitarianism and its translation to
twentieth-century modes of representation.
The British Empire was a global, seaborne empire in a way that other
land-based empires were not; more importantly, it understood its role
as such. In the Near East, this meant shoring up political and
financial interests by exercising informal imperial influence over the
Ottoman Empire through a network of consular and diplomatic outposts.
These relationships secured predominance in a region that was not part
of Britain’s formal empire, a position that Britain exploited for its
own ends in the Middle East after World War I under the guise of
internationalism. It was by casting empire as an instrument for
protecting civilians during the war, according to Nicoletta Gullace,
that the British Empire first legitimated its internationalist claims.
Britain positioned itself as the enforcer of what can be considered
the precursor to international law and treaties that bound Europe to a
common set of humanitarian principles played a crucial role in
determining the post-World War I international order. Simply put, in
an era before international organizations such as the League of
Nations and later the United Nations, the British Empire assumed that
institutional role for itself.
Britain’s imperial vision of itself as a civilizing force gave weight
to its humanitarian claims on behalf of Ottoman Christians. Religion
served as a primary marker of British identity, shaping and
legitimizing the humanitarian and imperial mission. The British Empire
was a Protestant empire embracing, in the worldview of
nineteenth-century liberalism, diverse regions and peoples. A tension
between the belief in its role as a defender of oppressed Christian
peoples and a tolerant global empire made up of many faiths, including
Islam, came under pressure during World War I and influenced thinking
about international justice at the moment when the world’s attention
first turned to the Armenian massacres.
Outrage over the treatment of Armenians, constrained as it was at
various moments by the pragmatic concerns of empire, remained
necessarily contingent on a universalist humanitarian vision that
relied on British imperial institutions for enforcement. The ultimate
failure to prosecute Ottoman officials for crimes against humanity
revealed the widening gulf between the language of moral obligation to
Ottoman Christian minorities, which dated back to the nineteenth
century, and twentieth-century imperial priorities. In addition,
visual modes of representation emerged as a new tool of conscience.
Starting in the nineteenth century, Britain asserted its right as a
defender of minority rights in the Ottoman Empire. The nations joined
in the Concert of Europe understood humanitarianism as an integral
part of European politics. Humanitarianism loomed large as an imperial
responsibility, particularly after the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878)
ended with the signing of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, which gave
Britain explicit charge to defend the rights of Christian minorities,
including Armenians. The massacre of more than 200,000 Armenians in
the mid-1890s was an important moment in crystallizing the meaning of
what the London Times called a “humanitarian crusade” on behalf of
Armenians. In September 1896, former prime minister W. E. Gladstone
gave voice to this crusade when he asserted in a speech in front of
thousands of supporters that Britain and its empire had an obligation
in the face of the failed response by the European powers to impose
“our just demands” in the wake of the massacres. Gladstone balanced
the British Empire’s obligation to its diverse subjects with
humanitarian commitments, calling Armenians “our fellow Christians”
while at the same time asserting that this was “no crusade against”
Muslims. It would not represent any “altered policy of sentiment as
regards our … fellow” Muslim “subjects in India.”
This humanitarian crusade marked the culmination of a decades-long
campaign that universalized the Armenian cause as an imperial duty
realized through British diplomacy. The vision found its clearest
expression in the person of Gladstone himself. Gladstone later
witnessed the failure of the first set of Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of
1839, which created the impetus to support the principle of protection
for Christian minorities. The role of humanitarian policeman did not
come immediately or easily for the British Empire. Though some, like
Gladstone, supported the idea of minority protection codified in the
1856 Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War, many followed the
prime minister, Lord Palmerston, in trying to encourage internal
Ottoman reforms to improve the status of minorities from a safe
distance.
An overwhelming outcry over the “Bulgarian Atrocities” on the eve of
the Russo-Turkish War brought a new sense of urgency to the cause and
shaped how Britain understood its obligation to Ottoman Christians. In
May 1876, Ottoman soldiers massacred thousands of Bulgarian Christian
civilians. Gladstone denounced the killings and led the call for a
more activist role for the British Empire as arbiter of justice. As he
would later do with the Armenian case, he appealed to “the language of
humanity, of justice, and of wisdom” in his widely read 1876 pamphlet
Bulgarian Horrors. Against the unbridled geographic expansion
advocated by the Tories, Gladstone proposed that one aspect of “the
great work assigned to the Imperial State of the United Kingdom” was
“the noble duty of defending, as occasion offers, the cause of public
right, and of rational freedom, over the broad expanse of
Christendom.”
Religious, secular, and parliamentary advocacy organizations came to
share this vision. They found inspiration in Gladstone’s crusade on
behalf of Eastern Orthodox Christians, whom many saw as belonging to a
religion that shared a common origin with Anglicanism. Anglicans and
Nonconformists alike embraced the cause, raising money and performing
relief work in the Ottoman Empire. Such activism cast humanitarian
intervention as a simultaneously moral, religious, and imperial duty
that Gladstone maintained would “serve civilization.” In 1876,
advocates founded the Eastern Question Association as an umbrella
organization to advocate for Ottoman minorities that included
Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Orthodox Christians. Other organizations
included the Anglo-Armenian Association, the Friends of Armenia, and
the Church of England Assyrian Mission sponsored by the Archbishop of
Canterbury.
This activism made the once-reluctant British Empire a steward of
minority rights in the Ottoman Empire. The end of the Russo-Turkish
War and the signing of the Treaty of Berlin in July 1878 released a
wave of sentiment in favor of humanitarian intervention on behalf of
persecuted Christian minorities. Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty
codified Britain’s leadership role regarding minority protection,
though it offered little in the way of enforcement. Despite its
failure as a diplomatic tool, however, this international agreement
formalized British responsibility for Ottoman Christians. By the
mid-1890s, a growing pamphlet literature declared Armenia Britain’s
special “responsibility” and implored readers to support “our treaty
obligations.” The campaign launched on behalf of Armenians appealed to
humanitarian sentiments to accept “responsibility” for stopping what
one commentator called “the hugest and foulest crimes that have ever
stained the pages of human history.” This question of responsibility
would again be tested during the 1909 massacres at Adana and later
during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, when influential members of the
House of Commons started the British Armenia Committee to lobby for
the enforcement of Ottoman minority protections. By the time world war
broke out on the Eastern Front, the British Empire was widely
recognized as the legitimate and primary protector of minority
interests in the Ottoman Empire. Wartime massacres of Armenian
civilians would inspire renewed calls by those who believed in
Gladstone’s crusade to honor this commitment.
Viscount James Bryce (1838-1922) responded to this call. Disturbed by
reports of widespread massacres against Ottoman Armenians and the
arrests on unnamed charges of more than two hundred Armenian
intellectuals and religious leaders following the Allied invasion at
Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, Bryce launched an investigation. His
report, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16,
chronicled the unfolding humanitarian crisis and helped transform what
one commentator cast as the British Empire’s “war against German
militarism” into “a war of liberation” for “small nationalities”
throughout Europe and Asia.
The report set the tone and established the terms by which the
international community understood the Armenian Genocide. Issued as a
Parliamentary Blue Book in October 1916, the 733-page volume contained
evidence from more than one hundred sources. It remains today the most
complete set of testimonies in English regarding the massacre of
Armenian civilians that started in the spring of 1915.
Part history, part documentary, the Blue Book offered compelling
evidence of concurrent massacres throughout Anatolia, a pattern that
Bryce blamed on a premeditated government policy of eliminating
Armenians and other Christian minorities from the Ottoman Empire. In
total there were 149 documents and 15 appendixes, which together made
the case for the “exceedingly systematic” plan behind the massacres.
This official report, commissioned by the government, brought together
the documents and arguments that would shape how advocates and
institutions later defined the crime of genocide.
Debates in Parliament and the Blue Book itself revealed the importance
of establishing the facts while not alienating the British Empire’s
Muslim subjects. On October 6, 1915, the Earl of Cromer rose in the
House of Lords to register his shock at “accounts of Armenian
massacres” and to ask His Majesty’s Government “whether they have any
reliable information and can tell us what has actually occurred.”
While being careful not to offend “Mahomedan [sic] fellow-subjects,”
Cromer argued that “the facts should be made public … to let the
people of this country know for what we are fighting.” Having already
begun to gather information for what would become the Blue Book, Bryce
argued that “publicity” given to these events would The British people
had a “moral bond” with Armenians, and thus they had the
responsibility to gather evidence and save “the unfortunate remnants
of this ancient Christian nation.”
Bryce’s sense of obligation to Armenians, his status as a Liberal
statesman, and his sensitivity to Muslim opinion boosted the Blue Book
to prominence and lent further weight to its findings. Others who
witnessed the atrocities firsthand, including U.S. ambassador Henry
Morgenthau, whose work has received a good deal of scholarly
attention, published compelling and verified accounts that also had a
wide audience. Yet Bryce’s less-studied government report stood apart
as the first official record of this event “corroborated by reports
received from Americans, Danes, Swiss, Germans, Italians and other
foreigners,” emerging as the centerpiece of an international
humanitarian campaign. His casting of the genocide as motivated by
politics rather than religious hatred mitigated worries expressed by
Cromer and others at the Foreign Office that taking on the Armenian
cause would alienate Muslims in the empire. As Bryce put it in the
preface, “In such an enquiry, no racial or religious sympathies, no
prejudices, not even the natural horror raised by crimes, ought to
distract the mind of the enquirer from the duty of trying to ascertain
the real facts.”
The Blue Book’s universalism resonated in the international community
thanks in part to Bryce’s ability to manage its production and use. He
secured the assistance of British and American lawyers and historians
to review the documents and gave the task of editing to historian
Arnold Toynbee. When Charles Masterman at the War Office got involved
to assess the propaganda potential of the volume, Bryce and Toynbee
ignored pressure to shorten it and publish it quickly, insisting that
all documents be unabridged and verified by independent sources before
publication. The painstaking effort to maintain the integrity of the
sources made the Blue Book a trusted source for the humanitarian
argument. At the same time, it encouraged President Woodrow Wilson,
who reportedly kept a portrait of Gladstone on his desk, to view the
war as a just cause and buoyed his support of self-determination for
Ottoman minorities, later codified in the “14 Points.”
British imperial diplomatic and military resources made the Blue Book
possible. Information about Anatolia and Armenians came from records
kept by the empire’s network of consular and diplomatic outposts. The
volume’s regional organization familiarized readers with Armenia and
Armenians.
Evidence-gathering relied on imperial networks, but it was secular and
religious humanitarian organizations that raised money and awareness
in the international community. Church and missionary organizations
across Britain and the United States accepted Bryce’s representation
of the massacres as an “exceedingly systematic,” politically motivated
crime. The Anglican Church, under the leadership of an archbishop with
strong ties to Orthodox Christians, held a series of Remembrance
Sundays during which parishioners heard about Ottoman atrocities
against Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek minorities. Immediately after
the war, the Archbishop of Canterbury used the Blue Book in an address
to the House of Lords to make the case for genocide.
This campaign found voice in international channels that recognized
the massacres 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 phrase in relation to war crimes. Inserted by the Russian foreign
minister, Sergey Sazonov, the declaration raised the stakes for
Britain. Mindful of the empire’s leadership role in minority
protection and its competition with Orthodox Russia for the loyalty of
Ottoman Christians, officials and activists began using evidence in
the Blue Book to make the case that the massacres of Armenian
civilians constituted a crime against humanity. According to the Blue
Book, “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.”
At the end of World War I, the British Empire, with its significant
military and humanitarian presence on the ground, had the means and
motivation to make this case.
The British Empire took the lead in war crimes prosecutions after the
war. The Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany and was made aware
during peace negotiations that it would be held responsible for the
crimes committed against minorities during wartime. “The Armenian
race in Asia Minor has been virtually destroyed,” charged one critic,
who blamed the massacres in part on “the ill-success of the
Dardanelles expedition.” This moral responsibility, coupled with the
more than one million troops still stationed in the Ottoman Empire at
the war’s end, poised the British government to take the lead in
Allied peace efforts on the Eastern Front, which included the
arbitration of the Armenian case.
David Lloyd George cast World War I as a fight for international
justice led by the British Empire. This included in its initial stages
the prosecution of the German Kaiser and those responsible for the
Armenian massacres. Early on, the prime minister called upon Britain
to support the cause of freedom and humanity in a series of wartime
speeches published as The Great Crusade, much as his Liberal
predecessor W. E. Gladstone might have done. In a response to the
Ottoman delegation at the Peace Conference, Lloyd George made clear
the kinds of “violations” he had in mind.
The war crimes tribunal was a new tool used by the Allies in the case
of the Ottomans and Germans. The British had shown enthusiasm for
trying the German Kaiser for war crimes immediately after the war. The
Leipzig Trials were the result, and in the end amounted to a
short-lived set of legal proceedings that led to the prosecution of
several minor German officials in a German court, who received short
prison sentences for war crimes. The decision to try Ottoman officials
for a new category of crime committed during wartime against their own
people would fare little better.
In October 1918, the British negotiated an armistice with the Ottoman
Empire, which was signed on the 30th of the month at Mudros on the
Greek island of Lemnos. The framing of this document offered the first
opportunity to put into practice what the 1915 joint declaration had
posited as a universal commitment to human rights, and what the Bryce
Report had poised Britain to defend. Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe
was the man charged with making the peace. Serving as both the
commander in chief of British Mediterranean Naval Forces and the high
commissioner at Constantinople, he had strict instructions from the
Foreign Office that this was to be a wholly British affair. French
demands to have a hand in the negotiations were rebuffed on the
grounds that they amounted to little more than “butting in,” in the
words of one observer. The Armenian question found its way into
several provisions of the armistice that Calthorpe negotiated on his
own, sanctioning involvement in the subsequent pursuit of war
criminals. These included amnesty for Armenian prisoners, giving
Britain charge of Turkish prisoners of war, and securing the right to
occupy Armenian villages to prevent further massacres.
By the spring of 1919, the Ottoman government, under British pressure,
had arrested more than one hundred high-profile suspects, including
government ministers, governors, and military officers. The trials
took place between 1919 and 1922 and resulted in the execution of
three minor officials for “crimes against humanity,” a term that
Calthorpe deployed in reference to the proceedings.
The failure to fully prosecute the key figures responsible for the
genocide was due in part to the difficulty of executing human rights
justice under the banner of the British Empire. After the signing of
the armistice, the British Empire alone had the authority, the
military infrastructure, and the political will to launch an inquiry
into the massacres. The idea of a “High Court” to prosecute war crimes
was first discussed in February 1919 at the Preliminary Peace
Conference, where Allied jurists met as part of the Committee on the
Responsibility of Authors of the War to discuss violations of “human
rights.”
Though questions regarding jurisdiction ultimately led the Allies to
reject the proposed British Empire Tribunal, Britain continued to put
pressure on war crimes prosecutions, producing dozens of dossiers on
suspected war criminals. The prosecution of Ottoman leaders for the
Armenian massacres overlapped with the issue of the ill-treatment of
prisoners of war from Britain and its empire. Ultimately, the category
of “war crimes” in the Ottoman case included crimes against both
British military and Armenian civilian populations, which further
complicated the proceedings. One of the questions raised by legal
experts at the time was whether “war crimes” applied to acts committed
by a country against its own subjects. In the case of the Armenians,
this proved a particularly important distinction. The issue of whether
Ottoman officials could be tried for crimes against their own subjects
during wartime opened up new questions regarding the application of
human rights standards in a military conflict. British officials asked
“whether the term ‘acts committed in the violation of the laws and
customs of war'” covered “offences committed by … Turkish Authorities
against Turkish subjects of the Armenian race.”
In the end, the War Crimes Tribunal did not fall under the
jurisdiction of the British Empire or the League of Nations thanks to
successful maneuvering by Ottoman officials, who convinced the British
that the current government was not, in the words of Grand Vizier
Damad Ferid Pasha, “inclined to diminish the guilt of the authors of
this great tragedy.” Instead, Ottoman authorities set up their own
regional tribunals to try war criminals. If the British Empire was
going to follow through with the maze of prosecutions of those accused
of massacring civilians and mistreating prisoners of war, it would
have to balance its commitment to human rights with concerns about
what it could and could not do in the early days of an unstable peace.
Officials ultimately relied on the language of imperial
responsibility. Calthorpe reported having warned the vizier about the
commitment that British statesmen had made when they “promised the
civilized world that persons concerned [with the massacres] would be
held personally responsible and that it was the firm intention of His
Majesty’s Government to fulfill this promise.” In an interview with an
Ottoman official, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, the high commissioner
addressed “the question of the Armenian massacres and the treatment of
British Prisoners,” conveying an “inflexible resolve” that “the
authors of both would have to be punished with all rigour.” Reshid
Pasha responded with assurances that the Ottoman government planned to
punish those responsible, and that “he would resign from the cabinet
if this were not done.” Calthorpe remained skeptical: “what we looked
for was more than good will; it was for actual results.”
On May 28, 1919, the British took custody of all the prisoners
awaiting trial at Constantinople. The transfer of accused war
criminals to jails in the British colony of Malta, however, failed to
move the prosecutions forward. A reluctant sultan who had pledged to
support the prosecution efforts worried about a looming nationalist
backlash that was being mobilized behind the rising power of Mustafa
Kemal. This coupled with the threat that Turkish nationalists posed to
the British Empire’s supremacy in the region, weakened resolve on both
sides. Greek forces invaded Smyrna in May 1919 with the assistance of
a convoy sanctioned by Lloyd George’s government, resulting in
massacres of Muslim civilians. This galvanized anger against the
Allies, further limiting the possibility of Ottoman cooperation. The
confusion and embarrassment caused by what critics called Lloyd
George’s Greek disaster (it would eventually force him out of office)
challenged the British Empire’s legitimacy as the enforcer of human
rights justice. Diplomats and officials still pressed on, citing honor
and prestige as a factor in this decision.
But the British Empire’s “inflexible resolve” had begun to weaken. The
glacial pace of the Ottoman peace settlement, which was still four
years away, and the drawing-down of troops in Anatolia diminished the
effectiveness of moral and military posturing regarding the
prosecutions. By the summer of 1919, Britain had reduced its force in
the region from 1,000,000 to 320,000. The problem of Turkish prisoners
at Malta made an untenable situation worse. In the months preceding
the signing of the Treaty of Sevres, War Secretary Winston Churchill
received a request from a diplomat asking for leniency for a
pro-British Turkish prisoner, Rahmy Bey, who was being held at Malta.
After inquiring into the case in the spring of 1920, the investigation
concluded that “behind the friendly exterior,” this man was most
likely guilty of grave crimes against civilians during the war. The
decision to deny his release, however, was based on his having been
arrested “on the orders of the Turkish government.” But there was
another reason to keep Rahmy Bey and others at Malta that had little
to do with war crimes or questions of jurisdiction. In addition to
worrying about the precedent that such an action would set, one
Foreign Office official maintained, “There may come a time when it
might be a good thing to release several Turks.”
Ideological commitments to take the lead on human rights prosecution
met realpolitik a year later as the Treaty of Sevres began to unravel.
Churchill proposed a prisoner exchange to keep the peace process on
track. Although a number of protests were heard from within the
government, most came around to the idea that the British Empire would
exchange all but the worst offenders held at Malta for a group of
twenty-nine British and Punjabi Muslim soldiers recently captured by
the Turkish Nationalist Army, which was gaining strength in Anatolia.
An “all for all” prisoner exchange eventually took place. The Foreign
Office justified this about-face, maintaining that it was more
important to save “the lives of these British subjects” than it was
“to bind ourselves by the strict letter of the law as regards the
Turkish prisoners at Malta.”
Set for the fall of 1921, the exchange led the Times to ask why those
“accused of the gravest offenses” had not been tried when the evidence
was fresh in 1919, and to claim that it was still not too late. A
letter to the editor argued against a prisoner exchange because of the
nature of the crimes. Others worried that an unconditional release of
accused war criminals would diminish the empire’s moral authority:
“Throughout the East our assertion of right and not mere force of arms
has been our strength. If by such a pitiful surrender we abandon this
weapon how shall we cope with the growing dangers?” The failure to
fully prosecute Ottoman war crimes made visible the tension between
nineteenth-century notions of moral responsibility and a universal
standard of human rights by exposing a moralizing British Empire as a
less than legitimate voice of international justice mired in its own
imperial struggles.
Why did the notion of imperial responsibility ultimately work against
efforts to recognize, prosecute, and later memorialize the Armenian
Genocide? Three possible explanations emerge. First, the evidence
collected in the Blue Book made the case that the systematic,
premeditated extermination of a minority population constituted a
“crime against humanity” that warranted prosecution. However, as the
events of the War Crimes Trials demonstrated, a seemingly universal
notion of protecting human rights during wartime came out of an
imperial context that had its own internal logic and priorities.
Second, the British Empire was the only institution with the resources
and sense of purpose capable of launching a response. The trials
failed because Britain did not truly represent or could not in the end
legitimately stand in as an international body to pressure a fading
Ottoman Empire to prosecute its war criminals. Britain’s historical
claim to this leadership role could not be sustained as attempts to
join imperial and human rights concerns under the umbrella of a
diverse, tolerant Christian-led empire came under pressure at the end
of the war, particularly after Amritsar. Finally, the sensationalist
presentation of evidence onscreen that appeared simultaneously too
real to some and not real enough to others created a backlash, leading
to questions regarding the historical reliability of the narrative and
the humanitarian crusade that it had inspired. The ensuing controversy
over the film after the war revealed the difficulty of representing
the Armenian massacres as a universal humanitarian cause rather than a
sectarian religious conflict. This stalled the momentum of the
humanitarian response that had led Britain to speak out against the
killings in the first place. The notion of imperial responsibility cut
both ways, then, by positing, albeit differently, a responsibility to
Christian minorities and the opinion of the British Empire’s Muslim
subjects and ultimately the empire itself.
As historians explore the evolution of the idea of human rights, it is
worth considering how the experience of empire and the humanitarian
ideal shaped the uneven way genocide came to be understood as a crime
against humanity. Our contemporary narrative of the origin of human
rights omits its rootedness in the ideas and institutions of the
British Empire. A moral responsibility to respond to atrocity grew out
of an imperial ideology that rendered persecuted Christian Armenians a
universal subject worthy of humanitarian consideration. Out of this
British imperial framework emerged a new way of representing the
premeditated killing of minority civilians during wartime as genocide.
The global reach of an empire that had the resources and power to
stand up to perpetrators made this response possible. At the same
time, the inability of the British Empire to fulfill broad universal
claims of protection weakened commitments to prosecute this act as a
crime against humanity when the empire found itself caught between
humanitarian Christian ideals, on the one hand, and the realpolitik
considerations that it believed to be necessary to maintain its
hegemony, on the other. From these humanitarian imaginings and
imperial realities emerged the beginnings of the modern story of human
rights justice.
The Armenian Genocide’s status as the forgotten genocide remains an
important legacy of Britain’s failed humanitarian empire. One could
easily conclude that the massacres in Armenia fell victim to political
expediency and were cast aside as one of the unfortunate casualties of
Total War as a necessary amnesia of empire. Of the hundreds of
remembrances of the genocide scattered across the globe, Britain has
only one public memorial in Wales, the former home of W. E. Gladstone.
The inability to effectively pressure the Ottoman government to
prosecute its war criminals initiated the cycle of remembrance and
forgetting that characterizes how the genocide is treated today in
popular culture, by politicians, and by some historians. However, it
is also important to understand this process of forgetting as part of
the larger story of how a universal notion of human rights relied on
the specific context of British imperial politics in its early
practice. The unsteady ideological work of empire that tied
humanitarianism to imperial exigencies and imperatives still colors
how the Armenian Genocide functions in the collective memory of both
survivors and nations.
http://www.keghart.com/Tusan-Genocide