THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AS JIHAD
January 25, 2015
by Richard L. Rubenstein
New English Review –
There is a 1919 silent film about the Armenian genocide, “Ravished
Armenia,” originally produced in Hollywood using Turkish documentary
footage. It was based on a book by a survivor, Aurora Mardiganian,
who also starred in the production. The film originally consisted of
nine reels, most of which have been lost. Recently, a twenty-minute
clip was found that contains brief scenes of many of the incidents
that took place during the genocide.1
Although low-definition, there is one terrible scene toward the end of
the clip that is especially difficult to watch. Seldom, if ever, have I
viewed a film scene that matches this one in sadistic obscenity. It is
a crucifixion scene, but unlike Christian images of Christ on the cross
that express symbolically the triumph of eternal life over evanescent
human pain, this film’s crucifixion scene carried a very different
symbolic meaning. There are eight crosses in a row to which are nailed
eight naked, young Armenian women. After the film offers a panoramic
view of all of the crosses and their victims, it focuses on a single
sufferer. Nailed to the cross, she is helplessly alive. One could
tell by her eyes and facial movements that her cognitive functions
were unimpaired as she awaited the painful doom of her crucifixion.
In this writer’s opinion, that scene symbolically expressed much
that the Turks wanted to convey about their behavior towards both the
Armenians and their religion. In 1915, there were no pocket-sized cell
phones with high-definition video capabilities. Motion picture cameras
were heavy instruments and the terrible scenes of the deportations,
confiscations, sadistic brutality, rapine, outright murder of helpless
Armenians, and the crucifixion of the Armenian maidens could not have
been filmed without the involvement and consent of Turkish authorities.
The perpetrators took the most sacred symbol of Christendom and turned
it into a blasphemous obscenity, symbolically proclaiming absolute
Muslim dominance. Nevertheless, something else was involved: women
are the child bearers. Their wombs carry the next generation. No words
were necessary. The message was clear: “We express our utter contempt
for you and your religion. We intend to destroy your future. You have
no human rights. We can do with you what ever we wish.”
Nevertheless, shortly after the film was released, Turks apparently
had second thoughts about what could be made available publically.
Since then, for almost a century, Turkish governments have vehemently
rejected the charge that Turks committed genocide against the
Armenians. The most Turks have been willing to acknowledge is that both
the Turks and Armenians inflicted wartime harm on each other, thereby
arguing for moral equivalence between Turkish genocidal violence and
rare instances of Armenian defensive action. Admitting that there
were massacres, Turkish authorities have insisted that the number of
Armenians killed has nevertheless been greatly exaggerated.2 Moreover,
in spite of the publication of a host of well-documented eye-witness
reports and testimonies, Turkish governments have used their diplomatic
influence to prevent governments, such as the United States, the United
Kingdom, Israel and others, from taking any action that would validate
the Armenian claim that a nearly successful attempt to exterminate the
Armenians of the Ottoman empire took place during the first World War.3
Admittedly, the subject is complex, but I concur with the overwhelming
weight of scholarly opinion that affirms that genocide did take place.
Yet while concurring with the judgment of groups such as the
International Association of Genocide Scholars, my interest lies
elsewhere: In view of the fact that post-war German governments have
acknowledged the role of National Socialist Germany in planning and
implementing the extermination of Europe’s Jews, why have successive
Turkish governments refuse to tread a similar path with regard to
the Armenian victims?
Briefly stated, while steadfastly denying that genocide took place,
Turkish governments have also implied that, no matter how terrible
Turkish behavior may have been, no crime was committed and the actions
taken against the Armenians were fully justified. This is not the
view that the Turkish government has publicly expressed. Nevertheless,
no other view appears able to explain the consistent behavior of the
Turkish governments for almost a century.
In order to understand why, we must turn to the realm of religion
in addition to politics and military affairs. This suggestion is in
accord with the first words in Vahakn N. Dadrian’s magisterial study
of the Armenian genocides. Dadrian begins: “As a first step toward a
full analysis of the nationality conflicts [in the Ottoman Empire],
it is necessary to examine Islam as a major determinant in the genesis
and escalation of these conflicts.”4
As is well known, the Ottoman Empire was governed as a theocratic
state at the apex of which stood the Sultan, both the supreme head of
state and, for Sunni Muslims, the Caliph and, as such, the successor
to the Prophet and supreme protector of Islam.
Moreover, Islam was an indispensable part of Turkish personal and
national identity, even for those members of the Turkish elite who
were unaware of the extent to which they were influenced by their own
religious inheritance. According to Turkish historian, Taner Akcam,
“…the Turks, as a ruling stratum (even though they themselves
were not conscious of their Turkishness), and under the influence of
Islamic thought, identified themselves with Islam and felt themselves
superior to the empire’s other religious groups. The idea of the
“ruling nation” (Millet-I Hakime) dominated the thinking of the
Ottoman-Turkish ruling elite.”5
According to Dadrian, the Young Turks or Ittihad, the Committee of
Union and Progress, that gained power in 1908 and consolidated that
power in 1913, were not “followers of the tenets of Islam.” Dadrian
adds, “While the Ittihad continued to run the State largely as a
theocracy, its leaders were personally atheists and agnostics.”6
Nevertheless, although the ruling elite had a very elevated opinion
of themselves and their empire in comparison with neighbors whom they
had once dominated, the actual situation of the Empire throughout
the nineteenth century was one of decline and defeat at the hands of
European Christian powers and their own Christian subject peoples. One
can argue that the process of decline began with the Ottoman defeat at
Vienna in 1683. It accelerated in the nineteenth century when Greece
(1820), Serbia (1867), and Romania (1878) gained their independence.
In addition, Turkey lost Libya to Italy in the Italo-Turkish War of
1911-12 and was defeated in the Albanian Revolt of 1912. The European
borders of the Ottoman Empire shrank and those of their formerly
Christian subjects expanded. There was a painful dissonance between
the Young Turk image of themselves as leaders of the “ruling nation”
and what was happening to their nation.
Another series of humiliations came from the Capitulations, a series
of treaties or contracts between European powers, especially France,
and the Ottoman Empire in which the Empire limited its jurisdiction
over those Christian domiciled in the Empire who were the subjects
of Christian rulers. In general, traders and later other foreigners
were exempt from local prosecution, taxation, conscription, and the
searching of their homes. Initially, such treaties were not seen as
humiliations although they did constitute a limitation on Ottoman
sovereignty but by the beginning of the twentieth century that they
were seen as such. After Word War I, they were finally abolished.
According to Taner Akcam, an important Turkish scholar who teaches
at Clark University, the second half of the nineteenth century
witnessed a new problem for the Ottoman Empire: There was a very large
in-migration of Muslim refugees from territories recently lost by the
Ottoman state. There were also expulsions and the Muslim immigrants
had nowhere else to go. While the Ottoman state was shrinking, the
number of Muslim immigrants had become a serious demographic problem.
The problem peaked in the 1912-13 Balkan wars, not long before the
genocide was initiated in 1915.
Akcam adds that until then, the Ottoman government solved its
immigration problem on an ad hoc basis, but, in keeping with the
modernizing and rationalizing bias of the Committee of Union and
Progress, they decided to solve the problem systematically as part of
a plan for the “homogenization” of Anatolia.7 In effect, plans for
homogenization meant that Christians would either be expelled in a
population exchange program, such as took place between Turkey and
Greece, largely after the war, or the unwanted population would be
exterminated, as happened with the Armenians.
Unlike most Armenian scholars, Akcam had access to Turkish archives
and found that before World War I, the Committee of Union and Progress
had already formulated a detailed, rational plan “to free [themselves]
of non-Turkish elements” in the Aegean region. When the war came, they
were fully prepared to implement their project of “ethno-religious
homogenization” of Anatolia.
At this point, I would suggest a word of caution. Ronald Grigor Suny
and other scholars have argued that the predominant motive for the
murderous homogenization project was nationalism and there is no
doubt that radical nationalism played a part. Nevertheless, I would
argue that the most important motivation for the monumental “ethnic
cleansing” projects was religious and specifically a consequence of
the unchanging nature of certain aspects of Islam.
Although the official religion of the Ottoman Empire was Islam, over
the centuries the empire had conquered a number of non-Muslim nations.
This resulted in a double problem: The empire was thinly spread
and many of the subjugated nations had skills that the conquering
Muslims needed but did not possess. The problem was solved by a
system of structural inequality that has persisted wherever Islam
has been dominant.
According to Dadrian, the fundamental common law principle governing
the relations between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects was a quasi-legal
contract, the Akdi Zimmet (contract with the ruling nationality), in
which the sovereign guaranteed non-Muslim subjects the safety of “their
persons, their civil and religious liberties, and, conditionally,
their property in exchange for the payment of poll and land taxes,
and acquiescence to a set of social and legal disabilities”8
In reality, the Akdi Zimmet was in spirit and substance the dhimma,
the Muslim pact of submission that terminated the state of war with
Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians and stipulated the conditions
under which the subjugated “peoples of the book” were permitted
domicile in Islamic lands.9 Strictly speaking, Islamic tradition
envisages no such thing as enduring peace between faithful Muslims
and infidels. There can be a truce when combat appears unlikely to
succeed or when it serves Muslim convenience. There could also be
conditional toleration in a multi-national, multi-religious empire
based on an hierarchical gradation of status, such as the Ottoman in
which the distinctions of rulers and ruled, Muslims and non-Muslim,
were strictly maintained.10 This arrangement worked well until the
nineteenth century when intervention by European powers, England,
France, and Russia, that had provided a system of extraterritorial
rights for their citizens living and trading in the Ottoman Empire,
became a source of Turkish resentment.
There had also been an hierarchical gradation of status in Christian
Europe, but under the influence of the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution, there was a definite move toward equality of legal, if
not social, status in the countries of western Europe and the United
State in which law was not thought of as unchanging in character
or divine in origin. This does not mean that there were no forces
for change in Islamic law. There were, but the agency of change was
interpretation by recognized scholarly authorities who maintained
the fiction of an unchanging law while change was effected through
casuistry and interpretation. There was, incidentally, a comparable
phenomenon in traditional rabbinic law.
There was, however, one area in which interpretation could change
nothing, the legally enforced social, religious, and political
inferiority of non-Muslims to Muslims. Nor did this change when
the modernizing Young Turks, the Committee of Union and Progress,
took power in 1908. Although some Christians were under the mistaken
impression that the Young Turks favored an Ottoman polity based upon
equality of status, they were quickly disabused of the notion. The
Young Turks were as committed, as were their predecessors, to the
idea of Muslims as the ruling nation and non-Muslim as, at best,
tolerated infidels. In reality, the defeats suffered by the Ottoman
Empire made them, if anything, more committed to the idea, so much
so that they were willing to commit mass murder for it.
The idea of Muslims as the ruling nation is best understood by two
related concepts, dhimmitude and dhimmi. According to Bat Ye’or,
who has done much to acquaint western readers with the terms:
Dhimmitude designates the civilizations of peoples conquered by jihad
over the past thirteen centuries and subjected to shari’a law. A
“dhimmi” is a non-Muslim belonging to the civilization of dhimmitude.
Having surrendered to the armies of jihad, the dhimmi loses
his territorial rights and his sovereignty, but in exchange he is
protected by a contract (dhimma) against jihad–the obligatory and
irrevocable war against the infidels. This protection provides some
relative security, conditioned upon a series of demeaning restrictions
and discrimination.11
The Christians of the Ottoman Empire were all descendants of conquered
peoples and were, as such, dhimmis. It made no difference that, in
many cases, their ancestors had settled the land long before Muslim
conquest. The Muslims were the conquerors and the Christians were
the conquered peoples and were treated as such.
There was only one way a conquered person or community could achieve,
at least theoretically, full equality with his or her overlords,
conversion to Islam which made a person a member of the Muslim umma
or nation. Not only did equal status depend on religion, so too did
subordinate status. Put differently, personal and political status
were religiously legitimated.
As Peter Balakian and other scholars have shown, the Christian
population of the Ottoman Empire was both wealthier and better educated
than the Muslim population. This is not an uncommon phenomenon where
there is a system of structured inequality. Apart from land-owning
and control of the peasantry, the personal characteristics valued
by a dominant group are those that facilitate dominance, such as
bureaucratic skills and military leadership. Money making skills that
require advanced schooling, such as large-scale trading, finance,
and commerce are looked down upon.
In the Ottoman Empire, Christians took advantage of the schools and
colleges, largely established by American Protestant missionaries,
or they sought training at European universities. As a result, they
acquired the skills necessary for wealth, but they also became the
objects of envy, resentment, and hostility.
During the nineteenth-century, Armenians tended to rise above the Turks
economically. The more affluent sent their sons abroad to receive
their education in a rapidly modernizing Europe. As Christians,
they had links to Europe that were not available to the Muslim
majority. Diaspora Armenians sent home remittances and brought back
to their families in the empire new machines and technology. When the
sale of Muslim lands to non-Muslims became permitted by the reforms
of 1856, Armenians had the resources to buy up large landholdings,
especially after 1870.12 This resulted in a reversal of status in a
world newly oriented toward industry and commerce.
Resentment was bitter and fed upon itself, so that Sultan Abdul Hamid
II’s efforts to undo the emancipatory reforms received widespread
Muslim support.
A related source of Turkish resentment stemmed from the fact that
the Armenians were a “market dominant minority.”13 As noted above,
discriminated minorities, barred from service in the military or
the state bureaucracy and subject to other forms of social and
vocational discrimination, tend to rely on education and training
for their economic survival and well-being to a much greater extent
than do indigenous majorities. Such minorities are also likely to
be concentrated in urban centers and to specialize in urban trades
and crafts, finance, and the professions. Their capital consists in
what is in their heads and is easily transportable. Often subject
to expulsion, they formed diaspora networks that were intrinsically
advantageous in both finance and commerce. This had been the case with
the European Jews before World War II, the Chinese in Southeast Asia,
the Lebanese in West Africa, and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, reformist sultans,
such as Mahmud II (1789-1839) and Abdulmecid (1823-1861), as well
as prominent European-educated Turkish bureaucrats, recognized that
traditional religious and military institutions could no longer meet
the needs of the modern empire. Among the changes introduced were
universal conscription, and educational and institutional reforms. The
measures were known as the Tanzimat reforms the objective of which
was the creation of a common Ottoman identity in the empire for
Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The policy was initiated with the
Imperial Rescript of the Rose Chamber of 1839 that stipulated that
the different peoples within the empire were declared equal before
the law. The reforms guaranteed the life, honor, and property of all
Ottoman subjects, regardless of race or religion. In 1856, a second,
expanded edict of reform asserted the equality of all Ottoman subjects,
Muslim and non-Muslim.14
The era of reform came to an end shortly after the accession of
Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918). The response, especially from the
Armenians, was not long in coming. In the 1880s, Armenian exiles in
Europe, influenced by western ideas about national self-determination
and the “people” as the source of political legitimacy, began to
campaign for national autonomy. The Armenians did not initially seek
full political independence, but nationalism provided a powerful
legitimation for separation from the multinational Ottoman Empire. As
such, it was profoundly subversive of the imperial order. Armenian
rebels in the Caucasus organized raids into Ottoman territory. While
the vast majority of Armenians sought amelioration of their situation
within the empire, by 1890, an Armenian Revolutionary Federation was
established in Tiflis (Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia) that demanded
Armenian freedom “with gun in hand.”15 In 1891, the Sultan responded
by raising a force of Kurdish Muslim irregulars and sanctioning
their predatory attacks on Armenians.16 Within a year, the Kurds had
formed cavalry units totaling 15,000 men. Assured of legal immunity,
the Kurds attacked and spread terror among Armenians in the capital
and the hinterland. In 1893 Armenian revolutionaries posted placards
in many towns and cities calling on Muslims to rise up against the
Sultan’s oppression. Since, as noted, the Sultan was also the Caliph,
combining the traditional functions of political and religious
leadership, the Armenian challenge was seen by traditionalists as a
radical breach of thedhimma.
Actual massacres first broke out in the summer of 1894 in Sasun in
southern Armenia. Turkish authorities used Armenian resistance to a
system of double taxation and officially sanctioned Kurdish violence
and sexual abuse of Armenian women as a pretext for indiscriminate
rape and slaughter.17 News of the outrages quickly spread to Europe
and Britain, France and Russia demanded a commission of inquiry. These
same powers also sought to persuade the Ottoman government to adopt
reforms in those provinces where most of the Armenians were domiciled.
The Sultan made an empty show of accepting some reforms, although he
had no intention of implementing them. In September, 1895, Armenians
demonstrated in Constantinople in order to pressure the Sultan and
the European powers to implement the reforms. The police and radical
Muslim elements in the capital city responded with ten days of massacre
and terror. About the same time, an unprovoked, premeditated massacre
began in the city of Trebizond on the Black Sea (Adalian).
The massacres then spread through almost every town with a significant
number of Armenian inhabitants. There was nothing spontaneous about
the massacres. They were in fact military operations that began and
ended daily with the call of a bugle.18
The worst massacre occurred in the city of Urfa, known to the ancient
world as Edessa, where Armenians constituted about a third of the
population. In December 1895, after a two-month siege of the Armenian
quarter, Armenian leaders gathered in their cathedral and requested
official Turkish protection. The Turkish commander agreed but then
surrounded the Cathedral of Urfa, after which Turkish troops and
the mob rampaged through the Armenian quarter burning, looting,
and killing all adult males. 2,500 Armenians were burned alive in
the cathedral. Dadrian comments that wherever possible the killing
was done in such a way as to emphasize the religious nature of the
deed.19 Lord Kinross describes the manner in which the slaughter was
assimilated to a sacrificial ritual: “When a large group of young
Armenians were brought before a sheikh, he had them thrown down on
their backs and held by their hands and feet. Then, in the words of
an observer, he recited verses of the Koran and “cut their throats
after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep”
The mosques were places of incitement; the Christian churches served
as slaughterhouses. Murderous mobs were urged on by their imams. The
worst butchery often followed Friday services. Dadrian also comments
on the importance of local religious authorities in the implementation
of the massacres. The sultan in distant Constantinople could issue
orders for the massacres, often framed in covert language, but the
interpretation, planning, and implementation of such orders required
the leadership of local authority figures. Because of the empire’s
theocratic nature, local religious leaders used their authority to
assure the mob that the massacres were in accordance with the Seriat
(shari’a).20 With very few exceptions, the muftis [jurisconsults who
dispensed formal legal opinions], kadis [magistrates and guardians
of law and order], ulemas [Muslim theologians] and mullahs played a
crucial role in conferring religious legitimacy.
The reactions of both the Muslim and non-Muslim populations were
recorded by Cevet Paþa, an astute observer and a high Ottoman
official:
In accordance with this ferman [edict] Muslim and non-Muslim subjects
were to be made equal in all rights. This had a very adverse effect
on the Muslims. Previously, one of the four points adopted as the
basis for peace agreements had been that certain privileges were
accorded to Christians on condition that these did not infringe on the
sovereign authority of the government. Now the question of (specific)
privileges lost its significance; in the whole range of government,
the non-Muslims were forthwith to be deemed the equals of the Muslims.
Many Muslims began to grumble: ‘Today we have lost our sacred national
rights, won by the blood of our fathers and forefathers. At a time
when the Islamic millet was the ruling millet, it was deprived of
this sacred right. This is a day of weeping and mourning for the
people of Islam.’
As for the non-Muslims, this day, when they left the status of
raya [dhimmi] and gained equality with the ruling millet, was a
day of rejoicing. But the patriarchs and other spiritual chiefs
were displeased, because their appointments were incorporated in
the ferman. Another point was that whereas in former times, in the
Ottoman state, the communities were ranked, with the Muslims first,
then the Greeks, then the Armenians, then the Jews, now all of them
were put on the same level. Some Greeks objected to this, saying:
‘The government has put us together with the Jews. We were content
with the supremacy of Islam.’
As a result of all this, just as the weather was overcast when the
ferman was read in the audience chamber, so the faces of most of
those present were grim. Only on the faces of a few of our Frenchified
gentry dressed in the garb of Islam could expressions of joy be seen.
Some notorious characters of this type were seen and heard to say:
‘If the non-Muslims are spread among the Muslims, neighborhoods will
become mixed, the price of our properties will rise, and civilized
amenities will expand.’ On this account they expressed satisfaction.21
Even before Abdul Hamid II abolished the reforms, their likely
negative consequences of were already understood in 1856 by Grand
Vizier, Mustafa ReÃ…~_id Pasha (1800-1858), a brilliant diplomat. In
a memorandum addressed to the sultan in the wake of the reforms of
that year, ReÃ…~_id foresaw the possibility of a “great slaughter”
as a result of the efforts to establish the civic equality of all
Ottoman subjects through legal enactment.22
ReÃ…~_id’s views were prescient. Muslim traditionalists regarded the
emancipation of Jews and Christians as profoundly offensive. Before
emancipation, payment of the jizya, the poll tax imposed upon all
male dhimmis, symbolized their subjection, inferior status, and
suspension of jihad. By voiding dhimmi disabilities, traditionalists
believed the dhimma had been rendered null and void. In their eyes,
dhimmi emancipation did not mean an end to civic disabilities but
the restoration of the state of war against the dhimmis. Under the
circumstances, the traditionalists believed that, at least in theory,
the umma, the Muslim community, could commit any outrage against
them.23Moreover, these actions were regarded “not only as justified
but also as mandatory and even as praiseworthy”24
Peter Balakian has described one of the most agonizing disabilities
imposed upon the Armenians because of their dhimmi status:
Another burden solely for the Armenians was the kishlak, or
winter-quartering obligation, which enabled Kurds and Turks to quarter
themselves, their families, and their cattle in Armenian homes during
the long winter months. The fact that the Kurdish way of life was
nomadic and rough and the Armenian dwellings did not allow for much
privacy made the intrusion unbearable, and knowing that the unarmed
Armenians had neither physical nor legal recourse, a well-armed Kurd
or Turk could not only steal his host’s possessions but could rape
or kidnap the women and girls of the household with impunity.”25
The massacres of 1894-1896 constituted an unprecedented level of
violence on the part of the Ottoman Empire against one of its subject
peoples. In spite of pressure from the Great Powers, Abdul Hamid II
was clearly determined to frustrate Armenian hopes of reform. He also
sought to crush any Armenian attempt to organize politically.
Estimates of the number of dead range from 100,000 to 300,000. Tens
of thousands emigrated; thousands were forcibly converted to Islam.
Moreover, the Sultan understood that he could deal with his subjects
with utter impunity because the Great Powers were more interested
in good relations with his empire than the fate of a minority
subject-people. From the sultan’s point of view, the Armenians got
what they deserved. By seeking to overcome their religiously-defined
subordinate status and seeking the help of foreign rulers, they had
broken their contract of submission and had placed themselves in
a state of war with his realm in which no violence, expropriation,
or indignity was out of bounds as we see in the crucifixion of the
eight Armenian maidens.
Abdul Hamid’s massacres can be characterized as pre-genocidal. The
slaughter had irretrievably marginalized and dehumanized the
Armenians. The massacres thus prepared the way for the full-scale
genocide and ethnic homogenization perpetrated by the modernizing
twentieth-century regime of the Committee of Union and Progress,
the Young Turks.
Nevertheless, the political agenda of the Young Turks was different
from the sultan’s. They were a Turkish reform party that responded to
the weakness of the Ottoman Empire as manifested in Austria-Hungary’s
annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, Italy’s seizure of Libya
and the island of Rhodes in 1912, the independence of Albania in 1912,
and the Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War of 1912-1913 that led
to the loss of much of the Ottoman territory in Europe. Moreover, as
noted, in the empire itself, Muslims had been losing ground to dhimmi
minorities, the Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, who dominated the world
of commerce and the professions. The Young Turks were modernizing,
rationalizing “progressives” who understood, as did the Japanese
elites at the time of the Meiji Reformation of 1866-1869, that,
absent modernization, the independence and territorial integrity of
their respective empires would be at risk.
In 1908, the Young Turks effectively overthrew Abdul Hamid II’s
traditionalist regime. In their initial enthusiasm, many Armenians
made an understandable but deadly miscalculation. They assumed that
the overthrow of an inefficient and corrupt traditional regime by
one that was less corrupt and more rational augured well for their
own community. The Young Turks had given public assurances of equal
treatment of the empire’s non-Muslim minorities, but the logic of
their modernizing revolution made ethnic homogenization rather than
diversity the almost inevitable political outcome.
The first generation of Turkish revolutionaries were divided on the
issue of working with the Armenians, as was evident at the First
Congress of the Ottoman Opposition that met in Paris in February,
1902. Some of the more liberal Young Turks thought that an alliance
with the Armenians would get a favorable response from the Europeans.
Armenian activists declared that cooperation with the Turkish
revolutionaries was conditional on the implementation of reforms
in the six Anatolian vilayets (provinces) with significant Armenian
populations to be guaranteed by the European powers. The conditions
were acceptable to the majority attending the Congress but were
vehemently rejected by the nationalist minority. The latter regarded
European support as wholly at odds with their fundamental objective,
the creation of a strong, independent Ottoman realm in which the
traditional status hierarchy would remain more or less intact. The
views of the minority ultimately carried greater weight as they
represented the dominant tendency among most Young Turk organizations
and newspapers.26
According to Ronald Grigor Suny and other scholars, in the first decade
of the twentieth century there was a shift by the Young Turks from
what he characterizes as an “Ottomanist orientation” that emphasized
the equality of themillets in a multinational society to a more
Turkish nationalist position that stressed the predominance of the
ethnic Turks over the subordinate communities that were regarded as
“the protected flock of the Sultan,” Armenian, Catholic, Jewish,
and Orthodox.27 Until World War I, loyalty to the empire remained
part of Young Turk rhetoric, but it was increasingly supplanted by
nationalist ideology. The shift placed the Armenian political leaders
in a difficult position. Their community was to be found on both sides
of the Ottoman-Russian border. In addition, the Armenians were split
into two factions, largely along socioeconomic lines. The Dashnak,
members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Hai Heghapokhakan
Dashnaksutiun), represented the Armenian petty bourgeoisie of Anatolia;
the patriarchate represented the wealthy commercial class of the
capital and other larger cities.28 The Dashnak ultimately sought
autonomy if not complete Armenian independence. The patriarchate and
its allies sought a restoration of their traditional privileges as
dhimmis in the millet system that was threatened by the centralizing
tendencies of government.
When the war began, the Dashnak urged Armenians to volunteer in the
Ottoman army. In Tsarist Russia, the Dashnak urged Armenians to enlist
in the Tsarist army. As a result, both the Tsarist and the Ottoman
governments suspected the Armenians of disloyalty. The situation was
aggravated by the dangers confronting the Ottoman Empire in 1914 and
1915. In November, 1914, over the objections of field commanders,
Turkish forces led by Enver Pasha, Minister of War and one of the
ruling Young Turk triumvirate, attempted to regain land in the Caucasus
lost to the Russians in 1878. Enver’s effort ended catastrophically
at Sarikamis, a Turkish town in the Caucasus. In the west, Djemal
Pasha led an attack in February 1915 on the Suez Canal that also ended
in defeat. In March 1915, in response to a Russian request for aid,
Allied naval forces under Admiral Sir John de Robeck, Commander of
the Aegean Squadron, made preparations to force a passage through
the Dardanelles Strait. The evacuation of Constantinople began and
the state archives and the empire’s gold reserves were sent away.
Most observers anticipated the empire’s collapse. However, on March 18,
1915, as a result of an unsuspected Turkish minefield in the Strait,
five Allied warships were destroyed. The Allied attempt to force the
Strait ended in disaster.29
When the Young Turks contemplated evacuating from Constantinople to
the Anatolian heartland, they could not ignore the issue of security.
Anatolia’s population was mixed. In addition to Turks, it was inhabited
by Greeks, Armenians and Kurds whose loyalty was suspect in Turkish
eyes. Some Greek civilians were deported from the coastal areas,
but those deportations were not genocidal in intent. In the first
months of 1915, the Young Turks responded to the defeat at Sarikamis
by blaming the Armenians whom they accused of sympathizing with the
Russians.30 The Ottoman authorities disarmed and demobilized Armenian
soldiers who were then forced into labor brigades and compelled to
dig their own graves before being shot.31
Rumors of the slaughter spread in the Armenian villages.32 On April
20, 1915, the Armenians of Van rose up in self-defense when Djevdet
Bey, the recently appointed governor of Van and Enver Pasha’s
brother-in-law, demanded that the Armenian leadership hand over
four thousand men for the Ottoman army’s labor battalions. With
no illusions concerning the fate of the men if they complied,
the leadership refused, an action depicted by the Turks as a
revolutionary uprising.33 The Armenians held out in Van until May
14, 1915, when the city was captured by the Russians with the aid
of some Armenian guerrillas who proclaimed Van the capital of an
independent Armenian republic. When the Turks recaptured the city in
July, they were infuriated by what they regarded as Armenian treason
and launched a massacre, butchering the men, and robbing, raping and
leaving the women to die. Dr. Clarence B. Ussher, an American medical
missionary in Van, reported that 55,000 Armenians were killed there
in May.34 On April 24, 1915 the Ministry of the Interior ordered
the arrest of Armenian parliamentary deputies, former ministers,
and some intellectuals. Thousands were arrested, including 2,345 in
the capital, most of whom were subsequently executed.35
On May 27, 1915, a new emergency law was promulgated, the Temporary
Law of Deportation. The law authorized military leaders to order the
deportation of population groups on suspicion of espionage, treason,
and military necessity. With this sweeping authorization and without
explicitly naming the Armenians, the Turkish government arrogated to
itself the genocidal deportation of its Armenian population. Shortly
thereafter, Djevdet Bey, Van’s governor, gave an order to “exterminate
all Armenian males of 12 years and older” in that border region.36
Actual genocide had begun in April, 1915, with the rounding up and
deportation of Armenian men in one population center after another.
The men were usually imprisoned for several days, after which they
were marched out of town and massacred. Later women, children and
older men were also deported. The women were often raped and mutilated
before being killed. Thousands of the female deportees were given
the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Having lost their men
and completely at the mercy of hostile Turks and Kurds, many of the
women converted. We return to that subject below.
In June, 1915, the government began to use the railroads to expedite
deportation and extermination. Freight cars were employed to transport
thousands to remote areas where they were left to starve to death
while being assaulted by the ravages of nature and human malice. Many
were murdered outright. The Armenian deportees were among the first
men and women in the twentieth century to learn that human rights
are inseparable from political status. Having been deprived by the
Ottoman government of all political status, save that of outlaw,
there was no abuse that could not with impunity be inflicted upon them.
The extermination project was thoroughly modern in spirit and
implementation from its initial planning stages to its execution.37
Mass extermination was advocated in the planning sessions as the
appropriate “scientific” response to the universal struggle of the
races for survival.38 Like other modernizing elites of the period,
the largely European-trained Young Turks interpreted the relations
between races and nations in Social Darwinist terms. Above all, the
Young Turks had a reliable, centralized bureaucratic network. Taalat
Bey, one of the ruling triumvirs and Minister of the Interior, did not
entrust the assignment to old-fashioned provincial bureaucrats but
sent Young Turk bureaucrats to act as his personal representatives
and, when necessary, to punish governors and local governors who,
out of compassion or greed, failed to carry out orders. There was a
special organization with responsibility for organizing the massacres.
At the local level, much of the actual killing was carried out by
death squads who were given the name of “Butcher Battalions.”39
Taalat Bey spelled out the objectives of his government in a telegram
to the Police Office in Aleppo, Syria, dated September 15, 1915:
It has been reported that by order of the Committee [of Union and
Progress] the Government has determined completely to exterminate
the Armenians living in Turkey. Those who refuse to obey this order
cannot be regarded as friends of the Government. Regardless of the
women, children or invalids, and however deplorable the methods of
destruction may seem, an end is to be put to their existence [i.e.,
the Armenians] without paying any heed to feeling or conscience.”
(emphasis added).
Taalat,
Minister of the Interior40
The Young Turks characterized their aggression as “deportations,” and
insisted that they were acting in the interests of national security.
However, it was quickly apparent that the number of victims far
exceeded the nineteenth-century massacres. In 1915 deportation had
acquired a new and sinister meaning. It had become an instrument of
extermination in which no fewer than one million Armenians perished.41
Many volumes have been written about the Armenian genocide. One
of the earliest was also one of the most comprehensive, the report
assembled by Viscount James Bryce in 1916 in partnership with Historian
Arnold Toynbee and presented to Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign
Secretary. The authors concluded their report with an observation
concerning the slaughter: “It was a deliberate, systematic attempt
to eradicate the Armenian population throughout the Ottoman Empire
and it has certainly met with a very large measure of success.”42
To this day, Turkish authorities have denied that genocide ever took
place, and insist that their actions were necessary defensive measures
against a disloyal and rebellious minority.43 That claim has been
refuted by the vast majority of responsible scholars. Nevertheless,
the Turkish government has used every threat in its diplomatic arsenal
to prevent friendly governments from officially taking issue with
its denial of genocide.
As noted above, there is little reason to doubt that Abdul
Hamid’s massacres were in large measure religiously motivated. The
sultan-caliph was responsible for mass murder on an unprecedented
scale but extermination of the entire community was beyond his
capacities. Not so, the Young Turks. Within months after Turkey’s
entrance into the Great War, the decision to exterminate the Armenians
had been taken. When the deed was done, the justifications the Young
Turks offered were largely political and economic.
When I first wrote about the Armenian genocide of 1915, I stressed the
modernity of the enterprise and its economic, political and military
motives.44 I did not consider the possibility that the perpetrators’
motives might have included a very important religious component.
Today, I would argue that religion was an indispensable component in
the motivation for genocide. It was certainly an indispensable element
in defining the otherness of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. I would
further argue that the crimes perpetrated against the Armenians were
regarded by the Turks as legitimate defensive methods of dealing with
dhimmis who had violated the conditions of the dhimma, and, hence,
were outlaws for whom everything, including life, property, freedom,
and family, was forfeit. I would also argue that the persistent Turkish
genocide denial – so different from the German way of dealing with
their genocide – has been due, at least in part, to the Turkish belief
that they did no wrong in exterminating the Armenians, a belief that
rests ultimately on the traditions of jihad and the dhimma.
In the massacres of 1894-1896, Turkish authorities were quite open
about religious legitimations. In 1914, religion was once again
an important component in the conduct of Turkish authorities, this
time in the way the war was initiated and its purposes defined. On
November 2, 1914, the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Entente
powers, Britain, France, Russia, and their allies. On November 13,
the Ottoman Sultan, in his capacity, as Caliph, issued an appeal
for jihad. The next day Mustafa Hayri Bey, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, and
as such the chief Sunni religious authority in the Ottoman world,
issued a formal (and inflammatory) declaration of jihad “against
infidels and enemies of Islam.” Jihad pamphlets in Arabic were also
distributed in mosques throughout the Muslim world that offered a
detailed plan of operations for the assassination and extermination
of all “unbelievers” except those of German nationality, the empire’s
wartime ally.45 Killing squads and their leaders were “motivated by
both the ideology of jihad and pan-Turkism influenced by European
nationalism.”46 While the practical influence of the jihad on the
masses was limited, “it later facilitated the government’s program
of genocide against the Armenians.”47 It is also worth noting that
although the Sheikh-ul-Islam was customarily appointed by the Sultan,
Hayri Bey was appointed by the Committee of Union and Progress,
the Young Turks who were to instigate the genocide.
According to historian Ara Sarafian, in addition to the killings and
general massacres, a large number of Armenians were “‘abducted,’
‘carried off,’ or ‘converted to Islam'”48 Sarafian argues that
“the fate of this latter class of Armenians was part of the same
genocidal calculus as those who were murdered.” It is estimated that
in 1915-1916 between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenians, most of whom
were women and children, escaped death by converting to Islam. The
absorption of these converts into the Muslim community had the same
objective as outright genocide, the elimination of the Christian
Armenian community as a demographic presence in the Ottoman Empire. In
addition to killing a very large number of Armenians through forced
marches and starvation, the deportations served to weaken and terrify
women and children who had lost their male protectors before or during
the deportations. According to Sarafian, “…young women and children
were rendered prime candidates for absorption into Muslim households
after they were isolated from their families and terrorized during
the forced marches and execution of their elders”49
Sarafian contends, with considerable justice, that the authorities were
implementing a “single policy of destruction” in both the outright
murder of adult males and in the absorption of Armenian women and
children into the Muslim community. The same Ottoman bureaucrats who
controlled the deportations were also in charge of the conversion
program. In the initial stages of the assault on the Armenians,
there were “voluntary” conversions. Some individuals were selected by
individual Muslims for absorption into their households. In addition,
government agencies distributed Armenians to Muslim families. Children
in government-sponsored orphanages were converted and directly absorbed
into the Muslim community.
Events in Trebizond are illustrative of how the program functioned.
Between July 1 and July 18, 1915, five deportation convoys left
Trebizond. Oscar Heizer, the American Consul, reported that most of
the deportees were killed by their guards shortly after leaving.50
Approximately 3,000 children, girls up to 15 years old and boys
no older than ten, were placed in a number of houses designated by
the Turks as “orphanages.” Another 300 were housed in the American
missionary school which was turned into an orphanage. Both orphanages
were subsequently closed down by an official sent from Constantinople
to supervise the extermination of the Armenians. Some children were
drowned by the Turks; others were distributed to Muslim households
where, according to Heizer, they were assimilated as Muslims within
weeks.51 Elsewhere, U.S. Consul Leslie Davis reported on the passage
of thousands of deportees through Harpoot which was situated on a
principal route to the deserts of Syria. Davis wrote that hardly any
men had survived among the deportees. Subject to constant beatings,
with little or no food or water, the victims were rapidly dying. The
gendarmes guarding the Armenians refused to permit them to leave
the convoy or to receive aid from American missionaries. They did,
however, permit Turks to visit the convoys with doctors to select
“the prettiest girls” for their own purposes. Davis further reported
that the Turks were not only seeking to exterminate the Armenians;
they were also seeking to absorb a large number as Muslims. Sarafian
concludes that there was a mass transfer of Armenians into Muslim
households in 1915. By destroying the Armenian social structure in the
early stages of the genocide through the murder of young men, heads
of families, and community leaders, the Turks were able to garner
“the ideal candidates for absorption” into Muslim households and the
general Muslim population.52
As cruel as this program was, it was fundamentally different
from the Nazi Final Solution. Suny has observed that “To a
considerable degree, religious differences were transmuted by both
the Armenians and the Turks into racial and national differences,
far more indelible and immutable than religion”53 Nevertheless,
Suny’s qualifier, “To a considerable degree” is important. For the
Nazis, the racial divide between the so-called Aryans and Non-Aryans
was absolute and unbridgeable. In the National Socialist universe,
there was no room for an absorption program for Non-Aryans, save for
a miniscule number of “Honorary Aryans.” Some Poles and others with
the appropriate physical characteristics could be absorbed, but not
the Jews. By contrast, even in genocide, religion made a difference
in the Ottoman Empire. Conversion could and did save some Armenians
even as it destroyed their community. Moreover, as noted, both the
extermination and the conversion process were fully consistent with
Islamic tradition in the eyes of the Turks.
Nor were the Armenians the only Christian minority eliminated by
the Turks, albeit by somewhat gentler means. In January, 1923, after
Greece’s failed invasion of Turkey’s Anatolian mainland and Turkey’s
repudiation of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, at Turkey’s insistence both
countries agreed to an “exchange” of populations. Between 1923 and
1930, 1.25 million “Greeks” were “repatriated” from Turkey to Greece;
a smaller number of “Turks” departed from Greece to Turkey. However,
as Bernard Lewis points out, the exchanges did not imply acceptance
of the European principle of nationality in which Greeks and Turks,
“unwilling or unable to live as national minorities among aliens,”
elected to return to their homeland and live among their own people.
In reality, the great majority of Anatolia’s “Greeks” spoke little
or no Greek. They spoke Turkish among themselves although they wrote
in the Greek script. Similarly, many of the “Turks” in Greece and
Crete spoke Greek among themselves and knew little or no Turkish. The
expulsions were actually based on religion. Turkish-speaking Christians
faithful to the Greek Orthodox Church were expelled to Greece, a
“homeland” they had never known, while Greek-speaking Muslims were
expelled to Turkey.54 The Armenian genocide, the absorption-conversion
program, and what was, in effect, the expulsion of Turkey’s “Greeks”
all shared a common objective, the elimination of a significant
Christian demographic presence from Turkey. The methods varied,
but all three can be seen as religiously-motivated state-sponsored
programs of population elimination.
Finally, I take note of an authoritative report based entirely on Arab
sources entitled “Contemporary Islamist Ideology Authorizing Genocidal
Murder” by Yigal Carmon in which he demonstrates that today’s radical
Islamists regard genocide as a legitimate weapon against those whom
they regard as enemies of Islam.55 Holding that Islam is now under
attack, they see unremitting jihad as both defensive in character and
the single most important Muslim religious obligation. It is obligatory
for Muslims without restriction or limitation. No weapons or types
of warfare are to be excluded. Without exception, all infidels are
to be fought and, barring conversion, are to be exterminated. I must,
however, stress that these are the views of the most radical elements
within contemporary Islam. We do not know the extent to which the
extremists can persuade or compel the Islamic mainstream to share
their views.
_________________ ________________________________
[1]
.
[2] See, “Inflated Figures of Armenian Genocide & Credibility,”
[3] See the text of an ‘open letter from the members of the
International Association of Genocide Scholars to Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdogan of Turkey, dated June 7, 2005, calling on him ” to acknowledge
the responsibility of a previous [Turkish] government for the
genocide of the Armenian people, as the German government and people
have done in the case of the Holocaust.” The text is available at:
[4] Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic
Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence:
Berghahn Books, 1995), p. 3.
[5] Taner Akcam, The Genocide of the Arrmenians and the Silence of
the Turks, p. 49.
.
[6] Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 5.
[7] Akcam, op. cit., Kindle location 1239.
[8] Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 4.
[9] Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide
(Madison, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002) 37-38.
[10] Suny, “Religion, Ethnicity,” 30-31.
[11] Bat Ye’or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal
Caliphate (Rowman & Littlefield, Kindle Edition), p.1.
[12] Suny, “Religion, Ethnicity,” 39.
[13] For an exploration of the phenomenon of market-dominant
minorities, see Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market
Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. (New York,
NY: Doubleday, 2003)
[14] On the Tanzimat Reforms, see Dadrian, The History of the Armenian
Genocide, 25-27, 32-33.
[15] Lord Kinross (John Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross), The Ottoman
Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire. (New York, NY:
William Morrow, 1977), 556-557.
[16] Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 45-47.
[17] On the origins of the Sasun massacres, see Balakian, The Burning
Tigris, 54- 56 and Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide,
114-116.
[18] Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 559.
[19] Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 147.
[20] Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 149.
[21] Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York: Holmes
and Meier Publishers, 1982), 30.
[22] J. C. Hurewitz, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, A
Documentary Record: 1535-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1956), Vol. 1, 154;
[23] See “Infidel Status in the Ottoman Empire” in Balakian, The
Burning Tigris, 40-43.
[24] Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 101.
[25] Balakian, The Burning Tigris, 41-42.
[26] Suny, “Religion, Ethnicity,” 46-47.
[27] Suny, “Religion, Ethnicity,” 47.
[28] Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews, 418.
[29] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry
Holt, 1989), 152-153.
[30] Balakian, The Burning Tigris, 178.
[31] Balakian, The Burning Tigris, 178.
[32] Suny, “Religion, Ethnicity,” 52.
[33] Balakian, The Burning Tigris, 179.
[34] Henry Morgenthau,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Letter_from_The_International_Association_of_Genocide_Scholars
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Letter_from_The_International_Association_of_Genocide_Scholars
http://www.wbarrow.co.uk/rememberarmenia/pdfs_in_chapters/04_armenia2_turk_affirms.pdf
http://www.horizonweekly.ca/news/details/60337
http://www.newenglishreview.org/Richard_L._Rubenstein/The_Armenian_Genocide_as_Jihad/