WHAT WAS BEHIND THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF ARMENIANS?
Al-Monitor
April 9 2015
Author: Mustafa Akyol
Posted April 9, 2015
In 1915, the Ottoman state, in the midst of World War I, took the
fateful decision of deporting all Armenians in Anatolia to eastern
Syria. An entire people was forced to migrate over night, and many of
them, perhaps a million people, perished on the road due to starvation,
disease and massacres by locals. There is no doubt this enormous
tragedy deserves remembrance and empathy today — and we Turks must be
much more considerate about it than we have been over the past century.
The proper term to use in defining the fate of Ottoman Armenians has
been a matter of controversy. Armenians themselves and many others
in the West use the G word: genocide. Most Turks, in return, only
use the much more innocent term “tehcir,” or deportation. Personally,
I take a middle ground and opt for the term, “ethnic cleansing.” (The
difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide is that the former is
about cleansing a geographical area from a group of people, whereas the
latter is about the very extermination of that people. As a comparison,
note that the Ottoman government only pushed Armenians out of Anatolia,
whereas the Nazis searched for Jews everywhere in order to exterminate
them one by one.)
A perhaps more important question, however, is why did this catastrophe
happen? In the West, sometimes religion is perceived to be the
underlying problem, as “Muslim Turks” are pitted against “Christian
Armenians.” Yet this perception disregards the very fact that, before
1915, the same Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians co-existed for
centuries under the banner of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious entity,
where faith communities constituted “nations.” Muslims were the
“ruling nation,” whereas Christians and Jews were “protected” nations,
in line with the status Islamic law gives to “the People of Book.”
That is why Armenians, like Greeks or Jews, lived and flourished
in the Ottoman Empire for centuries with some autonomy and certain
rights. They were not allowed to become soldiers or public servants,
which were jobs reserved only for Muslims, hence they excelled
in artisanship. (No wonder some of the most beautiful mosques and
palaces in Istanbul were built by Armenian architects from the famous
Balyan family.) Moreover, in the Reform Era of the mid-19th century,
the Ottoman state gave all non-Muslims the status of equal citizenship.
That is why in final decades of the empire, Armenians began to take
public jobs, becoming ambassadors, ministers or parliamentarians.
Yet in the same 19th century, the road to disaster began to unfold,
in a seemingly unrelated place: the Balkans. The French Revolution
had ushered in an era of nationalism, which gradually influenced
Ottoman-ruled Christian peoples of the Balkans, such as Serbs, Greeks
and Bulgarians. Rebellions by these peoples led to nation-states,
which often resorted to ethic cleansing, whose victims were often
Muslims. A similar tragedy hit the Muslims of Crimea and Caucasus as
well, who were persecuted by the Russian advance. Historian Justin
McCarthy estimates that some 5 million Ottoman Muslims have perished
during the decline and shrinking of the empire over two centuries —
all due to various waves of ethic cleansing.
The impact of this drama was to lead the Turks, who tried to hold the
empire together, to finally develop their own nationalism, culminating
in the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) that dominated the Ottoman
state’s final decade. When they entered the Great War in October 1914,
the CUP leaders faced the Russian onslaught from the east, and they
found that Armenian nationalists had established paramilitary units
to support the enemy. This formed the basis for the catastrophic CUP
decision to expel all Armenians in Eastern Turkey to Syria. It was
an inexcusable verdict — but it happened out of the fear that the
Balkan nightmares would be repeated this time in Anatolia, the last
stronghold of the Turks.
In other words, the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Armenians took place
not because of the Ottoman system. Rather, it occurred because of
the fall of the Ottoman system. Christian Armenians, who lived with
Muslim Turks for centuries, were driven out not because of religion,
but a modern ideology: nationalism.
It is therefore not an accident that some Islamic sentiments and
views of the era fell at odds with the nationalist motives behind
the deportation and murder of Armenians. In a famous incident, in
Bogazliyan, a district of the central Anatolian province of Yozgat,
the mufti of the town, Abdullahzade Mehmet Efendi, protested the
governor of the town who willingly executed the deportation orders
from the capital. Later the mufti testified in the Ottoman military
tribunal trial of 1919, stating, “I fear the wrath of God.”
In the neighboring province of Cankiri, some elders accompanied by
their mufti put a request to the governing in May 1915, saying: “The
Armenians and their children from the neighboring vilayets [provinces]
are being driven like cattle to the mountain for slaughter. We do not
want these type of things to occur in our vilayets. We are afraid of
the wrath of God.”
A more scholarly Islamic objection had come from Egypt’s Al-Azhar
University in 1909, when Grand Sheikh Salim al-Bishri condemned the
massacre of Armenians in Adana, in a drama that preceded the bloodshed
in 1915. His fatwa, or religious opinion, read:
“We have seen in local newspapers agonizing news and vile reports
about Muslims of some Anatolian provinces of the Ottoman Empire
attacking Christians and killing them brutally. We could not believe
these reports and hoped that they were false, because Islam forbids
aggression, oppression, bloodshed and harming human beings — Muslims,
Christians and Jews alike.”
The Egyptian sheikh then reminded the “protection” Jews and Christians
deserve under Islamic law:
“Oh Muslims living in that region and elsewhere, beware of actions
prohibited by God in His Sharia [Islamic law] and spare the blood
that God prohibited to spill and do not transgress on anyone since
God does not like aggressors. Your duty toward those who are allied
with you, who entrusted their safety to you and who reside among you
and next to you from Ahlul Dhimma [Jewish and Christian minorities
protected under Islam], as imposed by God, is to uplift them as you
would uplift yourselves, prevent them from what you prevent yourselves
and your kinsfolk, make your strength their strength, make pride and
prosperity out of your strength, and protect their monasteries and
churches the way you protect your mosques and temples.”
Of course, history is never clear-cut, and many of the Turks (and
Kurds) who engaged in the massacres against Armenians acted with
hatred against (or fear of) “the infidels,” reflecting their Islamic
identities. Still, the distinction between the religion-as-identity,
taking the form of a nationalism, and religion as a set of values,
is important.
It is practically important, too, because if Turkish society will
develop a more emphatic view of the ethnic cleansing of Armenians,
this will happen not due to any foreign pressure, which actually
only backfires, but rather due to some honest self-criticism based
on authentic values. A wise reading of Islam presents such values,
and no wonder in the past few years some notable Islamist pundits in
the Turkish media expressed remorse and sympathy for the Armenians
by Islamic arguments. In my view, these arguments — and not any
imposing statement from Washington or any other Western capital —
presents the key for a much-needed grand reconciliation between us
Turks and our good old neighbors, the Armenians.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/turkey-was-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-armenians-islamic.html