he Omaha Daily Bee, on April 23, 1909, reported on the front page Muslim massacres of Christian Armenians in the Adana province of Turkey, also known then as the Ottoman Empire.
The article in the local paper ran opposite an article on the price of wheat. These massacres, more than a riot but less than a full genocide, are mostly unknown in the U.S. today. They are recalled in a detailed new book by University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Bedross Der Matossian, titled “The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century” and was just published by Stanford University Press.
History for the sake of history is important. One can learn that the Adana massacres were preceded by other Turkish violence against the Armenians especially in 1895-96. Adana was followed by a real Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks (and Kurds) centered on 1915 during World War I. Historians debate the connections among the three episodes. Der Matossian does not see tight linkage; some others do. I am not a historian, although I read a lot of it, and I primarily want to know if Adana offers lessons for today.For Der Matossian, the fall of the Sultan in 1908 and the coming to power in Istanbul of the “Young Turk” government opened society for more freedom. But this freedom allowed deep tensions to surface. Instead of social media and fake news, there were rumors of an Armenian uprising. The old guard Muslims, fearing for their status, and in the wake of a failed counter coup against the Young Turks, exploded in fury against the local Armenians in the region of Adana who were doing well locally in the cotton trade. Perhaps 20,000 Armenians were killed as compared to about 2,000 Muslims.
Events were widely reported, but the outside powers with gun boats off the coast in the Mediterranean did not intervene. They feared rivalries among themselves, getting stuck in a broader involvement and maybe even a restoration of the repressive Sultanate. Better to leave the Young Turks in charge of things. They and others did provide humanitarian assistance after the fact.
Lesson No. 1: Freedom without consensus and compromise is dangerous. Especially dangerous is an old guard that fears further loss of status and privilege, especially in the context of conspiracy theories or more simply ill-founded rumors. Violence is likely when some “other” is seen as pernicious, even treasonous. In 1909 in Adana, the Muslim notables and Imams belonging to the ancien régime saw the Armenians, exercising their new freedoms to organize and advocate, as meriting a violent comeuppance. The result was widespread death and destruction.
In the U.S. today, White supremacist militias are a reality. The Department of Homeland Security has said they constitute the most important terrorist threat facing the U.S. They tried to take over the Jan. 6, 2021, events leading to mob violence at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. They see particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, if not all that party, as dangerous to the American Republic, not at all a legitimate and loyal opposition party, and hence to be opposed with force. To put it mildly, this situation is dangerous.
Public opinion polls show a deeply divided country, with the moderate center having withered away. The Republican Party has moved very far right. Some of its leaders said nice things about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, during disturbances in 2017. Some propagate the myth about a stolen election, undermining a core democratic value. The Democratic Party has become slightly more left. Some of its leaders talk of defunding the police.
This deepening divide requires urgent attention. American stability, even genuine democracy, is very much at risk. Mitt Romney has had the courage to speak out about the fragility of democracy. We need more like him to address deep fissures in the U.S. with a declining consensus. All independent indices show declining democracy, aka political freedom, in America.
Lesson No. 2: Even widely reported atrocities, such as mass murder, do not necessarily result in humanitarian intervention to protect civilians. The Adana massacres of 1909, although forgotten in the American heartland as elsewhere, were widely covered at the time by newspapers in Turkey, the Arab world, Europe and North America — including Omaha. But ruling elites in outside nations processed the news according to their national interests as defined at the time. The U.S. government back then did not see any reason to get involved, although the American Red Cross provided some humanitarian assistance.
Today, terrible atrocities in places like Myanmar (formerly Burma), Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere do not lead to decisive action to stop the killing of civilians and other mass atrocities. Even before Ukraine took all air out of the global humanitarian response system in 2022, powerful outside states avoided deep involvement in most nasty violent conflicts. They were wary of quagmires and forever wars and more big expenditures.
Race and religion also played a role, witness European willingness to accept millions of Ukrainian refugees whereas these same European states — especially Hungary and Poland — had been much less welcoming to Syrian refugees. Syrian refugees too had been victimized by merciless Russian bombing and even use of chemical weapons.
The global humanitarian response system is much better organized than in 1909, both through the United Nations, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and others like Doctors Without Borders. We read of the commendable actions of the UN High Commissioner of Refugees and UNESCO for example.
As I write, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross is in Ukraine trying to limit the violence. Arranging humanitarian corridors has its value: better to have refugee flows than mass murder. But state calculations of national interest still dominate, often to the detriment of civilian victims. That has not much changed since 1909. Even a real Armenian genocide later did not provoke outside intervention, although by 1915, World War I complicated matters enormously.
Professor Der Matossian, an Armenian born in Jerusalem, came to UNL in 2010. He knows the Middle East well. He has written a carefully researched account of Adana in 1909, relying on numerous sources in multiple languages. Historians will find it useful for many reasons.
The rest of us benefit from thinking about what the events of 1909 might tell us about our world of today. As often said, history does not exactly repeat itself. But sometimes it seems to come close.
David P. Forsythe is UNL professor emeritus of political science, specializing in international human rights and humanitarian affairs.
https://omaha.com/opinion/columnists/midlands-voices-omaha-the-armenians-and-today/article_5cbb5998-abb1-11ec-bebc-476991d3107f.html