April 29, 2005
Calling a Crime by its Name; America and the Armenian Genocide
Sean Gannon
Regrettably, the United States has once again allowed the April 24th commemorations of the Armenian Genocide to pass without calling the crime by its name. On that date in 1915, 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals were
deported from Constantinople and subsequently tortured and killed, the beginning of a campaign which resulted in up to one and a half million Armenian Ottoman subjects dead and a further one million in exile. While Turkish threats to cancel lucrative defence contracts and curb use of military airbases kept Bill Clinton onside, it was rumoured that President Bush would use this year’s 90th
anniversary to end U.S. appeasement of Ankara by recognizing these deaths as genocide. Sadly, such speculation appears to have been unfounded.
Turkey, of course, strenuously rejects the genocide charge and accuses Armenia, and in particular America’s sizeable Armenian community, of wilfully disseminating an inaccurate picture of what happened in the World War I period and why. And to be fair, there is an element of truth in Ankara’s claim that the situation in Anatolia in 1915 was not as clear cut as is generally presented today.
For instance, it is rarely acknowledged that the rise of Armenian nationalism in the 19th century led to enormous tensions between Armenians and their Ottoman overlords with the result that many took sides against the Empire in 1828, 1854 and 1877. It is also infrequently admitted that although 250,000 Armenians were conscripted into the Ottoman armies during World War I, another 150,000, out of
a sense of religious affinity with the Orthodox Slavs and in the hope that a Russian victory would lead to an independent Armenian state, volunteered to serve in the Czarist forces while a further 50,000 joined various guerrilla groups such as the Dashnaks and the Huchnaks who openly sided with Nicholas II against the Central Powers. And seldom spoken of is the fact that about 200,000
Moslems, Greeks and Jews died directly at their hands.
But while it is then perhaps understandable that the Ottomans came to view the Armenians as a fifth column within the Empire, there was no justification for their
response to this perceived problem. Aside from the fact that the treasonable tendencies of a substantial minority can never be used to justify the wholesale slaughter of the substantial majority, it is clear from non-partisan sources that the massacres and deportations of Armenian civilians began before the rampages by Armenian regular and irregular forces through Anatolia. As David Fromkin,
who studied German sources for his acclaimed book on the period writes; “There are historians today who continue to support the claim of Enver and Talaat that the Ottoman rulers acted only after Armenia had risen against them. But observers at the time who were by no means anti-Turk reported that such was not the case. German officers stationed there agreed that the area was quiet until the deportations began.”
In any case, Ankara continues to deny that a substantial majority of Armenians were actually murdered during the War. While some Turkish historians go so far
as to allow that up to 600,000 Armenians died during the period in question, the semi-official Turkish Historical Society maintains that the figure is closer to 300,000 and that, of these, only 10,000 were massacred, the remainder dying of the starvation and disease which is the inevitable accompaniment of war. It further claims that these 10,000 were killed, not as the result of any master plan to rid the Empire of a turbulent minority, but in the heat of battle and more often than not by non-Turkish Kurds.
But it is a matter of historical record that there existed the “Special Organization,” an official department of the Central Government which oversaw the activities of Einsatzgruppen-style killing squads which, in the words of one American diplomat, travelled around Anatolia “massacring men, women and children and burning their homes. Babies were shot in their mothers’ arms, small children were horribly mutilated, women were stripped and beaten.”
Furthermore, Turkey’s claim that the Kurds were primarily responsible for the killing is disingenuous in the extreme. For a start, the mass murder of Armenians
by Ottoman Turks was not unprecedented, having occurred between 1894 and 1896 and again in 1909. Certainly Kurds were involved in the events of 1915-1923 but they were consciously co-opted by Enver Pasha for the purpose of
massacring Armenians in the knowledge that their historic blood enemies would lose no opportunity to avenge ancient and not-so-ancient grudges. Therefore, the army command in Constantinople was fully culpable for the anti-Armenian
activities of its Kurdish battalions.
In addition, Turkey’s drawing of a distinction between those who died directly at the hands of the Ottomans and indirectly from starvation, exposure and disease
is entirely unsustainable. With no provisions made for clothing, food or shelter, the anticipated outcome of the forced deportations of Armenians into the Syrian deserts was obviously death. Indeed, Talaat Pasha termed them “marches to eternity” and his meaning was manifestly clear to his appalled Austrian and German allies who went to great lengths to distance themselves from the policy.
To say that the Armenians who died during the deportations were not deliberately killed by the Ottomans is akin to claiming that no intentional Jewish deaths occurred during ‘relocation to the East’ during the Second World War or on the ‘death marches’ to the West which followed the Russian advances in 1944 and
1945.
So, by any international standard, the events of 1915-1923 constituted genocide, the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians in this period conforming to the accepted 1948 U.N. definition in having being “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” An American acknowledgement of this fact is long overdue and, with U.S./Turkish relations in the doldrums since the invasion of Iraq, President Bush has for once little to lose by extending it.
Yorumlar kapatıldı.