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Confiscation and Destruction CONFISCATION AND DESTRUCTION 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd i 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:33:50:33 PPMM 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd iiii 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:34:50:34 PPMM Confi scation and Destruction Th e Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property Uğur Ümit Üngör and Mehmet Polatel 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd iiiiii 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:34:50:34 PPMM Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group Th e Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London New York SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © Uğur Ümit Üngör and Mehmet Polatel, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. First published 2011 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1441-13578-0 Designed and typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd iivv 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:35:50:35 PPMM ‘Mal sahibi mülk sahibi, hani bunun ilk sahibi?’ ––– Yunus Emre (1240–1321) Th e British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the French President Charles de Gaulle, and Stalin are showing off their expensive gift s. Churchill displays an expensive snuff box with an inscription reading, ‘To dear Winston, from your loving wife.’ De Gaulle has a distinctive pipe that reads, ‘To our beloved De Gaulle, from a patriotic Frenchwoman.’ Th en Stalin pulls out a gold cigarette box encrusted with diamonds with an inscription that reads, ‘To Count Uvarov, from Grand Prince Sergei Alexandrovich.’ ––– Evgeny Andreevich, Kreml i narod 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd v 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:35:50:35 PPMM 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd vvii 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:35:50:35 PPMM Contents Preface ix Illustrations and Maps xiii Abbreviations xv 1 Introduction and Problematization 1 2 Ideological Foundations: Constructing the Turkish ‘National Economy’ 15 3 Legal Foundations: Using the Justice System for Injustice 41 4 Th e Dispossession of Ottoman Armenians 61 5 Adana: Th e Cotton Belt 107 6 Diyarbekir: Th e Land of Copper and Silk 133 7 Conclusion 165 Appendix 1 173 Appendix 2 175 Notes 181 Select Bibliography 215 Index 221 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd vviiii 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:35:50:35 PPMM 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd vviiiiii 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:35:50:35 PPMM Preface Th is book is a study of the mass sequestration of Armenian property by the Young Turk regime.1 It details the emergence of Turkish economic nationalism, off ers insight into the economic ramifi cations of the genocidal process, and describes how the plunder was organized on the ground. Th is book will shed light on the interre- lated nature of property confi scation initiated by the Young Turk regime and its cooperating local elites. It will also off er new insights into the functions and benefi - ciaries of state-sanctioned robbery. Th is study builds upon the work of other scholars who have worked on partly overlapping subjects such as the fate of Ottoman Armenians during World War I, Turkish economic nationalism, genocide theory, and local histories of Ottoman towns and Turkish cities. Th ere are two boundaries that delimit the scope of this book in time and space. Geographically, the book will address the confi scation of Armenian property in two major provinces, Adana and Diyarbekir. Th ese choices were not arbitrary: these provinces are situated in the eastern provinces and share certain characteristics. None of these provinces were a direct battlefi eld during World War I; Armenians historically played important roles in their economies, and in both of them Armenian popular resistance against the genocide was negligible. Even though each of these provinces had disparate economic contexts, they were aff ected in similar ways by Young Turk persecution: disruption of commerce, stagnation of economic output and pauperization of the victims. Similarities and dissimilarities will be discussed in the respective chapters. Chronologically, this book will refer to ‘the Young Turk era’ as an operational periodization but will exclude the Young Turk confi scations of non-Muslim property under the Wealth Tax during World War II and the fate of Armenians’ property during the Istanbul pogrom of 6–7 September 1955. Quantitatively, there are clear restraints on this study as well. Estimating Armenian wealth quantitatively has proven to be impracticable without system- atic investigation of the proprietorship certifi cates at the land register offi ce, in church records, local archives or the records of the Ottoman Bank. Most import- ant, the highly politicized archive of the land registers (tapu kayıtları) remains closed due to Turkish fears of potential Armenian material claims. Th ese records, stored at the Land Register General Directorate (Tapu Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü), contain the (presumably) highly detailed account books of confi scated Armenian 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd iixx 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:35:50:35 PPMM x preface property. In August 2005 Turkey’s powerful Council for National Security (Millî Güvenlik Kurulu) strongly and confi dentially admonished the archive staff not to disclose their material because ‘the data could be abused for the purpose of unfounded genocide and property claims’.2 Even then, the poorly registered records of the rural economies that most Ottoman Armenians inhabited off er little in way of complete statistical data and are of questionable accuracy. An additional problem that clouds the issue even more is that considerable Armenian possessions were stolen by Young Turk sat- raps and went unrecorded amid the mists of corruption. Th erefore, defi nitive conclusions can unfortunately not be drawn in this book regarding this import- ant dimension of the problem. Future studies will have to confi rm or challenge the vision we propound and provide new details of the economic ruination of Ottoman Armenians. Despite its limitations, this study argues that the Young Turk political elite launched a process of societal and economic transformation in order to establish a Turkish nation state with a robust economy consisting of ethnic Turks. In this pro- cess of persecution, the ethnically heterogeneous Ottoman economic universe was subjected to comprehensive and violent forms of ethnic homogenization. Th e dis- tribution of Armenian wealth was a central part of this process. Th e genocide ripped and tore apart the fabric of urban, provincial, and national economies, destroying market relationships and maiming economic patterns that had endured for many centuries in the empire. Th e structure of these sequestration policies involved the whole range of Ottoman society, from top to bottom. Th e Young Turk political elite played the decisive role in the subjugation of the Ottoman Armenian economy to an ideologically legitimized process of mass pillage. Local elites collaborated in this endeavour by assisting the militias that came to deport and murder Armenian shopkeepers, manufacturers, craft smen, peasants. Moreover, ordinary Turks, such as direct neighbors, bazaar merchants or refugees from the Balkans, profi ted from the confi scation policy in diff erent ways. Altogether, these classes and groups con- tributed to the economic destruction of Ottoman Armenians and the construction of a Turkish national economy. Th e fi eld of Armenian genocide studies is rapidly developing. Th e publication of several important monographs in the past decade has covered new ground on the organization of the mass violence, the international context of imperialism and national context of nationalist homogenization, and rescue eff orts. But so far there exists no detailed treatment of the expropriation of Ottoman Armenians as a func- tional component of the genocide. Th is signifi cant aspect of the genocide still needs to be properly understood. Th is study aims to fi ll that gap by looking at the confi s- cation process from the theoretical perspectives gleaned in the discipline of geno- cide studies. It will tackle the subject through a combination of approaches, focusing on the development of the legal process, explaining the Young Turk ideology of 99781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd781441135780_Prelims_txt_Prf.indd x 44/5/2011/5/2011 66:50:35:50:35 PPMM preface xi economic ‘Turkifi cation’ and concretely demonstrating the policy on the ground through three case studies. Th us, it will approach the problem both by concentrat- ing on the top-level organization (law, ideology), and the destruction process from below (the actual confi scation process in the provinces). Th e main themes in this book will be ideology, law and mass violence. Of particular interest is the relation- ship between genocide and property transfer, that is, the coherency of economic destruction and construction: how did the dispossession of Armenians serve the interests of the Young Turk regime? Th is book aims to problematize the major issues in a systematic way in order to gain a
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