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The Armenian Genocide: Review of Its Historical, Political, and Legal Aspects University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy Volume 5 Issue 1 Fall 2010 Article 5 January 2010 The Armenian Genocide: Review of Its Historical, Political, and Legal Aspects Vahakn N. Dadrian Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.stthomas.edu/ustjlpp Part of the Human Rights Law Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Armenian Genocide: Review of Its Historical, Political, and Legal Aspects, 5 U. ST. THOMAS J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 135 (2010). Available at: https://ir.stthomas.edu/ustjlpp/vol5/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UST Research Online and the University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy. For more information, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at [email protected]. THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: REVIEW OF ITS HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND LEGAL ASPECTS VAHAKN N. DADRIAN INTRODUCTION During World War I, the authorities of the Turkish Ottoman Empire carried out one of the largest genocides in world history, destroying huge portions of its minority Armenian population. That genocide followed decades of persecution, punctuated by two similar but smaller rounds of massacres in the 1894-96 and 1909 periods, which claimed two hundred thousand Armenian lives. In all, over one million Armenians were put to death during World War I. Adding to this figure are the several hundred thousand Armenians who perished in the course of the Turkish attempt to extend the genocide to Russian Armenia in the Transcaucus during the spring and summer of 1918, as well as in the fall of 1920 when Ankara's fledgling government ordered General Karabekir's army to "physically annihilate Armenia." The European Powers, who defeated the Turks time and again on the battlefield, were unable or unwilling to prevent this mass murder.1 Of even more consequence, they failed to secure punishment of the perpetrators in the aftermath of the war, despite the fact that they had publicly committed to doing so. The events of that time have subsequently slipped into the shadows of world history, thus acquiring the imagery of "the Forgotten Genocide." To this day, Turkey denies the genocidal intent of these massacres. Such a scale of perpetration, at the very least, warrants a documentary exposure and examination. The results may yet impel the civilized world to show a greater concern for the depth of the anguish that has been tormenting Armenians for generations. It may even move the more enlightened segment of the population of modem Turkey to face the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide and try to come to terms with it. Over the past eighty years, the Armenian nation has struggled to bring 1. The terms "Ottomans" and "Turks" are used interchangeably given the historical interconnections and interplays. 136 UNIV. OF ST THOMAS JOURNAL OF LA W & PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. V the history of the Armenian Genocide to light and examine it. Despite the magnitude of the disaster, the international community has only recently officially recognized its genocidal character. In April of 1984, a group of public figures-including three Nobel Prize laureates, including the late international jurist Sean McBride-conducted "People's Tribunal" hearings on the Armenian Genocide at the Sorbonne in Paris and adjudged it to be a crime of genocide without statutory limitations. In August of 1985, the U.N. Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, which had been deadlocked for over fourteen years, "took note," by a 14-1 vote (with four abstentions), of the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide. In June of 1987, the European Parliament declared the Turkish massacres of World War I to be a crime of genocide under the terms of the U.N. Convention on Genocide, stipulating that Turkey must recognize the Armenian genocide before the European Parliament would favorably consider Turkey's application for membership in the European Community. The European Parliament labeled Turkey's refusal to do so an "insurmountable obstacle to consideration of the possibility of Turkey's accession to the European Community." Moreover, on April 24, 1994, the wire services of United Press International and the Associated Press announced that "Israel issued its first official condemnation of the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, ending a tradition of silence to appease its regional ally, Turkey." Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Bellin then told the Israeli Parliament that Israel would become part of an effort to ensure that the world remembers the genocide. "We will always reject any attempt to erase its record, even for some political advantage," he said. Rejecting Turkish denials of the crime and its claim that the incident was a "civil war," Bellin declared that "it was not war. It was most certainly massacre and genocide." The relatively low impact of the destruction of one million Armenians on modern public consciousness raises serious questions about the ability of the international community to prevent or punish acts of genocide. Many see the lack of action and reaction following the Armenian Genocide as a critical antecedent of the ensuing Jewish Holocaust during World War 11. Indeed, it has been reported that, in trying to reassure the doubters of the morality and viability of his genocidal schemes, Hitler stated, "[w]ho, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" This historical connection was raised repeatedly during the U.S. Senate's consideration of the U.N. Convention on Genocide, which the United States ratified on February 19, 1986. A score of senators, most notably Kerry and Wilson, emphasized the historical precedent of the Armenian case and pointed to the enormous calamity of the Jewish Holocaust, which they claimed was a by- product of humanity's callous disregard of the Armenians' fate. Neither were, nor are, other victim groups in the post-Nuremberg world No. 1] The Armenian Genocide exempt from the consequences of the obliviousness to which the Armenians were subjected. Foremost among the series of genocidal massacres that stand out in this respect are those that occurred in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Kurdish territory in Iraq. In each one of these cases, a state system was beset by the pressures of centrifugal movements and revolutions before being engulfed by wars. Given certain conditions of simmering international conflicts, war emerges as a catalyst for radical methods of conflict resolution. From the standpoint of contemporary international law, the central issue is the relationship between the concept of war crimes on the one hand, and crimes against humanity on the other. The recognition of the significance of this relationship in deciding to initiate legal actions against the offenders was evident in U.N. efforts to come to grips with the contemporary issues of ethnic cleansing. In its Resolution 808 (1993), the U.N. Security Council unanimously established an ad hoc international tribunal to prosecute and punish the perpetrators associated with the series of wars that were waged in the territories of former Yugoslavia, especially in the province of Bosnia. An almost identical initiative was applied to the Rwandan case in November of 1994. The basis of this initiative was the August 12, 1949, Geneva Civilian Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. The idea was to punish, under international law, the offenders accused of crimes against humanity. A note on a specific category of sources and data used in this study may be in order. They originate from within Ottoman Turkey and her allies during World War I, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Specifically, these sources include: 1. Secret and top-secret Ottoman-Turkish state documents, each one of which was authenticated by ministerial officials before being introduced in the Turkish Court Martial Proceedings. 2. The importance of the preponderance of German and Austrian documents anticipating and corroborating the findings of the Turkish Military Tribunal cannot be overemphasized. As noted above, Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary were the political and military allies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Their representatives' "confidential," "secret," and "top-secret" reports, mostly composed during the war for internal and in-house purposes only, have an authenticity and immediacy not matched by any other available category of sources and data. EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW The interplay of European attempts to impose reforms and the Turkish resistance set the stage for a bellicose Turkish response to the escalation of 138 UNIV. OF ST. THOMAS JOURNAL OFLAW& PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. V the Turko-Armenian conflict. In this clash, the disjunction of European public law and Turkish customary law deteriorated into a sharp conflict between the two legal domains. Taking the series of enacted reforms seriously, the Armenians pressed for their actual implementation as a matter of legal entitlement. The Turks, however, relied on their common law claims of traditional super-ordination vis-A-vis the non-Muslim subjects of the empire. One such cardinal common law principle refers to a rule in the Akdi Zimmet (contract with the ruled nationality), which stipulates cessation of hostility against non-Muslim subjects following their defeat and submission. Once defeated, these subjects are dehalet 'granted refuge and protection.' By attempting to influence Turkish national policy in their favor by enlisting the intercession of foreign powers, the Ottoman Turks argued that the Armenians had violated this fundamental treaty provision, and under the prevailing common law, had therefore forfeited the Berat 'grant of exemption and clemency.' The cycle of massacres preceding the World War I genocide was rationalized essentially in this fashion. In describing the scenes of the 1895 Urfa Massacre and the entire 1894-96 era of Abdul Hamit Massacres, the Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy, who was fluent in Turkish and who based his report on evidence supplied to him by local Muslims, wrote the following: [The perpetrators] are guided in their general action by the prescriptions of the Sheri Law.
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