RONALD GRIGOR SUNY Explaining Genocide: the Fate of the Armenians in the Late Ottoman Empire
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RONALD GRIGOR SUNY Explaining Genocide: The Fate of the Armenians in the Late Ottoman Empire in RICHARD BESSEL AND CLAUDIA B. HAAKE (eds.), Removing Peoples. Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) pp. 209–253 ISBN: 978 0 199 56195 7 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 9 Explaining Genocide: The Fate of the Armenians in the Late Ottoman Empire RONALD GRIGOR SUNY In late February to early March 1915, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire ordered the deportation and eventually the massacre of hundreds of thousands of its Armenian subjects. The first victims were soldiers, who were demobilized, forced to dig their own graves, and killed; when some Armenians resisted the encroaching massacres in the city of Van, the Committee of Union and Progress had the leading intellectuals and politicians in Istanbul, several of them deputies to the Ottoman parliament, arrested and sent from the city. Most of them perished in the next few months. Women, children, and old men were systematically forced to leave their homes at short notice, to gather what they could carry or transport, and to march through the valleys and mountains of eastern Anatolia. The survivors reached the deserts of Syria where new massacres occurred. Ninety per cent of the Armenians of Anatolia were gone by 1922; it is estimated conserv- atively that between 600,000 and 1,000,000 were slaughtered or died on the marches. Other tens of thousands fled to the north, to the relative safety of the Russian Caucasus. Much of the public debate about the events of 1915 has foundered on the question of whether or not there was a geno- cide in Ottoman Anatolia during the First World War. Does the term, invented some decades later, apply to these mass killings? Were the deportations and mass murder of a designated ethno- religious group planned, initiated, and carried out by the Young Turk authorities? These debates, as heartfelt as they are for some and as cynically manipulated by others, have not advanced the understanding of the motives of the perpetrators. The research of most scholars interested in these events has produced over- whelming evidence that would lead any serious investigator to 2IO RONALD GRIGOR SUNY conclude that, by any conventional definition, genocide had occurred. The principal question remains, however, 'why geno- cide?' In this essay I will review the existing interpretations- those of the denialists who claim that no genocide occurred, as well as those who argue for genocide but differ as to why it happened. I will then suggest my own analysis that brings together ideological/political factors, social/ environmental context, and emotions as keys to the framing of the ultimate deci- sion to commit mass murder. 1 The Denialist Position Surprisingly, much of the existing literature has either avoided explanations of the causes of the genocide or implied an explana- tion even while not systematically or explicitly elaborating one. For deniers of genocide there is simply no need to explain an event that did not occur as stipulated by those who claim it did. What did occur, in their view, was a reasonable and understand- able response of a government to a rebellious and seditious popu- lation in a time of war and mortal danger to the state's survival. Raison d'etat justified the suppression of rebellion, and mass killing is explained as the unfortunate residue ('collateral damage' in the now fashionable vocabulary) of legitimate efforts at establishing order behind the lines. The denialist viewpoint might be summa- rized as: there was no genocide, and the Armenians are to blame for it! They were rebellious, seditious subjects who presented a danger to the empire and got what they deserved. But there was no intention or effort by the Young Turk regime to eliminate the Armenians as a people. Even though the denialist account fails both empirically and morally, its outrageous claims have shaped the debate and led many investigators to play on their field. Many historians sympa- thetic to the Armenians have shied away from explanations that 1 For my version of a social environmental analysis, see Ronald Grigor Suny, 'Rethinking the Unthinkable: Toward an Understanding of the Armenian Genocide', in id., Looking Toward Ararat: Annenia in Modem History (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), 94-115.For my version of a strategic political explanation, see 'Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism: Armenians, Turks, and the End of the Ottoman Empire', in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds.), In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2001), 23-61. Explaining Genocide 2II might place any blame at all on the victims of Turkish policies. Because a nuanced account of the background and causes of the genocide seems to some to concede ground to the deniers, Armenian scholars in particular have been reluctant to see any rationale in the acts of the Young Turks. Explanation, it is claimed, is rationalization, and rationalization in turn leads to the denialist position ofjustification. The denialist argument proposes the following theses: 1. that Armenians and Turks lived in relative harmony for many centuries, and that that peaceful coexistence was undermined by noxious outside influences-American missionaries, Russian diplomats, Armenian revolutionaries from the Caucasus-who worked to undermine the territorial integrity and political system of the Ottoman Empire; 2. that the response of the government to Armenian rebellion was measured and justified; 3. that Armenians, therefore, brought on their own destruction, launching a civil war against the government. The first fundamental criticism to be made of the idea that 'outside agitators' disrupted the relatively peaceful relationship that had long existed between the millet i-sadika ('the loyal millet') and the ruling Turks is that such an imagined past, rather than being based in 'reality', was the cultural construction of the dominant nationality, its ideologues and rulers, and was not shared by the subordinate peoples of the empire who lived in a limbo of legally enforced inferiority. The Armenians, like the other non-Muslim peoples of the empire, were not only an ethnic and religious minority in a country dominated demographically and politically by Muslims, but, given an ideology of inherent Muslim superiority and the segregation of minorities, the Armenians were also an underclass. They were subjects who, however high they might rise in trade, commerce, or even governmental service, were never to be considered equal to the ruling Muslims. They would always remain gavur, infidels inferior to the Muslims. For centuries Armenians lived in a political and social order in which their testimony was not accepted in Muslim courts, where they were subject to discriminatory laws (for example, they were forced to wear distinctive clothes to identify themselves), where they were not allowed to bear arms when 212 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY most Muslims were armed, and where their property and person were subject to the arbitrary and unchecked power of Muslim officials. Most Armenians most of the time tried to improve their situa- tion through the institutions of the empire. Beginning in the late 1870s and through the following decade the Armenians of the provinces began to petition in ever larger numbers to their leaders in Istanbul and to the European consuls stationed in eastern Anatolia. Hundreds of complaints were filed; few were dealt with. Together they make up an extraordinary record of misgovernment, of arbitrary treatment of a defenceless popula- tion, and a clear picture of the lack of legal recourse. 2 Although the most brutal treatment of Armenians was at the hands of Kurdish tribesmen, the Armenians found the Ottoman state offi- cials either absent, unreliable, or just one more source of oppres- sion. It was hard to say which was worse-the presence of Turkish authorities or the absence in many areas of any palpable political authority. Corruption was rampant. Even after the 'bloody Sultan', Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909), abrogated the Ottoman constitution, the Armenian religious leaders and the middle class preferred to petition the government or appeal to the western powers for redress. When Armenians resisted the extortionist demands of the Kurds, either individually or collectively, the response from the Turkish Army was often excessive. Massacres were reported from all parts of eastern Anatolia, particularly after the formation in the early 1890s of the officially sanctioned Kurdish military units known as the Hamidiye. Against this background of growing Kurdish aggressiveness, western and Russian indiffer- ence, and the collapse of the Tanzimat reform movement, a small number of Armenians turned to a revolutionary strategy. Armenian revolutionaries attempted to protect Armenians but in general were few in number (though the Turks exaggerated their strength, organization, and effect). More importantly, they were allies of the Young Turks, who were themselves active opponents of the Sultan's regime, and after 1908, when the Young Turks 2 Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers: Accounts and Papers. Turkey, for the years 1877-81; A. 0. Sarkissian, History of theArmenian Question to 1885 (Urbana, Ill., 1938). Sarkissian used the thirty volumes of records of the Armenian National Assembly in Istanbul, 'a true mine of information on Armenian affairs in Turkey', Adenakerutiunk Azkayin Zhoghovoi, 1870-1914 (Constantinople, 1870-1914).