Chapter 7. Remembering Them
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2017-02 Understanding Atrocities: Remembering, Representing and Teaching Genocide Murray, Scott W. University of Calgary Press http://hdl.handle.net/1880/51806 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNDERSTANDING ATROCITIES: REMEMBERING, REPRESENTING, AND TEACHING GENOCIDE Edited by Scott W. Murray ISBN 978-1-55238-886-0 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org 7 Remembering Them All: Including and Excluding Atrocity Crime Victims Andrew R. Basso This chapter offers a critical genocide studies perspective on the construc- tion of narratives and memories of victimization in atrocities.1 It decon- structs exclusive memory constructions and offers critiques that challenge prevalent narratives regarding the Ottoman destruction of Christian minorities (Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians) from 1912 to 1925 and the victimization of Tutsis, Hutus, and Twa in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.2 Traditional studies of these two crimes have focused on the two main vic- tim groups involved—Armenians and Tutsis—and have typically failed to consider and analyze the experiences of all other victim groups involved, as well as the implications of these exclusions. Exclusionary memory cam- paigns, as will be demonstrated, can lead to incomplete, inaccurate, and isolated histories that are devoid of their larger contexts. Exclusionary memory campaigns can also contribute to current and future exploitations of isolated histories to undermine democratic governance. Future scholarship must be critically aware of the problems with ex- clusionary histories and remedy them by utilizing a comparative-inclusive approach to atrocity studies on “other” victim groups. Inclusive approach- es are a moral imperative, a necessity for holistic historical accuracy, and a tool for combatting attempts to politicize remembrance.3 By identifying and remembering all victims of atrocity, it is possible to create rich histor- ical narratives that recognize all victimization and give some semblance of equal justice to victims. 169 The comparative-inclusive approach presented in this chapter will demonstrate that privileging one victim group over others excludes im- portant historical memories that can otherwise be used to construct in- sightful narratives, and allows for deliberate distortions of memories for personal political gain. In short, inclusive approaches avoid relegating lesser-known victim groups to oblivion, where they remain forever in the shadow of larger victim groups that can “claim a monopoly on public attention, ensuring that others will remain shrouded in obscurity.”4 The Ottoman Genocide of Christian Minorities: Victim Memory Exclusion During the last great caliph, the Ottoman Empire undertook a devastating project of social restructuring and almost rid itself of its Christian minor- ity populations in toto. Three main victim groups—Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—were killed in succession by two different regimes in two different time periods: the Young Turks (1912–1918) and the Kemalists (1919–1925),5 led by the first president of modern-day Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. When analyzed together, the campaigns of destruction against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians are connected in that the geno- cides represent a concerted effort to rid the Ottoman Empire of its Chris- tian populations, thereby eliminating Christian influence from the Holy Land. While these crimes were framed as a battle of religions, there were many other factors that caused the Young Turks to conclude that genocide was the appropriate response for solving the empire’s problems. Victimization of Christian Minorities: Shared Pathways to Destruction Christians’ socio-economic and political roles in the empire have been emphasized as key exacerbating factors contributing to their destruction.6 Due to the intersection of international and domestic politics, as well as religious and ethnic differences over centuries, the imperial, authoritar- ian, and democratic leaders of the Ottoman Empire (later Turkey) blamed the empire’s problems on Christian minorities, who were framed as fifth columnists and separatists who could be scapegoated for all that was wrong with the declining empire.7 But while religious difference can offer 170 Andrew R. Basso face-value reasoning for why Christians were killed, this was at most an underlying factor, and as such is an insufficient explanation of the type of destruction Christian minorities faced. Christian minorities were collect- ively persecuted in large part due to the multitude of perceived injustices that Christians had inflicted upon the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Exist- ing literatures offer varying contextual justifications for the destruction of the Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians by the Ottoman/Turkish perpe- trators, but macro anti-Christian sentiments that link these individual accounts can offer more powerful explanations for why Christians were targeted for similar reasons and exterminated using similar methods. Ger- man historian Tessa Hofmann argues that the genocide of Aegean, Thra- cian, Pontic, and other Anatolian Greeks should be considered a “cumu- lative” genocide. Cumulative is utilized here in the sense that the genocide was perpetrated over the course of a decade and victims were killed in varying geographical locations depending on exogenous and endogenous socio-political factors.8 The notion of a cumulative genocide offers a rich conceptual starting point for analyses of this genocide and is a propitious label to apply to the shared pathways of destruction Christian minorities experienced as a whole. Before the genocide, Christians were marginalized as slaves or semi- freed peoples in the period leading up to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Christian women were sold into harems, men and women forced into labour, and, for comparison’s sake, sometimes treated worse than Russian serfs. The non-slave, “freer” Christians were ostracized from many facets of the Ottoman socio-economic system, most notably the traditional agrarian sector. Christians did, however, find some affluence and capitalized on trade, small-business ownership, and banking, areas that were ultimately perceived by other Ottomans as contributing to the demise of the once-great empire.9 The empire’s economic decline had everything to do with previous poor planning choices, and the sultan’s answers to these problems. The Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe” and the sultan knew that in order to compete with other European economies, the empire had to modernize and westernize its economy.10 However, the modernization ef- fort had unintended consequences, most notably the creation of tensions between the traditional Ottoman ways of life and the “modern” ways of Western