“Freedom or Death”: The Armenian Revolutionary Federation and Justice for the

Lilit Zeltzburg 2

“Freedom or Death”: The Armenian Revolutionary Federation and Justice for the Armenian Genocide

Lilit Zeltzburg 12293717

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MA HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES

University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities 2021

Supervisor: Dr. Nanci Adler Word count: 21633 words

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Contents

Abstract ………………………………………………………………… 4

Introduction ……………………………………………………………. 5 Theoretical framework ………………………………………………………. 6 Methodology …………………………………………………………………. 12 Scope and limitations ………………………………………………………... 14

Chapter 1: A Century of Struggle …………………………………… 18 Victimisation and proto-justice …………………………………………….. 18 Politics and terror, recognition and denial ……………………………….... 23

Chapter 2: The Armenian Revolutionary Federation ……………… 30 History ………………………………………………………………………... 32 Ideology ………………………………………………………………………. 39

Chapter 3: United , Nationalism, and Justice ……………... 50 ……………………………………………………………… 50 Nationalism …………………………………………………………………... 59 Justice ………………………………………………………………………… 63

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………... 65

Bibliography …………………………………………………………… 68

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Abstract

The Armenian Genocide is a ‘non-case’ of transitional justice, and it continues to be denied by . The members of the large Armenian created by this genocide carry the legacy of their ancestors’ victimisation with them to this day. Throughout the century since the genocide, they have demanded justice for the victims of the genocide in various ways, and they hold differing views on justice. This thesis uses methods associated with oral history to research the perspectives on justice held by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation/Dashnaktsutyun, an international socialist and nationalist political organisation that can be seen as the main political representation of in diaspora. By outlining the history of the general Armenian struggle for justice and the historical and ideological background of the ARF, the groundwork is laid upon which, consequently, the ARF’s perspectives on justice can be analysed. This thesis finds that the ARF formulates its own central aim, namely the creation of a United Armenian nation-state, as the ultimate form of justice for the Armenian Genocide, seeing no other resolution as truly ‘just’. The thesis also concludes that existing transitional justice infrastructures are ill-equipped to offer group justice. 5

Introduction

During the First World War, the was falling apart. At this time, around 1915, a genocide that led to the deaths of over a million people was carried out on the empire’s Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian minorities. This was to become one of the most notorious examples of genocide before the Holocaust, with some calling it (erroneously) “the first genocide of the twentieth century”.1 The victims of this genocide were expelled from their homes and scattered across the globe. One of the reasons this genocide is so infamous is the fact that until this day, Turkey, the successor of the Ottoman Empire, upholds a policy of denial of the genocide. The many victims, survivors, and their descendants have not received any semblance of (official) justice for the trauma they have suffered. Throughout the century since the end of the genocide, different calls for justice have been made, in many different forms, ranging from recognition of the genocide, to the payment of reparations, to the yielding of land to the Republic of Armenia. The means through which these calls have been transmitted have also varied from building societal awareness, to lobbying through political means, to – briefly – even terrorist violence. Still, all of these calls have been unsuccessful, and the subject remains taboo within Turkey. Since the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent rise of transitional justice as a concept and a field of research, there appears to be a general presumption that transitional justice should follow genocide and other instances of mass categorical violence and human rights violations. The Armenian Genocide is a non-case of transitional justice, as no justice has (successfully) been offered to the survivors and their descendants. Among these people, the trauma is still very much on the surface of their experience, and they have different ideas of what justice should look like one hundred years after the genocide. However, little research has been done into what exactly those ideas of justice look like. To that end, an interesting starting point would be the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) or Dashnaktsutyun, which is considered to be the foremost political representation of the . At present, the ARF has very little formal political influence in the Republic of Armenia; however, it has profoundly shaped the lives of Armenians in diaspora. Considering that of the total eleven million Armenians living in the

1 David Olusoga, “Dear Pope Francis, Namibia was the 20th century’s first genocide,” The Guardian, April 18th, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/18/pope-francis-armenian-genocide-first-20th-century- namibia 6 world, just under three million live in the Republic of Armenia and approximately eight million live in the diaspora,2 the organisation can arguably still be seen as one of the most important groups, if not the most important group, involved in international advocacy for the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants. This makes the perspectives on justice held by the ARF and its members particularly relevant. Therefore, this thesis will focus on the question: how does the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s historical struggle for justice for the Armenian Genocide reflect the organisation and its members’ perspectives on the concept of justice?

Theoretical framework Conceptions of transitional justice The study of transitional justice is a burgeoning field, and there is much discussion on the history of and modern practices in the topic. One of the most renowned authorities in the field, Ruti G. Teitel, provides the following definition of transitional justice: “Transitional justice can be defined as the conception of justice associated with periods of political change, characterized by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes.”3 According to Makau Mutua, another expert in the field, transitional justice seeks to stabilize a postconflict (sic) society through temporary measures that signal a commitment to addressing the abuses of the past. […] The point is that in order to move forward to an inclusive and fair society, no major party can be left behind. Those who have been aggrieved must find justice in order to let go of the hatreds of the past. But equally important is the place of the perpetrators of the abusive past in the future of the society. While justice needs to be done, deep concessions must be made by each side in order to move forward to a shared and common future.4 Although the birth of modern transitional justice can be pinned around , the concept evolved into the specific, international phenomenon that we currently understand it as

2 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, “General Information about Republic of Armenia,” MFA of Armenia, accessed 29th September, 2019, https://www.mfa.am/en/overview; The Big School Encyclopedia [Dprotsakan metz hanragitaran], vol. 2, “Spyurk [Diaspora],” : Armenian Encyclopedia [Haykakan Hanragitaran], 2010. 3 Ruti G. Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69. 4 Makau Mutua, “What is the Future of Transitional Justice?” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9, no. 1 (2015): 2. 7 after the end of World War II. The Nuremberg trials marked the transformation of post-war justice from a mostly national to a mostly international phenomenon, and from sanctions being aimed at nations to a focus on individuals and their responsibility for the events.5 After the end of the , which was accompanied by an international wave of political liberalisation, multiple conceptions of justice emerged that were based not only on the rule of law, but on more pragmatic principles aimed at advancing legitimacy. This led to the development of alternative forms of justice directed at truth-seeking and accountability.6 During this time, the phenomenon of truth commissions, which were created for the investigation and documentation of human rights abuses, emerged. In this period in transitional justice, the focus widened from individual legal accountability to include more community-based reconciliation, turning the idea of forgiveness into a political act. The goal was not so much to establish the rule of law, as to preserve peace. Moreover, transitional justice also became viewed as a way to help victims as individuals recover from their trauma. In the words of Teitel, “[transitional] justice became a form of dialogue between victims and their perpetrators.”7 Currently, transitional justice is in a period of expansion and normalisation. Whereas in the past it was viewed as a phenomenon associated with extraordinary conditions, transitional justice has now been institutionalised and stabilised with the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court.8 In addition, whereas in the past there appeared to be a tension between the search for truth and the struggle for justice, in this millennium that tension has been replaced by the view that the two are actually complementary. It is now argued that pursuing only one pathway of transitional justice is insufficient for any kind of “larger justice” to emerge.9 More specifically, it is argued that a strictly legalistic approach to transitional justice does not do justice to the survivors, whose experiences are often more complex than can be processed through a legal paradigm. Selma Leydesdorff explains as follows: By narrowing the survivors’ desires down to material compensation and juridical procedures, the survivors’ life stories are also reduced to the demands, format, and language of the law. In preparation for the proceedings and in court, exact

5 Teitel, “Genealogy,” 73. 6 Ibid., 77. 7 Ibid., 78-84. 8 Ibid., 89-91. 9 Naomi Roht-Arriaza, “The New Landscape of Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice in the Twenty-first Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice, eds. Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8. 8

information is required, yet the victim struggles with something incomprehensible, something beyond any traditional concept of history.10 In other words, the legal path to justice, which takes a strict approach to ‘historical facts’, can only address a small part of the victims’ suffering. Moreover, we must be wary of the presumption that the ‘truths’ created by the legal process are somehow separate from, and therefore not influenced by, the social context of the legal process itself. ‘Justice’ can mean different things to different peoples, and since the legal path does not automatically and inescapably lead to cultural change or reconciliation, it cannot unequivocally guarantee justice in all cases.11 Therefore, a broader approach to transitional justice is needed. The concept of transitional justice is thus based on the idea that perpetrators of mass violence can be held to account. The ways that this has been done in the past can be divided between three “models of accountability”, according to human rights academic Kathryn Sikkink. The first, the “sovereign immunity” model, holds that state officials cannot and should not be held accountable for human rights violations at all. In the second, the “state accountability” model, states as a political entity could be held accountable for human rights violations; however, this also means that if a state chooses not to cooperate with the demands of international law, international organisations are essentially powerless, as they cannot enforce the law. This model is used by many international courts, such as the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. On the other hand, the third, “individual criminal accountability” model demands accountability of individuals. Unlike the second model, according to which a state could be required to provide remedies and pay restitutions, those convicted under this model end up in prison. This model is prominent in our contemporary understanding of transitional justice and is followed by courts such as the International Criminal Court, as well as tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.12

10 Selma Leydesdorff, “Why Compensation is a Mixed Blessing,” in The Genocide Convention: The Legacy of 60 Years, eds. Harmen van der Wilt, Jeroen Vervliet, Goran Sluiter, Johannes Houwink ten Cate (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2012), 110. 11 Nanci Adler, “Introduction: On History, Historians, and Transitional Justice,” in Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling, ed. Nanci Adler (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2018): 2-7. 12 Kathryn Sikkink, “Models of Accountability and the Effectiveness of Transitional Justice,” in After Oppression: Transitional Justice in Latin America and Eastern Europe, eds. Vesselin Popovski and Monica Serrano (Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press, 2012), 20-22. 9

Transitional justice as a concept is intrinsically linked to the idea of human rights. This means that what we view as fair and just is related to the universal rights that all humans inherently have. However, it has been argued that this carries with it certain limitations. First of all, as Makau Mutua argues, the ideas about human rights that we hold are shaped and defined by Western liberalism. The foundational texts of human rights as we know them were written with hardly any participation from people outside of the West. Second, much of the human rights movement is strongly focused on political and civil rights, meaning that discussions of economic, social, and cultural rights are largely sidelined. Finally, the human rights corpus places the individual at the centre of the moral universe, meaning that the role of the community is diminished and events are viewed as resulting from the actions of individuals.13 On the other hand, this carries implications for victims too. According to Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, although new instruments intended specifically for the protection of minority groups have been developed in the past decades, on its own, the universalised application of human rights to individuals is insufficient to protect those targeted for their (perceived) membership of a particular (imagined) community.14 As a result, the status quo within the infrastructure of transitional justice is centred around individuals, and the discussion on how to address group perpetration and group victimhood is ongoing. There is some tension between the different conceptions of transitional justice. Although the concept originated as a highly legalised one, some authors expand the definition to include grassroots approaches to justice and reconciliation after a period of violence.15 Thus, although ideas about what “transitional justice” really means vary, drawing on the literature discussed above, for the purposes of this thesis the concept will be defined as formalised processes of confronting violent events, aimed at offering justice to those affected by violence. These processes can, but do not need to, result in legal prosecution of individuals, material reparations for victims, the altering of national law, the education curriculum, and the public space to accommodate the new historical narrative and/or political situation, and other developments.

13 Mutua, “Future of Transitional Justice,” 3-4. 14 Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, “Genocide and Restitution: Ensuring Each Group’s Contribution to Humanity,” The European Journal of International Law 22, no. 1 (2011): 39. 15 Roht-Arriaza, “New Landscape,” 2. 10

Why is transitional justice important? The effectiveness of transitional justice is not at all self-explanatory or undisputed. After all, past experiences have demonstrated that transitional justice can be complicated and fragile. In some societies, attempts to implement transitional justice have backfired, leading to regression and sometimes even resumption of conflict. In other places, transitional justice mechanisms were unsuccessful in distancing the perpetrators from their positions of power.16 However, these historical failures do not diminish from the importance of transitional justice as a concept. In essence, transitional justice institutions try to spread the idea that individuals can and should be tried for systematic political violence; in other words, that justice for victims is possible and necessary.17 The stated goal of transitional justice is to “end impunity” by demonstrating that nobody, no matter how powerful, is above the law.18 This is affirmed by Michael Ignatieff, who states that “[…] leaving war crimes unpunished is worse: it leaves the cycle of impunity unbroken and permits societies to indulge their fantasies of denial.”19 Thus, institutions of transitional justice create a historical record of political violence, which serves to counter denial both about the scope of systematic violence and about a particular society’s responsibility for past violence.20 Countering denial is crucial because, in the Habermasian view, actively confronting and commemorating past abuses contributes to a society’s commitment to democratic values and reforms.21 In addition, according to Theodor Adorno, the desire to forget, that is, the “destruction of memory”, is tantamount to the loss of history; therefore, confronting the past on both an individual and a societal level is necessary to prevent violent tendencies from resurfacing.22 For societies that have experienced such extreme violence, an important benefit of pursuing transitional justice is the fact that “public rituals of atonement”, such as public apologies and commemorations, can symbolically release these societies from present association with historical crimes.23

16 Mutua, “Future of Transitional Justice,” 2. 17 Bronwyn Anne Leebaw, “The Irreconcilable Goals of Transitional Justice,” Human Rights Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2008): 109. 18 Ibid., 110. 19 Michael Ignatieff, “Articles of faith,” Index on Censorship 25, no. 5 (1996): 118. 20 Leebaw, “Irreconcilable Goals,” 107. 21 Ibid., 107; M. Cherif Bassiouni, “Searching for Peace and Achieving Justice: The Need for Accountability,” Law and Contemporary Problems 59, no. 4 (1996): 26. 22 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of ‘Working Through the Past’” (1959) in Adorno, Critical Models, Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 89-103; Bassiouni, “Need for Accountability,” 26. 23 Ignatieff, “Articles,” 121-122. 11

Transitional justice is important for victims of violence and their descendants, too. Recognition of their experiences can help restore victims’ sense of agency, following an event that violently rid them of that agency and turned them into objects. Some victims are helped by the short-term catharsis of testifying about their experiences in public, although some others are re-traumatised.24 It has also been argued that in the absence of formal justice, victims could be tempted to take justice into their own hands, leading to expressions of vengefulness.25 Conversely, trying individual perpetrators for their role in systematic political violence is believed to diminish potential feelings of vengefulness among victims.26 Trials, as well as the previously mentioned “public rituals of atonement”, can also help individuals to heal from a traumatic past.27 In acknowledging and atoning for past crimes, perpetrators demonstrate respect to the humanity of the victims, whereas denying them is “a continuing affront to [their] dignity and humanity”.28 Finally, some have claimed that formal processes of transitional justice bolster respect for (international) law and legal institutions. However, this argumentation must be problematised, as it assumes that the law and our legal institutions are, and should be seen as, unproblematic and infallible. Considering the fact that almost all forms of transitional justice that are known to us rest on the idea of individual accountability, tribunals most of all, they reinforce the idea that systematic violence is inherently a result of the decisions of an elite. By placing full responsibility for violence on the shoulders of a relatively small group of people, this assumption bypasses the question of why in reality, large groups of people get involved in systematic violence. In addition, it carries the implication that large groups of people cannot and should not be held legally accountable for their participation in mass violence at all.29 In other words, the transitional justice processes and institutions that we currently have are not and should not be above criticism. Although transitional justice institutions may contribute to the documentation of past injustice, the assimilation of democratic values in societies, and the healing of the trauma of

24 Roht-Arriaza, “New Landscape,” 4-5. 25 Gary John Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), ch. 8. 26 Leebaw, “Irreconcilable Goals,” 110. 27 Ignatieff, “Articles,” 121-122. 28 Haig Khatchadourian, “Compensation and Reparation as Forms of Compensatory Justice,” Metaphilosophy 37, no. 3-4 (2006): 431. 29 Leebaw, “Irreconcilable Goals,” 110. 12 victims of violence, it is vital that the discussion on how to best respond to genocides and other instances of mass violence remain ongoing.

Methodology This thesis will make use of methods associated with oral history, which involves the use of recorded oral testimony as a source for research. This method is not entirely uncontroversial, as oral history is challenged by questions such as the accuracy of witness accounts, the ethics of interviews, and the place of the interviewer in their own research. By definition, oral history is subjective, as it relies not only on the interviewees’ recollections of the (sometimes distant) past, but also on the interpersonal skills and interpretation of the interviewer.30 However, oral history also offers certain avenues that are inaccessible through other forms of research. It is important to examine who is given a voice in ‘traditional’, written history, and who is excluded; historically, those excluded have been members of societally disadvantaged groups, including members of groups that have been victims of mass violence.31 Thus, oral history can give a voice to those whose experiences were previously considered unworthy of being voiced. Thanks to the popularisation of social history after the 1960s, oral history as a method has greatly evolved. For example, when Holocaust victims’ testimonies began to be engaged with on a qualitative level, it was found that this met a certain strong, emotional need to be heard that was shared by many survivors. Still, these testimonies were not allowed to stand on their own, but were rather used to support the researcher’s general narrative. In other words, testimony was used to illustrate the researcher’s narrative, but it was not permitted to disrupt it or stand at its centre. This was perceived as problematic, because a great deal of the complexity of the victims’ experiences was lost in this process.32 One of the reasons why this problem could develop was because of a strict separation between different disciplines. Some have found that their research potential was limited because of their lack of training in methods outside of their formal

30 Ellen L. Fleischmann, “Crossing the Boundaries of History: Exploring Oral History in Researching Palestinian Women in the Mandate Period,” Women’s History Review 5, no. 3 (1996): 365; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 222. 31 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 352. 32 Tony Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 279-282. 13 academic discipline.33 Thus, for the practice of oral history, one must be prepared to look beyond the boundaries of traditional history and adopt practices from fields such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In this vein, since the 1990s, a certain shift has occurred, and thanks to insights gained from a more interdisciplinary approach, the value of the individual life story has slowly become more widely appreciated. Presently, oral history as a whole is more widely viewed as a valuable method that can provide us with perspectives that other methods simply could not.34 Whereas in the past, information gathering through oral history was done in a highly guided, impersonal, and quantitative way, nowadays researchers tend to prefer a more hands-off approach. The researcher is advised to remember that they intend to learn something from the interviewee. One of the suggested methods of interviewing involves simply letting the interviewee speak freely, only asking for elaboration after they have said their piece, reserving specific questions for later in the conversation. This method has proved highly effective in both learning new information and filling in the gaps in existing knowledge.35 It is also argued that by allowing the testifier to give information that they want to remember, rather than only information that the interviewer wants to know, the interviewer can actually glean certain details that fill the gaps of what is already known, thereby revealing alternative historical narratives.36 In addition, some assert that even testimonies that include inaccurate information or even have been (partially) fictionalised are valuable, because they still tell us something about the testifier’s personal experience and identity.37 In this sense, an exaggerated focus on empiricism can actually limit the production of history and the evolution of historical narratives.38 Oral histories can help create a record of the experiences of victims of mass violence. The implications of this practice reach far beyond the world of academia. Considering the fact that perpetrators of genocide have the intent to destroy their victim group, both physically and metaphysically, through the destruction of memory, the practice of oral history in itself effectively counteracts one aspect of this destruction. Thus, collecting and recording the testimonies of survivors of systematic mass violence such as the Armenian Genocide contributes

33 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 352. 34 Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,” 279-282. 35 Thompson, “Voice of the Past,” 284-286. 36 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 364. 37 Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,” 284-289. 38 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 367. 14 to keeping alive that memory which the perpetrators have tried to erase. After all, per Donald Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller: “The oral historian has a unique role to play in the Armenian community in attempting to mirror and clarify the complex experience of those who survived one of the greatest atrocities of this century.”39

Scope and limitations The lasting effects of the Armenian Genocide continue to impact the lives of the descendants of the genocide’s victims over a century later, both in the Republic of Armenia and in the diaspora. In Turkey, too, these effects are still visible. Assuming that the party from whom justice is demanded would be the legal descendant of the Ottoman Empire, i.e. the modern Republic of Turkey,40 we must take into account that the political situation in that country has a concrete effect on the struggle for justice for the Armenian Genocide. This discussion would be incomplete if we do not note the connection between Turkish nation-building and the ideological violence against its minorities, both historically and contemporarily. The construction of the modern Turkish state and its identity was accompanied by campaigns of ethnic homogenisation that victimised the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, but also the , among other minorities.41 The Turkish state’s more recent history of violence and discrimination against its Kurdish minority in particular stands out as what could be seen as continuity in the creation and enforcement of exclusionary Turkish national identity over the past century or so. Furthermore, it has been argued that the separation of these issues is part of an attempt to present as a response to, rather than a cause of, the oppression of the Armenians and the Kurds.42

39 Donald E. Miller and Lorna Tourian Miller, “Armenian Survivors: A Typological Analysis of Victim Response,” The Oral History Review 10 (1982): 72. Donald Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller’s analysis of their interviews with Armenian Genocide survivors in the early 1980s is one of the leading works in Armenian oral history, both from a theoretical and a methodological perspective. This report remains a reference point even for more recent oral history works. 40 Vahagn Avedian, “State Identity, Continuity, and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide,” The European Journal of International Law 23, no. 3 (2012): 819-820. 41 Uğur Ümit Üngör, “‘Turkey for the Turks’: Demographic Engineering in Eastern , 1914-1945,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 290. 42 Bilgin Ayata, “The Kurds in the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Process: Double-Bind or Double-Blind?” International Journal of Studies 47 (2015): 807-808. 15

The state ideology and national identity that this demographic engineering aimed to entrench have also been ingrained in Turkey’s conception of its own history. The campaigns of homogenisation of the Republic’s identity were accompanied by the deliberate erasure of the memory of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous Turkey, and the rewriting of ethnic minorities as Turks.43 This proceeded to the point where even internationally, the language used to discuss the geographical region is coloured. In common parlance, as well as in scholarly work, the region more or less encompassing the Ottoman provinces that had large Armenian populations is generally referred to as ‘Eastern Anatolia’. For all its aura of neutrality, this term is problematic, as it was deliberately introduced in order to replace the previous common designation of the region: the , or Armenian Plateau.44 Although this name for the province of modern Turkey was institutionalised at the First Geography Congress in 1941, official attempts to dissociate the region from the Armenians started as early as 1880, with Sultan Abdulhamid II’s prohibition of the use of the name ‘Armenia’ in official documents.45 The regions historically called respectively Anatolia and the Armenian Highlands do not overlap; therefore, the decision to rename the latter ‘Eastern Anatolia’ was deliberate and not based on historical or geographical precedent. It follows that the continued use of the term contributes to the erasure of Armenian history in modern-day Turkey and the normalisation of the repression of memory of the genocide.

43 Üngör, “Demographic Engineering,” 304. 44 Richard G. Hovannisian, “The Armenian Genocide: Wartime Radicalization or Premeditated Continuum?” in: The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 3. 45 Lusine Sahakyan, Turkification of the Toponyms in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey (Montreal: Arod Books, 2010), 12. In her research on the “Turkification” of toponyms, Sahakian makes excellent use of primary sources, which makes her work invaluable to the present discussion. However, her writing also shows a clear political bias, which is important to keep in mind. 16

Fig. 1. The natural borders of the Armenian Plateau according to H.F.B. Lynch (1901)46

Conversely, where Turkey has attempted to suppress or co-opt the memory of the violence against its minorities, it is important to note that Kurds have called for official recognition and justice for the Armenian Genocide and have been heavily involved in grassroots- level reconciliation with Armenians, thereby offering an alternative to state-led reconciliation attempts, which have been perceived as disingenuous in the past. An example of this is the restoration of Sourp Khach church on Lake Van by the Turkish government versus the restoration of Sourp Giragos church in Diyarbakir by the Kurdish municipality and Armenian patriarchate. The restoration of Sourp Khach was announced as an effort to counter “genocide claims”, and entailed the changing of its Armenian name to the more Turkish-sounding ‘Akdamar’ and conversion of the church to a museum, in which mass can only be held once yearly. On the other hand, the restoration of Sourp Giragos was accompanied by active attempts to revive Armenian history and culture in Diyarbakir.47 From this, we can see that the Turkish state is trying to appropriate and sanitise the remembrance of Armenian history and the Armenian Genocide by incorporating it into a narrative that complements and legitimises its own state nationalism.

46 H. F. B. Lynch, The Natural Borders of the Armenian Plateau, 1901, in Armenia, Travels and Studies, vol. 1, Wikimedia Commons accessed February 5, 2021, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27028489 47 Ayata, “Double-Bind,” 809-810. 17

This narrative of denial does not exist in a vacuum; it has an effect on the people whose history is being denied. Research exists on the impact of trauma on the generations following a traumatic event.48 Research also exists on the trauma experienced by the (descendants of) survivors of the Armenian Genocide due to the re-traumatisation as a consequence of Turkey’s policy of genocide denial.49 Leydesdorff explains that “[to] be denied recognition - or to be ‘misrecognized’ - is to suffer both a distortion of one’s relation to one’s self and an injury to one’s identity, because it involves reconnection to a society and a world that seem to have been lost.”50 The world that the survivors of the Armenian Genocide knew was lost to them forever, and the world that replaced it left no space for them or their descendants, having been built on the denial that a different world had ever existed at all. Therefore, for any semblance of justice for the Armenian Genocide to be perceived, this denial must be confronted, and the experiences of the victims of Turkey’s nation-building must be recognised. Further exploration of (intergenerational) trauma, genocide denial, Turkish national identity, and the Kurdish question is necessary, but falls outside of the scope of this thesis. In the chapters that follow, I will focus on the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s struggle for justice. I attempt to place the organisation’s goals within the framework of transitional justice. I also use the methods of oral history to conduct interviews with young ARF members in the diaspora, in order to discern their personal experiences of the organisation’s ideology. The first chapter will provide a brief background of the many different ways in which Armenians around the world have pursued justice for the genocide. The second chapter will discuss the ARF’s history and ideology, including the insights gleaned from the interviews conducted with Dutch ARF members. In the third chapter, I will delve deeper into the organisation’s understanding of and ideas about justice, and analyse these ideas’ roots, implications, strengths, and shortcomings. Ultimately, through this discussion, I hope to contribute to the ongoing academic debate on how best to offer justice and recognition to survivors of systematic violence.

48 See for example Liat Ayalon, “Challenges Associated with the Study of Resilience to Trauma in Holocaust Survivors,” Journal of Loss and Trauma 10, no. 4 (2005), John Saroyan, “Suppressed and Repressed Memories among Armenian Genocide Survivors,” Peace Review 27, no. 2 (2015), Anie S. Kalayjian et. al., “Coping with Ottoman Turkish Genocide: An Exploration of the Experience of Armenian Survivors,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 9, no. 1 (1996). 49 See for example Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (1995), Selina L. Mangassarian, “100 Years of Trauma: the Armenian Genocide and Intergenerational Cultural Trauma,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 25, no. 4 (2016). 50 Leydesdorff, “Mixed Blessing,” 106. 18

Chapter 1: A century of struggle

The pursuit of justice for the victims of the Armenian Genocide began while atrocities were still ongoing during the First World War and continues until this day. This amounts to over a century of struggle, throughout which much has changed not just for the Armenians and their understanding of their trauma, but also for the world’s perception of mass violence and minority rights. During this time, this pursuit of justice has taken a number of different forms, born out of the needs of and means available to the Armenians, wherever they were, and whenever. Some of these forms were specific to the time and context they were borne of, whereas others echo through to our times, having perhaps modernised somewhat, but retaining their essence. In order to understand the contemporary ARF’s perspectives on justice, it is necessary to provide a background on what the broader struggle for justice looked like and to situate the ARF within that context. Therefore, the varying ways in which Armenians have struggled for justice for the genocide will be discussed in this chapter.

Victimisation and proto-justice The world was different from ours at the time of the Armenian Genocide. The word ‘genocide’ itself had not even been invented yet, and within the dominant conception of state sovereignty, violence against a state’s own minorities was considered an internal affair, and not the responsibility of an international community. International justice as a notion was not, itself, unheard of, but the idea that the perpetrators of wartime civilian massacres could be legally prosecuted was unprecedented.51 Nevertheless, the fate of the Armenians did not go unnoticed by foreign dignitaries at the time. Disturbed by reports of violence on Armenian intellectuals in April 1915, Viscount James Bryce launched an investigation into the events, the results of which he published as a Parliamentary Blue Book in late 1916 under the title The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.52 Regarding the contents of this report, he stated that: “All civilized nations able to assist the Armenians today should know that the need is still extremely

51 Michelle Tusan, “"Crimes against Humanity": Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origin of the Response to the Armenian Genocide,” American Historical Review (2014): 47. 52 James Bryce and Arnold J. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce (London: Gomidas Institute, 2005). 19 urgent . . . this requires worldwide assistance for feeding, clothing, housing and repatriation.”53 American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morgenthau also wrote in detail in his 1919 memoir about the violence against Armenians and particularly his discussions on the topic with Enver and .54 These and other observers in various degrees called to help the Armenians and the other persecuted Christian minorities during the war, making it so that people in the West were aware of the plight of the Armenians, and the topic was discussed on a political level as well. This affected the way the Ottoman Empire was treated after the war. The Entente powers were generally sympathetic to the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire, and this was quite clear from the Treaty of Sèvres, in which the terms of the Ottoman defeat were established. Among other provisions, the Treaty included obligations with regards to the groups that had been subjected to violence by the Ottoman government. Article 142, for example, required the government to facilitate the work of commissions established by the League of Nations to receive complaints from victims of violence, while Article 144 required the government to assist victims in returning to their homes and livelihoods.55 In addition, importantly, the Treaty obligated Turkey to recognise an independent Armenian state, within the boundaries of the Van, , , and vilayets. These provisions were included specifically with the aim of providing some measure of justice to the victims of what was, at the time, referred to as massacres and deportations. However, although the representative of the sultan signed the Treaty, the nationalists that would soon assume power in the country had secretly come to a separate agreement with the , which would free Turkey from the obligations laid upon it by the Treaty of Sèvres. After their victory in the ensuing civil war as well as a war against the young Armenian republic, the nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal, succeeded in renegotiating new terms for Turkey under the in 1922-1923. This Treaty,

53 Tusan, ““Crimes against Humanity”,” 57. 54 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15-21. 55 “The Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers and Turkey Signed at Sèvres,” signed 10th of August 1920, The Treaties of Peace 1919-1923, Vol. II (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924), https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Section_I,_Articles_1_-_260. 20 which thoroughly avoided any mention of Armenians or the crimes committed by the Ottoman government, allowed Turkey to consider the Armenian problem resolved.56 Before Lausanne, however, the Ottoman government was still bound to the terms being negotiated in Sèvres. Simultaneously, in part hoping for more goodwill from the Western powers, the Ottoman government instituted a series of courts-martial to try the perpetrators of the crimes committed during the war. Although many top functionaries of the wartime Ottoman government, including the Three Pashas, had fled the country in 1918, the general sentiment in the Ottoman administration and the general population was that the remaining perpetrators needed to be prosecuted; the first post-war Ottoman Prime Minister even proclaimed that the crimes against the Armenians were sufficient “to make the conscience of mankind shudder with horror for ever (sic).”57 The trials were carried out over two years, between 1918 and 1920, in series clustered around principle sites of mass murder (Yozgat, Trabzon, Harput, Bayburt, Erzincan, Mosul), as well as a series dealing mostly with charges of pillage and plunder, and a series that specifically tried the responsible officials, including the ministers of the two wartime cabinets. They involved dozens of suspects, ranging from minor functionaries to the Three Pashas themselves. The trials were procedurally sound, despite periodic obstruction in the form of the obfuscation or destruction of evidence.58 Crucially, the courts-martial judged that the deportations and massacres of Armenians had been premeditated, intended, and centrally planned. In addition, they judged that the violence was not a result of mutual slaughter of any kind: in other words, the victims were not casualties of a civil war, and had not provoked the violence on themselves. This was a conclusion that was not reached based on Armenian testimony: on the contrary, Armenian testimonies were ultimately excluded from the judgment, in order to erase any doubt on the impartiality of the court. These considerations led the court to find many of the defendants, including high-level officials, guilty of premeditated murder. However, many of the suspects managed to escape prison before this verdict had been pronounced. As a result, only three defendants were convicted and hanged following the

56 Richard G. Hovannisian, “The Republic of Armenia,” in The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, Vol II: Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1997), 332-346. 57 Richard G. Hovannisian, “Genocide and Independence,” in The Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of National Identity, eds. Edmund Herzig and Marina Kurkchiyan (Oxon: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 93. 58 Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23 (1991): 552-562. 21 judgment; others were sentenced to death in absentia.59 Due to the absence of the international legal infrastructure necessary to prosecute the fugitive officials outside of Turkey, they were able to travel through Europe with minimal impediments. In this sense, the courts-martial did not bring justice to Armenian victims; however, they did generate a body of archival material that would later prove invaluable to our understanding of the genocide.60 The justice not delivered by the Ottoman military courts continued to be actively sought afterwards, as many in the Armenian communities, now expelled from their homes, pondered how to claim redress, retribution, and, perhaps, revenge on behalf of their murdered brethren. Although they had previously been split along the lines of political affiliation, geography, and class, following the genocide it felt as though all Armenians were fighting on the same side. Therefore, what was set into motion by the ARF in 1919 was received with sympathy by Armenians not affiliated with the organisation as well. The ARF’s General Congress in the autumn of 1919 approved a top-secret resolution titled ‘Hadug Kordz’ (Special Work or Mission). For this special work, a list of names of former Ottoman officials responsible for the deportations and massacres was compiled, at the top of which were the Three Pashas, as well as dr. Shakir and dr. Nazim.61 To finance the operation, a ‘Hadug Kumar’ (Special Fund) was opened, which was subsequently fed by donations from wealthy Armenians, primarily in the American diaspora. By the summer of 1920, the logistics of this work had been thought out, and it was named , after the Greek goddess of retribution. Its goal would be to track down and assassinate those deemed most responsible for the genocide, most of whom had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Ottoman courts-martial.62 This operation spanned across continents, lasted three years, and was kept completely secret for decades. The most famous among these assassinations was Soghomon Tehlirian’s attack on Talaat Pasha in in March of 1921. At the ensuing trial Tehlirian claimed that he had been ordered to kill Talaat

59 The court did not only hand out death sentences: some of the defendants were sentenced to light prison terms, although they rarely served them out. Dadrian, “Documentation,” 566; Annette Höss, “The Trial of Perpetrators by the Turkish Military Tribunals: The Case of Yozgat,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1992), 219-221. 60 Ibid., 564-566. 61 It is unknown how many names were actually on these lists, as they are kept in the carefully guarded archives of the ARF. Some of these lists are said to contain two hundred names. The names we know for certain are (at least) as follows: , Mustafa Kemal Pasha, Jemal Pasha, Cevdet Bey, Muamar Bey, Jemal Azmi Bey, Bedri Bey, Azmi Bey, Topal Atif, Kara Kemal, dr. Behaeddin Shakir, dr. Mehmet Nazim, Talaat Pasha. Eric Bogosian, Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 206-207. 62 Ibid, 205-208. 22 by his dead mother, whom he saw in recurring dreams, and that his conscience was clear. The trial garnered both national and international attention, and crucially, the presiding judge insisted on hearing the circumstances that led Tehlirian to seek revenge against Talaat - in other words, the trial transformed from one on the premeditated murder of a former Ottoman official, to one on the Armenian Genocide. When Tehlirian was pronounced not guilty of murder, the verdict was met with cheers and flowers - and with approval from Armenians worldwide.63 What was unknown at the time was that Talaat was on the top of the list compiled by the instigators of Operation Nemesis, and Tehlirian had been recruited by the ARF specifically for this task based in part on his sympathetic, melancholy impression, with the intention of using the trial to bring widespread attention to the genocide.64 What was likewise unknown was that Talaat’s murder was part of a larger plan. In three years, ARF operatives systematically tracked down and assassinated seven former high-level Ottoman officials across Europe, the , and the Soviet Union.65 Armenian communities around the world welcomed news of these assassinations, but by 1922, the ARF voted to shut down the operation on the grounds that it had become too expensive. They decided that the primary challenge for Armenian communities, both in the Caucasus and in the diaspora, was to feed and clothe the survivors of the genocide; the money from the Special Fund would be of far more use to that end than any satisfaction that may have been derived from revenge assassinations.66 The survivors of the genocide had been scattered across the world and were confronted with the ordeal of processing their trauma and building up their lives again. Many of them, unable to face what they had gone through, chose not to discuss their experiences and focused instead on their new lives and homes. This time, spanning roughly from the 1920s to 1965, is sometimes referred to as the ‘silent period’. That name is somewhat misleading. Granted, there were little to no public discussions of the genocide, particularly in Armenia, where the Soviet government censored the topic in line with its ideology of turning its constituent nations from nationalism to proletarian internationalism, shaping their historical identity into a new, socialist

63 Sévane Garibian, “"Commanded by my Mother's Corpse": Talaat Pasha, or the Revenge Assassination of a Condemned Man,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 2 (2018): 223-232. 64 Bogosian, Operation Nemesis, 285-326. 65 In 1926, the Turkish national assembly voted to grant pensions to the widows and orphans of those killed during Operation Nemesis and those hanged by the military tribunal after the war. Erik Jan Zürcher, “Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 314. 66 Bogosian, Operation Nemesis, 362-377, 403-404. 23 one.67 Nevertheless, the genocide was not completely absent from the public sphere. Armenian political parties worked to remind the West of the plight of the Armenians, to the point where the American and European public was well acquainted with the image of the ‘starving Armenians’.68 In addition, within Armenian communities, the genocide was still discussed in art and literature. Literary representation of the genocide allowed the memory to live on even as survivors passed. Survivors often wrote not directly about the events of the genocide, but about their experiences of them, and about the fate of the Armenian people as a group now living in dispersion. Notably, this literature rarely discussed the perpetrators. According to Rubina Peroomian, one of the leading experts on , this was out of an unwillingness to believe what had happened, and what the perpetrators, many of whom had previously been compatriots, neighbours, even friends, had done. What is also reflected in literature of the time is an intense anxiety over the loss of Armenian identity, as young Armenians, having experienced such immense trauma, turned away from their communities and their identity and chose to comfort themselves through relationships with non-Armenians.69 Altogether, in the half-century following the genocide, survivors struggled to understand and convey the burden that weighed on them, that affected them and their children even when they tried their hardest to ignore it. In the words of Rubina Peroomian: “Genocide is not comprehended yet. Its impact persists.”70

Politics and terror, recognition and denial The fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1965 brought an end to this period of silence. The first ever commemoration of the genocide in Soviet Armenia, held that year, escalated into a rally, with people demanding justice for their suffering and the ‘return’ of historically Armenian lands. At the same time, in the diaspora, there was growing impatience with community leadership, particularly the ARF, on account of their failure to advance the Armenian cause towards any kind of recognition or justice for the aging group of first generation survivors. This all happened against the background of a decade when widespread student

67 Rubina Peroomian, “The Memory of Genocide in Soviet Armenian Literature,” Banber Matenadaran 21 (2014): 233-235. 68 Suny, “Writing Genocide,” 21. 69 Rubina Peroomian, “Armenian Literary Responses to Genocide: The Artistic Struggle to Comprehend and Survive,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1992), 227-244. 70 Ibid., 245. 24 protests and movements for national liberation created tolerance for (potentially violent) political struggle. It was at the crossroads of these circumstances that the phenomenon of Armenian terrorism arose. The early 1970s saw the appearance of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), a group that had friendly ties with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Workers’ Party (PKK), and that directly challenged the position of the ARF as the face of the diaspora’s political demands for recognition and justice. With their leftist radicalism and willingness to use violence to achieve their goals, they mirrored the ARF’s own history with Operation Nemesis, signifying themselves as successors to both that legacy and to the ARF’s leadership position. Their stated goals were the recognition of the genocide, payment of reparations to victims, and restoration of historical Armenia. To these ends, the group attacked Turkish officials and diplomats, most famously seizing the Turkish Consulate in Paris and holding 56 people hostage for 16 hours in 1981. Such attacks garnered the group and the causes it pursued international attention and support, from Armenians and non- Armenians alike.71 Shortly after ASALA’s debut, another Armenian terrorist organisation emerged: the Justice Commandos for the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), reported (though not definitively confirmed) to have been created by the ARF in response to the challenge issued by ASALA. Where ASALA used explosives in its attacks, the JCAG favoured firearms, and its attacks were frighteningly precise and deadly. Despite the fact that it killed significantly more people than ASALA, it received less publicity than its competitor, because it was far less keen on focusing attention on itself and its ideology than the more overtly leftist, socialist ASALA.72 Much of ASALA’s popularity waned, however, following its botched attack on Orly Airport in 1983, when an explosive device detonated prematurely and killed eight people, none of whom the group intended to target. By the mid-1980s, most Armenians and non-Armenians were no longer comfortable expressing sympathy for ASALA, and the organisation waned away into infighting and oblivion. JCAG halted its activities around the same time, seemingly feeling it had nothing more to accomplish, having accomplished all it could.73 Even though most people no longer valorised these terrorist groups and disapproved of their increasingly indiscriminate and bloody violence, what ASALA and JCAG had

71 Laura Dugan, Julie Y. Huang, Gary LaFree, Clark McCauley, “Sudden Desistance from Terrorism: The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide,” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 1, no. 3 (2008): 233-235. 72 Francis P. Hyland, Armenian Terrorism: The Past, The Present, The Prospects (Boulder: Westview, 1991), ch. 7. 73 Dugan, Huang, LaFree, McCauley, “Sudden Desistance from Terrorism,” 243-246. 25 accomplished was inspiring a renewed interest in and awareness of the Armenian Genocide and the Armenian cause. In a 1983 article, Paul Wilkinson wrote that it must be admitted that until the current Asala (sic) terrorist campaign, very few people knew anything about the grievances of the Armenians against the Turks. The young fanatical idealists who now declare themselves ready to go on ‘suicide missions’ […] believe that terrorism is the only weapon left to them, and that it is only the propaganda of atrocity that can bring them the international publicity and pressure to further their cause.74 This “propaganda of atrocity” was indeed successful in materialising international publicity. The United States House of Representatives passed several resolutions on the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide since 1975, none of which, however, subsequently passed in the Senate.75 Interestingly, even though these resolutions had emerged from the awareness engendered by the wave of terrorist violence, they made no mention of this violence. In Paris in 1984, the Permanent People’s Tribunal, a civil society initiative established several years prior, convened a Session on the Genocide of the Armenians, and found “that the charge of genocide of the Armenian people brought against the Turkish authorities is established as to its foundation in fact”.76 In 1987, the European Parliament approved a resolution that recognised the events of 1915 as genocide.77 Outside of the political sphere, scholarship on the Armenian Genocide also proliferated starting in the late 1970s, corresponding with the expansion of the academic field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.78 With the development of this political and academic awareness, Armenian communities around the world found that their advocacy and lobbying efforts were no longer falling on deaf ears. On the other hand, as the international community began to discuss commemorating or even recognising the Armenian Genocide, Turkey was forced to respond to these new developments. Since the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1922-1923, Turkey had lived under the assumption that the ‘Armenian problem’ had been resolved, and it was very much surprised

74 Paul Wilkinson, “Armenian Terrorism,” The World Today 39, no. 9 (September 1983): 349. 75 U.S. Congress, House, Joint resolution to designate April 24, 1975, as National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity, H. J. Res. 148, 94th Cong., introduced in House January 28, 1975, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/94/hjres148 76 Gabrielle Simm, "The Paris Peoples' Tribunal and the Trials: Archives of the Armenian Genocide," Leiden Journal of International Law 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 245-268. 77 European Parliament, “Resolution on a political solution to the ,” Doc. A2-33/87, June 18, 1987, https://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.152/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.html 78 Suny, “Writing Genocide,” 22-23. 26 by the JCAG and ASALA strikes on its diplomats half a century later. The Turkish populace, having been taught a mythologised version of their nation’s history, could not comprehend why these Armenian terrorist groups could possibly undertake such violence. The government was not immune to this either, having been caught off guard to the extent that the Foreign Ministry had not a single English-language text on the state position on the events of 1915 to send to Western courts trying ASALA and JCAG perpetrators.79 However, very quickly, Turkey solidified a position of proactive, hard denial on the topic, and began to exert pressure on organisations and governments considering recognising the genocide. For example, when the American government tried to propose to commemorate the Armenian Genocide throughout the 1980s, these attempts were met with widespread public outcry in Turkey, and the Turkish government threatened that the adoption of such a resolution would negatively affect the diplomatic relationship between the two states. The US took such a threat seriously, considering Turkey’s status as a NATO ally in the Middle East and bordering on the USSR. In addition, organisations directly or indirectly supported by the Turkish government endeavoured to spread information intended to shake the public’s confidence in the facts of the Armenian Genocide, especially with regards to the scope and intentionality of the violence. These combined efforts succeeded in making it so that it seemed that the interest of preserving positive relations with Turkey outweighed any benefit or moral value derived from recognising the genocide.80 This tactic, whereby Turkey spends enormous sums of money on creating denialist propaganda to manipulate the public opinion and threaten foreign governments with diplomatic repercussions if they recognise the Armenian Genocide, continues to be used until this day.81

79 Fatma Müge Göçek, “Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42-45. 80 Vigen Guroian, “The Politics and Morality of Genocide,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1992), 311-339. 81 Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-5. 27

Fig. 2. The number of publications in Turkey on the “Armenian question”, by Jennifer Dixon.82

The developments in the Armenian quest for justice up until our times show that this pursuit has had mixed results. On the one hand, as is evident from the subject of this thesis, Armenians still have not received any form of recognition or formal justice from the successors of the perpetrators of the genocide. In fact, one could argue that Turkey has only doubled down on its denial that any injustice took place at all, and it seems as unlikely as ever that it will reverse this uncompromising stance. On the other hand, I propose that taken separately, the steps on the road to justice carry with them valuable lessons in their own right. Certain parts of the Treaty of Sèvres and the Ottoman courts-martial could be seen as precursors, if not early attempts, at transitional justice, for example. We also see the significant role that Armenian

82 Jennifer Dixon, Number of official or quasi-official publications on the "Armenian question", 2010, 10.1080/13608746.2010.513605, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98411724 28 political organisations have played in shaping their communities’ struggle for justice, for better or for worse. Consider, for instance, the emergence of a second, deadlier terrorist organisation in response to the success of one that challenged the position of the ARF establishment. In addition, while the Turkish state seems increasingly unwilling to recognise the genocide, the same cannot be said for Turkish civil society, which birthed such initiatives as a (albeit highly controversial) ‘apology campaign’ in 2009.83 Where the state maintains a rigid, ideological denial in the face of its national history, it would be incorrect to suggest that civil society universally and unquestioningly accepts this denial; on the contrary, oral history research shows that many people are aware of the events of the genocide, as recollections of (the perpetration of) these events have been passed down through generations. In the words of Uğur Ümit Üngör, “the Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.”84 Finally, we must reflect on how, not simply the genocide itself, but the pursuit of justice specifically has echoed through time and space and influenced our world. The Armenian Genocide happened at a time when no framework existed through which such traumatic events could be processed, and for the first few decades after it, the survivors had to find their own justice. What they did not yet know was that this would contribute to the creation of a conception of justice that would be considered normal a full century later. When through Operation Nemesis, Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated one of the men deemed most responsible for the genocide, Raphael Lemkin, who had been troubled by the massacres of the Armenians when he first heard of them several years prior, was already puzzled at the fact that no mechanism existed to punish large-scale, systematic violence. Having followed Tehlirian’s trial, he reflected later that “as a lawyer, I thought that a crime should not be punished by the victims but should be punished by a court, by international law.”85 Lemkin’s interest in and concern over the fate of the Armenians contributed to the creation of the word ‘genocide’ itself, as well as the international legal framework for the punishment of the crime. Ironic as it is, therefore, that the events that

83 Ayda Erbal, “Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the “Apology” of Turkish Intellectuals,” in Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Birgit Schwelling (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 51-94. 84 Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Lost in Commemoration: The Armenian Genocide in Memory and Identity,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 2 (2014): 157. 85 Raphael Lemkin, interview with Quincy Howe, February 13, 1949, CBS Television in conjunction with the United Nations, DVD entitled, The United Nations Casebook, Chapter 21: Genocide, as cited in Peter Balakian, “Raphael Lemkin, Cultural Destruction, and the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 59. 29 inspired the creator of the word ‘genocide’ are not recognised as genocide by the perpetrators over a century later, the survivors’ struggle for justice has nonetheless certainly not been in vain.

30

Chapter 2: The Armenian Revolutionary Federation

Despite the organisation’s significance to the history of modern-day Armenia and the Armenian diaspora, it is surprisingly challenging to reconstruct a full history of the ARF and its ideology. Because the ARF was banned in the USSR, works written at that time generally portray the party as defending the interests of a national bourgeoisie.86 In 1951, for example, one A. Elchibekyan wrote, about the Dashnaks’ brief attempt at an alliance with Kemalist Turkey in resistance against the ’ advance on the First Armenian Republic in 1920, that the ARF “did not hesitate to sell out the Armenian people to its centuries-old enslaver, only to suppress the revolutionary movement in the country and to keep its dominance.”87 One L. A. Khurshudyan wrote an ideological analysis in 1970 that defended Lenin’s characterisation of the ARF as “petty bourgeois socialists”.88 Later scholarship is also not always informative: while much has been written about the early history of the ARF,89 scholarship covering the organisation’s activities during and after World War II is limited and often partisan, much of it coming from authors known for their denial of the Armenian Genocide. According to notorious denialist historian Mehmet Perincek, for example, the ARF’s youth organisation “was founded on the basis of Hitlerjugend ideology and produced racism propaganda”, and the collaboration of several prominent ARF members with the Nazis during WWII was inherently linked to the organisation’s racist ideology.90 Sometimes, the available literature even describes the same events in radically different terms, presenting widely disparate interpretations of history. Regarding Nazi-Dashnak collaboration, some have claimed that the Dashnaks selflessly

86 Razmik S. Oganisian, “Формирование политической доктрины партии “Дашнакцутюн” в 1890-1920 гг. [The Formation of the Political Doctrine of the Dashnaktsutyun Party 1890-1920],” Vestnik Moskovsogo Universiteta 12, no. 1 (2011): 115. 87 A. Elchibekyan, “Материалы к истории турецко-дашнакских отношений в конце 1920 и начале 1921 гг. [Materials for the History of Turko-Dashnak Relations in late 1920-early 1921],” Izvestiya Akademii Nauk Armyanskoj SSR no. 9 (1951): 62. 88 L. A. Khurshudyan, “К вопросу о ленинской оценке социальной сущности партии Дашнакцутюн [On the Question of Leninist Assessment of the Social Essence of the Dashnaktsutyun Party],” Vestnik obshhestvennyx nauk no. 4 (1970): 13. 89 See: Dikran Kaligian, Armenian Organization and Ideology Under Ottoman Rule: 1908-1914 (New York: Routledge, 2017), Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties Through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1963), Anaide Ter Minassian, Nationalism and Socialism in the Armenian Revolutionary Movement, trans. A. M. Berrett (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Zoryan Institute, 1984). 90 Mehmet Perinçek, “Nazi-Dashnak Collaboration during World War II,” in Turkish-Russian Academics: A Historical Study on the Caucasus, ed. Center for Eurasian Studies (: Terazi Publishing, 2016), 204. 31 struggled to free Armenian prisoners of war, while others claim that the Dashnaks led the Armenische Legion, a unit within the German army, contributing directly to the Nazis’ military efforts. What is left unsaid is that while these assertions are seemingly contradictory, this contradiction is superficial: the Dashnaks freed POWs by recruiting them to the Legion, from where many soldiers defected back to the USSR as soon as the opportunity presented itself.91 Notwithstanding these challenges, it is crucial to understand how the Dashnaktsutyun has worked and how its ideology developed throughout history, in order to assess its perspective on justice for the Armenian Genocide. To this end, this chapter attempts to present a historical overview of the activities of the ARF, leading up to this day. This chapter also covers the ARF’s ideological development and expression. The final section of this chapter will touch on the ARF’s perspective on justice. The challenge of understanding the organisation’s ideology will be addressed using entirely new sources: interviews conducted with active members of the ARF between the ages of 25 and 35. Despite being part of the fourth generation since the Armenian Genocide and having spent the overwhelming majority of their lives in the Netherlands, these young people feel a strong connection to the Armenian cause. This makes them particularly interesting representatives of the ARF, as it shows that the organisation’s ideology has survived for more than a century, across generations of Armenians living in diaspora, and continues to resonate with young people who intend to pass it on to future generations. The picture that emerges is of a decentralised organisation that, despite never having changed its stated goals since its founding, has shifted in structure and modus operandi depending on the geographical and temporal context. However, the strength of the identification of its members with the organisation across time and borders appears to be unwavering, even considering the wide variety of ways in which the ARF has functioned. Therefore, although the activity of the ARF in, for example, the United States differs widely from, say, , and sometimes even within the same country from chapter to chapter, there are some interesting parallels in these chapters’ histories, presumably due to their shared pursuit of the same goal: justice for the Armenian people. This justice is defined as the creation of a United Armenia; however, as I will discuss in the chapter following this one, this goal is not as straightforward as it may seem.

91 Harutyun Marutian, “Как помнят Великую Отечественную в Армении: некоторые наблюдения [How the Great Patriotic War is remembered in Armenia: Several Observations],” Plural 4, no. 2 (2016): 100; Eduard Abramian, Кавказцы в Абвере [Caucasians in the Abwehr], (Moscow: Yauza, 2006), 33-34. 32

History The Armenian Revolutionary Federation was founded in in 1890 as a federation of several revolutionary organisations aimed at the emancipation of Armenians in the Ottoman, Russian, and Persian Empires. It is one of three political parties that represented Armenians in the diaspora, besides the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party (Hunchaks) and the Armenian Democratic Liberal or Ramkavar Party. Of these three, in the diaspora, the ARF always was and currently remains the most prominent. As early as 1907, the party counted a staggering 167,000 members.92 Since the party’s founding in 1890, its members were part of the political and social elite of Armenian society.93 It currently holds seats in the parliaments of Lebanon and the (Nagorno-Karabakh). The ARF’s modus operandi often shifted with the times. For example, in the early 20th century, many nationalists across the Ottoman Empire were organising in paramilitary formations. Influenced by its warm ties with nationalist movements in the Balkans, in 1906, the ARF established a military academy in Bulgaria, where it had connections with other active nationalists, with the intention to train cadets to assume leadership positions in the organisation’s hierarchy.94 This willingness to take up arms is significant, as it constituted a rejection of the Ottoman Empire’s established order, which legally prohibited non-Muslims from carrying arms.95 Although this academy was clandestine and short-lived, having existed only for one academic year starting in 1906, its establishment must be seen as the earliest attempt at military institutionalisation undertaken by the ARF. In addition, many of the cadets trained at the academy went on to assume prominent positions within the party and to fight in conflicts abroad,

92 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 116. 93 Aleksei V. Antoshin, “Политическая элита Восточной Армении в годы Первой мировой войны: путь на Голгофу [The Political Elite of in the Years of the First World War: the Path to Golgotha],” 100- летие Геноцида Армян в Османской империи: уроки истории. Сборник статей по материалам международной научно-практической конференции 20 апреля 2015 г. в Уральском федеральном университете (РФ) [Centenary of the Genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: lessons from history. A collection of articles based on the materials of an international scientific-practical conference on the 20th of April 2015 at the Ural Federal University], (Erevan: EGU, 2016): 39. 94 Varak Ketsemanian, “Straddling Two Empires: Cross-Revolutionary Fertilization and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation's Military Academy in 1906–07,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4, no. 2 (2017): 339-363. 95 Gerard J. Libaridian, “What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties in the Ottoman Empire?” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99. 33 such as the Persian Constitutional Revolution, thus spreading the ideology and influence of the ARF beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire.96 The ARF made its parliamentary debut in the Ottoman Empire. During this time, the party’s agenda was mostly focused on reforming the Ottoman political and legal system, under which the empire’s citizens did not have equal rights.97 To this end, having seats in the Ottoman parliament, around 1907, the ARF built ties with the rest of the opposition, specifically the organisations Union and Progress, which would later unite and become the Committee of Union and Progress (also known as the ). However, when the CUP came to power in 1908, they embraced the nationalist ideology of Pan-Turkism, which aimed to unite all Turkic peoples in one great state, to the exclusion of non-Turkic minorities. This ideology was fundamentally at odds with that of the ARF, and therefore, by 1912, the ARF formally withdrew its support and cooperation from the CUP.98 This would lead to the ultimate outlawing of the ARF in the Ottoman Empire. The organisation still retained a degree of influence, however, to the extent that its choices at the dawn of the First World War were heavily monitored both by the Ottoman Empire and the . At this time, the ARF was divided on the question of whom to side with. The Eastern Bureau, active in the Russian Empire, proposed that the ARF should support the Russian advance by organising volunteer units in the Russian Empire. The Western Bureau, active in the Ottoman Empire, asserted that the ARF should maintain strict neutrality unless the safety of Ottoman Armenians came under direct threat.99 Ultimately, the organisation called on all Armenians to “fulfil their civic duty” and defend their states. This meant that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were encouraged to serve in the Ottoman military, and those living in the Russian Empire were to serve in the Russian military. Neither the Russians nor the Ottomans were satisfied with this development, as both sides wanted the Armenians living across the border to cross lines.100 It was at this time that the Armenian Genocide took place. The genocide naturally had an effect on the activities of the ARF. Among the intellectuals arrested in Istanbul on April 24th,

96 Ketsemanian, “Straddling Two Empires,” 339-363. 97 Libaridian, “Armenian Revolutionary Parties,” 91. 98 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 116. 99 Toygun Altintas, “Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF),” in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, eds. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, 2018-06-21. 100 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 117. 34

1915, many were members or allies of the ARF. The ARF subsequently set up initiatives for resistance and protection. By the time the Ottomans began to advance on the significant Armenian minority in 1914-1915, the Eastern Bureau of the ARF organised armed volunteer forces that allied with the Russian army in order to defend the Armenian civilian population.101 Besides these volunteer forces, which carried out offensives as well, the ARF notably coordinated the defence of the city Van in late April of 1915. The Armenians sequestered two quarters of the city and managed to hold off the Ottoman forces until mid-May, when Russian forces took the city and appointed ARF leader acting governor. ARF leadership of Van was brief, however, as Ottoman forces retook the city in July of that year and most of the city’s Armenians were consequently killed or exiled.102 After the Armenian Genocide left most of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire dead or expelled, the ARF, seen as a legitimate representative of the Armenians, was the party that negotiated the inclusion of clauses on the Armenian question in the treaty of Sèvres between the Allies and the Entente in 1920.103 This can be seen as the birth of the demand for an independent state and the modern concept of United Armenia, which will be explored further below. In the spirit of uniting Armenians in their homeland after the genocide, during this period, the ARF directed its attention to . Here, the first Republic of Armenia, founded and led by ARF members, was established in 1918. The First Republic cannot be seen separately from the ARF, as the organisation had a profound effect on every facet of the republic’s creation and function, thanks to its near-total control of the parliament and bureaucracy.104 This republic was short-lived, as it was brought under Soviet control by late 1920. Despite the fact that the ARF managed to fend off a local Bolshevik uprising in May 1920, it was powerless against the force of the Red Army, which advanced from the already Sovietised in December. In an attempt to regain power, the ARF tried to agree to peace with the new Turkish government under Mustafa Kemal, but the latter reneged on this agreement by trying to capture more Armenian territories, until the Turkish forces were stopped by the Red Army. After this, the ARF retreated to Zangezur, where they staged an (unsuccessful) uprising in 1921. From that time, the ARF was

101 Ibid., 117. 102 Altintas, “ARF.” 103 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 118. 104 Antoshin, “Political Elite,” 40. 35 outlawed in the Soviet Union.105 Subsequently, in the late 1940s, during the time when the USSR encouraged ‘repatriation’ to Soviet Armenia in diasporic Armenian communities, tens of thousands of repatriating Armenians were accused of being Dashnaks and sent to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan.106 The ARF’s attitude toward the Soviet Union was complicated. In the early 1920s, a rift emerged within the party on the question of whether to support or oppose the Bolsheviks. The Dashnak former Prime Minister of the First Republic, Hovannes Katchaznouni, presented a report at an international ARF convention in 1923 wherein he proposed support. This report was extremely critical of the organisation, relaying that the parliamentary democracy of the First Republic was, in fact, a veiled dictatorship of the Dashnak party. Katchaznouni continues to criticise the ineffectiveness of Dashnak functionaries, including himself. At the same time, summing up the condition of the Armenian Cause of the time, he states that “[the] Bolsheviks are necessary in Armenia under the present political conditions and there is no other force that could take their place.” He continues, however, to deliberate: “Nevertheless, the Bolshevik system in its entirety is not acceptable for us. But what can we do? Perhaps, fight it from without?”107 Katchaznouni concluded his report by calling for the dissolution of the party forthwith. This did not come to fruition. Nonetheless, his proposed stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, i.e. the rejection of Soviet Communism, pragmatic acceptance of the existence of the regime, and resistance to the regime from outside, can be seen as symptomatic of the ARF’s stance toward the USSR through the rest of the 20th century. As a result of the organisation’s outlawing in its ancestral homelands, much of the subsequent history of the ARF took place outside of the Caucasus. For a while, it had some notoriety in the United States due to its involvement in the assassination of Archbishop Leon Tourian, the primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the US, in New York in 1933. Tourian had refused to speak at an event as long as the Armenian tricolour flag, which at that time was prohibited in the USSR, was raised on the podium. His refusal was

105 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 118. 106 Natalia N. Ablazhey, С чужбины на чужбину... Армянские иммигранты в алтайской ссылке (1949-1958 гг) [From One Foreign Land to Another: Armenian Immigrants in Exile in Altay (1949-1958)] (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2018), 8. 107 Hovannes Katchaznouni, “The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnagtzoutiun) Has Nothing To Do Anymore: The Manifesto of Hovannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic,” trans. Matthew A. Callender, ed. John Roy Carlson (Arthur A. Derounian), (New York: Armenian Information Service, 1955): 13. 36 perceived as a grave insult by ARF members and sympathisers, who viewed the flag itself as an embodiment of the land they had lost. Several months later, during a church service, he was attacked and murdered by members of the ARF. Although the ARF maintains that they had nothing to do with the murder and it was legally exonerated from direct complicity in it, this event alienated many unaffiliated Armenians from the organisation. This incident widened the split between American Armenians along the lines of political affiliation, confirming the divide between the ARF on one hand and the Hunchaks and Ramkavars on the other.108 During World War II, the organisation’s activities continued to be controversial. Several prominent ARF members, most notably Drastamat “Dro” Kanayan and , who had roles in the leadership of the First Republic, the anti-Soviet uprising in Zangezur, as well as the establishment of the Armenian Youth Federation (AYF), also collaborated with the Germans during WWII.109 This is one of the periods in ARF history that are most difficult to analyse, because many discussions of the topic are clearly partisan to the point of misrepresentation of the available information. As previously stated, some have tried to paint the ARF’s nationalist ideology as racist, antisemitic, and sympathetic to the Nazis. However, it has also been argued, among others by historian Yair Auron, that these ARF members collaborated not out of sympathy for fascism, but out of the hope that following an Axis victory the Germans would permit the establishment of an independent Armenian state.110 In addition, arguably, the choice to collaborate reflected the ARF’s anti-Soviet stance. The earlier mentioned discussion on how – and whether at all – to commemorate Dro and Nzhdeh is ongoing, and the issue is divisive both in the diaspora and in the Republic.111 For the ARF, these figures have remained heroes due to their activity before the war and the founding of the AYF, and many chapters of the AYF are named after them. After the Second World War, the ARF further consolidated its status as an important political actor in the diaspora. In Lebanon, for example, the organisation was a key player in one of the biggest instances of inter-community violence among Lebanese Armenians in the late

108 Ben Alexander, “Contested Memories, Divided Diaspora: , the Thousand-day Republic, and the Polarized Response to an Archbishop's Murder,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no. 1 (2007): 32-59. 109 David Arakelyan, “Karekin Njdeh: A Biographical Sketch,” , December 21, 2015, http://asbarez.com/143441/karekin-njdeh-a-biographical-sketch/#_ftn97 110 Yair Auron, The Banality of Denial: and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 261-263. 111 Jeremy Sharon, “Armenian Monument to Nazi Collaborator Draws Criticism,” The Post, June 17, 2016, https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Armenian-monument-to-Nazi-collaborator-draws-criticism- 457072#.V2T1A6tRAlo.facebook 37

1950s, when the ARF was involved in a power struggle with other diaspora parties surrounding the succession of the Catholicos of the Cilician See, an important religious figure.112 The ARF’s involvement in what seems like a strictly religious issue might appear surprising, as the political organisations in the diaspora were formally non-religious. However, the integration of religion and religious institutions in the fabric of Armenian diasporic communities cannot be understated, and even in its programme, the ARF acknowledges the role of the church in safeguarding Armenian national character.113 Following this incident, however, it is important to note that neither the ARF nor the other Armenian political parties focused solely on the representation of Armenian interests in Lebanon; on the contrary, these parties, indeed the entire Armenian population of the country, integrated into Lebanese society and have contributed to the country’s political, social, and cultural scenes in many ways.114 Having established itself in the diaspora, the ARF was ultimately able to re-establish itself in the Caucasus as well in the 1990s as a result of the recent developments in the region. By the late 1980s, the USSR was experiencing internal turmoil that would ultimately result in its dissolution. On one hand, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict erupted in 1988, when the soviet (council) of the autonomous region, which is situated within the borders of Azerbaijan but has a majority-Armenian population, voted to join Armenia. This sparked a violent response from Azerbaijan, and by 1992, the situation had escalated into war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.115 The ARF, seeing Nagorno-Karabakh as part of the Armenian homeland, has included advocacy for the right to self-determination of the inhabitants of the region into its activities.116 In addition to this, the Republics of the USSR, including Armenia, were beginning

112 In 1952, the Catholicos of the Cilician See passed away in Lebanon. The National Ecclesiastical Assembly, an organ under considerable influence from the ARF, elected a successor, Bishop Zareh of Aleppo. The legitimacy of this successor was undermined by a coalition of (tacitly) Soviet-supported anti-ARF parties, including the Hunchaks and Ramkavars. As a consequence, the Catholicos of All Armenians, the highest spiritual leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church based in Echmiadzin, refused to recognise the election of Bishop Zareh. Despite this, the bishop was officially consecrated Catholicos of the Cilician See in 1956. This confirmation polarised Armenian diaspora communities worldwide, but particularly in Lebanon, where the polarisation even led to inter-community violence in the context of the political crisis in 1958. R. Hrair Dekmejian, “The Armenian Diaspora,” in The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, Volume II: Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1997), 418-419. 113 Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Program, Tiflis: 1890. 114 Tsolin Nalbantian, “: Becoming Local in the Levant,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50 (2018): 773-777. 115 Lionel Beehner, “Nagorno-Karabakh: The Crisis in the Caucasus,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 3, 2005, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/nagorno-karabakh-crisis-caucasus 116 David Galstyan, “The Positions of Political Parties in Armenia on the Resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict and Turkey-Armenia Relations,” Caucasus Edition: Journal of Conflict Transformation (2017): 15. 38 to demand independence from the Soviet Union. Ironically, the ARF, despite having vocally advocated for this independence for seventy years, issued a declaration in 1988 urging Armenia not to secede from the USSR, fearing that secession could place the under threat from Turkey. Soon afterwards, however, they reversed this stance and backed independence.117 Following Armenian independence, the other diaspora parties, the Ramkavars and Hunchaks, were generally supportive of the new president, Levon Ter-Petrosian. The ARF, however, very much was not. In particular, Ter-Petrosian and the ARF differed on those questions that for the ARF were fundamental ideological concerns: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian Genocide. The ARF demanded either unification with Nagorno-Karabakh or formal recognition of the independent Republic of Artsakh. In addition, the ARF linked this issue of national ‘unification’ to that of recognition of and restitution for the Armenian Genocide, underscoring the connection between Turkish and Azerbaijani control of lands it saw as rightfully Armenian. Ter-Petrosian, on the other hand, considered safeguarding the security of the state to be the primary task at hand, and called on the diaspora to subdue their demands for compensation for the genocide, seeing these demands as potentially damaging to Armenia’s international position.118 When in December of 1994 this tension reached a boiling point, Ter-Petrosian issued a decree by which the ARF was prohibited for several years until 1999 in the young Republic of Armenia.119 By 1999, however, they were elected into parliament once more after having had their legitimacy reinstated by the new president, Robert Kocharian.120 Since that time, the ARF has participated in parliamentary politics in the Republic of Armenia, Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh, and Lebanon. In the Republic of Armenia, it has traditionally been critically supportive of the Republican Party, which was the country’s ruling party until 2018, when massive peaceful protests led to the fall of the government in an event referred to as the Velvet Revolution. When protests erupted against the Republican Party and its leader, prime minister , the ARF pulled out of the ruling coalition and sided with

117 Simon Payaslian, The : From the Origins to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 192-193. 118 Payaslian, History of Armenia, 203-209. 119 Gaïdz Minassian, “L'Internationale socialiste et les partis socialistes exilés du bloc communiste: le cas de la Fédération révolutionnaire arménienne Dachnaktsoutioun [The Socialist International and the Socialist Parties Exiled from the Communist Bloc: the Case of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutyun],” Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest 32, no. 3 (2001): 122. 120 Payaslian, History of Armenia, 225. 39 the opposition’s demand for the prime minister’s resignation.121 At the following parliamentary elections, in December of 2018, the ARF did not get enough votes to surpass the 5% threshold, as a result of which it has been relegated to the extra-parliamentary opposition.122 In the parliament of the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, the ARF won 3 seats in the last parliamentary elections in March of 2020.123 In the Lebanese parliament, following the elections in May 2018, the ARF holds three seats as allies of the Free Patriotic Movement.124 Because of the fact that the ARF currently does not have parliamentary influence in the Republic of Armenia, but it does continue its activity outside the parliament and abroad, presently, the organisation’s strong ties with international organisations and its influence within the diaspora form its main political capital.125

Ideology In order to understand any organisation’s perspective on any issue, it is important to understand its traditions and guiding principles. This is all the more the case for a political organisation like the ARF, which has a long history of activism in countries all around the globe. The following section relies on interviews with young Netherlands-based Dashnaks to contextualise existing literature on the topic within the organisation’s present-day activities. I spoke to three young ARF members: Sepouh Abrahamian, Armine Makarian, and Pargev Nazarian. All three were born abroad, but have spent most of their childhood and adult lives in the Netherlands. Sepouh, living in Almere at the time of the interview, was born in Iran to a

121 “Pashinian Claims Armenian Ruling Party Defections, Warns PM,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, April 25, 2018: https://www.rferl.org/a/armenian-opposition-leader-pashinian-calls-for-renewed-protests-after-negotiation- karapetian-cancelled-hhk/29190858.html ; “ARF Signs ‘Political Cooperation’ Agreement With Government,” Asbarez, February 24, 2016, http://asbarez.com/146510/arf-signs-political-cooperation-agreement-with- government/. 122 “CEC announces final results of early parliamentary elections,” News.am, December 16, 2018, https://news.am/eng/news/486541.html 123 Peter Stano and Adam Kaznowski, “Nagorno-Karabakh: Statement by the Spokesperson on the so-called presidential and parliamentary elections,” European External Action Service, 200331_8, March 31, 2020, https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/76801/nagorno-karabakh-statement-spokesperson-so- called-presidential-and-parliamentary-elections_en ; “Factions,” Official Website of the National Assembly of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), May 21, 2020, http://www.nankr.am/en/6 . 124 Georgi Azar, “Breakdown of Lebanon’s New Parliament,” An-Nahar, May 9, 2018, https://en.annahar.com/article/801537-breakdown-of-lebanons-upcoming-parliament, but see also: Ara Sanjian, “Armenians and the 2000 Parliamentary Elections in Lebanon,” Armenian News Network/Groong, 2000, http://groong.usc.edu/ro/ro-20000907.html 125 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 119. 40 family that had ties with the ARF, but, in his own words, “it was not necessarily passed on in the family.” Armine, from Dordrecht, was born in Armenia to Iranian-born parents, and was involved in the founding of the Dutch department of the ARF’s youth organisation, the Armenian Youth Federation. Her interest in the ARF developed partly as a result of stories, passed on by her grandmother, of her great-grandfather, who had allegedly been a member of the ARF and fought alongside the Dashnaks’ heroes. Pargev, from Almelo, was born in , where his family was close with the ARF, which he told me was not allowed to function as a political organisation and worked more towards the preservation of the Armenian community’s identity and culture. The interviews were conducted individually and followed a loose, conversational structure, following a set of topics rather than specifically prepared questions. This way, it became possible to allow each of my interlocutors to tell me what they themselves found most important about the topics they were presented with. As a result, what emerges from these conversations is a picture of a generally coherent ideology, albeit with individual variations based on the young Dashnaks’ personalities and worldviews. The ARF is not and has never been a monolithic, unchanging organisation. Although the organisation’s goals have remained the same since 1890, its agenda and methods have shifted throughout its existence. This is partly due to the long history of the organisation, combined with its worldwide activity. According to Gaïdz Minassian, one of the leading experts on the ARF, the ARF is the only party that has survived Tsarism, Soviet Communism, and post-Communist anti- ARF policies, and yet is still active.126 These factors – longevity and geographical spread – are augmented by the organisation’s strict adherence to the principle of decentralisation. Upon the birth of the ARF, its founders insisted that it should be decentralised, believing that this would give its revolutionaries all the space they needed to conduct their activities effectively and in liberty.127 “It’s hard to think of reading material to suggest to you, because every region has different strategies and sometimes even different interpretations of the Armenian Question,” Sepouh told me when asked if there were any documents he recommended reading in preparation for this research. “In , activists routinely chant ‘Turkey - murderer!’ at protests, whereas here, there’s been discussion on whether that’s appropriate for a long time now - even though the ARF officially considers Turkey to be a genocidal recidivist.”128 In other words, this

126 Minassian, “L'Internationale socialiste,” 128. 127 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 116. 128 Sepouh Abrahamian, personal Whatsapp message to author, November 11th, 2019. 41 decentralisation affects the organisation’s functioning on many levels, from the documentation of the entire organisation’s history to the minutiae of appropriate behaviour at protests. The ARF’s programme, however, remains its central guiding text. The programme that the ARF has followed since 1892 lists the organisation’s goals as follows: A. The creation of a Free, Independent, and United Armenia. The borders of United Armenia shall include all territories designated as Armenia by the Treaty of Sèvres as well as the regions of Artzakh, Javakhk, and Nakhichevan. B. International condemnation of the as yet unpunished Genocide committed by Turkey against the Armenians, return of the occupied lands, and just reparations to the Armenian nation. C. The gathering of worldwide expatriate Armenians on the lands of United Armenia. D. Strengthening Armenia’s statehood, institutionalization of democracy and the rule of law, securing the people’s economic well being, and establishment of social justice.129 On close analysis of the programme of the ARF, it is possible to formulate several observations about how the ARF as an institution views the Armenian Cause. Before the Armenian Genocide, the organisation was sufficiently flexible as to be amenable to the idea of reforming the Ottoman state and receiving greater autonomy for Armenians, rather than the creation of an own nation-state per se.130 However, since the 1920s, the ARF has considered the creation of a united, independent nation-state for the Armenian people as the resolution of the Armenian Question. In the eyes of the ARF, the resolution of the Armenian Question has become synonymous with justice for the genocide. Moreover, according to the ARF, the question is still evolving because the genocide is, in fact, continuing, through the denial of the Armenian Genocide as well as the erasure of Armenian history and culture.131 An important point to take into account here is that the contemporary perpetrators, in the understanding of the ARF, include not only the Republic of Turkey, but also the Republic of Azerbaijan. From this perspective, Azerbaijan’s ownership of Nakhichevan and (de iure) Nagorno-Karabakh and its and Turkey’s erasure of the Armenian cultural legacy in those places constitute an essential part of the ongoing

129 Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Program. 130 Libaridian, “Armenian Revolutionary Parties,” 104. 131 Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Program. 42 genocide - the so-called ‘white genocide’, or continuation of the destruction of the Armenian nation through non-violent means.132 This concept was not unfamiliar to me prior to the writing of this research, nor is it unique to the ARF’s conception of the Armenian Question: I first encountered it at the kitchen table of a friend’s grandmother in Yerevan, where it was explained to me when I responded with surprise at hearing the phrase “white genocide”. The young ARF members I spoke with also referred to it frequently. Sepouh named it as the most concrete way that the Armenian Genocide had affected him. The reason I am here, indirectly, is the genocide. Coming from Iran, it’s hard to return to Armenia - it’s not your first choice. When we left Iran, in the 90s, Armenia simply wasn’t an option because of the terrible economic situation. So we came here. This is a part of the ‘white genocide’ that has been suppressing Armenian culture and identity. I speak Armenian pretty badly, for example. If Armenia were a good country, I would have gone there and I could have kept my identity with no trouble. It’s hard to understand for some people, but I live with it every day - particularly now that I have children.133 Sepouh also links the concept to Armenia’s current geopolitical situation. “Turkey openly supports the Azeris. They demonise Armenians in the exact same way. Turks and Azeris are raised to regard Armenians in the same way - as scum. And they also attack Armenian identity outside of their countries, in the diaspora.” Armine also brings up the conflict with Azerbaijan: “The genocide is still ongoing. They’re still doing it, in Artsakh. It’s not exactly the same, of course, but the adversary is the same.”134 Pargev, meanwhile, stresses Turkey’s denial of the genocide and refusal to come to terms with its own history as a dimension of ‘white genocide’: “The Turkish government can’t change what happened over a century ago. But if they don’t do anything now, then they are guilty of genocide now, because they are still contributing to the loss of a national identity. If they recognise it and start returning things, that will stop the process they once started.”135

132 Galstyan, “Political Parties,” 15-16. This usage of the term “white genocide” is not to be confused with its usage by white supremacists. 133 Interview with Sepouh Abrahamian, Amsterdam, December 11, 2019. 134 Interview with Armine Makarian, Dordrecht, December 24, 2019. 135 Interview with Pargev Nazarian, Utrecht, January 14, 2020. 43

As a result, the preservation of Armenian identity is crucial to the ARF as part and parcel of the process of justice for the genocide. This perceived connection between justice and the preservation of national identity is sufficiently essential to warrant more detailed discussion in the following chapter. To the end of its mission to preserve Armenian identity, according to the ARF’s official programme, the party describes itself as “essentially… socialist, democratic, and revolutionary”.136 What exactly this means is not self-evident. From its founding, the ARF has had strong ties with other socialist organisations through every iteration of the Socialist International that has existed so far. Evidently, the organisation’s self-identification as “socialist” is an essential part of its identity. Pargev tells me about the ideological appeal of the ARF: “At a certain point, as you get older, you make a choice. Socialism, capitalism, liberalism? If you choose the socialist direction, then this is the only party that also works for the preservation of Armenian identity and recognition for the genocide. That combination was important to me.”137 “Embracing my Armenian identity led to the desire to do more. In my nature, I am left-wing, I’m a little wild, and then this kind of thing is a great fit. For some people, that’s not the case, so they go do something else,”138 Sepouh explains when asked about the meaning of the ARF to his own identity. Armine also names and social justice as the organisation’s defining characteristics: Of course, there’s the interests of Armenians in the diaspora, and the demands we have for Turkey and the international community. But they also have goals in Armenia that are important to me personally, like social justice, social equality, things that are important in Armenia that we don’t really notice in the Netherlands. So social justice and democracy are some of the most important things to me. You don’t have to be a member if you’re only interested in culture.139 She elaborates, linking the organisation’s ideology to its differentiation from other organisations: In Armenia you have many political parties that suddenly become very important, and then disappear again. And if you look at what their goals are, it seems as if

136 Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Program. 137 Pargev, January 2020. 138 Sepouh, December 2019. 139 Armine, December 2019. 44

they’re only saying those things to win elections, and next time they’ll be saying something different. There’s no ideology there. The Dashnaks have had the same ideology ever since their founding, with some small exceptions; even after more than a century. I think that’s beautiful. Sometimes we can disagree on things, but we still have the same ideology. In the youth organisation, you see that people who don’t relate to the ideology leave pretty quickly. But the people who stay have the same goals.140 This identification is not universal, however, and the leftism of the ARF has been called into question more than once; Tsolin Nalbantian refers to the (Lebanese) Dashnak party as “rightist [and] nationalist”, which, considering their participation in Lebanese politics, can be considered a fair assessment.141 Similarly, in conversation with a non-ARF Armenian activist within the youth organisation of the Socialist International, I was told that the ARF currently is more concerned with nationalist issues than more traditional leftist questions, such as class and equality.142 Armine vehemently denies this reproach. In Armenia, topics like women’s and LGBTQ rights are absolutely on our agenda. In the Netherlands, there’s not much to be done on those topics, because those issues have already been solved here. And there, if you ask yourself: what’s more important, social justice or that [i.e. women’s and LGBTQ rights]? I would say, you’d have to fix that first, and then the rest. In the Netherlands, it’s already good. So I think that outside of Armenia we should spend more time on the genocide, on Artsakh, those kinds of things, because that’s the vulnerable group that nobody is advocating for. That’s the reason we spend more time on this. It doesn’t mean we don’t agree with those issues, it’s just that in Armenia they should be handled based on priority. But if we don’t advocate for Armenians, nobody will.143 Thus, the prioritisation of the Armenian Cause over other common leftist issues such as emancipation is seen as justified, as it has been traditionally. Another example of this prioritisation is that although at the time of its founding, the ARF became a member of the Socialist International, it rejected and continues to reject the notion of class warfare within

140 Ibid. 141 Nalbantian, “Becoming Local,” 774. 142 G. G., personal conversation with author, Berlin, October 17th, 2019. 143 Armine, December 2019. 45

Armenian society. It argues that its end goal is the liberation of the Armenian people; that rich and poor Armenians are both oppressed and thus constitute one class, and that class warfare could only work to the detriment of their collective emancipation.144 In this sense, Dashnak ideology constitutes an assimilation of socialist and democratic thought into a nationalist cause.145 In order to contextualise the ideology of the ARF, it is helpful to view it from the perspective proposed by Minassian, who claims that the organisation has swayed between “socialism of conviction” and “socialism of circumstance” throughout its history. This means that in its actions, the ARF has been and continues to be guided by socialist ideology, but also that this ideology is sometimes adhered to ‘genuinely’, out of principle or persuasion, and sometimes ‘disingenuously’, i.e. out of convenience.146 According to Minassian, these two socialisms form a division within the ARF between two general schools of thought. The first (“conviction”) is considered more leftist and rooted in anti-imperialism, internationalism, and international solidarity. This faction believes that only cooperation with leftist movements and parties can lead to national liberation. The other faction (“circumstance”) is considered more conservative, not eschewing cooperation with more rightist organisations if they are seen as friendly to the Armenian cause.147 The organisation has been known to lean to one side or the other throughout its history. For example, when Hrayr Maroukhian, who was a convinced socialist and had led the party for 25 years, suffered a brain aneurysm and the ARF came under new leadership in the 1990s, the organisation’s ideological expression also shifted from Maroukhian’s “socialism of conviction” to a “socialism of circumstance”. This coincided with the discussions on the direction of the young Republic of Armenia and the question of Nagorno-Karabakh. On these topics, the party remained divided: those Dashnaks living in the Western diaspora were supportive of the young post-Soviet state and did not denounce its liberal economic policies, whereas Dashnaks in the Caucasus and the Middle East refused the authority of the new president, Levon Ter-Petrosian, and preferred more leftist economic policy. At the same time, while European and Latin American Dashnaks tended to support progressive political movements, Middle-Eastern and

144 Oganisian, “Формирование,” 116; Libaridian, “Armenian Revolutionary Parties,” 95. 145 Minassian, “L'Internationale socialiste,” 109. 146 Ibid, 108-109. 147 Ibid, 110. 46

Russian Dashnaks established and maintained warm ties with right-wing political organisations and figures, such as Rafic Hariri in Lebanon and ultra-nationalist, conservative Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia, who espouses explicit anti-Turkish views.148 Once again, in the reconciliation of these internal ideological contradictions, we see the Dashnaktsutyun’s dynamics of decentralisation at work. While the young Dashnaks I spoke to independently agreed that the ARF’s socialism specifically appealed to them, their perspectives on what exactly ‘socialism’ entailed differed somewhat. Sepouh was a long-time active member of the Dutch social democratic Labour Party, and confidently called himself a leftist. Armine, meanwhile, recalled that experiencing politics in the Netherlands was what led her to join the ARF: The fact that the Netherlands is a democratic country, with social justice, with rule of law. Of course, there are things that could be better, but by and large, the reason I support these causes is because I’ve seen how well they work in the Netherlands. And I think it’s important that these causes are pursued in Armenia. The country needs to change, the mentality needs to change. Just sending aid is not going to address the core of the problem. Sometimes, I see things on the Dutch news, and I think, these are the things you worry about? Things are so good here, and that makes it all the more difficult to accept how things are in Armenia.149 However, Pargev’s testimony on the matter was the most notable: “It’s important to me that the ARF is a socialist and a patriotic organisation, because I think that a left-wing, progressive party is what’s best for Armenia. But that doesn’t mean that I think the same would be the case for any other country. Here, I’m not a Socialist Party voter, nor am I a Labour Party voter.” When faced with the question of whether he conceived of the ARF’s values as universal, he elaborated as follows: Socialism is a broad term. Things like human rights, democracy, equality, which are important parts of socialism, those things are universal. But whether economically speaking a country should be managed using socialist policy, can differ from country to country. In other countries, developed countries with a

148 Ibid, 122-125. 149 Armine, December 2019. 47

good economy, socialism probably wouldn’t be necessary. The government wouldn’t need to keep a short leash on the market. In Armenia, considering the state of the country, I think socialist economic policies are necessary.150 From this, it is clear that the ARF sees socialism not as purely an economic system for the redistribution of wealth and the means of production, but also as a vehicle for democracy, social justice, and national liberation. In this light, one of the defining features of the ARF’s ideology in the 20th century, namely its staunch opposition to Soviet Communism, becomes all the more notable. This was both a challenge and a benefit for the organisation. On one hand, after the Second World War, the ARF wanted to contribute to rebuilding a social democratic world by joining the Socialist International, but it was hindered by policies that precluded parties with origins in Soviet- administrated territories formally joining the worldwide organisation. The Socialist International’s diplomatic strategy tended to avoid openly anti-USSR attitudes such as those espoused by the ARF until the late 1980s.151 On the other hand, the ARF’s anti-Sovietism differentiated it from rivalling diaspora parties in a way that many sympathisers perceived as positive. “There has always been mutual hatred. The ARF was viewed as a big enemy by the communists in Armenia,” Sepouh explained. My father was a progressive guy, and he thought, I’m going to be naughty, I’m going to join the ARF. Because in those days it was really naughty to be a member of the ARF, because of communism. There were communists in Iran, too. It was really a conflict between the ARF and the communists. Not because of ideology, more like: ‘you’re a communist, so I hate you,’ and vice versa.152 In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the ARF used this opposition to communism and the USSR to present itself as a legitimate political representation of all diaspora Armenians. It must be noted, however, that this presented it with an ideological dilemma. The social- democratic Hunchaks’ defence of the USSR was consistent with their socialist ideology. The liberal Ramkavars insisted that they defended the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic out of patriotism. Therefore, the ARF was faced with the challenge of attuning its socialist ideology to that which was acceptable in the West, but could also justify its opposition to the Soviet

150 Pargev, January 2020. 151 Ibid, 106-107. 152 Sepouh, December 2019. 48

Union.153 This meant that the organisation functioned in a perpetual balancing act of sorts. However, one exception to the ARF’s general hostility to the USSR must be noted. Shortly after the end of WWII, the USSR briefly reopened the question of what to do with the Armenian provinces of Turkey by demanding the return of , Artvin, and . Although this claim was withdrawn after the death of in 1953, remarkably, this move united diaspora Armenians of all political affiliations in their support for this demand, including the ARF, who considered these provinces to be (partial) reparations for the genocide.154 The fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1965, when over 150.000 people marched in the streets of Yerevan demanding recognition of the genocide in spite of the government’s prohibition of the demonstration, was the point at which the Armenian Genocide evolved from being seen as a cultural or ethno-religious question, to a political one. This marks a shift in strategy for the ARF from calling for the liberation of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic from the USSR, to making international recognition of the genocide its primary stated objective. Going forward, although the organisation remained opposed to the Soviet Union, it did not see this opposition as a priority.155 This shift continued to develop in the following decades. In the 1970s, the rise of socialist movements in the Arab world served as an ideological inspiration for the majority of Dashnaks, who were Middle Eastern. At this time, the ARF aimed to unite all Armenians of the diaspora in the shared mission of recognition of the genocide. This completed the transformation of the ARF’s mission from the liberation of Soviet Armenia to the liberation of the Armenian provinces in modern-day Turkey. This was also the time when the phenomenon of Armenian terrorism surfaced. Although the ARF formally renounced terrorism in 1985, much is unclear about the exact relationship between the ARF and terrorist organisations, particularly the JCAG.156 Sepouh explained that information on the topic is difficult to come by, partly due to an absence of a paper trail, but also in at least some part due to internal secrecy: I could ask the highest chief of the ARF, and he probably wouldn’t know either. Some people might know something from hearsay, but there’s not likely to be anything in the archives. And there will probably have been people who were

153 Dekmejian, “The Armenian Diaspora,” 418. 154 Ibid, 416-417. 155 Minassian, “L'Internationale socialiste,” 113. 156 Ibid, 114-117. 49

members of both the ARF and the JCAG, for example. That’s no secret. But I will never know how exactly those ties developed. I think many people think there was a connection because the ARF was very well organised in the diaspora, and these organisations developed in the diaspora. I think that’s a logical thought. And I have asked about it. But people don’t talk about it. They’re very secretive. You don’t know if it might be because these people were their relatives, and they don’t want to talk about it. But it’s certain that the ARF haven’t always been darlings.157 From this discussion, we can conclude that leftism is an important part of the ARF’s self- identification, as well as of its appeal for diaspora Armenians. During the 20th century, the ARF was the only political organisation available to the diaspora that was (at least nominally) left- wing, but opposed to Soviet Communism. Until this day, the ARF combines its left-wing politics with advocacy for Armenian communities and nationalism. However, as I will argue, nationalism and advocacy for Armenian interests, albeit from a leftist perspective, has the upper hand in the organisation’s ideology. Although, as the young Dashnaks featured in this research have confidently and repeatedly affirmed, the ARF’s democratic and socialist values and its nationalism are inseparable and should be viewed as such, I argue that the organisation’s progressivism and leftism exist primarily to serve the national cause. Therefore, having covered the history and outlined the ideology of the Dashnaks in this chapter, it is crucial to proceed to analyse the ARF’s brand of .

157 Sepouh, December 2019. 50

Chapter 3: United Armenia, nationalism, and justice

The previous chapter has explored the Dashnaktsutyun’s development throughout its history as an ideological and material mainstay in Armenian communities around the world, and particularly in the diaspora. It has discussed how the ARF has advocated for Armenian communities in dispersion and worked to preserve their culture, seeing the perceived potential loss of Armenian identity as the continuation of the genocide. Consequently, in order to halt this ‘white genocide’, the ARF believes that the Armenian Question must be resolved. The answer to the Armenian Question, in the organisation’s view, is the creation of a socialist, democratic United Armenia. As this concept is central to the Dashnaktsutyun’s perspective on justice for the Armenian Genocide, it warrants further investigation. Therefore, this chapter will outline what United Armenia means to the ARF, probe the concept’s theoretical basis and its origins in 19th century nationalism, and deliberate how this concept relates to the concept of justice.

United Armenia At the core of the ARF’s ideology lies their demand for the creation of a Greater or United Armenia. This idea involves the ‘return’ of territories currently held by Turkey that used to constitute historic Armenia. “A free and independent united Armenia,” Sepouh called it. “Within a timespan of one and a half years all those people were chased out of their homes, in a place that, de facto, was Armenia for a while. Suddenly, it’s all gone. And why? Turkey annexes it in a blitzkrieg, and we lose possessions and land.”158 This demand, naturally, is not uncontroversial, considering the fact that it involves a state ceding a large part of its territory to another state outright. In the time following the genocide, this demand was no less controversial. The delegation of the First Republic and the delegation of the jointly presented their demands at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918 for a state which included the Caucasus republic, the seven Armenian vilayets (Van, Bitlis, Sivas, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, Harput, Trabzon), and . The previously mentioned First Republic Prime Minister Katchaznouni called this demand “imperial, amazing […] childish and foolish”, and claimed that

158 Sepouh, December 2019. 51 the reasons the ARF signed on to this demand in the first place were fully due to external pressure.159 My young interlocutors could not be any further from this assessment in their own perspectives on the matter. “I think that what the ARF wants is not disproportionate. We have documents and events from history that we base our demands on. We are saying: we have a right to this, but we only have a fraction of it now. It’s painful and hard to conceive that that is allowed to happen, so for me, it’s not too much to ask,”160 says Armine. This is echoed by Pargev: In my opinion, and this is also the party’s position: first we need recognition, then we can talk about returning land. Personally, I think it’s only logical. As Turkey, you recognise that you’ve taken land, that that wasn’t good, if you recognise the genocide. Consequently, I think it’s only reasonable that if you admit to a crime, you return the things you’ve gained as a result.161 When asked if they see any alternatives to this demand, Pargev responds emphatically: “No. When it comes to this, I say: don’t take half measures. You have the right to something, and you should either get it in its entirety, or not ask for it.” Similarly, Armine reiterates: We have several different demands, but the land is non-negotiable. I think returning land is even more important than paying reparations to individuals. Money is fleeting, it fades; land does not. It’s our ancestors’ land, it’s our . If your child dies in a car accident, compensation won’t bring your child back - but it’s the very least you can get. So we expect compensation, because they’ve done this to us, but it’s not going to help us develop. Land will. That would be recovery.162 The idea of ‘returning land’ is not unpopular today, even among non-ARF members. In 2013, Armenian then-Prosecutor-General Aghvan Hovsepian stated that “the descendants of the genocide must receive material compensation, churches miraculously preserved in Turkey's territory and church lands must be returned to the Armenian Church, and the Republic of

159 Katchaznouni, “The ARF Has Nothing To Do Anymore”. 160 Armine, December 2019. 161 Pargev, January 2020. 162 Armine, December 2019. 52

Armenia must get back its lost lands.”163 This statement was somewhat extraordinary, as the Armenian government has generally avoided these kinds of implications since the country’s independence. Turkey was quick to issue a response to this declaration, saying that it “reflects the prevailing problematic mentality in Armenia as to the territorial integrity of its neighbor Turkey and to Turkish-Armenian relations and also contradicts the obligations it has undertaken towards the international organizations of which it is a member, particularly the UN and the OSCE.”164 In other words, in an official capacity, the Turkish government views such land claims as detrimental to the relations between the countries. “I think they won’t be very cooperative, because in their view, it’s still their land,” Pargev admits. But, Armine argues, “I think, personally, that if we get this, we’re really not going to bother Turkey any further. We all want good relationships with our neighbouring countries. What’s stopping us now is Turkey’s denial of the genocide and how it conducts its foreign politics. But if this is solved, we’ll be able to develop our political relations.” Not only do they believe that returning land will improve the relations between Armenia and Turkey in the long run, Sepouh explains, they also see it as directly beneficial to Turkey itself: At minimum, recognising the genocide is a precondition to Turkey’s democratisation. The Turk who recognises the Armenian Genocide is brave enough to change the entire country, because the genocide is part of Turkey’s identity, authoritarianism is part of Turkey’s identity. When Turkey realises that the two are equivalent, it will be able to change itself.165 Also linking the state of democracy in Turkey to the broader struggle for justice for the Armenian Genocide, Pargev says: The freer it is there, the less taboo it is, the more it can be talked about. That will eventually lead to recognition. As long as the country is run by people who won’t hear of it, the conversation will never even happen. As long as Turkey continues

163 “Turkey Angry at Yerevan Over ‘Land Claim’ Remarks,” Asbarez, July 15, 2013, http://asbarez.com/111487/turkey-angry-at-yerevan-over-land-claim-remarks/. Emphasis added. 164 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey, QA-18, Statement of the Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey in Response to a Question Regarding the Declaration of the Prosecutor General of Armenia about the Border between Turkey and Armenia, July 12, 2013, accessed December 20, 2019, http://www.mfa.gov.tr/qa_18_- 12-july-2013_-statement-of-the-spokesman-of-the-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-of-turkey-in-response-to-a-question- regarding-the-declaration-of-the-prosecutor-general-of-armenia-about-the-border-between-turkey-and- armenia.en.mfa. 165 Sepouh, December 2019. 53

to retract its ambassadors from countries that recognise the genocide, we won’t be able to move on. So the democratisation of Turkey is also linked to our justice.166 More succinctly put, in Armine’s words: “I think they will also be able to move forward as a country if we get this.” Beyond these considerations, some parties, including the ARF, believe that there are legal grounds for land claims.167 Historian and lawyer has made the case that the current recognised border between Armenia and Turkey was determined in the (October 1921), which was ratified by Turkey and the Russian Soviet Federalist Socialist Republic (RSFSR), but not by the then-formally independent Caucasian Soviet Socialist Republics, which were supposed to be party to the treaty.168 In addition, he argues that the previously signed Treaty of Moscow (March 1921) had been ratified by Turkey and the RSFSR, neither of which were internationally recognised legal entities at the time, and thus did not have the legal basis to bring any such international agreements into existence.169 Therefore, according to Papian, the treaties and the border they define are both invalid and subject to legal re-examination. This is a position supported by the ARF, who have called for the wholesale rejection of the Moscow Treaty.170 Instead, they frequently defer to the Treaty of Sèvres and the conception of an independent Armenia outlined therein. Of that treaty, Sepouh says: “It was the first time in a long time that a real solution for the Armenian Question was proposed. It was a solution that everyone was satisfied with then, because everyone signed it. So if we were convinced then that it was a solution, then why wouldn’t it be a solution now?” Armine, meanwhile, sees it as a question of international legal justice, and not simply as justice for the Armenian Genocide. They’re two different issues. There’s the genocide, which they have to recognise, and then compensation is the least they could do. But then there’s also the Treaty of Sèvres, because in the end, Turkey and Armenia and all parties decided

166 Pargev, January 2020. 167 Naira Hayrumyan, “Armenia and Year 2015: From Genocide Recognition Demand to Demand for Eliminating its Consequences,” ArmeniaNow, July 11, 2013, https://www.armenianow.com/genocide/47534/armenia_turkey_genocide_recognition_aghvan_hovsepyan. 168 Ara Papian, Hayrenatirutyun, Reclaiming the Homeland: Legal Bases for the Armenian Claims and Related Issues, trans. Nareg Seferian (Yerevan: Asoghik, 2014): 158-160. 169 Ibid, 31-33. Papian has dedicated much of his writing to proving the validity of Armenian legal claims to Turkish territories. 170 “ARF Calls Kars Treaty Invalid, Urges End to Protocols,” Asbarez, March 15, 2011, http://asbarez.com/94155/arf-calls-kars-treaty-invalid-urges-end-to-protocols/. The article’s headline refers to the Treaty of Kars, but the contents concern the Treaty of Moscow. 54

together: Wilson can mediate and determine the borders. And he did. Turkey was also party to the Treaty. It’s not like we’re saying ‘we want this, and we’re going to take it.’ Sometimes they say Turkey was sidelined by the Treaty, but that doesn’t matter. It says: Wilson’s decision on the borders will take effect immediately. It’s remarkable that there are no consequences for this [disregard of the Treaty of Sèvres].171 The most important motivator for these land claims, however, remains justice for the Armenian Genocide and its consequences. Pargev insists that recognition alone is not enough. “I see justice as recognition and compensation. Recognition is an important part of justice, you can’t skip it and jump straight into compensation. But on its own, it’s not enough. The crime is admitted, but it doesn’t restore what you’ve lost.” Legal philosopher Henry Theriault similarly makes the case that the demand to cede territories to the Republic of Armenia is not only just, but also reasonable, considering the collective damage done to the Armenians by the genocide, and that recognition alone does not address this damage.172 Theriault argues that while on one hand, the Armenian community’s development was brought to a grinding halt by the genocide that killed some 60% of the Armenian population and scattered survivors across the world, modern-day Turkey’s wealth and power is inversely related to the Armenian community’s lack thereof, because the amount of wealth expropriated from Armenian victims was part of what allowed Turkey to build a modern, prosperous capitalist economy. As such, Theriault proceeds, Turkey continues to generate more wealth and power because of its past crimes. Meanwhile, he continues, besides the fact that all perpetrators of the genocide are long dead, prosecuting individuals would neither address the legacy of the Armenian Genocide, nor contribute to repairing the harm caused by it.173 Seen this way, ultimately, even paying reparations to individuals actually undermines restorative justice: by taking individuals as representative of a group, it is assumed that in receiving reparations, they in fact contribute to the restoration of a collective injustice done to the entire group. This assumption is erroneous, Theriault claims; however, where individual reparations fall short, land returns could be more viable.174

171 Armine, December 2019. 172 Henry C. Theriault, “Reparations for Genocide: Group Harm and the Limits of Liberal Individualism,” International Criminal Law Review 14, no. 441 (2014): 455-456. 173 Ibid., 441-445. 174 Ibid, 467-468. 55

Sepouh also argues to this effect. “To many people, not just the ARF, compensation feels like justice, and I understand that. It is just to say: the Armenian Genocide was an enormous crime against humanity, and on a micro level, there has never been compensation for that. But to the ARF, justice is returning papenakan hogh - the land of our ancestors,” Sepouh begins. I used to work in Limburg. There, you have these huge estates, many of which are now hotels. I asked one of these owners, how do you get by without any clients? How do you pay your bills? And the owner says, this estate has been in our family for centuries, if we have a good summer, we’re set for the rest of the year. Communities grow when you can pass on property from generation to generation. During the genocide, our property was taken from us, and our communities were uprooted. Three generations on, we’re still uprooted. So returning land, returning property, is very serious to me. Recognition is important on an emotional level, maybe even more important than the physical part, but compensation is true justice, in absolute sense, with which we can turn the page on the injustice that was done to us.175 A similar sentiment is echoed by Armine, who states that with the transferral of land to the Republic of Armenia, the consequences of the genocide will not yet have been fully redressed. “If you ask me, is this enough, in exchange for 1.5 million lives? My answer would be no. But if you ask: can we move on? I’d say yes. The ARF’s demands are clear, and one of the ARF’s goals is returning all Armenians to the country. It would be wonderful if we had the land to accommodate all those people.” Pargev elaborates on a similar point: There are currently three million people in Armenia, and ten million in the diaspora, approximately. There’s no way ten million people will go back, in fact, most of them will not. That will be a part of your nation that won’t be Armenian anymore. You cannot survive in diaspora from generation to generation. I don’t believe that that’s possible. Surviving is something you do in your own country. So at a certain point you’re going to lose a part of your nation. But it’s hard to demand justice for that.176

175 Sepouh, December 2019. 176 Pargev, January 2020. 56

He reaffirms this argument again: “The coming generations will not stay Armenian with recognition alone. In order to stay Armenian, you need to be able to live in your own country.” This is where we arrive at the crux of the ARF’s struggle for justice. Its ideology states that in order to preserve Armenian identity, it requires a United Armenia; conversely, to the ARF, existence in the diaspora, without the possibility of returning to a United Armenia, is tantamount to continuation of the genocide. This United Armenia must assume the form of a nation-state, specifically. When asked about the hypothetical possibility that Turkey might allow descendants of victims of the genocide to return to the places they were exiled from as an alternative to the creation of a United Armenia, my interlocutors expressed different reasons for their opposition to such an idea. “There will probably be people who’d think: alright, at least we managed to get this much. But ideologically speaking, it’s not an alternative. It’s not why I joined the ARF. We want a free, independent, united Armenia. If your Armenia is only 20% of what it once was, you simply will not have reached your goal,” Pargev says. Armine, meanwhile, expresses concern for the safety of Armenians returning in such a scenario: If it’s not ours, there’s still always the chance that you will face discrimination. I see what happens to Armenians living in Turkey now. I wouldn’t want to live under the Turkish government. I can’t imagine what would happen to me if I’m living there and Erdogan has control over my life. Maybe it would be different if it were the government of the Netherlands, with similar rights, a similar way of life, a similar economic situation. Maybe then I would consider it. But it’s not, and it’s not your country. Why would you return?177 From another angle, Sepouh explains: The classical diaspora [i.e. Armenians who have lived in diaspora since the genocide] has no connection with Armenia. They aren’t Armenians from Armenia, they come from Van, Sasun, Mush, Trabzon. Those people come from there, and they’ve taken their own unique culture from that region with them. Aren’t those people indigenous to ? Those people are here, not because Armenia doesn’t exist, but because Western Armenia doesn’t exist. The

177 Armine, December 2019. 57

ARF says that this goal is important to the classical diaspora, and I think for many people the ARF is a uniting factor when it comes to this.178 It is particularly relevant that both Pargev and Sepouh bring up the diaspora from different perspectives: Pargev emphatically insisting that a nation cannot survive in diaspora, Sepouh talking about the meaning of the ARF’s central goal to the classical diaspora. All three young Dashnaks told me that the ARF’s mission to preserve Armenian identity and represent Armenian interests was what drew them to the organisation initially. “I don’t know of an organisation that pursues these goals and defends these interests quite this actively,” Armine says. “For Armenians worldwide the ARF is the organisation that works for the preservation of Armenian identity.” “Wherever you go, the ARF is there,” Sepouh adds to this assessment. This view is held outside the ARF, too; in a completely unrelated discussion that I was privy to, a young Armenian man, himself not a member of the ARF, proclaimed that “the diaspora is united thanks to the Dashnaktsutyun; there is no diaspora without them.”179 Whether this claim can be empirically substantiated remains open to discussion, but it does show that the assessment of the ARF’s importance to the Armenian diaspora does not lie solely with the ARF itself. It can be argued that the ARF survived this long despite being banned in its homeland thanks to the diaspora, and certainly not in spite of it. In addition, as previously stated, the ARF has no parliamentary representation within the Republic of Armenia: indeed, it has more representation in the Lebanese parliament than in the Armenian one! How seemingly internally contradictory, then, that the ARF views existence in the diaspora as inherently detrimental and destructive to Armenian identity, and the creation of a united Armenian nation- state as the only real remedy to this. The presence of non-Armenian peoples in this nation-state does not constitute anything more than a minor challenge to this notion. Pargev is most wary of this inevitability, and he says: Once it’s part of Armenia, it should be populated by Armenians. You can’t call a country Armenia if there are no Armenians living there. That would be the case for any country. Of course, the people living there also have the right to be there, they’ve lived there for over a century. We can’t just kick them out of the country. If you’re going to be a democratic country, everyone will have voting rights. I

178 Sepouh, December 2019. 179 R. H. G., message in Whatsapp group, November 9th, 2020. 58

think we have to make agreements with the Kurdish leaders. But Kurds are also people who want their own country, which overlaps with part of Western Armenia. That could cause complications, in the long run.180 Armine, meanwhile, affirms the protection of the rights and liberties of minorities as one of the values of the ARF: If they want to stay there, that has to be possible, we have to facilitate that. There’s a reason why we don’t want war, we don’t want to conquer the land. It’s important to us that the transfer happens in a just way. And yes, it would be a big change [for the Republic of Armenia to suddenly have large Kurdish and Turkish minorities]. But they have lived there illegitimately, or at least, their rule over it is illegitimate. It’s something we have a right to, that’s been taken from us. If you look at it that way, you’d have to say: well, more Kurds live here now, so now the land is theirs. But it’s hard for me to see it that way.181 Why then, I ask, is officially administering that land so important to you? “There are economic and geopolitical interests. For example, we would have easier access to other countries. We are currently stuck between Turkey and Azerbaijan, and we’re very dependent on the countries around us, which are themselves very difficult countries. We also need the land so that Armenians can return from the diaspora.” But then, I pressed on, what is stopping a country like Switzerland from claiming half of Germany in order to improve its economic and geopolitical position? “The difference is that we have a right to this,” responds Armine. “The difference is that this is ours, it was taken unlawfully and unjustly. There are economic and geographic benefits, but the most important thing is that this piece of land, which is already ours, that we have that.”182 We can see, in short, the merger of the ARF’s central goal, its raison d’être, with its perspective on justice for the Armenian Genocide. In summary, the ARF sees the genocide as the interruption of the Armenian nation’s development as a group. In order to restore what was taken from this group and allow it to heal and develop further, the ARF believes that the group needs a nation-state, to be constituted out of the present-day Republic of Armenia and territories that the ARF refers to as “Western Armenia”. Until such a nation-state can be created, the ARF concerns

180 Pargev, January 2020. 181 Armine, December 2019. 182 Ibid. 59 itself with the preservation of Armenian identity in and advocacy on behalf of the diaspora, as well as promoting its central goal. However, this goal is based on a set of assumptions that warrant problematisation. For one, the ARF demands the “return of the occupied lands”.183 This demand rests on three premises: one, that Turkey is currently (illegitimately) occupying land, two, that this land once was Armenian, and three, that ceding it to the Republic of Armenia constitutes a return to a state of nature, of sorts. In addition, in linking the creation of a United Armenia to justice for the genocide, it is assumed that a nation-state and only a nation-state can be a vehicle for the restoration of the harms caused by the genocide. This demand is the central appeal of the ARF, but when subjected to scrutiny, as it will be in the following section, it becomes a weakness.

Nationalism The young Dashnaks’ feelings on the term ‘nationalism’ diverge. Armine says she is comfortable calling herself a nationalist, explaining that a nationalist, to her, is someone who loves their country: “How could someone be politically active in the Netherlands without being a nationalist? Aren’t you supposed to pursue the interests of your fatherland?” Pargev, meanwhile, prefers to see himself as a “patriot”, expressing discomfort with what he perceives as connotations of racial superiority that the term ‘nationalist’ carries with it. Sepouh also insists that the ARF is not nationalist, saying: People use that word because it sounds good. But we’re not nazis. The ARF has always served the interests of the Armenian people. If, for example, you’re passionate about gay rights or climate change, you’d do anything for [that cause], maybe in some cases you would be willing to lay down your life for it, that’s not seen as nationalist, but when you’re prepared to do the same for your identity, suddenly it is nationalist. In absolute terms, maybe it is, but practically, it’s the same thing.184

183 Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Program. 184 Sepouh, December 2019. Emphasis added. 60

In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson expresses a similar discomfort with the qualification of nationalism as a negative phenomenon: In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.185 In that vein, it is all the more interesting that Sepouh mentions the willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s nation. In his seminal work Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Eric Hobsbawm speaks of a principle that “also implies that the political duty of Ruritanians to the polity which encompasses and represents the Ruritanian nation, overrides all public obligations, and in extreme cases (such as wars) all other obligations of any kind” exactly when explaining his definition of nationalism.186 He determines this principle as the idea that the ‘political unit’ should be in conformity with the ‘national unit’: that is, that the political organisation of groups of people should rightfully be congruent with national identity.187 Where Anderson sees the development of nations and national consciousness as an organic process starting as early as the fifteenth century, Hobsbawm sees nations as constructed from above, i.e. by elites, noting, however, that it is impossible to understand them without analysing them from below, i.e. the experiences of ordinary people.188 While the young Dashnaks would perhaps be more comfortable with Anderson’s rather romantic qualification of nationalism, I would suggest that Hobsbawm’s analysis in particular offers us a framework within which the ARF’s ideology can best be understood. Therefore, it is fitting to now discuss the ARF’s place in the history of nationalism. Anderson famously defines the nation as an “imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”189 Hobsbawm, meanwhile, explains that the nation is a “social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the

185 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016), 141. 186 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9. 187 Ibid., 9. 188 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37-82; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 10-11. 189 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. 61

‘nation-state’.”190 Crucially, he contends that nationalism creates nations and states, and not the other way around.191 Anderson and Hobsbawm both agree that the concept of ‘nation’ as we know it is a modern phenomenon, originating in the late 18th to early 19th century, with the latter of the two writing that the “basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything connected with it is its modernity. This is now well understood, but the opposite assumption, that national identification is so natural, primary and permanent as to precede history, is [widely held].”192 It is this assumption that Anderson refers to when he writes that “the nations to which [nation-states] give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future.”193 This perfectly matches the young Dashnaks’ repeated allusions to the ‘return’ of land that was - or rather, as Armine stated - “already is ours”. In other words, they hold the perception that their conception of the Armenian nation and United Armenia is ancient, certainly more so than that of any ‘competing’ nations, and, by extension, more legitimate. The belief that the creation of a United Armenia would constitute a ‘return to nature’ thus rests on the assumption that the Armenian nation is so ancient as to be outside of history. This is in direct contradiction with the fact that our conception of ‘nation’ only emerged as recently as the 19th century. To nationalists, this contradiction is not a problem; it is part of their worldview. It is for this reason that Anderson rejects the characterisation of nationalism as an ideology and proposes to instead treat it as something other, akin to ‘kinship’ or ‘religion’.194 In the case of the Dashnaktstutyun, however, I question this approach. I would argue that their nationalism is strongly ideological, as the apparent contradiction between the modernness and the timeless ancientness of their conception of ‘nation’ can arguably be seen as part of the organisation’s identity, because they were the ones who ‘created’ the Armenian nation. Before the late 19th century, the Armenian millet of the Ottoman Empire was divided between the mostly urban, wealthy azgaser (those who loved the ‘nation’ or community), whose primary identification was with their religion, and the hayrenaser (those who loved the fatherland), who lived in the historically Armenian provinces and were concerned mostly with the deteriorating social and economic situation there. These groups, of which the latter was larger

190 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 9-10. 191 Ibid., 10. 192 Ibid., 14. 193 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11-12. 194 Ibid., 5. 62 but the former more politically influential, did not necessarily conceive of themselves as part of the same ‘nation’ as the other. In fact, city-dwelling Armenians referring to Armenians in the provinces would use the term Hayastantsi, ‘person from Armenia’, whereby with ‘Armenia’ they did not mean a common fatherland, but purely a geographical location. The creation of the revolutionary Hunchak and Dashnak parties by Armenian intellectuals from the Russian Empire was what would change this status quo. By establishing Armenian political parties, they began to redefine Armenians as a political community, rather than a (purely) religious one. This process cut across the lines not only of socio-economic class, but also of empires, as the parties imagined Armenians living in the Ottoman, Russian, and Persian empires as one nation, and a (potential) political entity.195 In this way, the Dashnaks and the Hunchaks created Armenian nationalism, and then they created the Armenian nation. In the best traditions of Marxist historical materialism, the revolutionary parties saw history as a natural force that inevitably leads all human development to enlightenment and liberation, and themselves as agents within that force. They were convinced that the Armenian Question was part of the larger historical struggle towards progress, and therefore that their mission, the creation of an Armenian-based society, was supported by the laws of history.196 At the same time, they struggled with the idea of a society based completely on ethnicity, rejecting the Ottoman millet system that they considered the main source of their oppression. However, they argued that the Muslim peoples of the Ottoman Empire had not demonstrated any sort of aspiration towards progress and democracy. Therefore, they insisted, it was actually necessary for Armenians to assume the administration of their historical provinces, as their progressiveness would guarantee a democratic society where and non-Christians alike would enjoy equal rights and protections.197 It is worth noting how similar this line of argumentation from the 19th century is to that put forward by Armine and Pargev earlier in this chapter. What is likewise worth noting is the acknowledgement, both now and in the early days of the Armenian revolutionary parties, that the heterogeneity of the population of the lands claimed for a United Armenia posed a conceptual challenge to their ideology. At the same time, this was not atypical within the paradigm of nationalisms in the 19th century. Hobsbawm writes that it was readily accepted at the time that nation-states would be nationally heterogeneous, as it was

195 Libaridian, “Armenian Revolutionary Parties,” 85-101. 196 Ibid., 88. 197 Ibid., 104. 63 recognised that people of all identities had always coexisted on the same territory. Within the context of liberal nationalism, the creation of this kind of situation was actually encouraged as part of a trend wherein national movements were generally expected to pursue expansion through the unification of smaller nationalities. Conversely, separation from larger nationalities was seen as illegitimate.198 Set against this backdrop, the ARF’s mission to create a society for Armenians could be seen as an aberration in this trend, a movement of separatism, id est, an ‘illegitimate nationalism’. Upon closer inspection, however, another perspective becomes apparent: that in their endeavours towards uniting the Armenians of the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires, the Dashnaks actually represented an example of a national unification movement, conforming perfectly to the liberal nationalist spirit of the time. The premise that modern-day Turkey must ‘return’ lands that it occupies to the Republic of Armenia, to which those lands ‘rightfully belong’, is, of course, historically inaccurate. A sovereign Armenian nation-state by our modern definitions has never existed on the full territory of . However, it is important to note that the ARF does not simply erroneously believe that the Armenian nation is older than it actually is, or that this error is based on some sort of delusion. It is not an error, nor is it a delusion: it is the result of 19th century historical materialist ideology and liberal nationalism. The ARF created Armenian nationalism, and then the Armenian nation itself.

Justice The question that remains is the relationship between the United Armenian nation-state and justice for the Armenian Genocide. As previously stated, the ARF holds that not only is the creation of a nation-state capable of bringing justice to genocide victims, it is also the only truly adequate measure of justice. They see nation-states as a natural and necessary organising principle for societies, as in their view, nations cannot maintain their identity in diaspora. In other words, the destructive consequences of the Armenian Genocide cannot be addressed or reversed in any way until the Republic of Armenia acquires the territories stipulated in the Treaty of Sèvres, and until that time, these consequences will only develop further, perpetuating the destruction of the Armenians.

198 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 33. 64

This line of argumentation touches on a sensitive topic within the field of transitional justice, namely the limitations of currently existing justice mechanisms. It has been noted in the introduction and earlier in this chapter that the current system of transitional justice, with its focus on individual perpetrators, whether in courtrooms or before truth commissions, falls short when it comes to addressing the collective nature of genocide. In addition, it has been argued that trials of individuals leave some groups of people that may have contributed to the perpetration of violence out of view. With regards to this, Laurel Fletcher and Harvey Weinstein have suggested that this could create a situation where within a society, only those few people who are legally prosecuted are seen as guilty, and everyone else is automatically exculpated. In other words, “individualized guilt may contribute to a myth of collective innocence.”199 Consequently, this could allow narratives to develop wherein the perpetrator group claims innocence or even victimisation: a process which is visible in Turkey.200 While Fletcher and Weinstein suggest that a more complete process of transitional justice could include elements such as rebuilding cultural institutions, paying reparations, neighbourhood-based reconstruction and reconciliation projects, and structural economic empowerment besides trials or truth commissions, they also admit that there is no definitive theoretical basis for collective social repair.201 “Missing is an appreciation for the damage mass violence causes at the level of communities. Totalizing experiences necessitate totalizing responses.”202 There is no definitive consensus on how to best do justice to a group of people who have collectively victimised on a massive scale. There is no agreement on how to initiate a process of group healing. The matter is only further complicated in the case of the Armenian Genocide, where there are no individuals left to prosecute even if survivors wanted to, because the perpetrators are long dead. The ARF’s emphatic insistence that only the creation of a United Armenian nation-state can bring justice to the descendants of survivors fits neatly into this discussion; after all, what can be a more totalising response than that?

199 Laurel E. Fletcher and Harvey M. Weinstein, “Violence and Social Repair: Rethinking the Contribution of Justice to Reconciliation,” Human Rights Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2002): 579-580. 200 Ibid., 605-615. 201 Ibid., 618, 639. 202 Ibid., 639. 65

Conclusion

When Talaat Pasha issued the orders that initiated the campaign of annihilation that would leave the vast majority of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian citizens dead or exiled, did he truly believe that he would succeed in eliminating them entirely? Did he expect to live out a long, comfortable life with his wife Hayriye in a fully Turkified Ottoman Empire, purified of internal foes? Did he have even the slightest inkling that his actions would have far-reaching consequences for not only his victims, not only his country, but for the rest of the world? The world Talaat inhabited over a century ago was a world that did not yet know the word ‘genocide’ and that had neither the political infrastructure nor the paradigms to accommodate transitional justice. The Armenian survivors of the systematic violence that their own government had inflicted on them were scattered across the globe, forced to seek their own justice for the loss of their homes, their communities, their loved ones. They settled in new lands and built new lives, all the while remembering their painful histories, passing them on to younger generations - younger generations that continued to be (re-)traumatised by the denial that anything violent had even occurred. The organisational power of their churches and political parties helped them in their process of rebuilding, as well as in demanding justice in any way they deemed possible at any given time. In the absence of transitional justice mechanisms, laws to punish crimes of a magnitude such as they had experienced, or even enforcement of those laws that did exist, Armenian survivors felt that it was up to them to make up for this absence. Because of the inventiveness, discipline, and connections of the leadership of parties such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, new Armenian communities in dispersion had some measure of support in their new lives and in their struggle. Because of the leadership of the ARF, Talaat did not die peacefully in his sleep, as he probably would have preferred, but at the hands of one of those whom he had tried to destroy. The assassination of Talaat Pasha and the earlier campaign of extermination against the Armenians were among the things that inspired Raphael Lemkin to invent the word ‘genocide’ and draft the Genocide Convention. On the basis of his work and the work of others like him, transitional justice was born and began to develop into something that we now see as almost self- evident. While we are still lacking in ideas on how to offer group justice, our world has an International Criminal Court, as well as international tribunals, for the prosecution of individual 66 genocidaires. Talaat’s world had no such thing. On one hand, this means that these institutions emerged at least in part out of a recognition that criminals such as Talaat needed to be prosecuted and punished. On the other hand, this also means that by the time these institutions emerged, it was already too late to prosecute the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. Over a century later, the ideology that led to the genocide is entrenched in Turkey’s identity, and the genocidaires may be dead, but their memory and impact are very much (deliberately) kept alive. The Dashnaktsutyun has been a stable presence in Armenian life since before the genocide. Throughout its history, it has not simply seen firsthand how the victims of the genocide struggled for justice: it has profoundly shaped this struggle, often even leading the way. The ARF insists that the only thing that can bring justice to the descendants of genocide survivors is the creation of a United Armenia in the historical Armenian Highlands. They see the genocide as the interruption of the natural development and freedom of the Armenian nation on land that rightfully belongs to them, and they believe that they need to administer this land if this development is ever to resume. Existence in diaspora is impossible and even actively oppressive to them. If such a nation-state is not created, they claim, Armenian communities will lose their culture and identity, and the genocide will never truly be over. There are many things to be questioned in this line of thinking. One could, for instance, question the assumption that nation-states are a natural, viable, and desirable mode of organisation, let alone liberation, for ethnic groups. One could also ask: what gives one group the right to a certain territory, more than another group? Armenians have not had a significant presence in the lands demanded by the ARF since the genocide, and Kurds form a plurality there. The ARF, meanwhile, has been prominent in the diaspora, far more so than in the Republic of Armenia. One could note, therefore, the internal contradiction of considering diaspora to be tantamount to the slow death of a community while existing due in large part to support in the diaspora. And what of other groups that have survived and maintained their distinct identity in diaspora for centuries, such as Jewish people? The most pertinent question, in my opinion, is as follows: can the creation of a nation- state bring community justice where presently existing transitional justice mechanisms cannot? The Dashnaks assert that it can, and it is herein that we find the key to their worldview. The ARF, as a nationalist organisation, created the Armenian nation as the political entity that we see it as today, but never got the chance to consolidate this nation on the territory that it had 67 envisioned for it. The organisation’s nationalism requires the creation of a nation-state, because nationalism puts the interests of the nation-state above all else: “freedom or death,” as its slogan reads. Therefore, while the ARF demands the creation of a United Armenia as justice for the Armenian Genocide in the name of the entire Armenian population of the world, the ones who really need this nation-state are the Dashnaks themselves. Justice for the Armenian nation becomes justice for the Dashnaktsutyun. 68

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Cover art: by author. Freedom or death. 2021.