Master Thesis A legal analysis of the mass atrocity crimes perpetrated against the ethnic and religious minorities in Anatolia during the 20th century in light of the Genocide Convention by Lamprini Koleidou Master in International Security and Law Department of Political Science and Public Management University of Southern Denmark Date of birth: 31.07.1989 Supervisor: Ulrike Barten Keystrokes: 181.731 Date of submission: 2/1/2017 Table of Contents Summary ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 2 1. Methodology ............................................................................................................................ 5 2. The Legal Framework ............................................................................................................. 7 2.1. The Genocide Convention ................................................................................................ 7 2.1.1. Nullum crimen sine lege: An analysis on the retroactivity of the Genocide Convention............................................................................................................................... 8 2.2. The applicable law during the commission of the atrocity crimes ................................. 15 3. Historical summary................................................................................................................ 16 4. Legal analysis in light of the Genocide Convention .............................................................. 25 4.1. Article II of the Genocide Convention ........................................................................... 25 4.1.1. Paragraph (a): Killing members of the group ......................................................... 25 4.1.2. Paragraph (b): Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group .. 34 4.1.3. Paragraph (c): Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part ........................................................ 37 4.1.4. Paragraph (d): Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group .... 48 4.1.5. Paragraph (e): Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group ......... 49 4.2. Article III: Punishable Acts ............................................................................................ 50 4.2.1. Paragraph (c): Direct and public incitement to commit genocide .......................... 50 4.2.2. Paragraph (d): Attempt to commit genocide ........................................................... 53 4.2.3. Paragraph (e): Complicity in genocide ................................................................... 54 4.3. A summary of the actus reus and a legal analysis on the mens rea................................ 55 4.3.1. The actus reus ......................................................................................................... 55 4.3.2. The mens rea ........................................................................................................... 58 5. Accountability achieved after the commission of the crimes ................................................ 65 6. Admissibility of the case to the International Court of Justice.............................................. 67 6.1. The international legal doctrine of state succession and state continuation .................. 67 6.2. State responsibility ......................................................................................................... 69 6.3. An internationally wrongful act: Responsibility for states assisting Turkey ................. 78 6.4. Establishing admissibility of the case to the ICJ ............................................................ 82 7. The main reasons behind the genocides ................................................................................ 85 8. Recognition issues ................................................................................................................. 87 9. “Never again” ........................................................................................................................ 89 10. From inaction to R2P ......................................................................................................... 91 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 95 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 97 Summary This thesis is a legal analysis of the crimes committed in the late Ottoman Empire and early 20th century Turkey against the minorities of the empire, namely the Greek, Assyrian, Yazidis and to some extent, the Jews. In this analysis, I provide an answer to the question of whether the crimes committed against the ethnic and religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire and continued in the newly established Turkish State amount to genocide. The inaction to prevent and to punish the culpable for the Armenian genocide has been considered as a precedent to the Holocaust.1 This is an excerpt from a speech of Hitler: “I have sent my Death’s Head units to the East with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the lebensraum that we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”2 (emphasis added). This speech proves that our political action -or our inaction- can affect the course of the historical events. For the prevention of future atrocities, it is the responsibility of every state to acknowledge genocides as such. 1 This kind of reasoning has been proposed by scholars with regard to the Armenian genocide, but could actually refer to all the cases of genocide in Anatolia. See Vahakn N. Dadrian, Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications, The Yale Journal of International Law, Vol. 14, Number 2, Summer 1989, 225. 2 Nicole Rafter, The Crime of All Crimes, Toward a Criminology of Genocide, New York University Press, 2016 2016, 9: Adolf Hitler, August 22, 1939. 1 Introduction The Armenian genocide has been characterized as “the forgotten genocide”, because it took seventy years until its international recognition.3 Travis argues that some cases of genocides may be hidden because of “national security dogmas, historical amnesia, politicized interpretations of the concept of genocide, and global power politics.”4 In this thesis, I will present the crimes committed against the ethnic and religious groups of Turkey. I will limit my research to the cases of the Greeks, the Assyrians, the Jews and the Yazidis, because they have not been acknowledged yet as genocide, compared to the Armenian case. The cases have differences and similarities. For instance, although the severity of the acts committed in each case might differ, I will examine the cases as one, because they were carried out during the same timeframe with the Armenian genocide and were committed for the same reasons and by the same perpetrators, but have been overlooked by both the Armenian scholars and the international community. Therefore, it is justified to call these cases of genocide, the hidden genocides. The scholars agree that among the persecuted, deported and massacred, were Greeks, Syrian Orthodox, Assyrians (Nestorians), Chaldeans and Jews of Palestine.5 I will have a special focus on the cases of the Greeks and the Assyrians and elucidated the crimes committed against them, two cases that been underrepresented in history. A legal opinion on the issue is necessary, since even nowadays, historical publications of prominent scholars, continue to misrepresent the genocides of the Greeks and the Assyrians.6 It is important to provide an answer through a legal 3 Dadrian 1989, supra note 1, 229. 4 Hannibal Travis, Constructing the "Armenian Genocide": How Scholars Unremembered the Assyrian and Greek Genocides in the Ottoman Empire, in: Thomas La Pointe, Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Thomas La Pointe (eds.), 2013, 170. 5 Daniel Marc Segesser, Dissolve or punish? The international debate amongst jurists and publicists on the consequences of the Armenian genocide for the Ottoman Empire, 1915-23, in: Dominik J. Schaller and Jurgen Zimmerer (ed.), Late Ottoman Genocides, The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies, 2009, 95. 6 See for example, Eugene Rogan’s interpretation in his 2015 book about the genocides. Rogan does refer to the case of the Armenians as a genocide but does not acknowledge the Greek and Assyrian cases as genocide. For the Greek genocide, he writes: ‘Greek Orthodox Christian villagers in western Anatolia, far from the troubled Balkans, resisted the State’s efforts to uproot them. Gendarmes rounded the villagers, beat the men, threatened to kidnap women, and even killed Ottoman Greeks who resisted deportation. Foreign consuls, appalled by the violence against Christian civilians, reported dozens killed in some villages. Yet the expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks could be carried out with relatively low levels of killing because there was a Greek state to which they could be deported. [...]’ and that: ‘[…] Whereas