Fires of Hatred

Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

Norman M. Naimark

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780674009943, 9780674003132
• eBook ISBN: 9780674975828
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Of all the horrors of the last century—perhaps the bloodiest century of the past millennium—ethnic cleansing ranks among the worst. The term burst forth in public discourse in the spring of 1992 as a way to describe Serbian attacks on the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but as this landmark book attests, ethnic cleansing is neither new nor likely to cease in our time.

Norman Naimark, distinguished historian of Europe and Russia, provides an insightful history of ethnic cleansing and its relationship to genocide and population transfer. Focusing on five specific cases, he exposes the myths about ethnic cleansing, in particular the commonly held belief that the practice stems from ancient hatreds. Naimark shows that this face of genocide had its roots in the European nationalism of the late nineteenth century but found its most virulent expression in the twentieth century as modern states and societies began to organize themselves by ethnic criteria. The most obvious example, and one of Naimark's cases, is the Nazi attack on the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Naimark also discusses the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia during the Greco–Turkish War of 1921–22; the Soviet forced deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars in 1944; the Polish and Czechoslovak expulsion of the Germans in 1944–47; and Bosnia and Kosovo.

In this harrowing history, Naimark reveals how over and over, as racism and religious hatreds picked up an ethnic name tag, war provided a cover for violence and mayhem, an evil tapestry behind which nations acted with impunity.

ONE

The Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the onset of the twentieth century provided the backdrop for a hundred years of genocide and ethnic cleansing in southeastern Europe and Anatolia. One need not romanticize the Pax Ottomanica to understand that the Turkish empire’s passing released forces of extreme nationalism and errant state-building whose aftershocks remain with us even today in Bosnia and Kosovo. Ottoman weakness, Western (including Russian) interventionism, and powerful national movements among the empire’s subject peoples created pressures at the faultline which led to the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. The 1913 Carnegie Report’s description of the killing, atrocities, and ethnic cleansing in this region could well apply to the terrifying events of the recent wars of Yugoslav succession—only a few dates, names, places would have to change.¹ As a result of the Balkan Wars, massive population transfers and ethnic separatism first became part of modern European conflict and made their way into the vocabulary of peacemaking. Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks sought to create nation-states in new borders by expelling minority populations and fostering the exclusive interests of their own kin.² In the years before the slaughter of World War I permanently altered the European landscape, demands for new state boundaries and ethnically homogeneous territories in southeastern Europe undermined the stability of the old European order.

The assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 by terrorists from the group Young Bosnia brought the great powers directly into the Balkan conflict, internationalizing and militarizing it in ways unexpected by any of the combatants. In the turbulent aftermath of the Great War, not just the Ottoman Empire but like houses of cards, one after the other—Imperial Russia, the Habsburg monarchy, and the German empire—came tumbling down. The collapse of multinational empires and the emergence of nation-states founded on the principles of self-determination left ethnic and racial minorities vulnerable to the state-building ideologies of the dominant nationalities. The minority-protection treaties attached to the Versailles Settlement did little to alter the fundamental weakness of the Wilsonian notion of self-determination: the question whose right to self-determination would dictate the policies of the new states? Political elites representing the majority nations tried to answer that question by diminishing the rights and influence of the minorities. Given the powerful influence of racial theories on the nationalist ideologies of both dominant and subordinate peoples, ethnic conflict, if not war or civil war, seemed the inevitable consequence.

The Swiss anthropologist and ethnographer George Montandon was one of the first to recognize the dangers inherent in the situation and to propose a solution. As early as 1915 he wrote that “natural” borders should be established according to ethnic criteria and that those nations which neither wished to nor could be absorbed into the majority population should be subjected to “massive resettlement” beyond the borders of the new states, ostensibly to join their own national groups abroad.³ In Montandon’s scheme, the minority nations would lose all rights to own property or to live as citizens in the new nation-state. After the Balkan Wars and the nationality struggles of World War I, academics and politicians of various stripes who looked at the problems of minority populations sometimes came to the same conclusion as Montandon: that population transfer was the only way to defuse antagonistic minority issues.

The Ottomans and the Armenians

Historians of the Ottoman Empire tend to paint a rosy picture of the minority peoples within its borders.⁴ By contrast, historians of the subject peoples—Serbs or Bulgarians, Greeks or Armenians—tend to do the opposite, emphasizing the brutality of the Ottoman yoke and the inevitable victories of their respective national movements or, in the case of the Armenians, the inevitable tragedy that engulfed the nation.⁵ The disagreement centers on different evaluations of the millet system, by which the major Ottoman religious groups enjoyed freedom of conscience and relative autonomy within their religious communities. Compared with what came before (the Byzantine Empire) or after (modern Turkey), unquestionably the minorities lived relatively well under the Ottomans, enjoying greater religious tolerance and communal autonomy in the early modern period than minorities in contemporaneous Western and Central European societies. It would be anachronistic to suggest that the Ottomans demonstrated racial and ethnic tolerance, because they did not think at all in those terms. Without exception, Islamic faith and Ottoman loyalty were the essential requirements for membership in the empire’s elites. But converts to Islam among Serbs, Albanians, and Greeks were prominent in the Ottoman government and army. During the rise of the Ottoman Empire between 1453 and 1623, only five of the Grand Vezirs were of Turkish extraction. Even among those groups that did not convert to Islam in large numbers—such as the substantial Sephardic Jewish community which had fled from Spain for the Ottoman lands, or the indigenous Armenian community of the ancient Gregorian Christian faith—opportunities to gain prominence, wealth, and status were not lacking in the Ottoman system. Indeed, the Armenians were known as the most loyal millet, millet i-sadika, because of their deference to official authority and their remarkable accomplishments under the Ottomans in trade, commerce, and artisanry.⁶

This picture of the relative tolerance of Ottoman society needs to be balanced by the fact that Islamic ideology unambiguously proclaimed the inferiority of non-Muslim peoples.⁷ Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis write that “persecution was rare and atypical” but that “discrimination was permanent and indeed necessary, inherent in the system and maintained by both Holy Law and common practice.”⁸ Ottoman law and custom relegated infidels (gaour) to second-class status in the empire. Christians did not enjoy equal standing with Muslims in the judicial system; the tax system openly discriminated against them; they were not allowed to serve in the higher ranks of the government or the military; and they were forced to pay a hefty tax for their exemptions from military service. But as long as Christians and Jews accepted these strictures, they were able to prosper and develop in their communities. Because Islamic law discouraged Muslims from participating in commerce and banking, Armenians, Jews, and Greeks increasingly dominated the developing economic and industrial life of the country. In the nine-teenth century, Greeks from the Peloponnese and islands migrated in large numbers to the coastal towns of Aegean Anatolia, where Greek communities had already achieved high standards of economic development and civic culture. The Sephardic Jewish community of Salonika, in Ottoman Macedonia, dominated the local economy and helped to create a vibrant commercial entrepot. The Armenians in Constantinople and in the coastal Mediterranean cities of Cilicia increasingly took on the visage of a modern European bourgeoisie, heavily involved in the medical, engineering, and law professions, in textile manufacturing, and in agriculture.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, this delicate balance between official inequality and relative tolerance was upset by the inability of the Ottoman state to keep pace as an economic and military power with its European rivals. Labeled at mid-century “the sick man of Europe” by Nicholas I—whose own Russian Empire wasn’t exactly healthy at that point—the Ottoman Empire commenced a profound decline from which it never recovered. Many factors underlay the weakness of the Ottomans, not the least of which was the overwhelming sense of superiority and permanence accorded them by their Islamic faith. The last phase of the reform movement (Tanzimat) of the 1860s came too late and offered too little, in large part because of a general lack of enthusiasm for its possibilities among the Ottoman elite. The Islamic ethos of imperial pride, aloofness from European problems, and imperviousness to domestic shortcomings made military pressures on the Ottomans from the Russians above all, but also from the Serbs, the Greeks, and the Austrians, even more nettlesome.⁹ The Ottomans would have to modernize the army; that much was clear from the increasing interest, as well, of the French, the British, and eventually the new German Empire in the potential imperial spoils of the Middle East. The “Eastern Question” fundamentally centered on control of the Straits but also included a wide variety of issues confronting the Ottomans, from the fate of Egypt to the struggle for independence of the Balkan peoples.

The heightened interest of the European powers in the future of the Ottoman Empire led increasingly to their interference in the affairs of the Ottoman government, the Sublime Porte. As early as the seventeenth century, the Ottomans granted trade privileges to European countries and city-states through special concessions—the so-called Capitulations. In the late eighteenth century, the Capitulations spread to include European rights to intercede on behalf of Christian minorities in the empire. Meanwhile, the Christian communities, predominantly the Armenians and Greeks, sought to use European influence at the Porte to achieve minority rights, both formal and real, within the empire. They found allies among a small, Westernized segment of Ottoman elite liberals, who, as part of their struggle for a constitution, promoted the ideal of “Ottomanism”: equal citizenship in the empire for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Great hopes were attached to the promulgation of the constitution of Midhat Pasha in 1876, which sought to shift the balance of power in the Ottoman system from the theocratic sultan and his council of imams to the government and its secular ministries. But Ottoman Muslims in and out of government were little interested in constitutional reform. In the midst of the government crisis provoked by the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Abdul Hamid II was proclaimed sultan and the constitution was abrogated. The Ottoman Empire would be ruled by the despotic and traditionalist sultan for more than thirty years.

Despite this return to traditional centers of authority in the empire, the Armenians took heart from potential allies at home and abroad and exerted even more resolute pressure on the government for reforms. In the Treaty of Berlin (1878), for the first time Armenian pleas for protection against the periodic attacks of Kurds and Circassians were recognized by the great powers. Article 61 of the treaty read: “The Sublime Porte undertakes to carry out, without further delay, the improvement and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians and to guarantee their security . . . It will periodically make known the steps taken to this effect with the powers, who will superintend their application.”¹⁰ The Armenian Catholicus, patriarch of the Gregorian Church, went to Berlin to intercede for this measure. But groups of young, educated Armenians wanted more. After a decade of socialist agitation, often of the Russian narodnik variety, in 1890 they formed the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Dashnaktsutian, in Tiflis (Tbilisi).¹¹ From the Dashnaks’ perspective, equality under the law, the slogan of the Young Ottomans, would lead to the abrogation of the Armenians’ national aspirations and rights, which could be guaranteed only by autonomy within the Armenians’ traditional lands. The Hnchak (Bell) party, founded in Geneva in 1887, was even more radical in its approach. Though Marxists, the Hunchaks advocated the use of terrorism to foster the independence of the six vilayets of eastern Anatolia, traditionally known as the homeland of Armenia.¹²

The Dashnaks and Hunchaks were tiny political formations, and the vast majority of Armenians knew little or nothing of the protections afforded by the Treaty of Berlin. Still, both conservative and liberal Ottomans looked upon these Armenian initiatives with considerable suspicion. The empire’s “most loyal millet” had become in their eyes the most treacherous. To Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909), known as “the Red” for his blood-thirsty disposition, the Armenians represented everything that was wrong in the Ottoman realm. They supported reform and constitutional change. They sought protection from the European powers and were closely aligned with the enemy Russians. Their business and professional elites were secular, Western, and wealthy; in Abdul Hamid’s view, the Armenians had gotten rich from the sweat of simple and devout Muslim laborers and the naive support of government procurement officials. “Trouble arose,” write Braude and Lewis, “when Jews or Christians were seen to be getting too much wealth or too much power and enjoying them visibly.”¹³ The wealthy Armenian elite, gathered in the Galata section of Constantinople, began to attract the attention of the Turkish public and resentful Ottoman officials. Most important, the Armenians had broken the informal social contract of the Ottoman realm by crossing the boundaries of the millet system, and as a result they had given up their rights to protection from the Islamic state. From the Sultan’s viewpoint, punishment was the only legitimate answer to the Armenians’ transgressions.¹⁴

In the summer of 1894 the Armenian highlanders in the Sassoun region refused to pay the double taxation imposed by the Ottoman government and the local Kurdish chieftains. Hunchak agitators sought to turn the tax revolt into a national Armenian uprising. While armed resistance sporadically appeared, no serious rebellion took place. Nevertheless, Abdul Hamid unleashed his irregular troops, the so-called Hamidians, on the Sassoun Armenians, and a terrible slaughter ensued.¹⁵ The Armenians turned for protection to the European powers, insisting that the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin be guaranteed by granting limited autonomy to the six Armenian vilayets. The temerity of the Armenians was too much for the irate Sultan, who instigated a campaign of terror against the Armenian population. Violent massacres took place in Trabzon on the Pontic coast in October 1895 and quickly spread to the highlands.

These bloody pogroms of 1894–1896 were far more deadly and destructive than the pogroms against Jews in Imperial Russia. But they shared several important characteristics with their tsarist counterparts. First, these urban riots and ethnic clashes were fed by intercommunal tensions but also by class resentments, religious antagonisms, and economic frustration. Equally important, the signals for the attacks in both cases came from their respective governments, and the police let the violence continue until ordered by the government to end the mayhem. The perpetrators were sometimes arrested but then later let go or only lightly punished. In the end, some 200,000 Armenians were killed or wounded.

Despite the terrible death toll of the Armenian massacres of 1894–1896 and the role of government in provoking them, they do not qualify as genocide, as the events of 1915 later would. The goal was severe punishment, not extermination. Nor do the events of 1894–96 share the general characteristics of ethnic cleansing; no attempt was made to remove the Armenians from their homes or to deport them. Richard Hovannisian notes that the massacres of 1894–1896 were intended to keep the Armenians “in their place,” whereas in 1915 the Young Turk triumvirate looked “to create a frame of reference that did not include the Armenians at all.”¹⁶ In his work on the German wars of colonial pacification in southwest and east Africa at the turn of the century, Trutz von Trotha distinguishes between a “limited war of pacification” and a “genocidal war of pacification.”¹⁷ The massacres of 1894–1896 clearly belong to the former category. The violence could be compared to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia
• 2 The Nazi Attack on the Jews
• 3 Soviet Deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars
• 4 The Expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia
• 5 The Wars of Yugoslav Succession
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index