Late Ottoman Genocides

The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies

Dominik J. Schaller, Jürgen Zimmerer, Dominik J. Schaller, Jürgen Zimmerer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317990444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Armenian Genocide has lately attracted a lot of attention, despite the Turkish government's attempts at denial. It has been developed into a central obstacle to Turkey's entry into the European Union. As such it attracts the highest political and public attention. What is largely ignored in the debate, however, is the fact that Armenians were not the only victims of the Young Turk's genocidal population policies. What is still largely forgotten is the murder, expulsion and deportation of other ethnic groups like Assyrians, Greeks, Kurds and Arabs by the Young Turks. This not only increases the number of victims, but also changes the perspective on the foundation of modern Turkey and as such on modern Turkish history more generally. The Thematic Issue of the JGR, the republication of which is proposed here, is the first publication, which addresses these wider issues. It contributes not only to our understanding of the Young Turks' population and extermination policies in all its complexities and so helping to bring the forgotten victims' stories "back" into genocide scholarship, but to our understanding of modern Turkey more generally. It is an indispensable tool for everybody interested in one of the great historical controversies of our time.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Introduction

DOMINIK J. SCHALLER and JÜRGEN ZIMMERER

From 1899 to 1922, the Swiss deacon Jakob Künzler (1871–1949) headed a missionary hospital in Ourfa, an old city in South-Eastern Anatolia. During his time in the Eastern Provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Künzler becamean important eyewitness to the Young Turks’ project of large-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide. In October 1915, Künzler had to witness the destruction of the Armenian community in Ourfa when the desperate Armenian resistance against the deportation orders was bloodily suppressed by the Ottoman army.¹ Even before this event, the Swiss deacon was well aware of the Young Turks’ policy of extermination. Since Ourfa was a significant regional crossroad, many convoys of Armenian deportees on their way to the Syrian desert passed the city. Künzler tried to relieve as much as possible the distress and pain of the Armenian deportees, who were in a deplorable condition. Furthermore, he made sure their fate was not forgotten. In his book In the Land of Blood and Tears, published in 1921 in Germany, Künzler described vividly his horrible experiences in Ourfa during World War I.²

As a missionary, Jakob Künzler was very much indebted emotionally to his Armenian coreligionists and felt open sympathy for them. Nevertheless, he understood that the fate of the Armenians was only part and parcel of a wider strategy of population policy by the Young Turkish government. In his above-mentioned report, Künzler stated: “The Young Turks did not only include Armenians and Kurds but also Arabs in their plan of extermination.”³ This is a remarkable statement in two respects. First of all, Künzler talks about a policy of extermination and not only about resettlement, as some groups wanted to make the world believe then and now. Second, he did not turn a blind eye to the fate of Muslims like the Arabs and Kurds, but identified them as fellow victims of Christian groups such as the Armenians. In particular, the deportation of Kurds from Erzerum and Bitlis in the winter of 1916 made quite an impression on him, as the following report about these deportations and their consequences shows:

No European newspaper has reported that the same Young Turks, who wanted to exterminate the Armenians, drove the Kurds who had been living in Upper Armenia from their house and home. Like the Armenians, the Kurds were accused of being unconfident elements that would join sides with the Russians. The deportation of the Kurds from the regions of Djabachdjur, Palu, Musch and from the Vilajets of Erzerum and Bitlis was carried out in the winter of 1916. About 300,000 Kurds had to wander southwards. First they were placed in Upper Mesopotamia, especially in the region of Ourfa, but also westward from Aintab and Marasch. Then in the summer of 1917, the transport of the Kurds to the Konya Plateau began. [...] The most horrible thing was that the deportations were carried out in the middle of the winter. When the deportees reached a Turkish village in the evening, the inhabitants were afraid and closed the doors of their homes. Thus, the poor Kurds had to stay outside in the rain and snow. The next morning, the villagers had to dig mass graves for those frozen to death. The suffering of the surviving Kurds who finally reached Mesopotamia was far from being over. [...] The winter of 1917/18 brought new hardship. Despite a good harvest, almost all of the deported Kurds fell victim to a terrible famine.⁴

As we can see from Künzler’s statement, Kurds had to endure a very similar fate to that of the Armenians. Forcing them on death marches during the winter closely resembles the Armenian’s marches, with a very similar outcome. The overall aim of the Young Turkish policy towards the Kurds was—according to Künzler—genocidal: “It was the Young Turks’ intention not to let these Kurdish elements go back to their ancestral homeland. Instead, they should little by little be completely absorbed in Turkdom [...im Türkentume aufgehen].”⁵

Jakob Künzler’s observation is of uttermost importance. It reveals that the Kurds were deeply affected by Young Turkish population and extermination policies and subject to social engineering already before the establishment of a Turkish nation state by Mustafa Kemal in 1922.⁶ The discussion of the question whether the deportation and forced assimilation of Kurds by the Young Turks has to be labelled as genocide or ethnocide is, at least from a historian’s perspective, irrelevant since a clarification of this particularly legal and political issue depends on the definition of genocide one resorts to.⁷ It is, however, important to acknowledge that the Young Turkish leaders aimed at eliminating Kurdish identity by deporting them from their ancestral land and by dispersing them in small groups. The Young Turks partially implemented these plans during World War I: up to 700,000 Kurds were forcibly removed; half of the displaced perished.⁸

This important but often neglected fact has consequences for our understanding of the terrible fate of minorities in the late Ottoman Empire. It suggests that the fate of none of those groups, be they Christian as the Armenians, Assyrians or Greek, or be they Muslim as the Kurds, can be treated in isolation. And this leads us to a historiographical problem closely related to memory politics. In accounts and studies on the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide, the Kurds are almost exclusively portrayed as bloodthirsty and ruthless murderers.⁹ Indeed, it is true that Kurdish Hamidiya regiments had ravaged Armenian communities in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96, Kurds killed up to 100,000 Armenians and stole their victims’ land.¹⁰ Finally, during the Young Turks’ genocidal campaign against the Armenians of 1915–17, Kurdish chiefs and bands participated in massacres, raped Armenian women and benefited from extensive plundering. Nevertheless, it is necessary to note that Kurdish reactions to the persecution of the Armenians were manifold. Whereas many Kurdish tribes joined the Young Turks, some Kurdish groups like the Alevis from Dersim (today Tunceli) decided to oppose the government and gave refuge to Armenians.¹¹

Even more importantly, as shown above, Kurds fell victim to a similar treatment at the hands of the Young Turks as the Armenians and other Christian groups. This not only serves as a reminder of the unsettling fact that victims could become perpetrators, but also that perpetrators could turn victims. It is not only activists struggling for the international political and legal recognition of the Armenian genocide that have a lot of difficulty in recognizing that the Kurds, who excelled in the murder of the Armenians, fell themselves victim to Young Turkish population and extermination policies, but also historians, and especially genocide scholars, working on the violent breakup of the Ottoman Empire generally.¹² This is partly due to a problem inherent to the concept of genocide, in as much as the original legal idea of genocide implies a rigid dichotomy between perpetrators and victims. Social reality, however, is much more complex: victims can become perpetrators and vice versa. There are many examples of this in history: many of the Hutu who participated in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, for example, had been expelled from Burundi, where the ruling Tutsi regime waged genocidal campaigns against the Hutu population in 1972 and 1988.¹³

Another problem arises in historical practice: the concentration on a single victim group. Mainly due to public perception of the Holocaust, genocide is commonly understood as a highly ideological crime against a single group of people. This hinders the identification of synchronic similarities and overall strategies.

Due to its deficiencies, some historians plea for the abandonment of the traditional idea of genocide or its replacement through alternative conceptions. Christian Gerlach, one of the pre-eminent voices in this discussion, claims that “extremely violent societies” like the ones in the Late Ottoman Empire or in Nazi Germany are characterized by mass violence against numerous political, religious or ethnic groups instead of only one. A new generation of historians working on World War II and the German war of extermination in Eastern Europe have taken this into account and shown that the Nazis’ “struggle for Lebensraum” was not only directed against the Jews—though they held an outstanding position as ultimate arch enemies in Hitler’s ideology—but also affected Poles, Russians, Roma and several other groups.¹⁴

In the case of the Ottoman Empire this has not yet been done sufficiently. The reasons for this are manifold. As Gerlach—amongst others—asserts, most genocide scholars still prefer focusing on one victim group in isolation in order to make this group’s fate appear more exclusive and consequently more meaningful. This approach has thus to be regarded as a contribution to the creation and strengthening of group identity.¹⁵

This observation is consistent with the current state of research on mass violence in Anatolia during World War I. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is in both historiography and public memory almost solely associated with the murder of the Armenians. Although the Turkish government still denies that the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire fell victim to systematic murder, the extermination of the Armenians is far from being a “forgotten genocide.” No book on the history of genocide can omit the case of the Armenians. In Switzerland and France, the public denial of this event can be a criminal act.¹⁶ The Armenian tragedy has not only entered the realm of collective global memory but also counts as the “first modern genocide.”¹⁷ Moreover, the belief is widely held that the murder of the Armenians is causally connected with the Nazi genocide against the Jews. The intention that lies behind the linking of these two genocides is obvious: as a straight precursor to the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide would gain even more significance.¹⁸ To sum up: Armenian lobby groups, human rights organizations and genocide scholars sympathizing with the Armenian struggle for justice and reparations have been rather successful in the global “competition among victims” (Jean-Michel Chaumont) for international recognition and moral capital.¹⁹ Like the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide has become a universal symbol for evil as such.²⁰

Unfortunately, achieving the global remembrance of the genocide against the Armenians seems to have downplayed the fate of all other minority groups in the Ottoman Empire that suffered from ethnic cleansing and mass murder at the hands of the Young Turks.

The one-sided association of the Armenian genocide with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is a relatively new phenomenon. In the postwar period, Western observers were well aware that the Young Turks’ policy of extermination was multifaceted. Henry Morgenthau, who served as US ambassador in Constantinople until 1916, for example, stated in his memoirs: “The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians. Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea.”²¹

Morgenthau was right when he emphasized that the Young Turks leaders’ systematic policy of violent turkification was first targeted against the Greeks. Even before the outbreak of World War I, more than 100,000 Ottoman Greeks were expelled from the Aegean and Thrace to create living space for Muslim refugees who had themselves been brutally driven away from Crete and the Balkans.²² Hundred-thousands of Greeks were deported from the coastal region to the interior due to alleged strategic reasons during the war. Finally, the anti-Greek campaign of the Young Turks found its continuation in Mustafa Kemal’s expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks. The burning of Smyrna and the slaughter of its Christian inhabitants in 1922 marked the symbolic end of Greek presence in Turkey. The euphemistically called “population transfer” between Turkey and Greece turned out to be nothing else than large-scale ethnic cleansing that was internationally approved. This sort of population policy became an influential model for solving minority questions in the twentieth century.²³

Where as politicians of the great powers and Western civil societies were well aware of the destruction of the Armenian and Greek communities in the Ottoman Empire, the persecution of smaller Christian minority groups has remained more or less unknown.²⁴ Since the Assyrians were more vulnerable due to the lack of an international lobby and an external nation state, the Young Turks did not perceive them as dangerous as the Armenians and the Greeks. Thus, Young Turk extermination policy against themwas less systematic. Massacres against Assyrians were often the result of initiatives by local government and party officials like Mehmed Reshid in Diarbekir.²⁵ When German consuls lear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abstracts
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Late Ottoman genocides: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies—introduction
• 2. Seeing like a nation-state: Young Turk social engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913-50
• 3. The 1914 cleansing of Aegean Greeks as a case of violent Turkification
• 4. Perception of the other's fate: what Greek Orthodox refugees from the Ottoman Empire reported about the destruction of Ottoman Armenians
• 5. A prelude to genocide: CUP population policies and provincial insecurity, 1908-14
• 6. Dissolve or punish? The international debate amongst jurists and publicists on the consequences of the Armenian genocide for the Ottoman Empire, 1915-23
• Index