When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide

James Robins

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838607517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Genocidio e crimini di guerra

On April 25th 1915, during the First World War, the famous Anzacs landed ashore at Gallipoli. At the exact same moment, leading figures of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire were being arrested in vast numbers. That dark day marks the simultaneous birth of a national story – and the beginning of a genocide. When We Dead Awaken – the first narrative history of the Armenian Genocide in decades – draws these two landmark historical events together. James Robins explores the accounts of Anzac Prisoners of War who witnessed the genocide, the experiences of soldiers who risked their lives to defend refugees, and Australia and New Zealand's participation in the enormous post-war Armenian relief movement. By exploring the vital political implications of this unexplored history, When We Dead Awaken questions the national folklore of Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey – and the mythology of Anzac Day itself.

1

Pro patria mori

There is a mountain called Ararat, its peak permanently tipped by ice and snow: a towering epicentre, a stone-faced sentinel and a witness to the first furtive kicks of civilization.

Three lakes and three seas encircle the mountain: to the west, the bustling Black Sea; eastwards, Urmia and Sevan mark the gateway to the Caspian; in the south, the salted shores of Van and onwards to the Mediterranean.

Guided by a dove, the common tale holds, Noah and his lifeboat ran aground on Ararat after the Flood. If this legend is to be believed, it is from the mountain’s slopes that all human and animal life descended to begin again in a purged new world.

Journeys across this highland are slow, volcanic tempers having long ago rent great peaks and valleys into fertile umber. The Euphrates and Tigris Rivers find their sources between tectonic cracks, spilling out to the desert and the Persian Gulf. The Silk Road searches through its more navigable southern reaches.

From the time of antiquity to the recent past, this busy corridor between Europe, Asia and the Middle East has been governed by the whims of warlords, traders, usurpers, rival faiths; the ebb and flow of kingdoms and empires. It is here, in the fourteenth century before the Common Era, that the first whispers of an Armenian people will be heard.

Their origins are mysterious. Even the name ‘Armenia’ is of uncertain provenance, lost to the prehistory of humankind. The Armenian language, hardened by stiff consonants, forms a distinct branch of the Indo-European tree. Pagan gods demand their worship – deities of sun, moon and rain – later to be corrupted by Greek and Zoroastrian fables. They have heroes, too: the Babylonian exile Hayk who felled a tyrant; Vahakn, slayer of dragons.

For millennia, their homeland is invaded, conquered and plundered by Hittites, Persians, Seleucids and others. Only once will the region be united under an Armenian banner, during the era of Tigran the Great in the first century BCE, a powerful but short-lived burst of empire contending with the ailing Roman Republic.

Gregory the Illuminator brings the teachings of a Jewish Nazarene dissident to the Armenians in the early 300s, shortly before Constantine’s conversion, making them arguably the first Christian people in the world. The Apostolic Church emerges as a pillar of identity, upholding a firm independence from both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Countless churches, monasteries and cathedrals are hived from dark rock, their cupolas made to resemble Ararat’s peak – redoubts in ages of war, treasure houses of sacred texts. Khachkars, carved stone tablets bearing intricate cruciform patterns, dot the landscape. To bring the Bible to the masses, a scholar priest named Mesrob Mashtots devises an alphabet in the fifth century: thirty-six letters, read from left to right, an elegant script.

By this potent combination of a distinct faith and a strong literary pedigree amongst the elite, Armenian life and culture endures – even as cycles of occupation roll on. Muslim Arabs arrive in the seventh century, Byzantines in the tenth and Seljuks soon after. Under this pressure, Armenians begin migrating en masse towards the Mediterranean’s northeastern coast. Here, they establish a kingdom known as Cilicia, later to become a base for marauding Crusaders on their quest to control the Holy Lands.

Then, further invaders: Mongols and Mamluks who break the back of Armenian society for generations. Finally Turks, descendants of roaming tribes from Central Asia, surge through Anatolia westward.

In 1453, twenty-one-year-old Mehmed II seizes Constantinople from the Byzantines. He anoints himself Conqueror and renames the ancient city Istanbul, the third capital of the rising Ottoman Empire. Cilicia splits apart not long after. Armenians become a colonized people once more.

The Ottoman Empire is a formidable machine of conquest and permanent warfare, mobilized for expansion. At its peak, the state is gargantuan, spanning Arabia and North Africa, parts of the Caucasus, the entirety of Anatolia and a European heartland: the Balkans, Greece, parts of Ukraine and Romania, pressing as far west as Austria.

From the Red Sea to the Danube, the Sultan reigns: a supreme ruler drawn from the House of Osman, Caliph of all Muslims, defender of the pilgrimage cities of Mecca and Medina.

Armenians comprise a small patch in an elaborate, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Ottoman quilt. Turks are dominant. Beneath them, Arabs, Kurds, Jews, Assyrians, and various European peoples who will one day fragment and define themselves as Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Montenegrins and Greeks.

Unlike early Christianity, Islam is built as a political force as well as a faith. The Koran and its accompanying Hadith lay out the ideal for Muslim rule, particularly for how to treat other monotheisms – People of the Book. Ottoman authority is split along religious lines into little theocracies known as millets, the Sultan delegating limited power to clerical figureheads. For the Armenians, a Patriarch acts as de facto leader of the community.

The millet system is a pact of privilege and subjugation. Armenians can practise their religion freely, operate civil courts, run schools, hospitals and businesses, but their status is second class. Churches and bell towers cannot shadow the minarets of mosques. Christians must make way for Muslims in the street. Access to Muslim courts is severely restricted. Their testimony carries little weight. They are not allowed to carry weapons.

Not separate and equal, then, but separate and protected. Compared to medieval Europe, it is an enlightened form of government and social organization. Armenians, by their willingness to keep their heads down, to make the necessary prostrations, earn the nickname ‘Loyal millet’.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, by far the majority of Armenians are peasants scratching out feudal lives in their ancestral lands, subdivided into the six vilayets, or provinces of eastern Anatolia: Van, Erzurum, Harput, Bitlis, Diyarbakır and Sivas.

For one hundred generations, Armenian women have wrung scarlet-hued clothes in the arterial ramblings of rivers and streams. They tend the silkworms, and with their husbands and sons, toil with rough-hewn tills in the grain fields, or pick pomegranates, dates, apples, tobacco and grapes. Winemaking originates here, fermented in vast pottery urns. Hillsides are indented with shepherds’ tracks, the wanderings over which livestock have long been driven.

Armenian homes are simple, mud brick and tiled rooves mostly, often warren-like and fortified against fearsome itinerant tribes who survive by stealing. Armenian families are extensive and tightly bound with sincere respect given to elders, for they know the rhythm of seasons most intimately: winter’s bitter chill and the warm promise of harvest. These homes smell thickly of smoke, a fire kept burning in a small pit in the living room, both for heat and for cooking. Over shredded chunks of lavash, stories, are shared around the fire, epic poems and lyrical songs of Armenian rulers and warriors past, like Saint Vartan the rebel king.

If the Armenian nation is to have a soul, it is here among the grazing herds, the apricot orchards and around the home hearth.

Because of their poverty and isolation, these peasants are tied to their neighbours. Conversations between Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Assyrian and settled Kurdish families can flit between languages, or develop a unique combined patois of their own. Customs filter across these ethnic lines, as do business partnerships, mutual aid and even friendships: the Armenian goatherd will know the Turkish tobacco farmer further down the valley, just as the Greek silk harvester will greet the Assyrian ploughman. Often, the only divisions between clans can be found on days of worship. Intermarriage is a taboo rarely breached.

Still, inequities thrive. Rural chieftains undisturbed by local authority extort protection money. Muslim landlords dominate. Common practice sees nomadic Kurds, who spend much of the year in the mountains, demanding to be quartered in Armenian homes when snow sets in – a hated tradition that leads to abuse and rape, against which no complaint can be made.

Electricity, even railways, has not yet penetrated these far-flung regions. Instead, rural roads still hum with oxen-pulled carts delivering surplus to market towns: rugged hives of blacksmiths and bakers, tailors of silk and rollers of cigars. Produce for the port cities: thriving and wealthy patchworks of schools and bazaars, jewellers, craftsmen and merchant houses lining the quayside. The Armenian hamal is a common sight: porters bearing heavy loads in patched wide-fitting trousers and tatty waistcoats. Because of their success in trade, Armenians come to be known in the West by a similar stereotype to the Jews of Europe: economically prosperous despite their political suppression.

And then, there is Istanbul: an imperial nerve centre sprawling over seven hills, jostling the Golden Horn, its vistas dominated by Haiga Sophia’s radiant dome and the heaven-reaching spires of its rival twin, the Blue Mosque. A bridge at Galata – which both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were once invited to design – links the grubby fervour of markets to the lofty uphill European quarter of Pera. Below the second-floor overhangs of apartments, between dense stalls of cardamom, cinnamon, paprika, mastic, fig, rose and jasmine, small kahvehane brew bitter black drinks: coffeehouses, a space for gossip and schemes, dissent and disputation.

Part of the capital’s illustrious sprawl, an Armenian elite achieve notoriety and respect as doctors, bankers, pharmacists, poets, musicians and industrialists – shipyard owners and silk mill tycoons, men who reek of iron and modernity. The Duzian family run the Imperial Mint. The Dadians guard the state arsenal. Beloved of the Sultan’s court is the Balyan dynasty, a lineage of architects just as adept at churches as they are mosques. Their designs are everywhere, from the gaudy mesh of styles that adorn Dolmabahçe Palace to the imposing frontages of Taksim Barracks.¹

But this well-to-do community is rarely allowed to ascend the loftiest levels of political influence. That privilege, for the most part, remains with Muslims, and them alone. But there is an essential interdependence. The Armenian elite need powerful patrons at court. The Ottomans, in turn, need Armenian wealth.

Orientalists of the era speak of ‘Armenia’, yet such a nation doesn’t really exist. It is an imagined homeland. For now.

The Ottomans’ engine of conquest trembles to a halt in the late seventeenth century. New pressures rise from Western Europe, bringing serious shocks to the system.

Figure 2 ‘A view of Beyoğlu, Istanbul in the late 19th century, through the eye of Armenian photographer M. Iranian’. Credit: Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Photography Collection/Pera Müzesi.

The French Revolution unleashes regicide, radicalism and twenty years of ravage. But above all, that great severance with hereditary monarchy imbues a new spirit in Europe: the rise of nationalism. No longer bound to the punitive protection of kings and aristocrats, ‘subjects’ begin to think of themselves as ‘citizens’, tied together by language, culture, ethnicity, religion and a shared history.

The first nationalist uprisings against Ottoman rule come from the West, inflamed by Napoleon’s campaigns of liberation. Serbs free themselves from the Sultan in 1804 and, after a crackdown, again in 1817. The Greeks follow soon after, kick-starting an insurrection in 1821 and drawing in the Great Powers of Europe to their aid, rousing a Romantic spirit embodied by the poet Byron, who gives his life for the Hellenistic cause. The result, in 1830, is total Greek independence.

The Ottoman Empire’s century of erosion has begun, a steady buckling under the weight of nationalist insurgencies within and Great Power pressures without.

To the north, the Russian Empire covetously eyes the Dardanelles Straits and Istanbul, which they longingly call Tsargrad. Justification for land-grabs is cloaked in the rhetoric of religion and antiquity. Russia sees itself as the successor state to the fallen Byzantines, upholders of Eastern Orthodoxy. Its emperors proclaim spiritual solidarity with put-upon Christians of the Ottoman domain, hoping to exploit separatist means for imperial ends. Separated only by the Black Sea, much blood will be spilled between these imperial rivals.

The British, meanwhile, fear Russian expansion. Under the guise of liberal interventionism, they too proclaim solidarity with Ottoman Christians with an eye to maintaining supremacy in the Mediterranean and securing Indian colonies. The British want the Ottoman Empire weak and malleable but still stable, a bulwark against Tsarist ambitions.

Those ambitions seem unstoppable. Russia encroaches through the Caucasus region, subsuming its imbricated peoples. By 1828, Armenians find themselves divided yet again, this time between Ottoman and Russian rule.

It is clear that the Sultan cannot maintain his moribund state in its present condition. Reform is necessary, if not vital, for survival.

Sultan Mahmud II and his successor son Abdülmecid cautiously enact a decades-long modernizing and centralizing project known as Tanzimât, or reorganization, which touches all areas of Ottoman life: education, banking, trade, taxation, the military and even styles of dress for the upper classes. In 1839 and 1856, two royal diktats tackle the sensitive subject of relations between Muslim and non-Muslim. Tanzimât will be given to them equally, and they, in turn, will be considered equal before the law.

Taken together, this incremental ideology is called Ottomanism, an attempt to harmonize and strengthen diverse peoples into a potent force. If a shining example of imperial unity can be forged, it may forestall any more nationalists ripping apart the fragile Ottoman quilt.

For Armenians, Tanzimât is both curse and blessing. An emerging intelligentsia in Istanbul quickly harnesses the progressive spirit of the age. From coffeehouse debates and salon meeti...