The Centennial of the Armenian Genocide
The approaching centennial of the Armenian genocide has led to a flurry of activity commemorating the event. The key date of a process that took place over several years is April 24, 1915, when Ottoman authorities arrested some 200 Armenian community leaders in Istanbul and deported them to central Anatolia – where most were then executed. The event marked a transformation of the previous decades’ distrust, discrimination, repression and occasional murders and massacres of members of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire. In times of instability and war, minorities suspected of sympathizing with the enemy – as many Armenians did – often suffer such depravities.
The arrests of April 24, however, seemed to indicate a new, more organized and methodical government plan to eliminate the Armenians entirely. Armenian leaders in Istanbul were not armed or engaged in insurrection against the Ottomans, yet they were deported and killed. At the same time, an Armenian uprising on the other side of the empire in Van – described by Armenians as a defensive reaction to abuses and depredations of Ottoman officials there – led to the government’s siege of the city and the targeting of the whole Christian population of Eastern Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women and children were rounded up and forcibly marched – without provisions and subject to continuous attacks by mostly Kurdish tribes – hundreds of miles towards Deir el-Zor, a dusty town in eastern Syria hardly able to feed its own population at the time. Only some 15,000 survived the march and the continued starvation in Deir el-Zor.
The final death toll is the subject of dispute between Turkish sources, who estimate around 500,000 Armenian dead (roughly equivalent to the number of Muslim Ottoman citizens killed during the World War One in Eastern Anatolia) and Armenian sources, who hold to a figure of one and half million Armenian victims. Western scholarly sources I examined mostly cite a figure of at least one million Armenian dead from the events of 1915 and 1916. Of a pre-1915 population of roughly two million Ottoman Armenians, less than 400,000 remained in 1917 – mostly in Istanbul and the European side of the empire. That number would be further whittled down in subsequent years.
Today, Turkey completely rejects the term “genocide” to describe what occurred. Ankara’s view has always been that the Armenians, along with a large number of Muslims, died during the fighting in the region that was part of World War One. They insist that there was no calculated plan on the part of the Ottoman government to eliminate the Armenian community of Anatolia. When Pope Francis this week used the term “genocide” in his commemoration, Prime Minister Davutoglu reacted by claiming the Pope had joined an “evil front” against Turkey aiming to unseat his government.
Your humble columnist is not a historian, of course, and is in no position to definitively settle contrasting accounts of history. This column represents no more than my considered opinion. Having been to eastern Turkey more than a few times, however, I can never help wondering: “If this was not a genocide, then where are all the Christians who were once a plurality in provinces like Van?” We call what the United States and Canada did to the native inhabitants of their lands a genocide, yet it remains a good deal easier to find Iroquois, Cherokee, Navaho, and other aboriginal peoples in most parts of North America today than it is to find an Armenian, an Assyrian or a Nestorian in Anatolia.
The Ottoman Empire of the 15th and 16th centuries was at its height and could afford to be magnanimous and tolerant of various groups, even taking in Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain. The crumbling empire of the early 20th century, on the other hand, was weak and desperate, seeing enemies anywhere and everywhere – including hundreds of thousands of passive Christian civilians who had lived in their villages for centuries, and who wanted nothing more than to live their lives and avoid the dangerous politics a few of their countrymen had gravitated towards.
Genocide scholar Helen Fein identifies four principle motivations for the act of genocide, all of which were present to some degree in a declining Ottoman Empire, whose elites were newly acquainting themselves with European ideas about nationalism and cultural homogeneity. The four motivations are: Eliminating a real or potential threat, spreading terror among real or potential enemies, acquiring economic wealth, and implementing a belief or ideology.
Unfortunately, similar reasoning still seems all too common today, as Yezidis reflect on the past year, as Iraqi and Syrian Christians seek shelter from the Islamic State, and a month after Kurds commemorate Halabja and the Anfal genocide.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.