What Happened?

Apr. 24 2005

CTV.ca News

In 1913, The Committee of Union and Progress, a party that stood for Turkish nationalism and reform, seized power of the Ottoman Empire.

Popularly known as the Young Turks, party members aligned themselves with the Germans in the years leading up to the First World War.

The multi-ethnic territory was in trouble -- by 1850, it was being called “the sick man of Europe.”

Its final years were characterized by revolts and local authorities opposing the central government while the empire went to war with both Russia and Great Britain.

The once-expansive territory that stretched from the gates of Vienna to Yemen was threatened by Balkan states that were trying to expand their territory at the expense of Ottoman lands.

In fact, when rulers ordered the mass deportation of all Armenians living on Ottoman soil in 1915, they cited fears that Armenian nationalists were siding with Russian troops who invaded eastern Turkey.

After Young Turks officials resigned in 1918, the continuing massacres were perpetrated by the Turkish Nationalists who shared a common xenophobic ideology with the Young Turks.

By the time the Turkish state replaced the Empire in 1923, the majority of the 2 million Armenians who had been living on Ottoman soil at the time had been wiped out.

Forcibly removed from their homes in eastern Anatolia, now eastern Turkey, most of the deportees died en route to Syria. The rest fled, changed their surnames, or were converted to Islam.

In spite of nations such as Great Britain, France, and Russia warning Ottoman rulers that they would be held responsible for their actions, foreign powers did not intervene.

Armenians, and several Western historians, say that up to 1.5 million perished at the hands of the Turkey’s nationalist government between the years of 1915 and 1923 – in a deliberate attempt to wipe out the population in a campaign of exile.

But Turkish officials dispute the numbers, saying they are inflated, and that the victims died in a climate of war.

Eyewitness accounts

“When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact,” Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey between the years of 1913 to 1916, said in a statement.

“Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people,” said Morgenthau.

Similar statements were made by historian Arnold Toynbee, who worked for the British Foreign Office during the war.

“The first to be butchered were the old men and boys — all the males that were to be found in the convoy except the infants in arms — but the women were massacred also. It depended on the whim of the moment whether a Kurd cut a woman down or carried her away into the hills,” he said.

“When they were carried away their babies were left on the ground or dashed against the stones. But while the convoy dwindled, the remnant had always to march on. The cruelty of the gendarmes towards the victims grew greater as their physical sufferings grew more intense; the gendarmes seemed impatient to make a hasty end of their task. Women who lagged behind were bayoneted on the road or pushed over precipices, or over bridges. The passage of rivers, and especially of the Euphrates, was always an occasion of wholesale murder,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, other notable leaders recognized the events that left scores dead.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: “In 1915, the Turkish government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor.”

As genocide historians continue their research, more evidence surfaces, says one scholar.

“There is so much evidence and it’s a matter of different kinds of evidence,” Roger W. Smith, past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars told CTV.ca.

More recently, several genocide scholars have begun to look at the archives of the Germans and Austrians who were allied with Turkey during the First World War.

“One, these documents were temporary; two, they were not meant for publication; three, they were produced by people who were in alliance with Turkey, and those things can be very damning,” said Smith, a pioneer in the field of genocide studies and Professor Emeritus of Government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, U.S.

There are also documents detailing the replacement of those local governors and officials who refused to carry out the massacres.

“These aren’t just documents here or there, there is this convergence of evidence…There are also the facts themselves that if the object was to relocate people, how did they do such a terrible job, such that almost everybody died?” Smith said.

“There are a lot of different kinds of evidence, and they all move in the same direction.”

In a 2000 article for The Independent, British journalist Robert Fisk chronicled his findings when he set out to look for evidence of mass murder in 1993.

His search took him to a site in northern Syria, which a 101-year-old Armenian woman pointed out, saying it was where her family had been slain.

“The more I dug into the hillside next to the Habur river, the more skulls slid from the earth, bright white at first then, gradually, collapsing into paste as the cold, wet air reached the calcium for the first time since their mass murder. The teeth were unblemished -- these were mostly young people -- and the bones I later found stretched behind them were strong. Backbones, femurs, joints, a few of them laced with the remains of some kind of cord. There were dozens of skeletons here. The more I dug away with my car keys, the more eye sockets peered at me out of the clay. It was a place of horror.”

Denial then and now

Several scholars affirm that the genocide meets the definition of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Under the Convention, genocide is defined as an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – regardless of whether it was committed in the time of war or not.

Despite numerous foreign eyewitness accounts, academic affirmations, photos, and documents bolstering the facts, Turkey has long upheld a position of denial.

Ninety years after the genocide, the denial is steadfast among the Turks as is the remembrance among the Armenians. Every year on April 24, 1915, Armenians worldwide remember the genocide, marking the date when the first Armenian intellectuals were rounded up and killed by Turks in Constantinople.

Still, the issue of genocide remains a sore point that keeps Turkish-Armenian diplomatic relations from moving forward.

“First of all, the Turkish position is that we do not accept the label genocide to the events," Fazli Corman, counsellor of the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa told CTV.ca.

“In the case of the Turkish position, we do not accept the label of genocide to the tragic events that (occurred) in Anatolia during the First World War. We generally accept that Armenians as well as Turks suffered during these great events,” Corman said.

Denial can involve several elements, Smith said.

First, Turkish officials deny the numbers. They argue that 1.5 million Armenians did not die – and that the death toll is closer to 300,000, maybe 600,000 at a stretch. They claim that thousands of Turks were killed in civil battles when the Armenians, supported by their Christian Russian allies, rose against their Ottoman rulers.

Another Turkish assertion denies responsibility for the deaths, alleging that the hundreds of thousands of victims died of thirst and starvation.

Meanwhile, another commonly held position is that the victims died in the hands of overzealous officials and criminals who were released prematurely from jails in a climate of lawlessness.

Indeed, in the post-war Ottoman government, tribunals convened in 1919 to hear testimony on the massacres and the Young Turks party was found guilty.

Still, the modern Turkish nation denied that the 1915-1923 massacres deserved recognition as genocide.

This denial is likely borne of two different roots, Smith explained.

“One is political, Turkey is afraid that there will be demands made, not so much for money, in a sense of reparations, but of restitution of demands for land, returning of assets,” Smith said.

“But I actually think that it’s more the image, the psychological and moral (image). It’s the feeling that ‘We are not that kind of people and we don’t want to be put in the camps of the Nazis.’”

‘The first large-scale genocide’

But it’s important to acknowledge this bloody stain on the world’s tapestry, to prevent it from happening again, Smith said.

“It was the first large-scale genocide, but it was met with almost no punishment meted out to anyone,” he said.

“The Armenian genocide was really the prototype, the pattern that a lot of 20th century genocides have taken,” Smith said, noting that the nationalistic fervour, the primitive killing techniques and the massacres within strict territorial boundaries are reminiscent for what was to come in Bosnia and Rwanda decades later.

“One of the implications is that would-be perpetrators can draw their own kind of lessons (from the genocide), they can say ‘All you have to do is do the deed, deny you did it, and the world will forget about it.’”

But the world won’t forget. Just when it seems the genocide issue may die, the embers are stoked again by Armenian descendants who lobby for legal and political recognition.

When French legislators recognized the Armenian genocide in 2001, Turkey cancelled millions of dollars worth of defence contracts.

Canada was one of the latest of several countries to recognize the genocide in a 2004 private member’s bill in the House of Commons.

Other countries include: Switzerland, France, Argentina, Russia, and a majority of U.S. state governments.

And in 1985, the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities listed cases of genocide in the 20th century, among those “the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916.”

Meanwhile, organizations such as the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Association of Genocide Scholars have also recognized the massacre as genocide. And in a public notice in The New York Times in 2000, 126 holocaust scholars, including Nobel Laureate for Peace Elie Wiesel, recognized “the incontestable fact of the Armenian genocide” and urged Western democracies to officially recognize it.

Lone Turkish voices of dissent

In the past few years, a few lone Turkish voices have joined international critics in condemnation.

All hell broke loose in Turkey earlier this year when bestselling novelist Orhan Pamuk acknowledged the genocide in an interview with a Swiss newspaper.

“Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for that,” he said. His statement set off a whirlwind of reaction in which he was denounced as a liar and vilified by the press.

Still, another professor at Sabanci University, Halil Berktay, supported Pamuk and said: “In 1915-16 about 800,000 or one million Armenians were killed for sure.”

Although Corman agreed that Armenians had suffered in a tragic turn of events that came as the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, he said he could not call it genocide.

But when asked if the issue is one of semantics, Corman agreed that this could be part of the problem.

“In Turkey this issue is as sensitive as it is for Armenians, and the general perception among the Turkish population is that they would not accept the label of genocide because that brings to the mind of Nazi holocaust. Once you use the term, it brings all this imagery, and we are not able to conceive that what happened in Anatolia is more or less what happened in Germany,” Corman said.

Even with the historical evidence in hand, Corman is unconvinced that there was a deliberate intent to wipe out an entire people.

“Of course the blame is not to be only directed to the government, because that government was in the process of dying or collapsing,” he said.

“It was in the last years of its existence and they were not able to have the public security or safety in the region at the time,and there was a lawlessness at the time that they took to relocate the Armenians.

“But the (relocation) decision went bad because they couldn’t execute it in the way that they designed or wanted because their authority declined,” Corman said.

Even with the benefit of nine decades of hindsight, the issue is still not black and white. It might never be.

Corman says he has read the sources and the eyewitness accounts. Now, his “idea about who is right, who is wrong, is now more complicated, it’s not as simple.”

What needs to be done, Corman says, is to challenge the full set of assumptions that both sides have as they approach the issue.

“We don’t try to harm Armenians’ feelings or try to justify, so that all the suffering that the Armenians went through is condemnable,” Corman said.

“This should be condemned by everybody, including Turks -- but what we say is that please do not try to show or portray Turks as the evil that suddenly decided to bloodily get rid of the Armenians from their country.”