The Lessons of Late Ottoman Genocides for Contemporary Iraq and Syria.

The Lessons of Late Ottoman Genocides for Contemporary Iraq and Syria. By Hannibal Travis.

Late Ottoman Genocides: False Hopes and Plans for Vengeance.

False promises of a more pluralistic era go back centuries in the Middle East. Crowds in London in the era of the Crimean War held up posters showing the Ottoman Sultan, Napoleon Bonaparte III, and Queen Victoria as the "three saviours of civilization."[7] Viscount Palmerston maintained that the "integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire are necessary to the maintenance of the tranquility, the liberty, and the balance of power" of the world.[8] The newspapers said that Britain was fighting against Russia as "the personification of Despotism," and that "God wills the liberty and happiness of mankind," so Britain was "doing God's work in fighting for liberty...."[9] Freedom for all was at hand.

Historians of the late Ottoman Empire describe a dynamic of catastrophe, in which attempts to limit Ottoman conquests resulted in massacres of local civilians, countermassacres of Ottoman settlers and occupation forces, threatened humanitarian interventions, paper promises of equality among Ottoman subjects in the future, and renewed conflict years later.[10]

The Russians did not believe in the Ottoman pledge to protect the rights of Orthodox Christians, which had been trampled consistently. In the Crimean War, the British and Austro-Hungarians supported the Ottomans against the Russians, with the result that "Russia was compelled to demolish her fortresses on the Black Sea" and to keep her warships out of the seas adjoining the western Ottoman coasts, while "Turkey made promises (on paper) that Christians should be admitted to equal rights with Mussulmans in her European dominions."[11]

Britain insisted on the "independence and territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire," eventually signing a pact to defend it against Russian attempts to liberate the Ottoman Christians.[12] The British heavily financed the late Ottoman military machine.[13]

In the twentieth century, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) collaborated with the Committee of Union and Progress or "Young Turks" on plans for a more democratic era in Ottoman history, one in which Armenians and Turks could be treated as equals.[14] According to historian Gerard Libaridian of the University of Michigan, the ARF looked to the Balkan revolutionaries and Russian socialists as models.[15]

He implies that its cooperation with the Young Turks only helped reinforce the new regime's authority, with disastrous consequences. The Balkan wars and the manipulation of the Armenian issue confirmed the worst instincts of some members of the Young Turks. The resulting Young Turk regime reinforced the Ottoman state with Turkism, one-party rule, and a modernizing national socialism.[16]

Revenge on Native Christians for British and Slavic Victories.

The Young Turks and the Constitution of 1908 pledged a new era of democratic pluralism.[17] Secretly, the Young Turks planned to avenge the human-rights violations against Turks in the Balkans, the Russian Empire, and other places. The plan was to deport Christians from their homes and use brigands or irregulars (çetes) or Kurds to perpetretrate massacres.[18]

The German consul in Erzurum reported that the "non-Muslim and non-Turkish inhabitants" of the Ottoman Empire would be "attacked and exterminated by Kurdish and Turkish brigands."[19] The extermination operations were often perpetrated by the "brigand cadres" of convicts released from prison to serve in the Ottoman Special Organization, joined by Kurdish tribes, Turkish gendarmes or police, and Muslim refugees from the Balkans or the Russian Empire.[20] (Hmmm....ISIS)

The refugees sought revenge on the Orthodox Christians and Slavs for their suffering in the Balkan Wars and the expansion of Russia's empire.[21] One of the leaders of the Young Turks, Enver Pasha, remarked that after the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, "our anger is strengthening: revenge, revenge, revenge; there is no other word."[22]

In 1914, the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies prophesied a "day of revenge" against the "Muscovites" and their "allies" for all the "martyrs they have trampled underfoot."[23] With the start of World War I, the German ambassador predicted that if British forces landed on the Turkish coast, all bets would be off when it came to the massacre of the Armenians.[24]

In July 1915, a German diplomat described how the Muslim refugees brought "tales of suffering" to Turkey, which led to "exceptional measures against the Armenians."[25] Historian Taner Akçam observes that "[a] nation that feels itself on the verge of destruction will not hesistate to destroy another group it holds responsible for its situation."[26]

With respect to this plan, some of their German allies encouraged the Young Turks. The German-Turkish League, with the German Foreign Office standing behind it, developed a geopolitics of pitting Germans and Turks against Russians and Armenians. Advocates of this type of geopolitics proposed removing the Armenians from the Ottoman-Russian border area so as to change the racial balance of forces, and to preempt further Russian victories. Arab populations would be deported to the Ottoman north, to be replaced by Armenians who could work the German railway in Mesopotamia, a project that promised agricultural and oil wealth.[27]

After reviewing the German diplomatic cables published by Johannes Lepsius in 1918, German scholar Gabriele Yonan has argued that the Kaiser, the German Intelligence Service for the Orient, and the German Embassy in Constantinople had helped bring about an Armenian and Assyrian "Holocaust," by aiding and abetting plans of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph for a "holy war" against the Christian allies of Britain and Russia.[28]

According to the German diplomatic traffic, the Ottoman Minister of Interior, Talât Pasha, told a German embassy official in mid-1915 that the Turkish government "is intent on taking advantage of the World War in order to [make a] clean sweep of internal enemies--the indigenous Christians--without being hindered in doing so by diplomatic intervention from other countries."[29]

The diplomatic archives indicated that German officials believed that the Ottoman government "resolved . . . to eliminate the indigenous Christians."[30]

This was consistent with reports that the Young Turks decided in 1910-1911 that the "'nations that remain from the old times in our [Ottoman] empire are akin to foreign and harmful weeds that must be uprooted.'"[31]

The native Christians, for their part, sought to escape annihilation by flight, appeals for justice, and spotty resistance. In July 1915, the German ambassador to Turkey wrote that under the guise of "relocations," the Ottomans carried out the "goal of annihilating the Armenian race in Turkey."[32]

The Armenian patriarchate claimed that 200 churches and about as many other places of worship or religious education were stolen or destroyed.[33] In early 1916, the Assyrian patriarch warned the Russians that Turkish and Kurdish forces "had determined to kill all of us [Assyrians]," so that he led his people to flee their homeland.[34]

The German imperial chancellor was told that the Assyrians of eastern Turkey had been "exterminated."[35] Paul Shimmon, on behalf of the Assyrian patriarch, complained that 70 Assyrian towns and villages had been looted and ruined by Ottoman troops and Kurdish militias.[36]

The Greek Foreign Minister spoke of the deaths of more than 300,000 Anatolian Greeks along the Black Sea coast.[37] The U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire condemned the murder of two million Christians in Turkey by 1918, including Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.[38]

Genocide scholar R.J. Rummel, surveying a variety of sources, has identified two periods of killing, involving 300,000 to 1.4 million Armenians in 1914-1918, nearly 200,000 Assyrian and Greek Christians in 1914-1918, nearly 50,000 Assyrians in Persia in 1914-1918, and 800,000 Armenians and Greeks in 1919-1925.[39]

Facing military defeat, the Ottoman Sultan signed a forward-looking treaty with the Western powers. The treaty adopted many of the tools later utilized by the United Nations to reduce the incidence of mass atrocities: ethnic autonomy, human rights for religious minorities, and nonaggression pacts.[40]

In response, Mustafa Kemal and Rauf Orbay waged a national "holy war" (cihad-? milliye) against the remaining Armenians and Greeks.[41]

Raphael Lemkin's notes for a study of Greek-Turkish relations after 1918 stated that after massacres of Turks by Armenians or Greeks, "wave[s] of genocide" reached the Armenians of Cilicia and Yerevan, while at Smyrna some Greek massacres of Turks were followed by attacks by the çetes on Greek villages, designed to "end in the elimination of the rival nationality from that particular area."[42]

The Kemalist irregulars (chéttes or bashibozuks in Lemkin's sources) murdered villagers, raped women, "cut down" children, and burned the villages.[43]

In June 1921, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs described the killing of 60,000 Christians in Soviet Armenia and the environs.[44] Later in 1921, Stanley Hopkins of the aid organization Near East Relief confirmed that the "Greeks of Anatolia are suffering the same or worse fate than did the Armenians in the massacres of the Great War."[45]

He described the Kemalists' intention as "to destroy all Greeks…."[46] A quarter of a million Armenians and Greeks persished in the Kemalists' reoccupation of Smyrna, mostly of drowing, burning, and hunger.[47]

By late 1922, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George condemned how the Kemalists had "slaughtered in cold blood ... five hundred thousand Greeks...."[48]

In December 1922, the British foreign minister concluded that "a million Greeks have been killed, deported or have died."[49] A million or more Ottoman Christians may have been slain after 1918, based on census records and the reports of various diplomats and scholars.

The subsequent Treaty of Lausanne promised to achieve what even the Ottoman Empire could not, that is, to seal "the extinction of Christianity" in Turkey. The Europeans and Russians offered moral and material support to Kemal and Orbay, while they rarely helped the Christians north of the Iraqi border.[50]

The Assyrians asked to receive the benefits of treatment as an "independent nation," failing which they feared "their future existence as a nation [was] doomed," but the British Empire refused.[51] The Ottomans had issued an order to exterminate the Assyrian and Armenian Christians of Mosul during the war, which the German consul Walter Holstein resisted, prevailing due to an "immense strength of will."[52]

The Turkish state created in Ankara claims to be the "legitimate successor of the Ottoman State."[53]

The pillars of modern Turkey are threefold: nationalistic intolerance (Turkification), religious intolerance (Sunnification), and political intolerance (the strangulation of dissent). The Turkish criminal code enforces each of these three pillars of modern Turkish society, with Article 301 codifying the immunity of the Turkish race and its history from criticism, Article 125(b) the immunity of the dominant religion from criticism, and Article 125(a) the immunity of specific Turkish officials from criticism.


The War in Iraq: Imitating the Turkish Model Read the full story here.