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.
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