Genocide: The Armenian Experience

(Corrected from the second revised edition, 1984)
© The Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation, 2000

Mass murder of civilians and genocide-the organized extermination of an entire people-are often used by repressive regimes as tools of political intimidation and conflict resolution. Armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons as well as the means to legitimate their bloody exploits, governments have annihilated whole populations with impunity, confident that they can dictate the writing of history. Authoritarian rulers are also certain that the public forgets such tragedies quickly and easily. As militarism increases, worldwide resources become scarcer, and their distribution grows more unequal, "final solutions" become more attractive to governments in crisis.

The genocide of the Armenian people during the First World War was the final act in the long history of repression of Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government. Along with other groups, Armenians were turned into an exploited and oppressed people by an increasingly repressive regime. To improve the lot of the largely peasant Armenian population, Armenian political parties had long struggled for a new social order based on equality between the various religious and ethnic groups as well as on political and economic justice. That vision contradicted the ideology of Turkish elites, both imperial and republican, who sought the solution to social problems in extreme nationalism, turkification of subject peoples and lands, and militarism.

The Genocide perpetrated by the Ittihad ve Terakke (Committee for Union and Progress) government, beginning in 1915, is, in this context, significant for world history as well as the victim people. It is the first genocide in the twentieth century, the best documented, the most successful, and the least remembered. This event brought to an end three millennia of collective existence for Western Armenians in their homeland. Yet, for "strategic" considerations, it is justified and covered up by the current Turkish government as well as some of its allies. 

Calculated Policies

In his work, The Tragedy of Armenia, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and eyewitness to the tragedy, Henry Morgenthau, expresses his firm conviction that Armenians were the victims of a preconceived plan of annihilation. He cites numerous sources of information about the massacres, their nature, and their scope:

During the spring of 1914 they [the Ottoman government] evolved their plan to destroy the Armenian race. Now, as four of the Great Powers were at war with them and the two others were their allies, they thought the time opportune . . . They concluded that, once they had carried out their plan, the Great Powers would find themselves before an accomplished fact and that their crime would be condoned . . The facts contained in the reports received at the Embassy from absolutely trustworthy eyewitnesses surpass the most beastly and diabolical cruelties ever before perpetrated or imagined in the history of the world. The Turkish authorities had stopped all communication between the provinces and the capital in the naive belief that they could consummate this crime of ages before the outside world could hear of it. But the information filtered through the Consuls, missionaries, foreign travellers and even Turks.

Renowned sociologist Irving L. Horowitz of Rutgers University points out the significance of the genocide of the Armenians by the Ittihadists as a precedent-setting case. In his study, Taking Lives : Genocide and State Power, Horowitz describes the Genocide as an act without parallel in any earlier era and "the fate of the Armenians as the essential prototype of genocide in the twentieth century." The civilized world, according to Horowitz, was too absorbed in its own horrors of the First World War to recognize the uniqueness of the destruction of the Armenian people.

Historian Howard Sachar, of George Washington University, devotes considerable space to the Genocide in his Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924. He argues that the Ittihadist regime viewed deportations and massacres as merely effective diplomacy, the realization of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's injunction that "the best way to finish with the Armenian Question is to finish with the Armenians." Sachar concludes, "By any standards this was surely the most unprecedented, indeed the most unimaginable racial annihilation, until then, in modern history." In his history of the First World War, The World Crisis, Winston S. Churchill describes the Armenian massacres:

In 1915, the Turkish Government began, and ruthlessly carried out, the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor . . . The clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be. It is supposed that about one and a quarter millions of Armenians were involved, of whom more than half perished. There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.

In her book, Accounting for Genocide, political sociologist Helen Fein recounts Germany's perception of their ally's policy during the First World War. Count Wolf-Metternich, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, understood that the Ittihadists sought to exterminate the Armenian people as an end in itself even though such a policy inhibited the war effort. He writes the Reich Chancellor in June 1916:

I have discussed with Talaat Bey and Hallil Bey the deportation of the Armenian workers from Amanus stretch, which deportation hampers the conduct of the war. These measures, I told the ministers, among other things, gave the impression as if the Turkish government were itself bent on losing the war . . . But no one any longer has the power to control the many-headed hydra of the Committee, to control the chauvinism and the fanaticism . . . there is not much to gain from the Armenians . . . Turkification means to expel or kill everything non-Turkish.

Helen Fein agrees with historian Ulrich Trumpener of Princeton University who, in his book, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1918, asserts that Germany was aware of and indifferent to the Ottoman policy of mass extermination.

Genocide as Radical Solution

The Genocide involved several premeditated steps, beginning with the disarming and emasculation of the Armenian population. In the early part of 1915, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were removed from combat positions, disarmed, and transformed into road laborers. They were driven by the whips and bayonets of Turkish soldiers into the mountains, where they were murdered en masse.

At the same time Armenian civilians, who since the 1908 Young Turk revolution had the right to bear arms for their own protection, were ordered by the government to disarm. Most Armenians understood what their fate would be if they did not have the means to defend themselves--the disarming of Armenians before the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896 was still an integral part of their collective consciousness. Many, nonetheless, surrendered their arms rather than provoke the hostility of the authorities. The arms they gave up were taken as evidence that a revolution was planned; the bearers were thrown into prison on charges of treason, tortured, and massacred shortly thereafter. The punishment of those suspected of concealing arms or discovered to be concealing arms was even more dreadful.

After the disarming of the population, the men in villages and towns throughout the Empire were issued official deportation orders by public criers and proclamations. The men were led away from their homes by Turkish soldiers and shot at the first desolate place.

Leo Kuper, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, describes the genocidal process in his study Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century:

The emasculation of the Armenian population was completed by the culling of Armenian leaders. Throughout the country, the government arrested and deported the elite, the educated, the deputies, the publicists, the writers, the poets, the jurists, the advocates, the notaries, the civil servants, the doctors, the merchants, the bankers and generally all those with substantial means and influence. This measure was presumably designed to deprive Armenians of leadership and representation so that the deportations might be completed without public clamor and without resistance. The effect was to leave the Armenian population a defenseless and easy prey for the next stage, that of deportation.

The Genocide continued throughout 1915 and 1916 with the elimination of the women, children, old men, and the sick, who suffered a harsher fate than the young men. The former were organized into caravans by the government and forced by Turkish soldiers to walk endlessly along pre-arranged routes. Their destination was the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia, but few made it that far. Denied provisions for survival, many faced slow and painful deaths by thirst, hunger, exposure, and exhaustion. Others were killed outright by local Turks, Kurds, and Turkish soldiers, who attacked the caravans with regularity and impunity.

After Armenians were removed from their homes, the Ittihadists resettled non-Armenians, including many of the Turks who were driven out of Western Thrace during the Balkan wars, on Armenian land. In Armenia. The Survival of a Nation, Christopher Walker notes, "Government resettlement of Turks, Kurds, or Circassians was from this time onwards a central feature of the process of killing Armenians. Resettlement of refugees is too complicated a process to be conjured out of the air; the frequency with which it occurs in 1915 highlights again the deliberateness of government policy.

Eyewitness to Horror

By focusing on statements dealing with the overwhelming fact of the Genocide, its premeditated nature, and its numerical or geographical scope, there is a danger of losing sight of the individual human suffering referred to by such phrases as "untold horrors," "unparalleled brutality," "hellish massacres," "lethal savagery," and "unimaginable racial annihilation."

The following brief excerpts from the official British Blue Book, compiled by historian Arnold J. Toynbee at the direction of Lord Bryce, provide an idea of the inhumanity embodied in the Genocide:

In Harpoot and Mezre the people have had to endure terrible tortures. They had their eyebrows plucked out, their breasts cut off, their nails torn off; their torturers hew off their feet or else hammer nails into them just as they do in shoeing horses. This is all done at nighttime, and in order that the people may not hear their screams and know their agony, soldiers are stationed round the prisons, beating drums and blowing whistles . . . Harpoot has become the cemetery of the Armenians. [From a statement by a German eyewitness, communicated by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief] At the first large station a sight burst upon my view which, although I knew and was prepared for it, was nevertheless a shock. There was a mob of a thousand or more people huddled about the station and environs, and long strings of cattle-trucks packed to suffocation with human beings. It was the first glimpse of the actual deportation of the Armenians . . . There was no confusion, no wailing, no shouting, just a mob of subdued people, dejected, sad, hopeless, past tears. [From a narrative of a physician who had resided in the Ottoman Empire for ten years]

In volume III of the seven-volume Source Records of the Great War, in which Talaat Pasha's infamous extermination orders are reprinted, appears a statement by Dr. Martin Niepage, the leader of the German missionary movement in the Ottoman Empire. He records the horror witnessed by German missionaries:

When I returned to Aleppo in September, 1915, from a three month's holiday at Beirut, I heard with horror that a new phase of Armenian massacres had begun which were far more terrible than the earlier massacres under Abdul-Hamid, and which aimed at exterminating, root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and progressive Armenian nation, and at transferring its property to Turkish hands. Herr Greif, of Aleppo, reported corpses of violated women lying about naked in heaps on the railway embankment at Tell-Abiad and Ras-el-Ain. Another, Herr Spiecker, of Aleppo, had seen Turks tie Armenian men together, fire several volleys of small shot with fowling pieces into the human mass, and go off laughing while their victims slowly perished in frightful convulsions. Other men had their hands tied behind their back and were rolled down steep cliffs. Women were standing below, who slashed those who had rolled down with knives until they were dead. A German I know saw hundreds of Christian peasant women who were compelled, near Ourfa, to strip naked by the Turkish soldiers. For the amusement of the soldiers they had to drag themselves through the desert in this condition for days together in a temperature of 40° centigrade, until their skins were completely scorched. Another witness saw a Turk tear a child out of its Armenian mother's womb and hurl it against the wall.

As did many eyewitness survivors, Rev. Abraham Hartunian recorded his own experiences during the Genocide. His son, Rev. Vartan Hartunian, translated these memoirs as Neither To Laugh Nor To Weep. The clergyman writes:

Many of our teachers, professors, and doctors--those of the educated class--were captured and with the words "So you are the intellect of this people!" had their heads placed in vises and squeezed till they burst. Many children were herded out of the deserts, thrown alive into ditches, and covered over with dirt and sand, to smother beneath the earth. Many were thrown into rivers or dashed to the ground. Many were killed by ripping their jaws and tearing their faces in half. Many women were stripped naked and lined up, and, their abdomens slashed one by one, were thrown in ditches and wells to die in infinite agony. The Kaymakam [mayor] of Der-el-Zor, holding a fifteen-year-old girl before him, directed his words to a murderous band and then, throwing her to the ground, clubbed her to death with the order, "so you must kill all Armenians, without remorse."

The atrocities witnessed by missionaries, relief workers, and survivors is confirmed by officials of the United States government, who were stationed at consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire. American consuls sent numerous reports and dispatches between 1915 and 1918 to their superiors at the American embassy in Constantinople and the State Department in Washington, D.C.

Jesse B. Jackson, American consul at Aleppo for over a decade, describes the Genocide in detail as he and his aides witnessed it:

One of the most terrible sights ever seen in Aleppo was the arrival early in August, 1915, of some 5,000 terribly emaciated, dirty, ragged and sick women and children . . . These people were the only survivors of the thrifty and well to do Armenian population of Sivas, carefully estimated to have originally been over 300,000 souls! From these camps the gendarmes took several hundred almost daily and pushed them on towards the desert beyond the reach of help, going from Aleppo first to Meskene, then to Hamam, Rakka, Sebha, Abou-Harari, and finally to Deir-el-Zor and the surrounding villages, about half way between Aleppo and Bagdad on the Euphrates river. At Meskene they died in such numbers that one of my employees who was sent there to distribute relief to the sufferers late in 1916 said that he had seen more than 150 long mounds where the dead had been buried in trenches (dug by themselves), wherein from 100 to 300 bodies had been buried . . . He also told of having seen many hundreds of skeletons lying strewn along the highways between Aleppo and Deir-el-Zor and Aleppo and Ourfa at which no effort whatever had been made to bury. It is without doubt a carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.

In a June 1915 report to the State Department, the American consul general in Beirut, W. Stanley Hollis, conveys his sense of the Ittihadist government's brutality:

Women with little children in their arms or in the last days of pregnancy were driven along under the whip like cattle. Three different cases came under my knowledge where the woman was delivered on the road, and because her brutal driver hurried her along she died of hemorrhage . . . Some women became so completely worn out and hopeless that they left their infants beside the road. Many women and girls have been outraged. At one place the commander of gendarmerie openly told the men to whom he consigned a large company, that they were at liberty to do what they choose with the women and girls.

Leslie A. Davis, American consul at Kharpert, explains the reality of the deportations in his communications:

I have visited their encampment a number of times and talked with some of the people. A more pitiable sight cannot be imagined. They are almost without exception ragged, filthy, hungry and sick. That is not surprising in view of the fact that they have been on the road for nearly two months with no change of clothing, no chance to wash, no shelter and little to eat . . . As one walks through the camp mothers offer their children and beg one to take them. In fact, the Turks have been taking their choice of these children and girls for slaves, or worse . . . There are very few men among them, as most of them have been killed on the road. All tell the same story of having been attacked and robbed by the Kurds. Most of them were attacked over and over again and a great many of them, especially the men, were killed. Women and children were also killed. Many died, of course, from sickness and exhaustion on the way and there have been deaths each day that they have been here . . . Those who have reached here are only a small portion, however, of those who started. By continuing to drive these people on in this way it will be possible to dispose of all of them in a comparatively short time . . . Not many men have been spared, however, to accompany those who are being sent into exile, for a more prompt and sure method has been used to dispose of them. Several thousand Armenian men have been arrested during the past few weeks. These have been put in prison and each time that several hundred had been gathered up in that way they were sent away during the night . . . There have been frequent rumors that all of these were killed and there is little doubt that they were . . . The fate of all the others has been pretty well established by reliable reports of a similar occurrence on Wednesday, July 7 . . . On Wednesday morning they were taken to a valley a few hours distant where they were all made to sit down. Then the gendarmes began shooting them until they had killed nearly all of them. Some who had not been killed by bullets were then disposed of with knives and bayonets. A few succeeded in breaking the rope with which they were tied to their companions and running away, but most of these were pursued and killed. A few succeeded in getting away . . . The entire movement seems to be the most thoroughly organized and effective massacre this country has ever seen.

The Terror of the State

From the Turkish government's point of view, the genocide of Armenians was the final solution to one aspect of a fundamental set of problems it faced. These included the democratization of political institutions, the implementation of agrarian reform, and the recognition of Kurdish aspirations--problems which remain to be resolved. From the Armenian point of view, the Genocide constituted the violent end to a long and oppressive Ottoman rule, which lacked respect for life and liberty. The Genocide also brutally stopped a process of development which had once promised a renewed life in a just and democratic society.

Before 1914, more than two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. By the end of the First World War no more than 100,000 Armenians remained in what is now Turkey. About a half-million homeless refugees fled to Russian Armenia, other areas of the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Thus, at least 1.5 million Armenians lives were claimed by the Genocide. Survivors who live with tragic memories and their descendants who share the suffering are found in a score of countries today.

The fate of Armenians, according to Irving Horowitz, illustrates that different forms of state authority and different power elites can generate the appropriate ideology and mobilize the machinery of death necessary to exterminate a people. The Sultan began the destruction of the Armenian minority in the name of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turks continued the process in the name of Turkish nationalism. The Kemalists, who replaced the defeated Young Turks in 1923, completed this process in the name of development and hegemonic integration. Horowitz concludes, "Hence, between 1893 and 1923 roughly 1,800,000 Armenians were liquidated, while another 1,000,000 were exiled, without a single political or military elite within the state assuming responsibility for the termination of the slaughter. . ."

Helen Fein places the Genocide within its political context:

The victims of twentieth-century premeditated genocide the Jews, the Gypsies, the Armenians were murdered in order to fulfill the state's design for a new order. War was used in both cases to transform the nation to correspond to the ruling elite's formula by eliminating groups conceived of as alien, enemies by definition.

In their joint study of Armenians for the Minority Rights Group, entitled The Armenians, David Lang and Christopher Walker conclude, as well, that the Genocide was systematic and ably executed from the highest government level to meet pan-Turkic political aims. They write:

The mass-murder was not just a matter of "isolated incidents." It was carefully thought out and planned months, if not years, in advance. Nor did it result from religious intolerance, though the Young Turks mobilized the innate fanaticism of the village Mullahs and the greed of Turkish have-nots. There were in fact Muslim leaders who were shocked by the measures taken and protested against them.

Rejecting Genocide

For many, including the recognized and community-supported political parties in the Diaspora, accounting for the unpunished Genocide constitutes a fundamental aspect of Armenian aspirations for a free and collective national existence. That vision remains relevant; Armenians refuse to be relegated to the dustbin of history either through genocide or by its denial, even if that means being a burden on the conscience of humanity.

The Genocide, which ended three thousand years of Armenian life in Armenia, generated new claims, sanctioned in international law by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. These include the recognition of the Genocide and the application of elementary justice. By international law, the present Turkish government bears responsibility for the crimes committed by its predecessors, even if republican Turkey had repudiated those crimes--something it has consistently failed to do.

Unless principles of justice are called upon to prevail in relations between nations, mass extermination as a tool of political dominance may become more common in the future than it has been up to now. If Armenians and other victims of genocide do not do everything in their power to pursue their battle against genocide, they will have failed in their responsibility toward future generations. Then not only genocide, but the total destruction of humanity, will be looked upon with indifference.
 

Bibliography

Churchill, Winston S. The World Crisis. 4 vols. in 5. New York: C. Scribner's sons, 1923-1929.

Davis, Leslie A. The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Dimplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917. Edited by Susan K. Blair. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989, 216p.

Fein, Helen. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. New York: Free Press, 1979, 468p.

Hartunian, Abraham H. Neither to Laugh Nor to Weep: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide. Translated by Vartan Hartunian. Second Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Armenian Heritage Press, 1986, 206p.

Horowitz, Irving L. Taking Lives: Genocide & State Power. 4th Expanded Revised Edition. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996, 256p.

Kuper, Leo. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981, 256p.

Lang, David Marshall and Christopher J. Walker. The Armenians. New Revised Edition. London: Minority Rights Group, 1987, 20p.

Morgenthau, Henry. The Tragedy of Armenia. London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co., 1918, 16p. [Reprinted by New Age Publishers, Plandome, New York, 1975.]

Sachar, Howard M. Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969, 518 + xxxiiip.

Source Records of the Great War. 7 vols. Indianapolis: The American Legion, 1931.

Toynbee, Arnold J. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. London: Sir Joseph Causton and Sons, 1916, 684 + 30p.

Trumpener, Ulrich. Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1918. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 433p.

Walker, Christopher. Armenia: The Survival of a Nation. Revised Second Edition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990, 476p.