Report to the Canadian Parliament on the Armenian Genocide


In March 1999, the Zoryan Institute was asked by a specially appointed subcommittee of the Canadian Parliament to give it a background report on the Armenian Genocide. The mandate of this subcommittee was to make a recommendation to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the policy of the Canadian Government with respect to recognizing the Armenian Genocide. What follows is a slightly abridged version of that report. (The abridgement consists of eliminating Appendix 10, a letter of opinion on the nature of some questions posed to Zoryan to answer in its report.)

Many individuals and special interest groups keenly followed the process by which the subcommittee would come to make its recommendation. The results of their recommendation were made public in Parliament on June 10, 1999, as follows:

During Question Period, Liberal Member of Parliament Mr. Sarkis Assadourian (Brampton Centre) asked: "Mr. Speaker, in February, in answer to my question in the House on the Armenian issue, the Minister of Foreign Affairs indicated that he had held a consultation process which involved members of parliament, concerned Canadian communities, historians and others. Could the Minister of Foreign Affairs please inform the House of any conclusions that have been reached as a result of this consultation?"

In the absence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (who was attending the G-8 Foreign Ministers' meeting in Germany) Mr. Julian Reed, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, responded: "Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member and all others who worked on this process. On behalf of the Minister of Foreign Affairs I wish to inform the House that together with all Canadians we remember the calamity afflicted on the Armenian people in 1915. This tragedy was committed with the intent to destroy a national group in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were subject to atrocities which included massive deportations and massacres. May the memory of this period contribute to healing wounds as well as to the reconciliation of present day nations and communities and remind us all of our collective duty to work together toward world peace-."
 
 

The Armenian Genocide: A Background Report
Prepared by the Zoryan Institute of Canada, Inc.
April 6, 1999

Historical Background

The wholesale annihilation of 1.2 million Ottoman Armenians from 1915 to 1923 was neither an accident nor a wartime aberration. Rather, it was the inevitable climax of the traditional and evolving Ottoman-Turkish policy of violence directed against a subject minority. The pursuit of that policy was particularly intensified during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, 1876-1908. Defying the contemporary six Great Powers, Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, who, through the terms of Article 61 of the 1878 Berlin Peace Treaty, had obligated him to introduce effective reforms in Turkey's eastern provinces heavily populated by Armenians, this Sultan unleashed during 1894-1896 the notorious "Armenian massacres." Approximately 150,000 Armenians directly and indirectly fell victim to these empire-wide bloodbaths. (Please see Appendix 1 for a bibliography on the 1894-96 massacres.) Again, twice in 1909, large-scale massacres against the Armenians were conducted in the city of Adana. (Please see Appendix 2 for a bibliography on the 1909 Adana massacres.)

At issue is an extreme case of what sociologists would call a dominant group-minority conflict. This conflict originated from and was fueled by the dogmas of an Islamic theocracy, upon which the Ottoman Empire itself was founded. Given the multi-ethnic character of that empire and the numerical inferiority of the Muslim Turks pitted against a numerically superior array of Christian nationalities, this religious cleavage made the Ottoman Empire from its very inception rife with conflict. The reliance of generations of Ottoman rulers on belligerence and imperialist military elites was a factor that helped produce an unending cycle of bloody clashes. At the same time, the military and associated political disasters the Turks suffered in 1909-1913 in the Balkans and North Africa, and the new agitation for the revival of the Armenian Reforms issue -- spearheaded by the Russians, the historical nemesis of Ottoman Turks -- were factors that served to further aggravate the brewing conflict and in the process exacerbate the frustrated and infuriated Young Turks. Amid these turbulent events there erupted in January 1913 the second Young Turk revolution, when the existing Itilaftist government was toppled by a swift coup and a new Young Turk regime was established. This development coincided with the emergence of the Young Turk party's radical wing as the dominant faction in the supreme directorate of the party. For the first time in its history that party was in near-complete control of the Ottoman state organization, including its government, whose new Armenian policy reflected the lethal designs of that emergent radical wing. The ultimate emancipation of nearly all of the nationalities from Ottoman dominion was accompanied by a progressive shrinkage of the empire's territories. The resolve of the Turks not to allow the Armenians, the only Christian nationality left under Ottoman rule, to likewise emancipate, substantially contributed to a "Final Solution" decision, the implementation of which coincided with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

These designs were outlined in a top-secret speech party boss Talaat delivered to the party elite in August 1910 in Saloniki.1 Some three months later these designs were embraced by the top leadership of the party during a series of deliberations that secretly were held outside of the regular sessions of the party's annual convention in the same city.2 Accordingly, Turkey was to be purged of its alien elements and forcibly homogenized under the motto "Turkey for the Turks."

At the heart of the conflict with the Armenians, as with the other nationalities, was the unwillingness of the Ottoman authorities to carry out reforms that would end the whole gamut of inequities and establish the principle of equality for all Ottoman subjects. In their dealings with the Ottoman Turkish overlords, the Armenians were a subordinate class of subjects, thus ever vulnerable to the abuses implicit in that condition. The rare instances of Armenians having been favored for appointments in the Ottoman government, bureaucracy, Civil List, and the royal household were but exceptions to the rule. Some of them were token appointments, others were due to the then existing paucity of competent and/or trustworthy Turkish functionaries.

Despairing of the hopelessness of the steadily worsening plight of the provincial Armenian population and of the futility of pleas and peaceful petitions to the Ottoman central authorities, groups of Armenians in Europe and Russia opted to challenge these authorities by embarking upon limited revolutionary activities in various parts of the Empire. The result was the acceleration of the conflict and aggravation of the suffering of the Armenians which became punctuated by episodic massacres against them.

Irrespective of differences between the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid and that of the Young Turks, the historical record of the consequences of their lethal acts of repression attests to a cardinal fact, that the two regimes converge in a policy of eliminating the Armenian population of the Empire. In this sense the Abdul Hamid era massacres may well be described as a prelude to the World War I Armenian Genocide.

The Acts of Violence Against Armenians

It is no accident that the two foremost genocides of this century were consummated in the vortex of two global wars. Official German and Austrian documents clearly indicate that in broad outlines there was a pre-war Turkish scheme to liquidate the Ottoman Armenian population at the first propitious moment once and for all. Before launching lethal operations in the spring of 1915, the Young Turk authorities paved the way with three preliminary steps.

1. Within 24 hours after signing the secret Turko-German political and military alliance on Aug. 2, 1914, the Turkish High Command ordered General Mobilization, in which practically all able-bodied Armenian males between the ages of 20 and 45 were conscripted in the Turkish army. After having been used for a while as labour battalion soldiers, most of them were executed by Turkish officers and fellow soldiers.

2. About the same time, the War Ministry, in close cooperation with the supreme directorate of the Young Turk party, set up the notorious "Special Organization" as the main instrument of the planned mass murder. Thousands of criminals were released from the main prisons of the Empire over extended periods of time. After a week's training on the campgrounds of the War Ministry, they were deployed in the interior of Turkey for massacre duty. In the words of a Turkish military intelligence officer at the time on duty in the Ottoman General Headquarters, "they perpetrated the greatest crimes against the Armenians."3

3. Prior to the initiation of the deportations and massacres in April 1915, the provincial Armenian population had been subjected to a constant barrage of provocative acts involving plunder, rape, and murder. Alleging separatism and other assorted treasonable acts by the Armenians, the Ottoman authorities ordered, for national security reasons, the wholesale deportation of the Armenian population of the empire's eastern and southeastern provinces. When Turkey entered World War I by attacking Russian seaports and shipping in the Black Sea in October 1914, it instituted severe confiscation of Armenian property. These widespread governmental provocations, during which some Armenians clashed with gendarmes and soldiers who were harassing them, increased tensions, as did sporadic acts of sabotage by isolated individuals and groups of Armenians. As attested to by German consuls on duty in the interior of Turkey, as early as November 1914 segments of the inoffensive Armenian population had been provoked to resist and retaliate in order to provide pretexts to the Turks for leveling pre-planned charges of rebellion against the Armenians in general. The first signal of the existence of such a scheme was relayed to Berlin by German ambassador Wangenheim, who transmitted to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg a report of Captain Dr. Paul Schwarz, his consul at Erzurum. Detailing these provocations, the consul spoke of the acute alarm of "the Armenian population of Erzurum, especially the rural population."4 As a matter of fact, Schwarz referred in his report to these provocations as "harbingers of new massacres." Another consul, Scheubner-Richter, a reserve captain, likewise reported to Berlin on "the excesses and severe harassment" of the Armenians by Turkish authorities, but especially by the Special Organization cadres.5 Major General Otto von Lossow, the wartime German Military Plenipotentiary and Military Attaché in Turkey, in a major summary report to the German Chancellor, declared, "Wherever possible, the Armenians are being aroused, provoked in the hope of thereby securing a pretext for new assaults on them."6

The surprise arrest of some 2,345 Armenian leaders in Istanbul7from the fields of commerce, education, politics, religion and the arts, commencing on April 24, 1915 ushered in the actual first phase of the Armenian Genocide as similar mass arrests were carried out in all large cities of the Empire, especially in the eastern provinces. None of those arrested was charged or tried in a court of law, and very few of them escaped summary murder at the hands of the Special Organization.

The second phase involved the wholesale and systematic deportation of the bulk of the remaining Armenian population, which consisted of terrified old men, women, and children, the confiscation of their goods and property, and their ultimate destruction. In order to give this outrage a semblance of legality, a Temporary Law of Deportation was decreed on May 27, 1915. The Young Turk authorities had suspended the Ottoman Parliament to enable them to do their will without any hindrance. The Armenians, given only two or three days' notice to prepare themselves, were driven on forced marches over distances that would take weeks to traverse. Once away from their homes, they were beaten, plundered, raped, and killed en masse. Those who managed to endure these death marches were pushed east into the Syrian desert, where they had no chance of survival. Many of the deportee convoys were ambushed and destroyed through butchery, drowning in the tributaries of the Euphrates River or in the Black Sea, or through burning alive in specially dug large pits, haylofts, stables and barns. The rest was allowed to perish through starvation, disease and infirmity.

The third phase affected the emaciated survivors of these debilitating treks of deportation. In the deserts of Mesopotamia, in Ras-ul-Ain, Deir Zor and Shedadi, in particular, some 150,000 such survivors were slaughtered by Chechen and Kurdish tribes in the summer of 1916 on the order of Turkish authorities, who were unpleasantly surprised by such a relatively high survival rate.8 The savagery of the atrocities that occurred have been documented by many reliable sources, e.g., American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, British historian Arnold Toynbee, French war correspondent Henry Barby, German doctor Johannes Lepsius, etc. The list of eyewitnesses to the massacres is extensive. (Please see Appendix 3 for a bibliography and Appendix 4 for representative example.)

Estimates vary, but approximately 1,500,000 Armenians were deported and of these, 800,000 to 1,200,000 were killed in this fashion, out of a total Armenian population of approximately 2,000,000.9

The Evidence of the Genocide

When a crime of such magnitude continues to be denied, causing doubt in many well-meaning and impartial people, one must refute such denial by producing evidence that is as compelling as possible. (Please see Appendix 5 for a discussion of the problem of genocide denial.) There is a vast corpus of official documents in the state archives of those countries that comprise the camp of Turkey's World War I enemies, i.e., Great Britain, France, Russia and, after April 1917, the United States. Deniers have attempted to dismiss these documents as wartime enemy propaganda. Similarly, deniers have attempted to dismiss the numerous, detailed, eyewitness accounts of Armenian survivors of the mass murder as products of victim bias. Deniers have further argued that the Court-Martial Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal, which prosecuted and convicted the authors of the Armenian Genocide during1919 and 1920, are merely "victor's justice." (Despite the strenuous efforts of the Young Turk party leaders to remove and destroy all incriminating evidence in this regard, inevitably a number of documents randomly survived. Before being introduced as exhibits in the trials, each one of them was authenticated by Interior Ministry officials who appended the notation "it conforms to the original" to them). There is another category of documentary evidence, however, which fills the state archives of Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary, the two principal and committed World War I allies of the Ottoman Turks. These documents fully corroborate the documents and testimony in the other three categories.

Armenian Genocide evidence is suffused with a large body of such documents that are not only reliable but are explicit about the premeditated and centrally organized nature of the mass murder in question. It would defy all logic that Ottoman Turkey's political and military partners would be motivated to falsely discredit that country in the midst of the crisis of the war by recording and documenting a capital crime. In fact, German ambassador after German ambassador (Wangenheim, Hohenlohe, Metternich, Kühlmann, and Bernstorff) consistently and repeatedly used the word Ausrottung (extermination, eradication) to describe the Armenian experience. They have rendered that crime verifiable by their ample record-keeping. If one adds to this the fact that these records were compiled at the time for strictly internal use and were not intended for public consumption, one may be reasonably safe in declaring this evidence as incontestable. There should be no doubt as to the historicity and actuality of the Armenian Genocide, as concluded by such official organizations as The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal and the European Parliament. (Please see Appendix 6 for the U.N. definition of Genocide and Appendices 7 and 8 for examples of official recognition accorded to the Armenian Genocide.)

Notes

1. Vahakn N. Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide. Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ/London, 1999, p. 96.

2. Ibid., pp. 96-97.

3. Ahmet Refik, Iki Komite Iki Kital [Two committees, two massacres], Ankara, 1994, p. 27.

4. German Foreign Ministry Archives, (hereafter A.A.) Türkei 183/54, A34707, December 4, 1914 report to Ambassador Hans Wangenheim who in turn forwarded it to German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg on December 30, 1914.

5. A.A. Türkei, 183/39, A28584, "secret report" no. 23.

6. A.A. Türkei, 183/54 A34707, August 5, 1918 report.

7. Kamuran Gürün, Ermeni Dosyasi [The Armenian file], Ankara, 1983, p. 213.

8. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, RI & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), p. 219-234; Christopher J. Walker, "World War I and the Armenian Genocide," in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian People, Vol. 2, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 245-268.

9. Christopher J. Walker, "World War I and the Armenian Genocide," in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian People, Vol. 2, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 271-272; Levon Marashlian, Politics and Demography: Armenians, Turks, and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, MA, Paris, Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 1991), p. 1. Official Turkish sources give the number of Armenians killed outright during the deportations as 800,000. Interior Minister Cemal's public declaration in the Turkish daily Alemdar March 15, 1919. The statement is repeated with protest in Y.H. Bayur, Atatürk. Hayati ve Eseri [Atatürk, his life and work], Ankara, 1963, p. 268; in Celal Bayar, Ben de Yazdim. Milli Mücadeleye Giri [I too have written. Joining the national struggle], vol. 7, Istanbul, 1969, p. 2114; and in T.B. M.M. Gizli Celse Zabitlari [The proceedings of the secret session of Turkish Republic's Grand Assembly], vol. 4, Ankara, 1985, p. 440.
 
 

APPENDIX 1
Select Bibliography on the Armenian Massacres of 1894-1896


"The Sorrows of Armenia." Canadian Methodist Magazine 43, No. 5 (May 1896): 409-420. (Numerous illustrations.)

Bliss, Edwin Munsell. Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities. A Graphic and Thrilling History of Turkey --The Armenians, and the Events that Have Led Up to the Terrible Massacres.... New York: Hibbard & Young, 1896, 573p.

Caven, Principal. "The Armenian Atrocities." Massey's Magazine (Canada) 1, No. 2 (Feb. 1896): 97-103.

Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Providence, RI, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995, 452p.

Hopkins, J. Castell. The Sword of Islam, or Suffering Armenia: Annals of Turkish Power and the Eastern Question. Brantford & Toronto: Bradley-Garretson, 1896, 450p.

Hovannisian, Richard G. "The Armenian Question, 1878-1923." In The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide. London: Zed Books, 1985, 11-36.

MacColl, Malcom. The Sultan and the Powers. London: Longmans Green, 1896, 308p.

Melson, Robert F., "Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: The Massacres of 1894-1896." In Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 43-69.

Ryan, R. M. "Why We Catholics Sympathize with Armenia." Catholic World 62, no. 368 (Nov. 1895): 181-185.

Somakian, Manoug J. Empires in Conflict: Armenia and the Great Powers, 1895-1920. London: I.B. Tauris, 1995, 276p.

Ternon, Yves. The Armenians: History of a Genocide. Trans. Rouben C. Cholakian. Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1981, 368p.

Walker, Christopher J. Armenia: The Survival of a Nation. Revised Second Edition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990, pp. 85-176.
 
 

APPENDIX 2
Select Bibliography on the Armenian Massacres in Adana, 1909


Dadrian, Vahakn N. "The Circumstances Surrounding the 1909 Adana Holocaust." Armenian Review 41 no. 4-164 (1988): 1-16.

Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Providence, RI, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995, pp. 179-199.

Gibbons, Helen Davenport. The Red Rugs of Tarsus: A Woman's Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909. New York: Century Co., 1917, 194p.

Somakian, Manoug J. Empires in Conflict: Armenia and the Great Powers, 1895-1920. London: I. B. Tauris, 1995, 276p.

Woods, Henry Charles. The Danger Zone of Europe; Changes and Problems in the Near East. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911, 328p.
 
 

APPENDIX 3
Select Bibliography of Eye-witnesses Reports of Atrocities


The Armenian Genocide in the Canadian Press / Le Génocide arménien dans la presse canadienne. 2 Vols. Montréal: Armenian National Committee of Canada, 1985-[1998], 159p. + 121p.

The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16. Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. London: Joseph Causton & Sons, 1916, 684p. + 30p.

United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide. 3 Vols. Compiled and Introduced by Ara Sarafian. Watertown, MA: Armenian Review, 1993-1995, 186p. + 174p. + 157p.

Henry Barby, Au pays de l'épouvante: L'Arménie martyre. Paris: A. Michel, 1917, 258 + 26p. Barby was a war correspondent.

James L. Barton, comp., Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915-1917. Edison, NJ: Gomidas Institute Books, 1998.

Kerop Bedoukian, Some of Us Survived: The Story of an Armenian Boy. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978, 242p.

Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Susan K. Blair. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, Pub., 1989, 216p. [Davis was U.S. Consul in Harput 1915-1917.]

Johannes Lepsius, Rapport secret sur les massacres d'Arménie. Paris: Payot, 1918, 373p.

Miller, Donald E. and Lorna T. Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993, 242p.

Henry H. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915-1917. Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 1997, 220p.

Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1919, 407p. [Morgenthau was the American Ambassador to Turkey 1913-1916.]
 
 

APPENDIX 4
Sample of Atrocities Committed During the Armenian Genocide


In most of the other valleys that we crossed there were heads sticking out of the sand on the shore of the lake and bodies lying unburied here and there. An occasional body was bloated and swollen, but most of them had begun to shrivel up. In almost every valley, there were some bodies and in several of them a great many,--in one, at least a thousand; in another I estimated that there were more than fifteen hundred, but the stench from them was so great that, although I tried to go up in the end of the valley, I was unable to do so at that time. I explored it more carefully a month later. This valley, like many of the others, was triangular in shape and shut in on two sides by high precipitous banks which the people when attacked were not able to climb. Two or three gendarmes stationed on each side could prevent a multitude from escaping in that way. Many bodies lay wedged among the rocks at the extreme end of the valley, showing that some had tried in vain to scale them in their attempt to escape and had been killed there. On the third side was the water. A rove of fifteen or twenty gendarmes across the valley could keep the people from fleeing into the water or escaping by the narrow path which led along the lake on either side of the valley. Thus the victims were literally penned in and butchered in cold blood. The bodies were piled one on top of another and had apparently been there between two and three weeks. This was confirmed by an old Kurd whom we saw at work near a Kurdish which overlooked the valley. We stopped and asked him what had happened there. He told us that the gendarmes had brought a party of about two thousand Armenians there some twenty days before and had made the Kurds from the neighboring villages come and kill them. This corresponded with the departure of a large party of exiles whom I had seen passing through the town of Mamouret-ul-Aziz three weeks earlier. He acted very indignant about the matter, as he said the smell of their dead bodies was very disagreeable to him and to the other inhabitants of the village. The fact was that many of the Kurds in that vicinity died of sickness due to the unsanitary conditions around them that summer and fall. It is a wonder that all of them did not die.

I was subsequently informed more in detail about the system employed in disposing of these parties of Armenians. They were allowed to camp for a day or two in the valleys or in some convenient place. While they were there the gendarmes summoned the Kurds, as this old man told us, and ordered them to kill the Armenians, telling the Kurds they could make money in this way but would have trouble if they refused. An agreement was then made by which the Kurds were to pay the gendarmes a certain fixed sum -- a few hundred pounds, or more, depending on circumstances -- and were to have for themselves whatever they found on the bodies of the Armenians in excess of that sum. As I heard this explanation and number of times, I think such a system was employed quite generally in that region and perhaps in other parts of Turkey as well.

A remarkable thing about the bodies that we saw was that nearly all of them were naked. I have been informed that the people were forced to take off their clothes before they were killed, as the Mohammedans consider the clothes taken from a dead body to be defiled. There were gaping bayonet wounds on most of the bodies, usually in the abdomen or chest, sometimes in the throat. Few persons had been shot, as bullets were too precious. It was cheaper to kill with bayonets and knives. Another remarkable thing was that nearly all the women lay flat on their backs and showed signs of barbarous mutilation by the bayonets of the gendarmes, these wounds having been inflicted in many cases probably after the women were dead. We also noticed that all the bodies in these valleys were apparently those of people who had been on the road at least one or two months, showing that they were not from Harput but were from distant places.

--Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Susan K. Blair. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, Pub., 1989, pp. 81-83. [Davis was U.S. Consul in Harput 1915-1917.]



APPENDIX 5
The Problem of Turkish Denial


As a rule, powerful perpetrators of genocide who manage to escape prosecution can not be expected to voluntarily admit guilt. Such confessions usually materialize when the perpetrator is incapacitated and apprehended at the end of a related war and thereby is legally held liable, as was the case with the Nazis. Denial is, therefore, a function of power that lasts beyond the act of perpetration.

The evolution of Turkey as a NATO ally, and as a growing military power with collateral economic assets and resources, fits into this picture. Notwithstanding, no manner of denial can adequately answer the paramount question: how did the Armenians so swiftly and near totally disappear from their ancestral territories? There is massive, incontrovertible evidence, and yet the fact of the genocide continues to be denied, often truculently, by the perpetrator. In order to deal with this acute problem, a repertoire of rationalizations, distortions and falsehoods has been created and made an integral part of the prevailing denial syndrome. As a result, one is confronted today with the remarkable spectacle of a political end-game bent on reducing the Armenian genocide to a "debatable" issue, cunningly creating the expedient of a "controversy."

In their attempts to portray this Genocide as questionable or debatable, the proponents of "the Turkish point of view" continue to advance several lines of disjointed arguments such as (1) the Ottoman government is responsible only for its order of deportation, (2) the deportations were limited to the war zones, (3) the attendant massacres were largely the result of "inter-communal clashes" over which the central authorities had no control, (4) most of the Armenian casualties resulted from inadequate resources to protect the deportee convoys, to care for their sanitation and feeding, (5) anyway, the intent of the Ottoman government was not to cause the destruction of the deportee population but merely its relocation, (6) there was a civil war between the Armenians and the Turks in the context of a larger global war, as a result of which the Turks sustained heavy losses, and (7) the overall Turkish losses throughout the entire period being about 2.5 million, they by far exceed the scope of total Armenian losses.

First of all, how did the Young Turk authorities expect to resettle in the deserts of Mesopotamia hundreds of thousands of dislocated people without providing the slightest accommodation or the barest conditions of life for human beings? As diplomat after diplomat from allied Germany and Austria (as well as American Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau) repeatedly stated, by dispatching the victim population to these deserts the Turks were dispatching them to death. Even the Chief of Staff of the Ottoman Fourth Army in control of these areas debunked and ridiculed in his memoirs the pretense of relocation. As he stated, "there was neither preparation, nor organization to shelter the hundreds of thousands of the deportees."1 Equally important, these "hundreds of thousands" were not deported merely from "the war zones," as repeatedly claimed, but were deported from all parts of the Ottoman Empire. As official documents unmistakably reveal, (and American ambassador Morgenthau confirms), only the rapid deterioration of Turkey's military situation and the resulting time constraints prevented the authorities from concluding the comprehensive deportation and liquidation of the rest of the Armenian population. In the case of Istanbul, for example, then the capital of the Empire, by November 1915, already thirty thousand Armenians had been surreptitiously, and by a system of quotas, removed, according to a confidential report to Berlin by German ambassador Metternich.2 As to Smyrna, only the forceful intervention of German General Liman Von Sanders, the regional military commander, stopped the completion of the deportation of that major port city's Armenian population. That intervention was triggered by the dispatch of Smyrna's first Armenian deportee convoy as ordered by the province's Turkish governor-general Rahmi.3 This intervention proved a mere respite, however, as in 1922 the insurgent Kemalists destroyed Smyrna in a holocaust that consumed large segments of the surviving Armenian population, as well.4

The argument of a civil war is simply absurd. As a rule, civil war implies either a breakdown in the system of central authority, or the existence of a central government that is impotent and, therefore, dysfunctional. The resulting armed clashes between antagonistic factions are possible because of the emerging authority vacuum. The cardinal fact with respect to wartime Turkey is, however, that the Ottoman state organization was fully functional and its armed forces were able to wage for four years a massive, multi-front war against such formidable enemies as England, France and Tsarist Russia. The wartime emergency measures, martial law, and the temporary suspension of parliament were conditions which helped invest the executive branch of the Ottoman government with enormous and concentrated power, power that was more than enough to exercise dictatorship. Moreover, most able-bodied Armenian males were conscripted in the Ottoman Army long before Turkey intervened in the war. What was left of the Armenian population consisted by and large of terror stricken women, children and old men desperately trying to stay alive in an environment filled with memories of past massacres, a consuming apprehension regarding new and impending disasters and burdened with all sorts of war-related hardships. Given these facts, is there any reason to take seriously the claim that people in these conditions would dare to contemplate, let alone be in any position, to wage war against the fully mobilized armed forces of an empire amply supported by the resources of two other empires in league with Turkey?

An integral part of this argument of civil war is the assertion of "Armenian rebellion," for which purpose the four major Armenian uprisings, abin Karahisar (June 6-July 4, 1915), Mussa Dagh (July 30-September 1915), Urfa (September 23-October 1915), and especially that of Van (April 20-May 17, 1915) are cited as proof. Yet, without exception these uprisings were improvised, last-ditch attempts to ward off deportation and destruction. Without exception they were all local, very limited, and above all, highly defensive initiatives; as such they were all doomed to failure. The temporary success of the Van uprising was entirely due to the timely arrival of the advance units of the Russian Caucasus army.

The vivid and painful memories of the Abdul Hamid era massacres had prompted certain Armenian groups to stockpile at great risk and with considerable difficulty an assortment of weapons that could easily be hidden. As the wartime Austrian Military Plenipotentiary to Turkey stated in his memoirs, the Van uprising was "an act of desperation." The Armenians, he went on to say "recognized that the general butchery had begun in the environs of Van and that they would be the next [victims]."5 A similar comment was made by Germany's veteran Aleppo consul, Walter Rössler with respect to the uprising at Urfa. He declared that the memory of the harrowing 1895 Urfa massacre and the spectacle of the unfolding mass murder in their area in the summer of 1915 animated the resolve of the Urfa Armenians to hastily organize their defenses.6

How could desperate groups of people trying to stay alive by defending themselves be described as "rebels" supposedly bent on undermining a mighty state system intent on destroying them? In a 72-page comprehensive report to his government in Berlin, German Ambassador Paul Count von Wolff-Metternich addressing this problem declared: "There was neither a concerted general uprising, nor was there a fully valid proof that such a synchronized uprising was organized or planned."7 Referring to the four uprisings mentioned above, Metternich furthermore emphasizes in that report the fact that all of them were but attempts to ward off imminent deportation, and were, therefore, defensive acts.8

It is a fact that individual Armenians and even some small groups of Armenians in very isolated cases, resorted to espionage, sabotage and other anti-Turkish acts. As American Ambassador Morgenthau and German consuls Rössler and Scheubner-Richter underscored in reports to their governments, the Armenians had every right to be disaffected and alienated, given the historical record of sustained Turkish oppression and episodic massacres. Furthermore, Scheubner-Richter argued that such acts are common occurrences in all theatres of war.9 It is a fact that several thousands of Armenians from all over the world, including several hundred former Ottoman subjects, rushed to the Caucasus to enroll in the ranks of the Russian Caucasus army to fight against the Turks; the majority of them were, however, Russian subjects.

The ultimate question to be raised and answered is this: Does the ensemble of these facts warrant a decision to deport and wantonly destroy an entire population? The answer should be no for a variety of reasons but in one particular respect that answer is cast into special relief. The reference is to a host of other ethnic and nationality groups and individuals who likewise indulged in anti-Turkish acts during the war, including sabotage, espionage and volunteering for service in the armed forces of Turkey's enemies. Foremost among these were the Kurds who, like the Armenians, were engaged in pro- as well as anti-Turkish activities. On the eastern front several of the spies caught by the Turks were themselves Turks; so were a number of Greeks operating in the west of Turkey. Jews, as well, provided two distinct volunteer corps fighting against the Turks at two different fronts, the Dardanelles (in 1915) and Palestine (in 1918). Moreover, one of the largest wartime espionage networks that was caught by the Turks, the NILI in Yaffa, Palestine, was run by a small Jewish group.10 And yet, a relatively mild, if not insignificant and inconsequential treatment was accorded to them by the Turkish authorities. These authorities at that time did not think it prudent to extend their operations of ethnic cleansing to these nationalities and minority groups and thereby compound the already existing problems arising from the ongoing mass murder of the Armenians.

As to the claim of 2.5 million Turkish victims during the years 1914-1922, one is amazed at the blatant sophistry at work here. Even if that number were accurate, it encompasses disparate categories of events such as losses in World War I, losses in the post-war Turkish campaign for independence, as well as losses due to epidemics, malnutrition and succumbing to the rigors of the elements, especially in World War I. What is fundamental in all these losses is that overwhelmingly they are the by-products and the results of warfare with Turkey's external enemies. These warfare losses are cryptically blended, juxtaposed and compared with the number of the victims of an organized mass murder.

Notes

1. Orgeneral Ali Fuad Erden, Birinci Dünya Harbinde Suriye Hatiralari [Syrian memoirs of World War I], vol. 1, Istanbul, 1954, p. 122.

2. For the source and a host of other pertinent references dealing with this issue see Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide. Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 4th ed., Providence/Oxford, 1997, pp. 227-28, note 2.

3. Ibid.

4. See Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922. The Destruction of a City, 4th ed., Kent, OH/London, 1988.

5. Vice Marshal J. Pomiankowski, Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches [The collapse of the Ottoman Empire], Graz, Austria, 1969, p. 160.

6. A.A. Türkei 183/40, A35040, Rössler's November 8, 1915 report.

7. A.A. Türkei 183/40, A25749, September 18, 1916 report, p. 14.

8. Ibid., p. 42.

9. A.A. Türkei 183/39, A28584, August 5, 1915.

10. Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide, Cambridge, MA, 2d ed., 1997, Appendix C, "The Case of the Jews," pp. 244-49.
 
 

APPENDIX 6
The Armenian Genocide as Genocide


The General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the following definition of the crime of genocide on December 9, 1948:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  • Killing members of the group;
  • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;