Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide is a name given to a historic event where hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of ethnic Armenians in Anatolia were raped, slaughtered, and deported to concentration camps under the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Turkey (the successor state to the Ottoman Empire) has denied its responsibility, suggesting that genocide did not occur. Turkey says it was a confusing period where many people were killed because of political uprisings. Internationally, twenty-one countries have officially recognized the tragedy as genocide. This has been a problem in the Turkish-Armenian relationship, as well as the relationship with Israel, which is a close ally of Turkey, and the U.S., which has a very large an active Armenian population of Armenian descent, and tries to be friends with both Turkey (a NATO ally), and Armenia.

Background

Following victory over Persia at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, the Ottoman Empire extended its rule over western Armenia. In 1555 Armenia was divided between the Shahs of Persia and the Sultans of Turkey. Oppression and heavy taxation led to depopulation. In the 19th century, however, Russia, after victories over Persia in 1828 and over Turkey in 1829, acquired the right to organize the immigration of Armenians into the Caucasus with the aim of developing the territories. Under Russia, the number of Armenians in the area now represented by present-day Soviet Armenia increased from 46,000 in 1827 to 511,000 in 1897. Thus by joining Russia, Eastern Armenia became the home of the national survival of the Armenian people. The fate of Western Armenia was different. The organized massacres of 1894-96 and 1909 and the genocide of 1915 completely depopulated Western Armenia.

Conflict between Turks and Armenians resulted from dissimilar cultural elements and social organization. By the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman authorities justified their attacks on Armenians by accusing them of being "revolutionaries, terrorists, and troublemakers acting on behalf of Russia or other foreign powers." Even with the demise of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the conflict between Turks and Armenians remained unresolved, resulting in contemporary Armenian terrorist attacks on Turkish targets.

Kurds

The Turks often used Muslim Kurds as intermediary oppressors between themselves and the Christian Armenians. Less firmly Islamic Kurds, however, often aided persecuted Armenians, and at times when the Kurds themselves were oppressed, Kurdish-Armenian solidarity emerged. The complex history of Turkish-Kurdish-Armenian relations culminated in Kurdish complicity in the genocide committed against the Armenians during World War I. Thereafter, Kurds and Kurdish independence movements became the chief targets of Turkish policies attempting to Turkify all Anatolia.

Armenian nationalists

Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, Russians occupied the six Armenian vilayets, and Armenian nationalism was stimulated. In 1880, a revolutionary organization known as the Defenders of the Fatherland was organized in Erzurum. A few years later, in 1885, the Armenakan society was organized, and in 1887 the Hunchagian Party appeared. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktzutun) was formed in 1890.

The Armenians expected outside assistance in their efforts to break away from Ottoman rule and were led to carry out a number of rash actions. The Russians therefore discouraged the Armenian liberation movement from establishing an independent Armenia on the southern borders of Russia. But the Russian government also took active steps to prevent the massacres of Armenians by Sultan Abdul Hamid. In August and September 1894, a series of massacres occurred in the vicinity of Sassun as a result of an uprising that was put down with ferocity by Kurdish irregular cavalry (Hamidieh regiments). The massacres soon spread, and in October and November 1895 there were pogroms at Trabzon, Erzurum, Bitlis, Kurun, Maras, and elsewhere. The essential cause of the massacres lay in the failure of the European powers to secure the reforms envisaged by the Treaty of Berlin for the Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The massacres caused an outcry in Europe, and ultimately Sultan Abdul-Hamid II appointed an investigating commission, joined by British, French, and Russian delegates, which produced a minor reform program. In August 1896 after an attack on the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople a massacre of Armenians occurred in the Ottoman capital; 4,000 to 6,000 Armenians were killed. By the end of 1896 it was estimated that as many as 200,000 had been massacred in the eastern provinces.

With the advent to power of the Young Turks in 1908, there was hope for improvement of the lot of the Armenians, but in April, 1909, there were massacres at Adana and other places of Lesser Armenia, sparked by peaceful demonstrations that inflamed nationalist Turks. Intermittent attacks took place in the following years.

World War I

The "Ittihad ve Terrake Djemieti" [Committee of Union and Progress] took the opportunity afforded by the war with Russia to solve its "Armenian question." The action began toward the end of 1914, when Armenian conscripts in the Ottoman forces were disarmed then killed. In April 1915 hundreds of writers, journalists, and artists were arrested, exiled, and murdered. The deportation and massacre of the bulk of the civilian Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire living in western Armenia, Cilicia, and surrounding regions, followed. In certain areas, notably Van, Shabin Karahisar, Sasun, Urfa, and Antioch, some Armenians were able to organize armed resistance. The attitude of the Great Powers to these events was one of studied indifference. The massacres climaxed in June and July 1915, but the slaughter continued until after the end of the war.

Postwar

The Treaty of Sèvres,Sevres, Aug. 10, 1920, provided for an independent Armenia. However, the situation was drastically changed by Turkish military assaults and the establishment of a Soviet republic in Yerevan on Nov. 29, 1920. A treaty imposed on Armenia by Turkey on December 3 reduced Soviet Armenia to the province of Yerevan.

Memory

Historical work on the genocide has been almost entirely pro-Armenian or pro-Turkish and therefore implicated in a political conflict still unresolved today. Armenian historians seek to exorcise the trauma experienced by earlier generations, to pass on the memory of this trauma, and to present the genocide of the Armenians as the founding element of contemporary Armenian identity. For Turkish historians, supporting the national republican myth is essential to preserving Turkish national unity, though the case of outside historians who support the Turkish case is hard to understand. Dissident historians in Turkey are trying to reclaim the Armenians as part of Ottoman and Turkish history and acknowledge the wrongs done to the Armenians as a condition for reconciliation with them on the basis of confidence in Turkish national unity.

Diplomacy

Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Caucasus became a new field for Turkish foreign policy, and in this region relations with Armenia became the most critical and sensitive challenge. Despite the extreme negative historical legacy of the genocide, Turkey tried to establish a new basis for relations with Armenia, and there were some positive steps taken in this direction under the presidency of Levon Ter-Petrosian in Armenia. Disputes over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh became the decisive factor in bilateral relations, as predominantly Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh protested control by the Muslim Republic of Azerbaijan, which had Turkey's support. During the presidency of Ter-Petrosian's successor, Robert Kocharian, aside from the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, diaspora communities gained influence, which led to the genocide issue again becoming an important element in bilateral relations. Despite Kocharian's early hawkish rhetoric, during the second term of his presidency a détente arose in relations between the two countries, and the Turkish-Armenian Peace Commission founded in 2001 was a significant step in the direction of better relations.

In 2007 a proposal to denounce the genocide was heatedly debated in the U.S. Congress, with the State Department and White House warning that passage would seriously damage relations between the U.S. and Turkey.

Bibliography

• Andreopoulos, George J., ed. Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. 1994. 265 pp. Compares Armenia with Cambodia, East Timor and Kurdistan.
• Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. ";Down in Turkey, far away': Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany," Journal of Modern History Volume 79, Number 1, March 2007, pp 80-111
• Auron, Yair. The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide (2005)
• Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (2003), 475 pp
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. "Patterns of Twentieth Century Genocides: the Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan Cases." Journal of Genocide Research 2004 6(4): 487-522. Issn: 1462-3528 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (1995)
• Hovannisian, Richard G. ed. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (1988)
• Hovannis1an, Richard G. "The Allies and Armenia, 1915-18." Journal of Contemporary History 1968 3(1): 145-168. Issn: 0022-0094 Fulltext: in Jstor
• Panossian, Razmik. The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars. 2006. 442 pp.
• Papazian, Bertha S. The Tragedy of Armenia: A Brief Study and Interpretation (1919) full text online
• Peterson, Merrill D. "Starving Armenians": America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1930 and After. 2004. 199 pp.
• Peroomian, Rubina. Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience (1993), focus on work of Armenian authors: Zabel Esayan (1878-1943), Suren Partevian (1876-1921), Aram Andonian (1875-1952), and Hakob Oshakan (1883-1948).
• Severance, Gordon and Diana Severance. Against the Gates of Hell: The Life & Times of Henry Perry, a Christian Missionary in a Moslem World (2003)
• Winter, Jay, ed. America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (2004), 325pp

Primary sources

• Kirakossian, Arman J. ed. The Armenian Massacres, 1894-1896: U.S. Media Testimony (2004), 317 pp
• Miller, Donald E. and Miller, Lorna Touryan, eds. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. 1993. 242 pp.
• older books, full text online