This is a history of the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, and also of the mistreatment of all Christians under three different Turkish governments over three decades. "The annihilation of the Christian communities was not the product of a single cause. At play were fears of foreign machinations and interference, Turkish nationalism, ethnic rivalries economic envy, and a desire to maintain political and social dominance." Islam played a pivotal role throughout. "It was the glue that bound together perpetrating Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Chechens, and Arabs...".
In the late 19th century, ethnic and religious tensions in the Ottoman Empire increased under the pressures put upon the state by a Russian invasion that would have captured Constantinople were it not for British, French and German intervention. Throughout the empire, there were nationalist movements: Greek, Arab and Armenian. For decades, overcrowding in the east and systemic Muslim prejudices had made life more and more difficult for the Christian minorities. In 1863, the government approved a very limited autonomy for the Armenians when it approved an Armenian-drafted constitution. Nonetheless, Muslims continued to abuse the Armenians while Constantinople was indifferent. The Sultan looked back on a long history of 19th century rebellions in Greece, Serbia, Lebanon, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Crete and Bulgaria. Many of the rebels were Christian, and after the Armenians sought out the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, they were deemed the enemy.
Armenian nationalism was met by Sultan Abdulhamid II with increased armed Kurdish suppression. Between 1894-96, the state unleashed a series of pogroms that led to over 100,000 deaths from starvation, exposure and outright massacre. Tribalism, exacerbated by religious fanaticism, ran amok. The violence was unremitting, constant, state-sponsored and widespread from the Caspian Sea west to Constantinople. The Turks continually pleaded that they were suppressing a rebellion, but history's consensus is that this was a racial and religious slaughter, motivated by the state's fear of Christians causing a weakening of Muslim control of the state. Rape, abduction and forced conversions were a central theme of the empire's actions. Thousands fled to Russia, Europe and America. The central government ordered a halt to the violence in late 1896.
In 1908, The Committee of Union and Progress, the CUP, or the Young Turks, took over the empire. They believed the Turkish race was the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. The need for an all-Muslim empire came to the fore as the empire lost more and more Balkan territory in the years before WWI. After allying with the Central Powers, the central government planned and implemented the Armenian genocide. The aim was to de-Christianize the empire and to use Anatolia's Muslims to carry out the massacre. In February, 1915, the Ottomans were decimated in battle by the Russians in eastern Anatolia. Blame for the defeat was placed on disloyal Armenians. "The CUP had the motivation and capacity to commit pre-meditated ethnic cleansing - that political will, not the exigencies of the Great War, underlay mass murders". Immediately after the army's defeat, Armenian soldiers were disarmed and moved into labor battalions. Soon, the slaughter began. In the summer of 1915, the government ordered the removal of all Armenians from the war zone in eastern Anatolia. Deportation meant the murder of the Armenians while on the road west. Very few ever made it to Syria; the men were murdered outright, many young woman were taken for sexual slavery and everyone else, old and young, were either shot, starved or thrown into rivers or the sea. The following year, the genocide reached into urban and western Anatolia as viciously and as thoroughly as in the east. The generally accepted estimate of deaths over the two years is 1.2 million.
At the end of the war, the leaders of the CUP, fearing a war crimes prosecution, fled to Germany. The empire was lightly occupied by Allied troops, including Greeks, who were seeking to grab parts of Anatolia. In what the Turks call their 'War of Independence', they fought the Greeks in the west and the Russians in the east. A xenophobic hatred of the Allies and Christians emerged in the body politic. The nationalist movement soon rallied around Mustafa Kemal, known to history as Attaturk. Kemal's vision of Turkey was of an exclusively Muslim, Turkic state. He opposed the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which dismantled the empire and gave a variety of occupiers pieces of Anatolia and Thrace. He made peace in the east with Russia, ceded some land and obtained arms to fight the westerners. The Nationalists expelled the Greek army from Anatolia in 1922, and soon completely controlled their coastline on the Aegean. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne granted the Republic of Turkey recognition of its borders and ended any Allied interference in the country.
From the end of the world war until Lausanne, there was a resumption of the Armenian genocide. Those Armenians who had survived the death marches to the south headed into Cilicia on the southwestern coast. The Allies encouraged Armenians to return home and many congregated in the cities of Cilicia, as it was under French protection. There was even an Armenian Legion, albeit briefly, that was part of the French occupation. The Turks' war for independence overturned the established order. They attacked Maras, pushed the French out and massacred more Armenians. The French were eventually defeated and withdrew. "The Franco-Turkish agreement ushered in the final stage of the Armenian departure from Anatolia." As the surviving Armenians left, Kemal announced that Asia Minor must be freed of all Christians thus leading to hundreds-of-thousands more people of different ethnic groups violently forced out of their homes.
"The deportation and murder of the Greeks during 1919-23 was a direct continuation of the effort to expel them that began in late 1913-1914." The 1919 Greek occupation of Smyrna (now Izmir) was a major threat to Turkish sovereignty and the beginning of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. The Greeks invaded at the encouragement of the Allies. They advanced into Anatolia and almost reached Ankara. The final Turk counter-attack was directed by Kemal to reach the Mediterranean and soon the Turks controlled the entire Aegean coastline. A fire in the Greek and Armenian sections of Smyrna and an ensuing massacre killed an estimated 75,000. Eventually, the Greeks and Turks agreed on a massive population exchange leading to approximately 1.5m Greeks and 500,000 Muslims leaving their homelands. The exchange was a violent, lengthy continuation of the tragic war that preceded it. Historians estimate a million Greek deaths.
When it was all over in 1924, the Christian population of Asia Minor was 2%. It had been 20% at the turn of the century a generation earlier. "Turkish governments and Turkish people have never owned up to what happened or to their guilt. They continue to play the game of denial and to blame the victims."
This book is both majestic in its scope and detail and very trying to read. It is dense and so thorough that it feels as if the authors identified every village in every province in the empire. The endless depictions of murderous violence in the name of ethnic and religious cleansing is horrifying. Man's inhumanity to man whether it be a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago or last week still shocks me.
"Imagine there's no countries It's not hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religions, too"
John Lennon
Imagine
