Armenian Genocide

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

The systematic expulsion and extermination of the Armenian population of historic West Armenia and Anatolia during and immediately after World War I.

In April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon policies designed to bring about the wholesale reduction of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire itself went out of existence and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at a little over two million in 1914. Nearly a million had already perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared and total losses had reached up to 1.5 million.

The unraveling of Armenian society in the Ottoman Empire began with the crisis precipitated by the Balkan Wars and the 1913 coup staged by the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP, Ittihad ve Tarraki ) which catapulted the triumvirate of Enver, Talaat, and Cemal to the head of government as minister of war, minister of the interior (and grand vizier in 1917), and minister of the marine, respectively. The coup effectively ended all hopes of securing constitutional rule and liberal change in the Ottoman Empire as the clique in power, which concentrated all critical decision making in its hands, also represented the extremist wing of the Young Turk movement. Exponents of Turkism and PanTuranism, the CUP promotion of an exclusive Turkish nationalism, threatened the multi-ethnic fabric of the Ottoman state at a time when the Armenian minority's hopes for administrative reforms and participation in local self-government had been elevated with the overthrow of Hamidian autocracy.

World War I provided cover for the implemention of the plan to eliminate the Armenian population putatively from the flank of the Ottoman Empire exposed to Russia. The military debacle on the Russian front in December 1914 and January 1915, and the barricading of the Armenian population inside its quarter of the city of Van in April 1915, in fear of threatened massacre, provided a pretext to validate charges of sedition by Armenians and justification for their evacuation. The announced purpose of Young Turk policy aside, the facts of the matter proceeded by a different course. The Armenian population in the war zone along the Russian front was in the main slaughtered in situ and not subjected to deportation. The mass expulsion of the Armenian population stretched the entire length of the Anatolian Peninsula from Samsun and Trebizond in the north to Adana and Urfa in the south, from Bursa in the west and all other communities around the Sea of Marmara, including the European sector of Turkey, all the way to Erzerum and Harput in the east and everywhere in between, including Ankara, Konya, Sivas, and Malatia.

The beginning of the deportations actually represents the second phase of the annihilation plan. On 24 April 1915 two hundred prominent Armenian leaders in Istanbul were summarily arrested, exiled, and subsequently executed. The expulsions had been preceded since February 1915 by the disarming of Armenian draftees in the Ottoman army, who were then reassigned to labor battalions and were eventually executed. With the elimination of able-bodied men from the Armenian population, the deportation of the civilian population proceeded with little resistance.

The journey of the convoys of families on the open road for hundreds of miles from all across Anatolia toward Syria, through the primary concentration point of Aleppo, resulted in massive loss of human life. The deliberate exhaustion of the population through deprivation of access to water proved a particularly excruciating and effective means of reducing numbers quickly. Though guarded to prevent escape, the convoys were by no means protected. Their arrival at predetermined locations in remote areas turned out to be appointments with the killer units known as the Teshkilati Mahsusa, the Special Organization, under the direct command of CUP functionaries reporting to Talaat. These wholesale massacres were also occasions for the abduction of children and younger women. In places like Sivas, Harput, and Bitlis, massacres as much as deportation announced the implemention of the policy of genocide.

The survival rate of deportees entering Syria from the farthest distances were as low as 10 percent. Deportees from regions closer to Syria, such as Adana Aintab and Marash, stood a fairer chance because of the shorter distances traveled; yet on arrival they were herded into concentration camps at places like Islahiya, Katma, Meskene and Raqqa, which became the breeding ground of epidemics that easily wiped out tens of thousands of the exhausted and starving refugees. From these locations smaller groups were sent farther into the desert to killing centers such as Ra ʿs al-Ayn and the infamous Dayr al-Zawr, where possibly more Armenians perished than at any other place on earth. The subterranean caves in some of these desert sites became the graveyard of thousands who were herded into them and burned alive. The deportees who were spared massacre were scattered from Syria as far as Ma ʿan and Petra in southern Jordan. To the east, deportees were sent all the way to Mosul and Kirkuk in northern Iraq. In all, only about 150,000 Armenians were found still living in Syria and Iraq at the end of the war.

The catastrophic loss of life and the violent and traumatic treatment of the deportees constituted only part of the larger scheme to reduce the Armenians. A second element was the total confiscation of their wealth; the government attempted to organize the transfer of title of their immovable properties to its cohorts, while the general population helped itself to all the movable property that deportees could not conceivably carry with them. More secure assets, such as bank accounts and corporate holdings, were seized by the government. Communal property, in the form of churches, schools, orphanages, and other institutions, was expropriated outright. It is presumed that much of the plunder was acquired by Young Turk party functionaries, with liquid assets deposited into party coffers. Since the genocide was implemented as much as a CUP scheme as government policy, the looting associated with the deportations constituted part of the payment system to the actual implementers of the genocide, effectively covering the expense of the mass deportation and murder of the Armenians with the plundered wealth of the victims, making the entire plan a highly profitable enterprise sanctioned by the allowances of martial law in wartime.

The plunder represented more than the loss of physical ownership by the Armenians, for in the process of looting, the cultural possessions of an entire people accumulated over the ages were turned into artless stone and metal. Centuries-old sanctuaries, from town chapels to pontifical cathedrals, were torched and demolished. Entire manuscript collections of monastic libraries vanished. Libraries went up in flames. The entire output of Armenian civilization since its beginnings was subjected to a policy of desecration and destruction.

The collapse of the Russian front ensuing the Bolshevik Revolution opened the way for Ottoman armies to advance through the Caucasus, creating additional opportunities for the slaughter of Armenian civilians in a campaign reaching Baku by September 1918. The end of the war prompted survivors to trek back to their former homes only to find them in possession of Turks, Kurds, and other Muslim refugees violently reluctant to return property to the Armenians. Under dire economic conditions, with so many Armenian refugees unable to resettle in their native towns, new tensions arose between the Armenians and the Turkish populace, who within a year began rallying to the Turkish Nationalist banner. Between 1920 and 1921 the Armenians of Anatolia were made refugees yet again, driven from their resettlements. The withdrawal of French occupation forces from Cilicia facilitated the uprooting of the Armenians through another series of massacres in Marash, Hadjin, and other towns in the area. The partition of the Republic of Armenia in the east in 1920 by Kemalist forces and the Sovietization of the Russian half had already been accomplished with the total excision of the Armenian population of Turkish-occupied Kars. The sweep through Smyrna in 1922 meant the utter and total eradication of the Armenians from all of Turkey in Asia.

Resistance to the deportations was infrequent. In only one instance were Armenians reasonably successful in avoiding certain death by taking flight up the mountain of Musa Dagh on the Mediterranean coast, where French naval vessels rescued them. The Armenians in the city of Van held out for a month until the arrival of the Russian army in May 1915, only to have to evacuate the city upon the retreat of the Russians in the face of an Ottoman counteroffensive. The mass flight to the Russian border proved no less a tragic affair than actual deportation. Of the more than 300,000 refugees counted in the Armenian republic in 1918, more than half perished within a year. Armenians in Urfa and Shabin-Karahisar who suspected the true intentions of the government defied the deportation edict in a vain attempt by barricading themselves in their neighborhoods. In these rare instances where the gendarmerie was unable to abide by the deportation timetable, artillery was called in to simply exterminate the resistant population through bombardment.

During the armistice period nearly 400 of the key CUP officials implicated in the atrocities committed against the Armenians were arrested. A number of domestic military tribunals were convened by the postwar Ottoman government, which brought charges ranging from the unconstitutional seizure of power, the conduct of a war of aggression, and conspiring the decimation of the Armenian population to more explicit capital crimes, including massacre. Some of the accused were found guilty of the charges. Most significantly, the ruling triumvirate was condemned to death. They, however, eluded justice by fleeing abroad. Their escape left the matter of avenging the countless victims to a clandestine group of survivors who tracked down the CUP archconspirators. Talaat, the principal architect of the Armenian genocide, was gunned down in 1921 in Berlin where he had gone into hiding. His assassin was arrested and tried by a German court, which acquitted him.

The chapter on the Armenian Genocide, however, was more conclusively closed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which, in extending international recognition to the Republic of Turkey, also absolved it of all responsibilities for the rectification of the crimes committed against the Armenians or for the resettlement of the tens of thousands made homeless and stateless. With immunity assured by the Treaty of Lausanne, the Turkish government subsequently adopted a policy of categorically denying that crimes had been committed against Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. Still concentrated in their historic homeland in 1915, surviving Armenians were scattered across the entire Middle East by 1923. All that was left of a once prosperous community were deportees living in squalid refugee camps. Under such circumstances the modern Armenian diaspora took form.

see also armenians in the middle east; lausanne, treaty of (1923); ottoman empire.

Bibliography

Adalian, Rouben P., ed. The Armenian Genocide in the U.S. Archives, 1915–1918. Alexandria, VA: Chadwick-Healey, 1991–1993.

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

Davis, Leslie A. The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, edited by Susan Blair. New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas, 1989.

Hovannisian, Richard G., ed. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986.

Rouben P. Adalian