by Benny Morris
Nizip
Nizip
Nizip
Latin(?): Nisibis
Sometimes mistaken
for
Nusaybin
Ordou
Ordu
Ordu
Osmaniye
Osmaniye
Osmaniye
Osmanjik
Osmancık
Osmancık
Osmanli
Osmanlı
Osmanlı
Pergamon, Pergama
Bergama
Bergama
Grk.: Pergamon
Phocia
Foça
Foça
Fogia
Pozanti
Pozantı
Pozantı
Grk.: Pendhosis
Bozantı
(Continued)
YWJ
Place Names
Ottoman
Armenian, Arabic,
En glish common
name
Greek, Syriac, Latin,
name WWI
(simplified)
Turkish name
or Kurdish name
Variations
Rakka
Rakka
Rakka
Rasulayn
Re’sülayn
Rasülayin
Arab.: Rās al-’Ayn
Rize
Rize
Rize
Rodosto
Tekirdağ
Tekirdağ
Grk.:
Rodosçuk
Rhaedestus,
Biysanthe
Samsun, Samsoun,
Samsun
Samsun
Grk.: Amisos
Sampsoun
Sassoun
Sasun
Sason
Arm.: Sasun
Sasson, Sasoun
Scutari
Üsküdar
Üsküdar
Grk.: Skoutarion
Sharkeuy(?)
Şarköy
Şarköy
Sinope
Sinob
Sinop
Grk.: Sinope
Sis
Sis
Sis
Sivas
Sivas
Sivas
Latin: Sebastia
Sebastea, Sebasteia,
Sebaste
Smyrna
Izmir
Izmir
Grk.: Smyrna
Talas
Talas
Talas
Grk.: Dalassa
Talori
Talori
Talori
Tarsus
Tarsus
Tarsus
Grk.: Tarsos
Tirebolu / Tripoli
Tirebolu
Tirebolu
Grk.: Tripoli
Tokat
Tokat
Tokat
Grk.: Evdokia
Trebizond
Trabzon
Trabzon
Grk.: Trapezunt /
Trapezous
Urfa, Edessa
Urfa
Şanlıurfa
Grk.: Edessa
Kurd.: Riha
Van
Van
Van
Kurd.: Wan
Viranshehir
Viranşehir
Viranşehir
Yalova
Yalova
Yalova
Grk.: Pylae
Yenikeuy
Yeniköy
Yeniköy
Yozgat
Yozgat
Yozgat
Zeitoun
Zeytun
Süleymanlı
Arab.: Zaytūn
Zeytoun
Arm.: Zeytun
Zonguldak
Zonguldak
Zonguldak
Introduction
We embarked on this proj ect in quest of the truth about what happened to
the Ottoman Armenians during World War I. Most Western scholarship on
the subject has concluded that the Ottoman Empire, exploiting the fog and
exigencies of war, carried out a genocidal campaign that resulted in a million
or so Armenian dead. Turkish and pro- Turkish scholars have argued that
Turkey, embattled by the British and Rus sian empires, was assailed from
within by treacherous Armenians and simply defended itself. On this view,
thousands of Armenians died amid deportation from troublesome combat
zones, while the Turks suffered significant casualties at Armenian hands.
Turning to the available con temporary documentation, we set out to dis-
cover for ourselves what had actually happened, and why.
We found the proofs of Turkey’s 1915–1916 anti- Armenian genocide to
be incontrovertible. The reports by Leslie Davis, the U.S. war time consul in
Harput, in central Turkey, offer a good illustration. Davis was no “Armenian-
lover”; in December 1915 he questioned Armenians’ moral fiber, writing,
“ Mothers have given their daughters to the lowest and vilest Turks to save
their own lives . . . lying and trickery and an inordinate love of money are
besetting sins of almost all. . . . Absolute truthfulness is almost unknown
among the members of this race. . . . From every point of view the race is
one that cannot be admired.”1 But he did not let his prejudices cloud his
eyesight. During the deportations Davis sent home dozens of reports de-
scribing the Turkish atrocities, which he summarized in a conclusive memo-
randum in early 1918. In these reports he recalled observations such as that
of September 24, 1915, when he toured the area southeast of Harput,
Introduction
around Lake Gölcük (Hazar Gölü), accompanied by the American mis-
sionary Dr. Henry Atkinson:
We saw [dead bodies] all along the road. They . . . had been partially
eaten by dogs. . . . There were several hundred bodies scattered over the
plain . . . [mostly] of women and children. . . . Some of the bodies . . .
had been burned . . . [by] Kurds . . . in order to find any gold which the
people may have swallowed. . . . In most of [the lakeside] valleys there
were dead bodies. . . . In one [valley] . . . there were more than fifteen
hundred. . . . The stench . . . was . . . great . . . I explored [this valley]
more carefully a month later. . . . [An old Kurd] . . . told us that the gen-
darmes had brought a party of about two thousand Armenians . . . and
had made the Kurds from the neighboring villages come and kill
them. . . . He acted very indignant . . . as he said the smell of their dead
bodies was very disagreeable.
The old man also described a “system” whereby Armenians were
massacred. They were, he said,
allowed to camp for a day or two in the valleys. . . . The gendarmes
summoned the [local] Kurds . . . and ordered them to kill [the Arme-
nians]. . . . 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 what ever
they found on the bodies . . . in excess of that sum.
Davis learned “that the people were forced to take off their clothes before they were killed, as the Mahommedans consider the clothes taken from a dead body
to be defiled.” Most of the dead had “bayonet wounds. . . . Few had been shot,
as bullets were too precious. . . . Nearly all of the women lay flat on their backs and showed signs of barbarous mutilation.”2
One of these lakeside massacres was witnessed by three Eu ro pe ans on Sep-
tember 17, a week before Davis�
��s first trek. They saw Kurds on the hills
above the lake shoot up a large Armenian convoy and then, bearing axes,
Introduction
attack the “defenseless flock” like “ferocious animals.” Kurdish women ran
down the hillside to “strip the bodies.”3
What happened at Lake Gölcük in August– September 1915 was emblematic
of the Armenian Genocide. But we discovered that the Armenian Genocide
of 1915–1916 was only part of the story, a story that began de cades before
and extended for years afterward. The story is both deeper and wider than
the Armenian Genocide. It is deeper in the sense that the events of 1915–1916
were part of a protracted history of vio lence; one has to look at Turkish be-
hav ior before and after World War I in order to understand what happened
during the war years. And it is wider in the sense that one also has to look at
how Turkey dealt with its other Christian minorities, Greeks and vari ous
Assyrian (or Syriac or Syrian) communities.4 This larger story extends from
the prewar years under Sultan Abdülhamid II through the war time dominance
of the Committee of Union and Pro gress (CUP) and the immediate postwar
rise of the Turkish Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. We found that,
under each government, Muslim Turks— including the po liti cal leaders and
everyday citizens— came to see Asia Minor’s Christian communities as a
danger to their state’s survival and resolved to be rid of this danger. In line
with changing po liti cal, military, and demographic circumstances, the
successive regimes dealt with Christian communities somewhat differently,
though to the same end. In the course of three campaigns beginning in
1894, the Turks turned variously to tools of steady oppression, mass murder,
attrition, expulsion, and forced conversion. By 1924 they had cleansed Asia
Minor of its four million– odd Christians.
This book is structured in accordance with the staggered nature of the
Turkish campaign. There are chapters on the pre-1894 background; the mas-
sacres of 1894–1896; the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916; and the destruc-
tion of the Greeks, Assyrians, and remaining Armenians in 1919–1924. The
coverage of 1915–1916 is relatively modest in light of recent, perceptive,
and comprehensive scholarship on the Armenian Genocide by Raymond
Kevorkian, Donald Bloxham, Taner Akçam, Ronald Grigor Suny, and others.5
By contrast, historians have devoted little attention to what happened in 1894–
1896 and 1919–1924, and almost none to what befell Turkey’s Greeks and
Assyrians during this thirty- year period. We tackle these subjects in great detail.
Introduction
If other historians have not treated the entire thirty- year scope of oppres-
sion and carnage as one continuous saga, they arguably have good reasons.
For one thing, the period spans three very diff er ent regimes: that of the last
autocratic sultan, until 1909; of the CUP, or Young Turks, who ruled during
the Great War after promising equality and supranational constitutionalism;
and of Mustafa Kemal, the war hero and founder of modern Turkey during
1919–1924. For another, each regime had diff er ent aims and constituencies.
The CUP and Ataturk each accused their pre de ces sors of unnecessary cru-
elty toward non- Muslims. Indeed, Ataturk is famously credited with labeling
the mass murder of Armenians during World War I a “shameful act.”
The traditional interpretation thus identifies three separate policies carried
out according to distinctive logics tailored to their par tic u lar circumstances.
The massacres of the 1890s are usually understood as Abdülhamid’s effort
to cow disruptive Christians into submission. The 1915–1916 genocide is de-
picted as a momentary war- induced aberration. And the ethnic cleansing
during 1919–1924, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, is por-
trayed as part of a chaotic, multisided bloodletting triggered by foreign inva-
sions and the reactive Turkish war of national liberation.
But from the documentation now available, it is clear that treating the three
periods separately obfuscates the real ity of what the Turks intended and what
tran spired. Nor does it make sense to view what happened to each of the victim
communities— Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—in isolation. To be sure,
the Turkish proj ect evolved over time. What appeared to Abdülhamid and his
entourage as a vague and disembodied idea in the 1890s crystallized under
the Young Turks into a full- fledged genocidal program, with the last nails ham-
mered into the coffin during Kemal’s National Strug gle. Each regime con-
fronted a diff er ent cluster of dangers, acted under diff er ent constraints, and imagined a diff er ent future. Ultimately, however, all three engaged in a giant and continuous crime against humanity.
The Armenians were the main victims of Turkish atrocity, in terms of the
numbers slaughtered in 1894–1896 and 1915–1916. Certainly, the Turks ap-
pear to have hated them the most. This is cogently illustrated by events in
Smyrna (Izmir) in September 1922. There, conquering Turkish troops
murdered thousands of Armenian inhabitants before dealing with the town’s
Greeks, even though the retreating Greeks had just (unsystematically)
Introduction
massacred hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Turks on the outskirts of the
city. Still, tens of thousands of Greeks would be murdered during the fol-
lowing days. Smyrna would prove to be merely one chapter in the destruction
and expulsion of Anatolia’s vast Greek minority, which had begun before the
Great War, in the first months of 1914.
As we hope to show, 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 po liti cal and social dominance. Perpetrators sought power, wealth,
and sexual gratification. A combination of these motivations was manifest in
each period and location. In the course of our research we have also concluded
that these forces were joined by another overarching ele ment: Islam. As an
ethos and an ideology, Islam played a cardinal role throughout the pro cess,
in each of its stages.
We are not arguing here that Islam is a single dogma, worse than other
religious dogmas. Islam has vari ous streams, and individual Muslims feel dif-
ferently about questions of practice, scriptural interpretation, and moral be-
hav ior. Inherent in Islam are humanistic and moderate traditions, and, as we
emphasize in our conclusion, Christians lived in relative security under
Ottoman rule for centuries. Indeed, their standing was prob ably more secure
than that of Jews or Muslims under Christian governments during the same
centuries.
Yet there is compelling evidence showing that Islam was an impor tant driver
in the events and pro cesses described in this book. Ottoman authorities in-
voked jihad to mobilize the Muslim masses to massacre and plunder. Perpe-
trators cited jihad and Muslim law more generally to explain and justify their
; actions, even to argue that these actions were obligatory. Moreover, Muslim
religious leaders and seminarians were prominent figures in the massacres.
Indeed, even during Kemal’s ostensibly secularist National Strug gle, officials,
himself included, frequently referred to Islam as the basis of their actions.
These same officials described the massacres of thousands of Christians, and
the expulsions of hundreds of thousands more, as jihad. Islam was the glue
that bound together perpetrating Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Chechens, and
Arabs and was the common marker of identity separating them from their
Christian victims. In 1894–1896, 1915–1918, and 1919–1924, conversion
Introduction
to Islam was often the only path to survival for Christians who remained in
the empire.
The Sources
This study focuses on what happened in Asia Minor and Constantinople, with
more limited treatment of events in eastern Thrace (specifically, the vilayet of
Edirne) and in the northwestern corner of Persia. We refrain almost completely
from covering events in the Caucasus, despite the fact that this remote moun-
tainous region was periodically engulfed in warfare among Turks, Rus sians,
Azeris, Armenians, Georgians, and other groups, with accompanying
large- scale massacres by all who participated. What happened in the Caucasus
requires a study of its own, partly because these events were not synchronic
with those in Asia Minor, and partly because the relevant archival material is
often inaccessible or written in languages with which we are unfamiliar.
Focusing on Asia Minor and Constantinople, one also encounters serious
archival prob lems. To some degree, these affected our research and writing
and so need to be described and explained.
The Ottoman Empire, and later Turkey, had large, or ga nized bureaucra-
cies churning out massive amounts of state papers, which eventually made
their way to a number of archives. The most impor tant are the Ottoman Ar-
chives of the Office of the Prime Minister (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri) and
the archive of the General Staff Military History and Strategy (Genelkurmay
Askeri Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt) Institute in Ankara. The military archive is in
effect closed to researchers. And the prime ministry’s archives, as well as
smaller provincial archives, have under gone several bouts of purging, starting
with the weeding out of rec ords by exiting CUP officials at the end of World
War I. Since then, Turkish officials have further sanitized the archives so that