The Thirty-Year Genocide

by Benny Morris

  initiated from the po liti cal center. Hundreds of documents published by the

  Ottoman and later Turkish governments make clear that removal was a state

  proj ect; it was not the incidental result of war time hardships and local clashes.

  The deportation was a premeditated, calculated, and pedantically imple-

  mented operation.

  Two matters, however, are still in dispute. First, the exact timeline of de-

  portation. Did planning begin after the outbreak of vio lence in Van and Zeytun

  in March 1915? If so, one could conceivably argue that deportation was a re-

  sponse, wise or unwise, just or unjust, to perceived Armenian treachery in

  these conflicts. But perhaps there was already a plan in the making in the weeks

  before Zeytun, and Van, not to mention the Entente landings at Gallipoli, an-

  other event that historians have viewed as encouraging CUP fears and the

  solution of deportation. If planning began before these events, there can be

  no defense on the basis of paranoid miscalculation.

  The second, more crucial, matter is whether the deportation was planned

  as a genocide. That is, were the deaths— not just the deportations—of between

  one and two million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians during Word War I

  part of the plan? (We cover Assyrians and Greeks more thoroughly in Chap-

  ters 8 and 9.) Or did these deaths result from a combination of war condi-

  tions and local initiatives taken by governors, gangsters, and tribesmen driven

  by ideology, fear, greed, sexual appetite, and religious fervor? If the latter was the case, then was the state ignorant of the killing, or was it just too weak to

  intervene?

  A Policy of Genocide

  These issues remain controversial in part because there is no smoking gun:

  no accessible Ottoman master plan or general order of extermination, no pro-

  tocols of the CUP meetings in which this genocide was discussed and agreed

  upon. Certainly no policy of genocide was publicly announced.1 Indeed, at

  times Ottoman be hav ior seems inconsistent with such a blanket policy. In key

  places, notably Constantinople and Izmir, there were almost no deportations

  during the war and no mass killings. And where Armenians were deported in

  large numbers, they were not always massacred, at least not at first. This was

  the case especially in the early phases of deportation. If the leadership had

  planned throughout to kill off the Armenians wholesale, wouldn’t the pattern

  of action have been uniform around the empire and throughout the deporta-

  tions? Even if one agrees that the government was responsible for mass

  killings, one might argue that official be hav ior was not inconsistent with a

  pro cess of gradual radicalization during the deportation campaign itself.

  The controversy over exactly what the Ottomans planned and when echoes

  that surrounding the genesis of the World War II Holocaust. In both cases

  uncertainty has generated debate between so- called intentionalists and func-

  tionalists. With re spect to the Holocaust, intentionalists argue that the destruction of Eu ro pean Jewry was planned well before it started. The seeds and

  blueprint of the Holocaust are found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other writings of the 1920s and 1930s, which demonstrate that comprehensive ethnic

  cleansing of the Jews was a Nazi goal from the first. The Final Solution— the

  killing of six million Jews and millions of others in death camps and else-

  where— may have begun years later, in 1941, but only because that was when

  opportunity knocked following the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German

  invasion of Rus sia.

  Functionalist historians do not disagree that ideological under pinnings of

  the Holocaust can be found in the earlier writings and speeches of the Nazi

  elite, among other sources. But these historians argue that the extermination

  proj ect began in an ad- hoc manner, spurred by Einsatzgruppen killings carried out at Babi Yar and elsewhere, amid the fog of Barbarossa. Like the per-

  petrators of the Final Solution, the Einsatzgruppen and others in the SS and

  Wehrmacht enjoyed the backing and direction of the state. But unlike the per-

  petrators of the Final Solution, the early Nazi murder squads claimed that

  their killings were improvised responses to war circumstances, whether

  The Young Turk s

  retaliatory or prophylactic. These first massacres and the mass murder of

  prisoners of war initiated a pro cess of brutalization, whereby re spect for

  life is thrown out the win dow by the act of killing, spurring more killings. On

  this view, it was only after the first stages of mass killing that the predicates were in place for an orchestrated effort to exterminate the Jews, which was

  then planned in Berlin and implemented at the death camps.

  Today’s consensus synthesizes the intentionalist and functionalist perspec-

  tives: bottom-up pressures from the field combined with top- down pres-

  sures from the Nazi elite to create the Final Solution. On this understanding

  Hitler was indeed determined to annihilate world Jewry and was the main

  driving force behind the Holocaust, but he had had no master plan until well

  into the war. The Holocaust was therefore a result of “cumulative radicaliza-

  tion” inside Germany and at the front, inflamed by a genocidal ideology that

  preceded the mass murder.2

  The same cumulative- radicalization approach has been applied to the Ar-

  menian case in 1914–1916, most notably by Donald Bloxham. He suggests

  that CUP leaders opted for war partly in the vague hope that the conflict would

  provide an opportunity to solve the Armenian prob lem once and for all. But,

  according to Bloxham, evidence does not sustain the argument that solving

  the prob lem meant physically destroying the Armenians. Rather, the idea of

  mass murder, and even deportation on a grand scale, evolved gradually as the

  war progressed. Killings may have begun already in January 1915 along the

  Rus sian frontier, but these were local initiatives, not the initial episodes in a general campaign of genocide. “Only by the summer of 1915 may we speak

  of a crystallized policy of empire- wide killing and death- by- attrition,” Bloxham writes.3

  In an impor tant 2003 article, Bloxham pres ents a point- by- point argu-

  ment against the intentionalist position. He begins by noting that the re-

  structuring of the Special Organ ization in 1914 does not constitute proof of

  genocidal intent. The Special Organ ization did become a kind of death

  squad, but, Bloxham suggests, we need not question its initial redesign as a

  covert, anti- Russian military unit on the eastern front. After all, the original Special Organ ization had been deployed for special operations in the Libyan

  War. It stands to reason that, with a new war on, it was resurrected for mili-

  tary, not genocidal, purposes.

  A Policy of Genocide

  Bloxham also notes that, until the war, there was no enmity between the

  CUP and the Dashnaks. In fact, the parties had a strong relationship prior to

  the hostilities. This may indicate that the CUP entered the war believing the

  solution to the Armenian prob lem lay in some sort of cooperation with Ar-

  menian nationalists. Only during the fever of war did that position change.

  This shift, Bloxham argues, was
conceivably a product of Ottoman fears,

  legitimate or overblown. The disarming of Armenian soldiers and civilians,

  the formation of the labor battalions, and the mass arrest of notables need not

  be understood as preliminary stages in the implementation of a planned

  genocide. Instead the arrests could be seen as a reaction to the anticipated

  Gallipoli landings and to the uprising in Van; the disarmament motivated by

  genuine fear that Armenians, if armed, would assist the invaders. There was

  of course serious concern surrounding a pos si ble Armenian- Russian alli-

  ance, given that Armenian volunteers had joined the Rus sian army and

  fought the Ottomans at Sarıkamış.

  Bloxham further questions whether the earliest massacres and deportations

  should be seen as evidence of an unfolding, top- down plan for ethnic cleansing.

  It is true that in late 1914 and early 1915 the Special Organ ization perpetrated

  massacres in the northeast and in eastern Van vilayet, on the border with Iran.

  But this was in line with a known CUP policy of punishing recalcitrant vil-

  lages and therefore not necessarily a signal of an overarching plan to totally

  destroy the Armenians.

  As to the deportations from Cilicia in January and February 1915, these

  were isolated events, born of the fear of Armenian collusion with Entente

  forces planning landings in the eastern Mediterranean. Furthermore, the Ar-

  menians from this region were deported to the interior, not on death marches

  southward, suggesting that there was no annihilation plan at this stage. Mor-

  genthau may have reported that Talât told him there was a “decision” to deal

  with the Armenians, but a decision is not a plan. At this point there was only

  an “ongoing search for a solution.”

  Bloxham also notes that, during the course of April, committees were

  formed in each province to suggest solutions for the Armenian prob lem. CUP

  representatives in these committees insisted on massacre, but were instructed

  by the governors to hold off. This suggests that, what ever ideas were brewing

  in the CUP leaders’ minds, they had not yet settled on a course of action.

  The Young Turk s

  If they had, they wouldn’t have been seeking input from the provinces on

  how to proceed.

  Fi nally, Bloxham sees the timing of the first large- scale atrocities as evi-

  dence that genocidal ideas did not become a plan of action until late May. On

  May 24, 1915, the Entente announced that it would hold Ottoman officials

  accountable for “crimes against humanity.” Thereafter the atrocities intensi-

  fied. Talât admitted his fear of international condemnation, but once it

  came, there was no longer reason to hold back the Turks’ most vicious ten-

  dencies. They had already been damned for smaller- scale affronts to justice

  and decency; refraining further would have no effect on their international

  reputation.4

  In his attempt to prove the case for cumulative radicalization, Bloxham blurs

  two distinct questions. First, was there systematic, state- organized killing of

  Armenians in the first months of 1915? Second, did a plan of physical exter-

  mination take shape in the first months of 1915? Bloxham’s study offers con-

  vincing evidence that there were no systematic, state- organized mass killings

  in January and February of 1915. But he doesn’t achieve his goal of demon-

  strating that no genocidal plan emerged in this period. We agree that mass kill-

  ings of Armenians at this time, mainly along the Rus sian border, were in all

  probability initiated by local commanders and governors, not by Constanti-

  nople. Yet this does not preclude the possibility that a detailed plan for mass

  killings was taking shape at the time and was kept secret until after the events at Van and Zeytun.

  As we outline below, we believe that such a plan existed already in the early

  days of 1915. Indeed, there is reason to believe that, even before the plan came

  together during winter, the highest ranks of the CUP were preparing the

  ground for annihilation of the Armenians. After the war, many officials testi-

  fied that as early as September 1914, Talât had instructed the provinces to

  start monitoring the local Armenian leaderships and their communications.

  A short time later, Armenian police officers on active duty were dismissed.

  Both of these moves would, at the very least, have been useful in preventing

  or ga nized Armenian re sis tance.

  The design was then finalized over some additional months, and imple-

  mentation began in spring 1915 after the bloodshed at Van and Zeytun.

  Though these events were not part of that plan, they did shape it, elevating

  A Policy of Genocide

  CUP fears and demonstrating the viability of deportation as a mechanism for

  killing Armenians.

  The 1915 plan would finish the job begun in 1894–1896. Massacring

  Armenians in large numbers more or less openly had proven only partially suc-

  cessful, as Western diplomatic intervention had helped stay the killing. Per-

  haps there was a better way. War and its exigencies made mass deportation

  opportune. Under the cover of war and deportation, Turks would have a

  chance to carry out their annihilationist campaign.

  Many officials viewed the destruction of the Armenians as a sacred mission

  on behalf of the nation and their religion, some as a strategic necessity, and

  still others as a financial opportunity. And there were decent and courageous

  Ottoman officials who defied the central government and refused to carry out

  the policy of genocide. But there was such a policy and, as we have shown, it

  was implemented.

  Preparation for Genocide

  Although there is no documentation of the planning preceding the deporta-

  tion decree of late May 1915, there are strong indications that the CUP lead-

  ership discussed the coming effort and concluded in the early months of 1915

  that it would perpetrate genocide. Evidence shows a small circle of CUP ac-

  tivists began the planning in the wake of the debacle at Sarıkamış. The dis-

  cussions were underway before the Allied naval attempts to break through the

  Dardanelles in February and weeks before the uprising in Van and the alleged

  rebellion in Zeytun. When Bahaettin Şakır arrived in Constantinople in March,

  early talks solidified into a set of guidelines for action. In turn, these led to a concrete plan, which was consolidated in April. Fuat Dündar captures the

  atmosphere:

  Following these military defeats [Sarıkamış, Van], Unionists, who in par-

  allel with German military war strategy had dreamt of destroying the

  Rus sian and British armies with lightning strikes and of reaching Egypt

  and the quasi- imaginary Turan, suddenly panicked about the security

  of Anatolia. This led to the conclusion that the only pos si ble way of

  saving Anatolia . . . was to change its ethnic composition.5

  The Young Turk s

  There is testimony to the effect that the Turks had by February developed, at

  the very least, a plan to deport Armenians en masse. In his memoirs the Ar-

  menian bishop Grigoris Balakian recalled a revealing conversation with an

  Armenian acquaintance in Adana. This man tol
d Balakian that in February a

  Turkish official urged him to save himself because calamity would soon strike.

  “Go to Mersin, get on a steamship and escape to Eu rope,” the Turk had en-

  joined him. “I say little; you must understand a lot. Do what you have to do

  and get away from here as soon as pos si ble so that you also will not drown in

  the coming storm.” When Balakian reported this to the Catholicos of Cilicia,

  Sahag II, the latter asked to speak to Cemal Pasha, who was then passing

  through Adana on his way to the Syrian front. Sahag then relayed the con-

  tents of the conversation to Balakian. According to Balakian, Cemal told Sahag,

  “During the deliberations over this matter in the council of ministers, I tried

  very hard to argue that instead of deporting and exiling the entire Armenian

  population, only the writers, intellectuals and Armenian po liti cal party

  leaders— say fifteen or twenty people from each town— should be exiled. I

  felt that the helpless common people should be spared, but I am sorry to say

  that I was not able to make my voice heard.” 6

  Also in February, the military command ordered the disarmament of the

  Armenian soldiers and their transfer to labor battalions. There are, of course,

  multiple interpretations of this decision. Like Bloxham, Zürcher and Akçam

  believe that disarmament was a product of the government’s genuine distrust

  of Armenian soldiers. In view of the expected landing at Gallipoli, Enver and

  Talât, who took the decision, felt the urgent need to remove Armenians

  from combat ranks.7 But, in light of other evidence, the move is highly suspi-

  cious. Depriving the Armenians of their status as soldiers not only under-

  mined their ability to defend themselves and their communities but it also

  denied them legal protection. Technically, the deportation orders exempted

  soldiers and their families— but what if the soldiers were no longer soldiers?

  Enlisted men went missing all the time— died in battles, were taken prisoner,

  or deserted. There was no real need to explain their disappearance. Recall

  the case of the former soldiers massacred on their way from Harput to Diyar-

  bekir in 1915. Prior to disarmament, Commandant Süleyman Faik erased the

  names of all Armenian soldiers from the rolls. From this point on, he had no