The Thirty-Year Genocide

by Benny Morris

  western segment of Anatolia as far inland as Konia; the Italians argued that

  Historical Background, 1918–1924

  British Indian troops taking part in the occupation of Constantinople.

  the area had been ruled by Rome 2,000 years before.8 Rus sian and Russian-

  backed Armenian troops controlled areas of northeastern Turkey. And, east

  of the border, in May 1918, Armenian nationalists established an Armenian

  republic with Yerevan as its capital.

  In May 1919, with authorization from the Allied Supreme Council, the

  Greek Army occupied Smyrna and the contiguous coastline. Turkish nation-

  alist groups— which would later unify under a single flag and take control of

  the country under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal— responded with a fero-

  cious guerrilla war. As early as January 1915, the British had tried to persuade

  the Greeks to join the Allied cause with the vague promise of territorial

  compensation in Asia Minor.9 But the Greeks had declined, and the Allies

  promised the Ionian coast to Italy.10 But then, in June 1917, the Greeks (re-

  luctantly) joined the Allies, leaving the British and French prime ministers,

  David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, in a quandary. The situation

  came to a head in spring 1919. The Italians landed troops in Antalya, and

  appeared to be inching toward Smyrna. Meanwhile, Turkish anti- Christian

  terrorism was on the rise, with massacre threatened. On May 5–6, the

  Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists

  principal Allied leaders— Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and U.S. President

  Wilson— deci ded to let the Greeks have Smyrna. The British foreign secre-

  tary, Arthur Balfour, immortally described their meeting: “ These three all-

  powerful, all- ignorant men [are] sitting there and carving up continents with

  only a child to lead them.”11 (The “child” in question may have been forty-

  one- year- old Maurice Hankey, secretary of Britain’s War Cabinet.) Lloyd

  George then summoned Eleftherios Venizelos, the Greek statesman, and

  asked, “Do you have troops available?” Venizelos replied, “We do. For what

  purpose?” Lloyd George responded that the Allies had “deci ded today that

  you should occupy Smyrna.” Venizelos: “We are ready.”12 Ten days later

  the Greeks landed.

  In June– July 1920, with Allied authorization and after Nationalist troops

  attacked British positions in Izmit, the Greek Army pushed inland, occupying

  Bursa and other parts of the western Anatolian highlands as far as the Sakarya

  River. They also occupied Eastern Thrace (Edirne vilayet).13 In doing so, the

  Greeks bit off more than they could chew: their aims were monumental, but

  they had relatively meager resources. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire

  in World War I, some Ottoman Greeks began pushing for unification with

  mainland Greece, their desires dovetailing with those of many mainland pol-

  iticians. On March 16, 1919, for example, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchal

  Council of Constantinople endorsed “Union with Greece” and distributed

  to the city’s churches a declaration: “The Greeks of Constantinople . . . re-

  gard Union with the mother country Greece as the only firm basis for natu ral

  development in the future.” Here and there Ottoman Greek schools and homes

  raised Greek flags.14 On the mainland Venizelos and many others, driven by

  the Megali Idea, sought to incorporate the lost Aegean islands, the western

  Anatolian coastline, Constantinople, and perhaps even the Pontus in a reborn

  Greek Empire.

  The Turkish Nationalist war against the Greek Army following the landing

  in Smyrna was soon accompanied by a campaign of ethnic cleansing against

  the Ottoman Greek communities, which had in some mea sure rooted for

  Greece during the Balkan and Great wars. The Nationalists’ campaign against

  the Greeks expanded during 1919–1920 into a simultaneous confrontation

  with the Rus sians and Armenians in the eastern marchlands and with the

  Historical Background, 1918–1924

  French, who at the end of 1919 had taken over from the British in Cilicia and

  Aleppo vilayet.

  It looked as if the Turks faced an insuperable challenge. But during 1920

  the tide began to turn. Though thrice embattled, the Turks drove the Russian-

  backed Armenians out of Kars and Alexandropol in the east and in 1921

  forced the French out of Cilicia and northern Aleppo vilayet. The following

  year they swept the Greeks into the Aegean.

  At the base of what the Turks were to call their War of In de pen dence was

  a deep sense that they had been wronged—in the Balkan wars, during the

  world war, and by the foreign occupations that followed. Xenophobia bur-

  geoned, mixing hatred for the Allied Powers with hatred for Christians in

  general. Among most Turks there was no “spirit of regret, much less of re-

  pentance at what had taken place, . . . The spirit of race hatred . . . is everywhere dominant,” the American missionary James Barton observed after a

  5,000- mile trek through Asia Minor. He concluded that the Christian in-

  habitants were “in danger of extermination.”15

  But the picture was a little more nuanced, and some Turkish leading fig-

  ures publicly opposed the continued persecution of Christians. When the war

  ended and the Ottoman parliament reconvened, there were stormy debates

  about the anti- Christian atrocities. Some deputies blamed the CUP and ab-

  solved the rest of the Turkish po liti cal establishment.16 Many demanded that

  the war time ministers be tried. When three Greek Orthodox parliamentar-

  ians proposed that the state acknowledge the atrocities, some of their Muslim

  colleagues concurred.17 But the new government’s interior minister, Fethi Bey,

  finessed the question of blame, while seemingly conceding that “injustice” had

  occurred and promising that the new regime would make concrete amends:

  The approach of the government will be to grant freedom and perfect

  equality to all segments of society. . . . Apart from this, it is the intention

  of the government to cure every single injustice done up until now, as

  far as the means allow, to make pos si ble the return to their homes of those

  sent into exile, and to compensate for their material loss as far as

  pos si ble. . . . It is also our common duty to make sure that such an event

  does not recur.18

  Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists

  Even those who pressed for individual blame tended to hew to the overall

  tenor of the debates, which held that the Turkish nation as a whole bore no

  responsibility for what had happened.19

  Events conspired to harden the Turkish position, and Allied actions exac-

  erbated Turkish xenophobia. During 1919 the Allies— principally Britain—

  tried to redress some of the wrongs committed. They helped Armenian

  deportees return to their homes and regain their property, incarcerated in

  British- ruled Malta hundreds of Turkish officers and officials implicated

  in the massacres and the abuse of Allied prisoners of war, and extricated

  women and children abducted to Muslim homes. According to one pos-

  sibly exaggerated calculation, by September 1919 some 90,000 women and

  orphans— out of a
total of 170,000 war time abductees— were recovered.20

  Armenians were also freed from prisons.21

  But by 1920 these reparative efforts were largely ended, and Turkey slipped

  out of Allied control. Horace Rumbold, Britain’s perspicacious high commis-

  sioner in Constantinople, put it this way a year later: “The history of the

  armistice has been the history of the gradual decline of Allied influence and

  Armenian survivors on a train back to Anatolia.

  Historical Background, 1918–1924

  authority in Turkey. . . . Allied influence counts for nothing at all in the bulk of Asia Minor.”22

  During the first months of the armistice, the Ottoman government, under

  the guns of Allied warships in the Sea of Marmara, played along with Allied

  wishes, or at least pretended to. But the government quickly lost legitimacy

  and power, partly because of this appearance of subservience. It was gradu-

  ally replaced by a new, uncowed Turkish force, in de pen dent of Constanti-

  nople. These were the Nationalists, based in Ankara and led by Mustafa

  Kemal, the Salonica- born general who projected a “marble like coldness.”23

  The surge of Turkish nationalism— and of the Nationalist movement that

  gave it expression and came to govern the country from Ankara— were prod-

  ucts of the defeat and the attendant humiliation of the officer class and po-

  liti cal nation. But the chief immediate trigger of these surges was the Greek

  occupation of Smyrna. Defeat at the hands of the Great Powers was one thing;

  conquest and occupation by a formerly subject, contemned people, the Chris-

  tian Greeks, auguring the permanent dismemberment of Turkey, was quite

  another. Fuel was added to the fire when the French took over from the British

  in Cilicia and northern Aleppo vilayet at the end of 1919. The French were

  overbearing and more intrusive than the British and appeared to have a long-

  term imperialist agenda vis- à- vis Turkey. The Turks were particularly fearful

  of the establishment of a Western- and Russian- backed Armenian state com-

  prehending the six eastern provinces and possibly also parts of Cilicia, and

  of the emergence of a Greek mini- state in the Pontus, whether aligned with,

  or in de pen dent of, Greece.24

  Days after the Smyrna landing, Rear Admiral Mark Bristol— the com-

  mander of American naval forces in Turkish waters who, from August 1919,

  doubled as the U.S. high commissioner in Constantinople— pointed out the

  danger of the Greek invasion. It “ will have a very bad effect,” he began. “Such

  occupation without the complete military occupation of Turkey is very apt to

  cause disorders in the interior.”25 “Disorders” was to prove a gross under-

  statement. The gradual replacement, in terms of sway, of Constantinople by

  a Nationalist government, and simultaneous wars by the Nationalists against

  the clutch of foreign occupiers, accompanied by the destruction of the re-

  maining Christian communities of Asia Minor, were to be the chief “disorders”

  that ensued.

  Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists

  Turkish recovery from the shock of defeat and the rise of the militant na-

  tionalist spirit were already apparent before the Greek landing. The recovery

  was spearheaded mainly by the CUP- dominated officer corps. Already in

  October– November 1918, CUP veterans were preparing for a protracted

  guerrilla strug gle against pos si ble Allied occupation. They resurrected the

  Special Organ ization, under the label of the General Revolutionary Organ-

  ization of the Islamic World (Umum Alem- i Islam Ihtilal Teşkilatı), amassed weapons and ammunition around Anatolia, and reconstructed the armed

  bands that had been active against the Armenian and Greek communities

  during the war. Their ranks were filled by “men of bad character, released con-

  victs, etc.”26 The budding Nationalist movement also set up a new organ-

  ization, the Karakol, to protect and empower Unionist officials in the interior.27

  Karakol— meaning ‘guard’ or, literally, ‘black arm’— was a direct continuation

  of the Special Organ ization, and many of its founding members were SO

  veterans.28

  Nationalists set up regional organ izations— “national defense” or “national

  rights” committees— comprising CUP branch secretaries, mutessarifs, gen-

  darmes, army officers, and educators, among others. During the spring of

  1919 these committees— The Erzurum Association for the Defense of the Fa-

  therland, The Cilicia Association for the Defense of the National Rights, and

  so on— loosely joined together under the banner of the Society for the De-

  fense of National Rights. Kemal, appointed commander of the Yıldırım

  Army Group on October 30, 1918, and enraged by the Mudros terms, began

  clandestinely stockpiling arms and organ izing cadres for The Day, as did gen-

  erals Nihat Pasha in Adana and Ali Ihsan north of Mosul.29

  Already in March 1919, two months before the Greek landing, there was a

  sense of impending insurrection, “to be accompanied by slaughter of Chris-

  tians.” Anti- Christian and Nationalist revolutionary propaganda were ram-

  pant, and CUP veterans mobilized manpower and amassed weapons.30 The

  Allies were stymied in their efforts to collect guns and ammunition that the

  Turks were obliged to surrender.31 A British control officer at Izmit reported

  that CUP agitators “poison[ed] the minds of a considerable portion of the

  common people.”32 “The country was full of combustible material, and it

  needed only a torch to set it aflame,” Rumbold wrote later. The Greeks’ ar-

  rival in Smyrna and their misbehavior during their first days ashore— including

  several massacres of Turkish civilians— provided that torch.33

  Historical Background, 1918–1924

  Actual vio lence against Allied troops and local Christians was rare between

  the signing of the armistice and the Smyrna landing.34 But Turkish intentions

  were clear. The resurrected brigand “bands will do as they did during the war”

  one British observer predicted. The Turks threatened “that the Greeks

  and Armenians will, this time, be wiped out to a man.”35 The bands were led

  by regular Turkish army officers: “practically the whole of the military seem

  to be implicated,” as were the preachers in the mosques.36

  Some historians see the Nationalist movement as a thinly veiled resurrec-

  tion of the CUP. Indeed, the emergent strug gle against Turkey’s invaders is

  sometimes considered merely a second, Anatolian stage of the Great War,

  based on a secret plan drawn up by Enver and Talât as early as spring 1915,

  when, between Sarıkamış and Gallipoli, the Ottoman Empire appeared to

  face defeat.37 Indeed, many leaders of the budding Turkish nationalist move-

  ment were former members and adherents of the CUP. During 1919–1920

  Kemal made a point of publicly distancing himself from the CUP, but Tur-

  key’s “alarmed” Christian communities, as well as some Muslim dissenters,

  viewed Kemal’s movement as “a regeneration of the [CUP] spirit which tri-

  umphed in 1908 . . . [and which bred] the Adana massacres of the year

  1909, and which, again triumphing in January 1913, worked steadily u
p to

  the ‘boycott’, deportations and massacres of the years 1914–1916.”38 Ideo-

  logically the connection between the CUP and the Nationalists was clear.

  After Talât was assassinated in 1922, Yeni Gün, an official publication of the Nationalist Ankara Government, declared: “Our great patriot has died for

  his country. We salute his fresh tomb . . . Talaat was a po liti cal giant. Talaat was a genius. History will prove his im mense stature and will make of him a

  martyr. . . . Talaat . . . was . . . the greatest man Turkey has produced.” On

  another occasion, Yeni- Gun stated, “We, the heirs of the great patriots of 1908, shall continue their work.”39

  The Nationalist movement came together around the figure of Mustafa

  Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, who, as commander of the 19th Division, had

  helped turn the tide against the Allied invaders in the grueling, protracted

  battle. By May 1919 the government was sending him to Samsun as inspector

  general. Ostensibly he was in charge of the military in eastern Anatolia and

  was to report on the situation and on “Greek complaints of harassment.” 40 But

  the purpose of his assignment may have been diff er ent: to thwart the emer-

  gence of a Pontic Greek polity.41 His arrival could not have been more timely.

  Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists

  As the British high commissioner put it, the Smyrna landing had “stimulated

  a Turkish patriotism prob ably more real than any which the [ Great] War was

  able to evoke.” 42

  Kemal had been an early CUP member, and, before leaving for Samsun,

  had frequently visited party stalwarts incarcerated in Constantinople.43

  But from 1919 through the early 1920s, he made a point of dissociating him-

  self from the CUP old guard. Indeed, eventually he even tried and executed a

  few.44 At times, Kemal distanced himself from the Armenian massacres as

  well; occasionally, he condemned them. He was also critical, or at least am-

  biguous in his appreciation of, the CUP’s expansionist tendencies, embodied

  in both its pan- Turanian and pan- Islamic ideological strains. But during

  1919–1923 he made use of both to mobilize the masses and to frighten the

  British and French. This wasn’t just a utilitarian calculation. As Akçam puts