by Benny Morris
Kingdom of Greece to look to— the Armenians had no homeland to offer
succor or haven. Eastern Anatolia, and perhaps Cilicia, was their homeland, as
the Turks understood. And these were, of course, parts of the Turks’ own
homeland. So, from the start, the Turks viewed the Armenian nationalists as
a dire threat to the empire’s territorial integrity, indeed existence. The Turks’
worries may have been exaggerated, even paranoid. But many felt them sin-
cerely, much as many Nazis later took seriously the absurd notion of a
Jewish “threat” to Germany.
To these reasons must be added the Turks’ feeling, from 1914 on, that the
Armenians had betrayed them. Armenian politicians, who had also sought
Abdülhamid’s removal, had been allies of the rebellious Young Turk leader-
ship in the years before the CUP seized power, and even in the first years fol-
lowing their successful power- grab. But, at the same time, in the 1890s and
early 1900s, the Armenians had often pleaded for Rus sian or Western diplo-
matic, po liti cal, and military intervention on their behalf— which the Turks
regarded as treasonous. And in 1914–1916, the CUP trumpeted the Arme-
nians’ alleged aid to the Rus sian armies fighting Turkey in the east, beginning
with the Battle of Sarıkamış.
Though the Balkan Wars, in which Greece participated, gave the Ottomans
a serious scare, the Ottoman Greeks posed no serious threat to the empire,
Conclusion
having produced in Anatolia no operative national movement or terrorism be-
fore 1919. To be sure, some Ottoman Greeks during these wars had openly
displayed pro- Greece sentiments. But that was it: no rebellion, no terrorism.
Moreover, the Ottoman Greeks were to a degree a protected species. Before
World War I, the Turks worried that wholesale massacres of Ottoman Greeks
might lead to war with Greece and to retaliatory Greek persecution of
Muslims. And during August 1914– May 1917, the Turks’ desire to maintain
Greek nonbelligerence was even stronger, as Greece’s entry into the world
war on the Allied side might tilt the odds against them.11 In any event, during
World War I there was no Ottoman Greek insurgency in Anatolia.
Nonetheless, in the first half of 1914 and during the Great War itself, the
Turks made centrally orchestrated efforts to rid Anatolia of at least some of
its Greeks, and hundreds of thousands were indeed hounded into the inte-
rior or out of the country, or killed.
Then in 1919, against the backdrop of the war against the invading Greek
army, the gloves came off. The Greek seizure of Smyrna and the repeated
pushes inland— almost to the outskirts of Ankara, the Nationalist capital—
coupled with the largely imagined threat of a Pontine breakaway, triggered a
widespread, systematic four- year campaign of ethnic cleansing in which hun-
dreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks were massacred and more than a mil-
lion deported to Greece. Whereas during the war the Ottomans could march
the Armenians to empty marchland deserts, afterward, there were no such
places left. The Greek “prob lem” had to be solved within the bound aries of
a newborn Turkey, by murder or forced assimilation (conversion), or else by
expatriation to Greece. Initially the Greeks of the littoral, especially in the
Pontus, were deported inland, with genocidal intent. Adult men were usually
first taken aside and murdered, while the convoys consisting of women,
children and the el derly were brutally marched hither and thither across the
sunbaked plateaus and snow- covered mountains or dispersed in Muslim vil-
lages. Then in late 1922–1923, Nationalist policy changed. While the Turks
continued killing many thousands of men from Ionia and the Pontus, women,
children, and the el derly were driven from the interior and the coastal towns
and deported to Greece. This last stage meant ethnic cleansing through exile
rather than genocide. But throughout 1914–1924, the overarching aim was
to achieve a Turkey free of Greeks.
Conclusion
The dispatch of the Armenians began earlier and was more thorough, partly
because they enjoyed no concrete foreign protection. Throughout 1894–1924,
the Western Powers and Rus sia, while often intervening diplomatically, failed
to send troops or gunboats to save them. The Turks were free to murder or
deport Armenians at will. The repeated Rus sian invasions of the Van- Urmia-
Erzurum areas during World War I prob ably saved some Christian lives, but
this was incidental to their war- making. The primary objective was strategic
rather than humanitarian. The Armenians were abandoned to their fate, as
the Turks, since 1894–1896, understood they would be.
As we have said, historians have tended to focus on what befell the Armenians,
specifically in the years 1915–1916. But the mass murder of the Armenians
in the Great War was not an aberration—as, say, the Holocaust of 1940–1945
was in the course of modern German history. The Turks systematically mur-
dered Armenians en masse before, during, and after 1915–1916. We believe
the story must be viewed as a whole, beginning in 1894 and ending in 1924,
and that one needs to look at the whole thirty- year period in order to properly
understand the events of 1915–1916. Looking at the Armenian segment of
what unfolded, historian Richard Hovannisian has written, accurately in our
view, that there was a “continuum” of genocidal intent and a “continuum of
ethnic cleansing,” aiming at the “de- Armenization of the Ottoman Empire and
the Republic of Turkey,” stretching from 1894 to the 1920s, even if “it is
unlikely that the sultan [Abdülhamid II in the 1890s] thought” in terms of
complete extermination.12 We would add, however, that it was not so much
“de- Armenization” as de- Christianization that the Ottoman and Nationalist
Turks were after.13
Viewed in retrospect, the 1894–1896 massacres pointed the way to 1915–
1916, and 1915–1916 pointed the way to 1919–1924. On vari ous levels
1894–1896 was a trial run. Abdülhamid was quoted as saying, “The only way
to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians.”14 The 1890s
persuaded the next generation of Muslims and Christians that genocide was
pos si ble— the populace and troops would do the job, the great powers would
not interfere, the Armenians would not resist— and conditioned the Muslims
for the next stage by dehumanizing and marginalizing the Armenians. In
1915–1916 the Turks were killing what some of them referred to as “infidel
Conclusion
dogs.” The killing and massive confiscation of Christian property during
WWI, by individuals and the state, were merely a repetition, albeit expanded,
of what had happened in the 1890s, as was the rape and acquisition of Arme-
nian women for immediate or long- term use.
During the Great War the Young Turk leadership understood and ac-
knowledged the connection between 1915–1916 and 1894–1896, and, in-
deed, saw themselves as improving on what Abdülhamid had begun. “I have
accomplished,” Talât reportedly told friends, “more toward solving t
he Ar-
menian prob lem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty
years.”15 On May 12, 1915, as the mass deportations were getting under way,
Vartkes Serengulian, the Armenian parliamentarian, anticipating massa-
cres, asked Talât, “ Will you continue the work of Abdul Hamid?” Talât re-
plied, “Yes.”16
Likewise the Armenian massacres of 1915–1916 paved the way for the anti-
Greek (and anti- Armenian) atrocities of 1919–1924, in which many of the
earlier mea sures were replicated: mass arrest of local leaders, initial killing of adult men, the use of lethal convoys, and so on.
What drove the successive Turkish governments and the Turkish people
in 1894–1896, 1914–1918, and 1919–1924 to “de- Christianize” the Ottoman
Empire and Turkish Republic? To be sure, there was a common po liti cal im-
pulse and motive during the reigns of Abdülhamid, the CUP, and Mustafa
Kemal. Most Turks, including the country’s leaders, genuinely feared that the
Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, were destabilizing the empire
and later Turkey. The Turks believed the Christians’ actions threatened their
country with dismemberment, through a combination of internal subversion
and precipitation of Western and Rus sian intervention.
Another key factor was the ideology of Muslim supremacy. All three re-
gimes, and the Muslim populace, regarded Christian subservience as a state
of nature. That had been the empire’s experience for centuries. Christian vic-
tories and depredations against Muslims—as had occurred in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries in North Africa, the Balkans, Crete, and the
eastern marchlands— were unintelligible subversions of the worldview Muslims
had been brought up with. And Christian iterations of equality with Muslims,
as prompted and backed by the Christian great powers and enacted as law in
nineteenth- century imperial reforms, were an affront to Allah’s will and the
Conclusion
natu ral order, based on the time- honored traditions of Christian dhimm-
itude. As aggrieved Turkish notables from Kastamonu put it in 1920— against
the backdrop of the Franco- Turkish war in which Armenians, too, periodi-
cally fought the Turks— “The Armenians, whom we have always protected,
now rise against their former masters, they massacre and plunder the [Muslim]
inhabitants. . . . We just won der if an instance of this kind has ever been wit-
nessed in the history of Islam.”17
After the ethnic cleansing of the Christians, Kemal came to be identified
with secularism and modernity. But Kemal, like the CUP leaders, had been
brought up Muslim and shared an Islamic world view, as well as a history of
familial dispossession and refugeedom at Christian hands in the Balkans.
During the Great War, and in the years immediately before and after, these
leaders shared with the Muslim population at large a deeply ingrained feeling
that the natu ral order had somehow been overthrown and that matters had
to be put right. Such sentiments also underpinned the repeated abuses of the
minute Christian communities living in Turkey during the later republican
years, from the “wealth tax” of the 1940s to the pogroms of the 1950s and
1960s.
Those who orchestrated the mass murder and expulsions, from Abdülh-
amid through the CUP triumvirs to Kemal, were motivated by the desire to
maintain the territorial integrity of the empire and then of the Turkish state.
Imperial, religious, and nationalist considerations motivated them to roll back
foreign control, interference, and influence. Their memories comprehended
the gradual diminution of Ottoman- Turkish domains as a result of internal
Christian rebellion (Greece, Serbia, Crete), external Christian invasion (Rus sia
in the western and eastern marchlands, Britain in Egypt- Palestine- Syria- Iraq),
and the occasional partnership between the two (British and Rus sian support
for internal Christian subversion or rebelliousness).
This political- religious motive shifted from “imperial” to “nationalist”
during the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, when
the Turks, under the CUP, adopted nationalism as a unifying princi ple, grad-
ually replacing Ottoman imperialism. The subsequent anti- Greek and anti-
Armenian campaigns, leading to expulsion and mass murder, were in large
mea sure driven by this nationalism and its exclusionist (“Turkifying”) men-
tality. But the nationalism that drove the murderous campaigns of 1909 and
Conclusion
1914–1924 also had a religious undertone, as nationalism in most Muslim
Middle Eastern countries in the twentieth century always had. To put it an-
other way, given the non- separation of church and state in the Muslim Middle
East, the nationalist politics of the region have often been underwritten by,
and are inseparable from, Islamic beliefs. Hence in the anti- Christian urban
pogroms of 1894–1896 and 1919–1922, Turkish Muslim clerics and seminar-
ians were prominent among the killers and jihadist rhe toric was prevalent, if
not dominant, in sermons, billboards, and the Turkish press. Hence, too,
religious conversion was often the desired result of depredations. (It is per-
haps worth noting that we have encountered no evidence, not one case, of
Greeks or Armenians forcing Muslims to convert to Chris tian ity anywhere in
the Ottoman Empire during 1894–1924. We find no such instances even in
the areas of western Anatolia and Cilicia where Christians— Greeks and
Frenchmen— dominated during 1919–1922. Nor, it should be added, have
we found cases of Christian priests leading the infrequent massacres of
Muslims that occurred between 1894 and 1924.)
To judge from the available documentation, among most of the actual per-
petrators of the mass murder and mass expulsion of Christians throughout
the thirty- year period, the overriding motivation was religious. The perpetra-
tors viewed the Christians, of all denominations, as infidels who, insurgent
or resurgent, should be destroyed. The perpetrators believed they were acting
in defense of Islam and in defense of the sacred Islamic domain. For most,
the slaughter of Christians, innocents as well as combatants, was imperative
in a state of declared jihad. And, of course, the fact that conversion to Islam,
in many cases, was sufficient to redeem potential victims and take them into
the fold is also proof of the religious impulse under lying Turkish Muslims’
actions. Indeed, some Western observers at the time situated the ethnic
cleansing of Turkey’s Christians within the wider context of a reborn clash of
civilizations between the Muslim East and the Christian West.18
The Thirty- Year Genocide can be seen as the most dramatic and signifi-
cant chapter in the de- Christianization of the Middle East during the past two
centuries. It was not the last, though. The destruction of Syria’s and Iraq’s
significant Christian communities— which started with the Syrio- Lebanese
pogroms in the mid- nineteenth century—is today nearing completion, as
is the de- Christianization, demographically speaking, of Syria
, Iraq, and
Conclusion
Palestine. For example, Bethlehem, once an overwhelmingly Christian town,
is now majority Muslim. These may be the final stages of the Arab and
Turkish “awakenings.”
It is not by accident that the Ottoman Empire declared jihad against the
Allied powers in November 1914, days after entering World War I. Some of
the CUP leaders may have been atheists, but even they could not imagine a
state that was not based, to some extent, on Islamic solidarity, and they were
keenly aware of what it would take to mobilize mass enthusiasm, hatred, and
sacrifice. As Enver put it in early August 1914, “War with England is now
within the realm of possibilities. . . . Since such a war would be a holy war . . .
it will definitely be pertinent to rally the Muslim population . . . [and] invite every one to come to the state’s defense in this war.”19 The Şeyhülislam’s
fatwa calling for jihad against the Allied powers followed. That fatwa did not
specifically refer to the empire’s Christian minorities. But it didn’t have to.
By 1914 the Turkish masses had been conditioned to regard their Chris-
tian neighbors as potentially or actually subversive and rebellious, helpmates
of the enemy without. It was only natu ral that removing or destroying them
would be a necessary part of the holy war, which the Turkish leadership and
masses viewed as a defensive, existential strug gle.
Proofs that the Ottoman and Turkish leaders, from Abdülhamid to Mus-
tafa Kemal, saw the prob lem as one of the Christians rather than of the Armenians or Greeks or Assyrians, are abundant, not only in their actions but also
in their words. Abdülhamid II, according to his private secretary, believed that
“within the limits of our State, we can tolerate but members of our own
[Turkish] nation and believers in our own [Muslim] faith.”20 As to the CUP
triumvirs, the German ambassador in Istanbul reported that in June 1915
Talât had told one of his embassy staff, “The Turkish Government intended
to make use of the World War to deal thoroughly with its internal enemies,
the Christians of Turkey.”21 Ambassador Morgenthau lumped the three CUP
leaders— Enver, Talât, and Cemal— together when he explained and defined