The Thirty-Year Genocide

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