Despite opposition from Lansing and the U.S. delegation, the War Crimes Commission passed a resolution by a large majority condemning enemy violations of what they termed “laws of humanity,” particularly the Turkish persecution of Armenians. This opened the door to international trials of Turkish Ittihad leaders and perhaps to trials of other Central Powers leaders who were alleged to have committed lesser acts of persecution in Europe. Importantly, the commission’s findings required that specific clauses be included in any peace treaty to force the defeated powers to turn over war-crimes suspects and evidence to the courts of the victors.32
But Robert Lansing, as commission chairman, refused to transmit the resolution to the highest council of the Paris conference, thus effectively vetoing it. That dispute soon spilled over into the personal discussions among the “Big Four” leaders—U.S. President Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando. For a time, the U.S. delegation’s opposition to war crimes trials threatened to derail the Paris Conference.
As Lansing saw things, he had important allies in his efforts to block the resolution, despite the lopsided vote against him in the commission. Lansing thought that “the British [delegation] knew the practical impossibility of the action” against war criminals, but “they were forced by public opinion to advocate [measures against criminals] and were depending upon the United States to block it,” historian Arthur Walworth has written.33 President Wilson also supported Lansing on this point and argued in private meetings that a trial of the kaiser would make a martyr of him, perhaps leading to a restoration of the recently overthrown Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany. Wilson preferred to sidestep the issue of war crimes altogether and leave it unresolved in any treaty ending the war.
But Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando each insisted on strong provisions concerning war crimes and the related issue of war reparations in any peace treaty with Germany. “This question [of war crimes trials], with that of reparations, is one that interests English opinion to the highest degree,” the British prime minister told Wilson, “and we could not sign a peace treaty that left it without solution.”34 In time, Wilson softened (though Lansing did not), and the Big Four approved a compromise that watered down the War Crimes Commission’s original proposals. Wilson believed that the compromise language would mollify public opinion and divert attention from the war crimes issue. “In withdrawing his opposition to the war-crimes clauses,” Walworth commented, “Wilson recognized that they were too ineffectual to warrant any determined resistance to them. When asked by [U.S.] Ambassador [to Great Britain John W.] Davis whether he expected to ‘catch his rabbit’, [Wilson] said no, ‘it was all damned foolishness anyway.’”35
3
Young Turks
In the end, the delegates at the Paris peace conference insisted on including in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles provisions that required the German government to admit responsibility for instigating the war and to turn over war crimes suspects and evidence to military courts of the Associated Powers for trial. Lansing’s views concerning “crimes against humanity” prevailed, however, and that phrase is not found in the peace treaties with Germany or the other Central Powers.
The concept of a crime against humanity was not well defined at this point, even by its advocates. But the definition had at least two important elements that set it apart from earlier understandings of war crimes, which were limited to acts that a government might take against the population or troops of a foreign power.
First, crimes against humanity included atrocities that were criminal not only under civil law but also under the most elementary morality, yet were not technically war crimes. The new definition included domestic campaigns to exterminate a particular ethnic or religious group as well as institutionalized slavery, even though neither of these was considered a war crime under the Hague or Geneva covenants.
Second, many (though not all) atrocities committed by a government against its own people were defined as crimes against humanity.
It was the Turkish government’s attempted genocide of that country’s large Armenian population that had led to the demand for a clear international ban on crimes against humanity. Turkey was the center of the Ottoman Empire, and the Armenians were a large minority group whose ancestral home clustered around Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Turkish religious extremists and security forces seeking racial and religious purity in Turkey had repeatedly instigated pogroms, murdering tens of thousands Armenians.1 One result was that militant Armenians took up arms and began pressing for political independence.
Shortly before World War I, a secretive and disciplined cabal of young Turkish military officers known as the Ittihad took power in Turkey and brought the country into an alliance with Germany. These were the original “Young Turks,” and their capacity for cruelty and violence still reverberates in that phrase today.
In the first months of World War I the Young Turks instigated a national effort to exterminate the Armenian population under the guise of modernization, suppressing domestic dissent, and securing Turkey’s borders. The Ittihad bent the power of the Turkish state to their purpose. Beginning in late 1914 and accelerating over the next three years, the Turkish government rounded up Armenian men for forced labor, worked many to death building a trans-Turkish railway for German business interests, then shot the survivors. The government then secretly ordered mass executions of Armenian intellectuals and political leaders in the spring of 1915. The state also uprooted Armenian women and children from their homes and drove them into vast resettlement camps that were barren of supplies or shelter. When the camps became full, the Turks expelled the people into the deserts of what is today Syria and Iraq.2 Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died from shootings, starvation, exposure, and disease.
The state declared that all the property of deported Armenian families had been “abandoned,” then confiscated it and used it to reward Ittihad party activists and others who participated in the extermination process.3 Many Turks prospered by liquidating Armenians’ businesses, stealing their stocks, and seizing Armenian farms and real estate.
The genocide was particularly cruel to Armenian women and girls, who became the objects of a pervasive, tacitly sanctioned campaign of rape. Turkish police encouraged gangs of thugs to prey upon the deportees as a means of humiliating and destroying these women. Meanwhile, some Armenian girls were able to escape deportation by announcing a religious conversion to Islam, and in this way some Turkish men secured Armenian concubines and house slaves.4
Surviving Turkish, German, and U.S. documents establish that the Ittihad expected to strike quickly, to keep the deportations and massacres secret, and to exterminate the Armenians as a race before the outside world learned of the atrocities. The Ittihad also persecuted substantial numbers of Greeks, Jews, and other minority groups, in some cases deporting them along with the Armenians. The Turkish government made a careful effort to explain away leaks that appeared in the press as nothing more than exaggerated accounts of the usual casualties of war.5
But the Ittihad miscalculated. Their empire was primarily Islamic, and the Armenians were largely Christians. When the genocide began, a number of Western diplomats and Christian missionaries in Turkey (including a German, Pastor Johannes Lepsius) made determined efforts to record the massacres and deportations and to mobilize world opinion against Turkish actions. The U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, and several U.S. consuls publicly protested the deportations and began to aid refugees—an unusually courageous gesture by diplomats, who ordinarily make a point of washing their hands of such matters.6 These efforts struck a responsive chord in the countries of the Western Alliance and, to a lesser degree, inside Germany as well. Publicity against the atrocities became particularly strong in countries where the news media remained hungry for wartime atrocity stories involving Germans and their clients and were willing to
give full play to deeply rooted Christian prejudices against Muslims.7
Tragically, Armenia could supply an almost unlimited number of such accounts. Unlike some war propaganda, most of the stories were true. In the end, however, the Armenians and their supporters failed to mobilize enough international support to halt the mass killings and deportations, although they did succeed in placing the crime of genocide clearly on the public agenda for the first time in modern history.
At the height of the pogroms in 1915, the governments of France, Great Britain, and czarist Russia issued a joint declaration denouncing the mass killings of Armenians as “crimes against humanity and civilization” and warning the leaders of the Turkish government that they would be held “personally responsible.”8
But too often there was little of substance behind the indignant rhetoric. At the height of the genocide, a factional split among the Young Turks opened the possibility that Turkey might put an end to the massacres in exchange for an agreement from the Associated Powers to abandon their claims on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire. Djemal Pasha, a member of the triumvirate that ruled Turkey, had settled into Damascus and exercised local control over much of what is today Syria, Jordan, and Israel. In late 1915, while Turkish efforts to exterminate Armenians were at their height, Djemal sought out an Armenian emissary and convinced him to carry an offer to the governments of the Associated Powers. If czarist Russia, France, and Britain would back him, Djemal promised, he would undertake a coup d’état against his Young Turk rivals, end the massacres, and take Turkey out of the war. Djemal himself would then emerge as sultan.
The price for the plan was that the European powers would abandon imperial claims to what is today Iraq and Syria and provide reconstruction assistance to Djemal’s government after the war. Djemal, for his part, was willing to concede control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles to Russia.
“Djemal appears to have acted on the mistaken assumption that saving the Armenians—as distinct from merely exploiting their plight for propaganda purposes—was an important Allied objective,” writes David Fromkin, a historian specializing in Ottoman affairs. The Russians favored Djemal’s plan and for a time assured him that the other Associated Powers would cooperate. But in early 1916, France rejected Djemal’s offer and claimed southern Turkey, Syria, and parts of Iraq. Great Britain followed suit, claiming Iraq on behalf of a local “Iraqi” government created by London. “In their passion for booty,” Fromkin writes, “the Allied governments lost sight of the condition upon which future gains were predicated: winning the war.… Djemal’s offer afforded the Allies their one great opportunity to subvert the Ottoman Empire from within”—and to save innocent lives—“and they let it go.”9 Nor did the Allies exploit Djemal’s attempted betrayal of his colleagues for propaganda or intelligence purposes. As far as can be determined, the other Young Turks never learned of Djemal’s secret correspondence with the enemy, and he remained part of the ruling triumvirate for the remainder of the war.
The pro-Armenian publicity may not have changed the West’s basic policy toward Turkey, but it did have a significant impact on public opinion in the Associated Powers. By the time the Paris Peace Conference began, there was widespread sentiment among the victorious nations that justice required some form of trial and punishment for those who had perpetrated atrocities in Turkey.
The Ittihad dictatorship crumbled as the war drew to a close, and a new, Western-backed Turkish government signed an armistice with the Associated Powers in late October 1918. Two days later, most of the senior Ittihad leaders fled their country for Germany, which granted them asylum. They left behind many who had collaborated in the genocide, however, including state and local administrators, party activists, Turkish businessmen and farmers who had seized Armenian property, policemen, and a variety of specialists in mass violence. The new Turkish government arrested several hundred former party leaders who were suspected of direct roles in the mass deportations and killings, and began to prepare cases against them for murder, treason, theft, and similar offenses under Turkish law.
The new Turkish authorities carried out a series of such trials during 1919 and 1920, placing on the public record an important collection of confessions by former Ittihad leaders, secret state and party papers concerning the tactics of deportation and mass murder, and an evidentiary outline against several hundred Ittihad leaders who had been instrumental in the crime. Much of this evidence was published in the official Turkish parliamentary gazette, Takyimi Vekayi.10
The trials were strongly opposed by a rising Turkish nationalist movement, however, which regarded the prosecutions as a symbol of foreign efforts to dismember Turkey. Led by military strongman Mustapha Kemal (later known as Ataturk), the new movement welcomed Ittihadists to its ranks and placed some party veterans in leading posts. Kemal’s movement enjoyed great influence in the postwar Turkish military, interior ministry, and particularly the police. Kemalist sympathizers systematically delayed and obstructed Turkey’s criminal prosecutions, destroyed evidence, organized escapes, and sparked large demonstrations and public protests against the trials.11
Importantly, Britain, France, and the United States were at that time vying with one another to divide up the vast oil and mineral wealth of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. Kemal skillfully played the three powers against each other and insisted on amnesty for the Ittihadists as part of the price for his support in the division of the defunct empire.12
Though often overlooked today, the Ottoman holdings were of extraordinary value, perhaps the richest imperial treasure since the European seizure of the New World four centuries earlier. The empire had been eroding for decades, but by the time of the Turkish defeat in World War I, it still included most of what is today Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf. The European governments sensed that the time had come to seize this rich prize.
The British had been the dominant foreign power in the Middle East prior to World War I. Their Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later known as British Petroleum, or BP) and the Turkish Petroleum Company effectively controlled most of the oil reserves in the region. But the French acquired an important mandate in the area during the war, and by 1919 they were seeking substantial concessions from the British. Both countries preferred to keep the U.S.-backed Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (today known as Exxon) out of the area.13 The U.S. government meanwhile opposed many aspects of the European colonial rule in the Middle East, preferring instead what it termed “open-door” policies—those that facilitated U.S. penetration of new markets and acquisition of new sources of supply.
Senior officials of all three Western powers became preoccupied with oil politics in the Middle East. It even led to an awkward new term, “oleaginous diplomacy,” that was used for years to refer to government initiatives on behalf of oil companies. “Oil,” said French Premier Georges Clemenceau, “is as necessary as blood.”14
For a short time after the war, the three allies pressed the new Turkish government on two fronts: First, they supported tough punishment for Ittihadist criminals, payment of damages to Armenians and Greeks for the lives and property lost during the massacres, establishment of an independent Armenian republic in northeastern Turkey, and transfer to Greece of the port city of Smyrna. Second, they demanded that the Turks surrender all claims to the resources of the former Ottoman territories outside of Turkey proper, particularly the Mosul oilfields in what is today northern Iraq. Although many Turks saw these terms as humiliatingly onerous, the first postwar Turkish government agreed to them in the Treaty of Sevres, signed in August 1920. That agreement was hailed at the time as the formal conclusion of World War I.15
But the Associated Powers could not agree among themselves on the terms of the division of the Mosul oilfields, and new fighting broke out between the Armenian nationalists, who sought to establish the republic they believed they had been guaranteed at Sevres, and the Turkish Kemalists, who still regarded Armenia
as a part of Turkey. Kemal’s embrace of the Ittihadists contributed to an escalating cycle of revenge killings and renewed massacres in Turkey.
By the end of 1920, the Kemalists were clearly in the ascendance, having established a rival government at Ankara, in the center of the country. The increasingly shaky Turkish government at Istanbul, under intense Kemalist pressure to abrogate the Treaty of Sevres, abruptly shut down the criminal trials of Ittihadists. The Western allies then stepped up their jockeying for influence in the Kemalist camp.
The U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey was Admiral Mark L. Bristol, a man with a reputation as a bigot and a determined advocate of U.S. alliance with Mustafa Kemal. “The Armenians,” Bristol wrote, “are a race like the Jews—they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character.”16 It was better for the United States, he contended, to jettison support for the Armenian republic as soon as possible, stabilize U.S. relations with the emerging Turkish government, and to enlist Kemal’s support in gaining access to the oilfields of the former Ottoman Empire. Bristol’s argument found a receptive audience in the new Harding administration in Washington, whose affinity for oil interests eventually blossomed into the famous Teapot Dome bribery scandal.17
As High Commissioner to Turkey, Bristol had considerably more power than might be enjoyed by any conventional ambassador. As the civil war unfolded inside Turkey, Bristol barred newspaper reporters from access to areas where renewed massacres of Armenians were taking place, purportedly to avoid inciting further atrocities against civilians.
The Splendid Blond Beast Page 4