A Question of Genocide

A Question of Genocide
Armenians and Turks at the
End of the Ottoman Empire

EDITED BY
Ronald Grigor Suny
Fatma Mge Gek and
Norman M. Naimark
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A question of genocide : Armenians and Turks at the end
of the Ottoman Empire / edited by Ronald Grigor Suny,
Fatma Mge Gek, and Norman M. Naimark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539374-3
1. Armenian massacres, 19151923.
2. TurkeyEthnic relationsHistory20th century.
3. ArmeniansTurkeyHistory20th century.
4. GenocideTurkeyHistory20th century.
5. TurkeyHistoryMehmed V, 19091918. I. Suny, Ronald Grigor.
II. Gek, Fatma Mge. III. Naimark, Norman M.
DS195.5.Q45 2011
956.620154dc22 2010024250

9 8 7 6 5 4 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
In Tribute to One Who Built Bridges
Hrant Dink
(September 15, 1954January 19, 2007)
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Contributors, ix
Preface, xiii
Norman M. Naimark
Acknowledgments, xxi
Introduction: Leaving It to the Historians, 3
Ronald Grigor Suny and Fatma Mge Gek

PART I: HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF THE GENOCIDE

1 Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians, 15

Ronald Grigor Suny
2 Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915, 42
Fatma Mge Gek

PART II: ON THE EVE OF CATASTROPHE

3 The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity,

and Power, 55
Stephan H. Astourian
4 What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties
in the Ottoman Empire? 82
Gerard J. Libaridian
5 Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the
Balkan War of 19121913, 113
Fikret Adanr
6 From Patriotism to Mass Murder:
Dr. Mehmed Reid (18731919), 126
Hans-Lukas Kieser

vii
viii Contents

PART III: GENOCIDE IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

7 The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia,

1915February 1917, 151
Peter Holquist
8 Germany and the Young Turks: Revolutionaries into Statesmen, 175
Eric D. Weitz
9 Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians?
German Talk and German Silences, 199
Margaret Lavinia Anderson

PART IV: GENOCIDE IN LOCAL CONTEXT

10 Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide, 221

Aram Arkun
11 The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians, 244
David Gaunt
12 The First World War and the Development of the Armenian
Genocide, 260
Donald Bloxham
13 Pouring a People into the Desert: The Denitive Solution of the
Unionists to the Armenian Question, 276
Fuat Dndar

PART V: CONTINUITIES

14 Turkey for the Turks: Demographic Engineering in Eastern

Anatolia, 19141945, 287
Uur mit ngr
15 Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on
the Armenian Genocide, 306
Erik Jan Zrcher
Notes, 317
Index, 415
Contributors

Fikret Adanr is professor of history at Sabanc University in Istanbul and

Emeritus Professor of Southeast European History at the University of
Bochum (Germany). He is the author of Die Makedonische Frage and
coeditor of the volumes The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of
Historiography and Osmanismus, Nationalismus und der Kaukasus: Muslime
und Christen, Trken und Armenier im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.

Margaret Lavinia Anderson is professor of history at the University of

California, Berkeley. She is the author of Windthorst: A Political Biography,
Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany,
and Down in Turkey Far Away: Human Rights, the Armenian
Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany, Journal of Modern
History.

Aram Arkun, until recently director of the Zohrab Center (New York City)
and editor of the quarterly Ararat, has written Into the Modern Age:
18001913, in E. Herzig and M. Kurkchiyan, eds., The Armenians, and
Les relations armno-turques et les massacres de Cilicie de 1909, in
H. H. Ayvazian et al., Lactualit du Gnocide des Armniens.

Stephan H. Astourian is executive director of the Armenian Studies

Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and adjunct assistant
professor in the Department of History. He has written numerous articles
and essays on the Armenian genocide, post-Soviet Armenia and
Azerbaijan, and the Armenian diaspora.

Donald Bloxham is professor of modern history at Edinburgh University.

He is the author of The Final Solution: A Genocide, The Great Game of
Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman
Armenians, and Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of
Holocaust History and Memory.

ix
x Contributors

Fuat Dndar was born in Diyarbakr and educated at Istanbul Technical

University as a petroleum engineer before he turned to history. He is the
author of ttihat ve Terakkinin Mslmanlar skan Siyaseti (The Committee
of Union and Progress and Its Resettlement Policy for Muslims), Modern
Trkiyenin ifresi: ttihat Ve Terakkinin Etnisite Mhendislii (19131918),
and Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question
(18781918).

David Gaunt is professor of history at Sdertrn University College in

Stockholm and has previously taught at Uppsala and Ume
Universities. He is the author of Massacres, Resistance, Protectors:
Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I and is
the main editor of Resistance and Collaboration during the Holocaust:
Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.

Fatma Mge Gek is associate professor of sociology and in the

Program in Womens Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the
author of East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the
Eighteenth Century and Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman
Westernization and Social Change.

Peter Holquist is associate professor of history at the University of

Pennsylvania. He is author of Making War, Forging Revolution: Russias
Continuum of Crisis and founder and editor of the journal Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. He is currently completing a
project on the role of imperial Russia in developing the laws of war in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Hans-Lukas Kieser is privatdozent for modern history at the University of

Zurich, specializing in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. He is the
author of Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen
der Trkei 18391938 and Vorkmpfer der neuen Trkei: Revolutionre
Bildungseliten am Genfersee (18701939), and has coedited the volume
of collected essays Der Vlkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah / The
Armenian Genocide and the Shoah.

Gerard J. Libaridian holds the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian

History and is the director of the Armenian Studies Program at the
University of Michigan. He served as senior adviser to the rst president
of post-Soviet Armenia and is the author of Armenia at the Crossroads:
Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era, The Challenge of Statehood:
Contributors xi

Armenian Political Thinking since Independence, and Modern Armenia:

People, Nation, State.

Norman M. Naimark is Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East

European Studies at Stanford University and senior fellow of the Hoover
Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. He
is author of The Russians in Germany: The History of the Soviet Zone of
Occupation, 19451949, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-
Century Europe, and Stalins Genocides.

Ronald Grigor Suny is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and
Political History and director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical
Studies at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political
Science and History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of
Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History, The Making of the
Georgian Nation, and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the
Successor States.

Uur mit ngr is lecturer in international history at the University of

Shefeld and staff member at the Shefeld Centre for the Study of
Genocide and Mass Violence. He is the author of Vervolging, Onteigening,
Vernietiging: De deportatie van Ottomaanse Armenirs tijdens de Eerste
Wereldoorlog and several articles and book chapters on mass violence. He is
currently revising his PhD thesis on Young Turk population politics.

Eric D. Weitz is McKnight Distinguished University Professor of

History at the University of Minnesota, where he also holds the
Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in the College of Liberal Arts.
He is the author of Creating German Communism, 18901990: From
Popular Protests to Socialist State, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race
and Nation, and Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy.

Erik Jan Zrcher is general director of the International Institute of Social

History in Amsterdam and holds the chair of Turkish Studies in Leiden
University. He has published seven books on twentieth-century Turkey,
among them: The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and
Progress in the Turkish National Movement, Political Opposition in the Early
Turkish Republic: The Progressive Republican Party, and Turkey: A Modern
History.
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Preface

Norman M. Naimark

Nearly a century after its occurrence, the Armenian Genocide of 1915

remains one of the most painful episodes of mass killing in the history of
the modern period. The conscience of contemporary world society is
haunted by images of doomed Armenian women and children, wandering
aimlessly in the Anatolian plateau, mad with hunger and grief, and by pho-
tographs of rows of corpses of murdered Armenian men and boys, guarded
casually by Turkish soldiers. Like the indelible impressions of the victims of
Auschwitz on modern consciousness, those of the Armenian genocide call
out for remembering and for the historical understanding of a series of
events that concluded with the elimination of the Armenian nation from its
ancient homelands in Anatolia.
The Armenian genocide is also a painful historical episode because of
the persistence over the entire history of the Turkish Republic of ofcial
government denial that genocide took place. Turkish denial erects practical
barricades to the study and understanding of the events of 1915 by compli-
cating archival access and intimidating scholars from engaging in
wide-ranging research into the origins, course, and consequences of the
genocide. Turkish government lobbying of foreign governments and sup-
port of foreign scholars who join the Turkish chorus of denial also holds
back progress in the historiography and impedes a sense of common pur-
pose in investigating the origins of mass murder. Denial is a continual
source of injury to the Armenian community as a whole, and in particular
to the few remaining survivors of the genocide and their progeny. But one
could argue that it also undermines the Turks ability to deal openly and
frankly with their own historical past and present. In fact, those Turks who
are willing to write without bias about the Armenian genocide tend to do so
out of a deep sense of patriotism and loyalty to the Turkish nation. A healthy
national consciousness cannot abide nasty secrets hidden away in a locked
drawer. An increasing number of Turkish intellectuals, writers, and scholars

xiii
xiv Preface

understand this essential historical lesson and are doing what they can to
face the past with an open mind.
Despite the practical barriers to engaging in fundamental research on the
Armenian genocide, including the need to know both antiquated Ottoman
Turkish (in Arabic script) and Armenian, the eld has experienced a ower-
ing of new work over the past decade. Part of this is due to the efforts of
Turkish scholars, among them Taner Akam, Fikret Adanr, and Fatma
Mge Gek, to come to terms with the complicated history of the late Otto-
man period, including the destruction of the Armenians. Part of it is the
harvest of the pioneer research of Armenian American historians, like Rich-
ard Hovannisian and Vahakn Dadrian, who have dedicated a major part of
their lives work to documenting and understanding the genesis of the
disaster of 1915. The historiography of the Armenian genocide has also
beneted enormously from the emergence of Holocaust awareness in the
1960s, the development of genocide studies in the 1970s, and the surge of
scholarly interest in comparative genocide as a result of the persistence of
horric episodes of mass killing in Bosnia and Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
If the Armenian genocide was not the rst genocide of the twentieth
century, as some scholars claimthe imperial German massacres of the
Herrero and Nama peoples in southwest Africa in 19047 may well claim
that distinctionit nevertheless serves as an important paradigmatic case
for thinking about the causes, course, and consequences of genocide. As
many Holocaust scholars have pointed out, the mass murder of the Jews in
World War II contains any number of unusual elements that underlie the
claim to uniqueness. Among them are: (1) the introduction of thoroughly
industrial means of mass murder, (2) the uncomfortable cultural linkages
with historical Christian anti-Semitism, (3) the comprehensive qualities of
the Nazi racial ideology, (4) the intent to chase down and murder the entire
world population of Jews, (5) the utter helplessness of the Jews and the
almost complete absence of the possibility of resistance when faced with
death and destruction, (6) the extent of the success of the nal solution in
Europe, and (7) the subsuming of the entire Nazi party and state apparatus
of the Third Reich to the goals of mass murder. Whether or not one accepts
the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, it is no doubt true that the Arme-
nian genocide may be more easily compared with other cases of genocide
and contains a number of important aspects that reverberate more broadly
with the comparative literature on genocide and mass killing as a whole.
Like other historical episodes of genocide, the Armenian genocide took
place within the context of war. It is not too strong to state that war serves as
a breeding ground for genocide, providing the arguments and possibilities
for its perpetration and creating both the domestic and political conditions
that make genocide more likely. The victories and defeats of the Ottoman
Preface xv

armies in World War I, the perception of the Young Turk rulers of danger
from the Russian front and the West, and the widespread conviction of the
treachery, both actual and potential, of the Armenian population, drove the
decision to deport and massacre the Armenian population. The mobiliza-
tion of the Ottoman army and of the Special Organization, attached to the
ruling ttihadist (Committee of Union and Progress, or Unionist) party, pro-
vided the manpower for deportation, executions, and mass murder. Military
needs during the time of war served as a pretext to further limit parliamen-
tary independence and the autonomy of local ofcials, some of whom were
decidedly unsympathetic to genocidal policies.
Modern ideologies of nationalismand of racial and religious hatred
also play a prominent role in genocide, including the Armenian case. As a
number of Armenian scholars have argued, Islamic religious prejudice
against the indels played a role in the hostility of Turks to Armenians. It is
also the case that Young Turk ideology contained elements of the racial
superiority of Turks to the Armenians, and other Christian (and even non-
Christian) peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, as in many cases of nation-
alist ideologies, the Young Turks worldview was a complicated amalgam of
the old Ottoman and the new Pan-Turkic, of premodern Islamic precepts of
the inherent inferiority of Christian religious groups, and of modernist
ideas of the mobilization of nationality and ethnic homogeneity. The Arme-
nians themselves challenged traditional Ottoman hierarchies of politics and
place by forming progressive political parties and assuming prominent po-
sitions in commerce and nance. Resentment and hatred of the Armenians
grew as the Armenians increasingly sought help from the Great Powers to
ensure their rights, property, and lives within the Ottoman realm. The more
the West was involved in the Armenian question, the less the Turks trusted
the Armenians to support the Ottoman government in the time of war. In
the minds of Turkish nationalists, the Armenians traditional designation as
gvur (indels) took on some of the elements of race prejudice and was
reinforced by popular resentment of alleged Armenian wealth and treachery.
That Christians had driven the Ottomans out of southeastern Europe
during the Balkan Wars of 19121913 and now threatened the integrity of
the Anatolian lands of the Turks from outside and within made the Arme-
nian threat even more dangerous from the Young Turk point of view.
Many scholars emphasize the fact that the muhacirsMuslim refugees,
rst from Russia in the nineteenth century (Circassians and Tatars, among
others), and then Macedonia and Thrace as a consequence of the Balkan
Warsplayed a prominent role in the Special Organization that did much
of the dirty work in relation to the Armenians. Their displaced status
in Ottoman Anatolia, so the argument goes, raised their level of hostility to
the ostensibly rich Armenians and led to their heavy involvement in the
xvi Preface

genocide. The literature on mass killing points to potential dangers of rapid

status reversals, especially when class and ethnicity are both involved.
Hatred, resentment, and impulses for revenge often result. In the Arme-
nian case, the muhacirs had lost their land and inuence at the hands of
Christian armies and, one could postulate, took out their frustrations on the
Armenians, who held land and wealth, if not inuence, in Anatolia. The
Armenians relative economic success in the late Ottoman Empireas in so
many cases of genocidearoused envy and greed. That the muhacirs were
moved as quickly as they were into Armenian houses and occupied Arme-
nian farmland after the deportations attests to the strength of popular eco-
nomic ambitions, as well as government policy, in the development of
genocide.
As in most cases of genocide, the mass killing of the Armenians took
place in full view of the international community. The governments of the
great powers were well aware of the impending deportation and extermina-
tion of the Armenians. The international press was full of stories about the
disaster. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians, allied with the Ottomans in
the war, might well have done more to try to stop the killing, and, in the case
of the Germans, have been accused not only of doing too little, but of aiding
and abetting genocide. The Central Powers were, however, also at war, and
the demands of Realpolitik tended to trump the moral objections that some
German citizens, even German ofcials, expressed about the genocide. The
Americans, who did not enter World War I until later, still were unable to
muster much more than diplomatic protests and isolated rallies, this despite
the clear-headed and emphatically pro-Armenian reporting of the American
ambassador Henry Morgenthau. The principle of noninterference in sover-
eign states held rm against the calls for humanitarian intervention. That
this was the case certainly encouraged Hitler and the Nazis, when inaugu-
rating their own genocidal campaign against the Poles and Jews in Septem-
ber 1939.
Recent research on mass killing indicates that the crime of genocide
needs to be thought of as occurring at various levels of society: at the very
top, where decisions are taken that lead to mass murder; at the meso-level,
where regional ofcials and their accomplices, the police and military, im-
plement orders or interpret signals from the political leadership that lead to
genocide; and at the most basic local level of society, where individuals par-
ticipate in the killing, steal from the victims, move into their houses,
or witness the depredations. Sometimes, locals try to save individuals and
families, or protest against the deportation or murder of their neighbors, usu-
ally in vain. As the articles in this volume demonstrate, the Armenian geno-
cide can protably be investigated at all of these levels. The Young Turk leaders
themselves can and should be studied for their respective involvement in
Preface xvii

turning loose the storm of genocide. At the top of the hierarchy of the Com-
mittee of Union and Progress (CUP) was the so-called Triumvirate,
Mehmet Tlt (Tlt Paa), smail Enver (Enver Paa), and Ahmed Cemal
(Cemal Paa), each of whom had his own priorities and ways of thinking
about the Armenian question. When the views of the other roughly forty
members of the CUP are studied, one sees considerable differences between
those who supported the destruction of the Armenians and the small mi-
nority that wanted no part of it. Similarly, at the meso-level, some valis (re-
gional governors) refused to go along with the killing and were released
from duty. Others became tribunes for forced deportation and mass killing,
and insisted on the need for the elimination of the Armenians. The some-
times aggressively eliminationist, sometimes conservative views of regional
army commanders and religious leaders (sharifs), similarly complicate a
straightforward narrative of the road to genocide.
There is even greater variation in the nature of the killing and deporta-
tions from village to village, city to city, district to district, depending on the
traditions of the locality, the inclinations of the local ruling elites, and the
particular ethnic and religious make-up of the population. As we know from
studies of other cases of mass killing, local rivalries, family feuds, and per-
sonal quarrels at the grassroots become almost instantaneously intertwined
with the broader dynamics of mass murder and produce rioting, assaults,
and what appears to be spontaneous killing. Every case of genocide is in
some measure local. However, the extent of the variations should not lead
us to conclude in the Armenian case, or in others, that genocide did not take
place, only that it is a more complicated social phenomenon than the indel-
ible images of the organized transport of Jews and their elimination in the
gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka might lead us to believe.
The Armenian case also supports the contention in the study of mass
killing that genocide has a dynamic of its own. It is not an event in and of
itself, but a process, one that grows and develops according to unwritten
rules of historical behavior. Many cases of genocide begin with programs of
forced deportation or ethnic cleansing that evolve sometimes seamlessly
into mass murder. If the deportations and killing of the Ottoman Arme-
nians began in the spring of 1915 and accelerated, though at an uneven
pace, over the next six months, it is also true that mass killing cannot be said
to have concluded until the early 1920s, when massacres nally subsided in
waves, with the agreement to a rm border regimen in the East, the with-
drawal of the French from Cilicia, and the establishment of the Turkish
Republics hegemony over Anatolia. Rarelyand the Armenian genocide is
no exceptiondoes genocide end up with just one designated set of victims.
The relationship between the killing of Armenians and that of the Assyrians
is a case in point. Also, the Turks attacks on the Greeks, resulting in the
xviii Preface

expulsion of the vast majority of the Greek population from Anatolia, were
closely related to the Armenian events. The whirlwind of killing pulls in
more and more victims and implicates an increasing number of assailants.
No one person or group of people seems to order an end to a genocidal ac-
tion; rather it expires more or less on its own. The frenzy is spent when the
victims are for the most part eliminated. If the deportation and killing of the
Armenians began in the spring of 1915 and the death rates increased dra-
matically over the summer, it is also true that the genocide continued when
Turkish troops massacred Armenian civilians in the borderlands of Turkey,
Russia, and Persia in 1920, and Armenians who had returned to Cilicia
from the Middle East were assaulted by Turkish police and irregular forces
during the French occupation and withdrawal from the region in 191920.
The chapters that follow contain fresh evidence that undermines any at-
tempt to mitigate the responsibility of the Ottoman government for the
mass murder of the Armenians in 1915. After reading these contributions,
which represent the state of the art in the eld, no scholar could contend
that there was not genocide in the Armenian case. More important, these
chapters take us beyond the question of denialwas there a genocide or
not?and probe deeply into the issues of causation and context, linking the
development of the destruction of the Armenians to the death throes of the
Ottoman Empire and its involvement in World War I. At the same time,
these studies also represent an important contribution to the scholarship on
genocide in particular and mass killing in general. The involvement (and
noninvolvement) of the Great Powers in the Armenian genocide provides
important insights into the ways the values and actions of the international
system can foster genocide, rather than preventing it, and illustrates how
difcult it is to shake norms of sovereignty on behalf of humanitarian inter-
vention. The international and the national are deeply entwined when
thinking about genocide in the Ottoman Empire and in its immediate back-
drop of German, Russian, British, American, and French policies as they
related to the Ottomans and to each other.
The ability of scholars in this volume to explore various levels of politics
and society in the Ottoman Empire draws our attention to the importance of
context, contingency, and timing in the development of the Armenian geno-
cide. While providing no excuses for genocide, many contributors demon-
strate that the Armenians were an active force in the combustible mix that
produced their own demise. There was not much they could have done to
prevent the catastrophe, but the activities of their political parties, the lob-
bying of their religious authorities, the periodic and forceful episodes of resis-
tance, and the formal and informal diplomacy of their leaders reveal a com-
munity episodically mobilized, in the end in vain, to avoid the impending
destruction. From these articles, as well, one gains a much more variegated
Preface xix

view of the motivations of the Turkish perpetrators, many of whom were

not Turks at all, but Kurds, Circassians, Laz, and muhacirs of disparate na-
tionality. Even the Young Turk leaders, including the enthusiastic perpetra-
tors of genocide, had a variety of motivations and concerns in mind. There
were isolated cases of opposition to their murderous policies and times when
force had to be used to implement them. The sad conclusion of the story
the reason it is essential to tell it againwas the destruction of the Armenian
community in Anatolia. But it is a complex and even intricate story that
requires continuing research and discussion. We believe this volume will
both reveal those intricacies and help the reader understand why the geno-
cide took place.
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Acknowledgments

This volume is the product of the research ndings and discussions of two,
sometimes overlapping, groups of scholars: the Workshop on Armenian
and Turkish Scholarship (WATS) and the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Sem-
inar on Mass Killing, organized by Norman Naimark and held over six years
at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) on
the campus of Stanford University. Ronald Grigor Suny was an ongoing
participant in both groups and helped to bring both together in the nal
Sawyer seminar in December 2007. The stunning impression of the two-
and-a-half days of discussion was how far these shared discussions had
evolvedhow questions that had troubled the earlier meetings of WATS
had been resolved and how subtle and nuanced the understanding of the
Young Turks motives, Armenian activities, and the role of the Great Powers
had become.
We are grateful and wish to recognize the contributions of the various
universities, foundations, and persons that helped us come to this point in
our discussions and research: the Universities of Chicago; Michigan; Min-
nesota; Geneva; and California, Berkeley; and New York University; the Cen-
ter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; the Norman Wait Harris
Memorial Foundation Fund; the Mellon Foundation; the Salzburg Seminar;
Louise Manoogian Simone; CIMERA (Geneva); Franois and Suzy Antou-
nian; Adam and Rita Kablanian; and Herant Katchadourian and the Flora
Family Foundation. We also want to thank those who have participated in
our programs, helped organize our meetings, submitted papers, made com-
ments, and contributed. Besides those represented in this volume, we would
like to express our gratitude to others who either presented papers, partici-
pated, or commented on panels or roundtables at our workshops: Engin
Deniz Akarl, Taner Akam, Mustafa Aksakal, Marc Baer, Rfat Bali, Kevork
Bardakjian, Elazar Barkan, Yavuz Baydar, Seyhan Bayraktar, Murat Belge,
smet Berkan, Halil Berktay, Paul Boghossian, Ferhat Boratav, Juliette
Cadiot, Soner aaptay, Cengiz andar, Hasan Cemal, Vicken Cheterian,
Vahakn Dadrian, Ani Deirmenciolu, Hayk Demoyan, Selim Deringil, the

xxi
xxii Acknowledgments

late Hrant Dink, Can Dndar, Howard Eissenstat, Geoff Eley, Ayda Erbal,
Ceren Ergen, the late Stephen Feinstein, Katherine Fleming, Marcello
Flores, Elizabeth Frierson, Phil Gamaghelyan, Ryan Gingeras, Ayla Gl,
Herv Georgelin, Mohsen Hamli, Pierre Hazan, Roger Heacock, Elke Hek-
ner, Richard Hovannisian, Charles Ingrao, Dikran Kaligian, Hasan Blent
Kahraman, Aykut Kansu, Hasan Kayal, Erdal Kaynar, Michael Kennedy,
Ferhat Kentel, alar Keyder, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Khodarkovsky, Rober
Kopta, Brd Larsen, Asbed Kotchigian, Etyen Mahcupyan, Nazan
Maksudyan, Marc Mamigonian, Mark Mazower, Robert Melson, Khatchik
Mouradian, Leyla Neyzi, Baskn Oran, Samson zararat, Hakan zolu,
Razmik Panossian, Simon Payaslian, Uur Pee, Berna Pekesen, Aurelie
Perrin, Michael Reynolds, Aron Rodrigue, Ruben Safrastyan, Ara Sanjian,
Alexander Semyonov, Elif Shafak, Seteney Shami, James Sheehan, Holly
Shissler, Akin Somel, Kaan Soyak, Tigran Sarukhanyan, Vahram Ter-Mat-
evosyan, John Torpey, Mete Tuncay, Klaas van der Sanden, Spyros Vryonis
Jr., Edward W. Walker, and Keith Watenpaugh.
For helping in a variety of ways, working behind the scenes, sometimes
merely showing up and supporting our efforts, we also wish to thank
Edmond Azadian, Carine Bachmann, Garbis Baghdassarian, Emily Greble
Balic, Kenneth Church, Elise Giuliano, Vincent Lima, Hank Manthei,
Armena Marderosian, Lou Ann Matossian, Michael Pifer, Stephanie Platz,
and Kathleen Schendl. There are surely others, family, friends, and col-
leagues, who will go unsung but who encouraged us at difcult times, read
this manuscript anonymously and made important contributions through
their comments, suggestions, and criticisms. A special measure of appreci-
ation is extended to Jirair (Gerard) Libaridian, who has not only been intel-
lectually involved in the project since its inception as presenter and com-
mentator but has served as a principal organizer and the literal infrastructure
of WATS. Finally, words are not adequate to thank our editor, Susan Ferber,
and her team at Oxford University Press for guiding this ship being built at
sea safely into port.
A Question of Genocide
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Introduction: Leaving It to the Historians

Ronald Grigor Suny and Fatma Mge Gek

For many Armenians the events of 1915 are immediate and inform their
sense of self and their place in the world. Turks encounter the same events
when they travel outside Turkey or read about demonstrations and parlia-
mentary resolutions and have to account suddenly for massacres they did
not know existed in their ofcially white-washed history. No matter how
much state policies work to suppress the memory of an unacceptable past,
ordinary people and the demands of historical scholarship have kept the
tragedies of that distant time alive. About a decade before this volume
appeared a number of scholars began a series of meetings to move beyond
the barriers that had long shackled research on the tragedies of the late Otto-
man Empire and kept two communities frozen in hostility.1
While there are certainly many Turks who deny the genocide, as well as
Turks who fanatically back the Kemalist view of history and of modern Turk-
ish statehood, and Turks who embrace an Islamist worldview and challenge
the Kemalist hegemony, there are also Turks, many of them intellectuals
and scholars, who are trying under very difcult political conditions to
rethink their own history, even the history of the Ottoman mass murders of
the Armenians. Those who came to the rst meetings of our Workshop for
Armenian-Turkish Studies (WATS) in Chicago and Michigan believed that
it would be a colossal intellectual and political mistake for Armenians and
others to slam the door in the face of those Turks who desire dialogue and
are prepared to take risks and suffer the consequences from their own gov-
ernment by proposing a fresh discussion of the events of 1915.
The governing structure of the present-day Turkish republic has both
authoritarian and democratic features. While certain practices are repres-
sive and disregard international standards of human rights, Turkey is not a
totalitarian state in which all dissent and open discussion are prohibited.
There are contested elections, cracks in the press, and episodic free discus-
sions in universities that sometimes allow controversial issues to be quietly
aired. In an atmosphere of censorship and repeated crackdowns, there are
occasions for political and intellectual openings. In a country energetically

3
4 Introduction

transforming itself, Turkeys vibrant public sphere is the site of profound

questioning of old orthodoxies. The initiators who organized the WATS
meetings believed that it was the responsibility of scholars to work with
colleagues of all nationalities seeking to foster honest and open intellectual
exchange.
Among Armenians there were other problems: a sense that the Genocide
(with a capital G) was a sacred event; that the Armenians should have a
single, united position on that event, and that arguments about causes of
the genocide might be interpreted as rationalizations or justications for
mass murder. Our view was that the causes of the genocide have not been
adequately analyzed, that there are a variety of explanations, ranging from
Turkish racism, religious hatred, economic and social jealousy of the Arme-
nians, the fallout from revolutionary politics, Pan-Turanism and the making
of empire, and clashing nationalisms, and that they had to be interrogated
by serious investigators. WATS was initially met by opposition from both
Armenians and Turks, but those who attended were convinced that there
could be no advances in scholarship if Armenians and Turks talked only
among themselves or with those who agreed completely with their commu-
nity alone.
The rst workshop met over the weekend of March 1719, 2000, in-
volving scholars from ten universities and research centers. Ronald Suny
opened the workshop with a brief statement:

This is a small, humble, and historic meetingthe rst time that scholars of
various nationalities, including Armenians and Turks, have gathered together
to present papers and discuss in a scholarly fashion the fate of the peoples of
the Ottoman Empire as that state declined and disintegrated. We do not expect
full agreement, but we do expect serious and learned discussion. This is a rst
probe, an attempt to form a new scholarly community inspired by liberal Otto-
manism, tolerance of difference on the basis of equality and respect, rather
than exclusivist and insular nationalism.

A eld that had been fraught with xed views and marred by unyielding
confrontation opened into normal scholarly exchange. The discussions at
the rst and subsequent workshops were free of partisanship and nation-
alism. Cultural barriers fell, and scholars learned from the work of col-
leagues whose sources they could not read.
While the series of workshops following Chicago attempted to open a
dialogue between Armenian and Turkish scholars, the Turkish state main-
tained, even intensied, its campaign of denial of the genocide. In the fall of
2000, when the U.S. House International Relations Committee voted on a
resolution recognizing mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
as genocide, Turkish money nanced powerful lobbyists in Washington to
Introduction 5

work against, and eventually scuttle, the resolution. At rst the House com-
mittee resisted powerful lobbying from the Turkish government and inu-
ential supporters like former Congressmen Bob Livingston, Stephen Solarz,
and Gerald Solomon, and put the United States on record as accepting this
historic tragedy as the rst genocide in the twentieth century. Reaction in
Turkey was furious. Prime Minister Blent Ecevit warned that Turkish-
American relations would suffer if the House accepted the characterization
of the massacres as genocide. The Turkish press condemned the Armenian
version of history as myth, and demonstrators in Adana burned an Arme-
nian ag. At the end, the administration of President Bill Clinton convinced
enough House members to kill the resolution. Similar outcomes occurred
in October 2007 and again in February 2010, when the House Committee
on Foreign Affairs resolved that the 1915 deportations and massacres
amounted to genocide. On the rst occasion Turkey recalled its ambassador
and threatened American supply lines to Iraq, and within weeks the resolu-
tion was withdrawn. On the second, both the State Department and the
White House pushed hard against moving the resolution out of committee.
Although Realpolitik had once again trumped moral and historical impera-
tives, the later debates focused almost entirely on policy considerations, not
on whether or not there had been a genocide.
WATS had been founded on the premise that as politicized as the matter
of the Armenian Genocide had become, scholars could at least establish the
documentary evidence, review the various interpretations, and make judg-
ments about the most convincing arguments. Workshop participants dif-
fered as to their willingness to engage in political efforts, but all were
committed to keeping WATS dedicated to scholarship and as free of politics
as possible. We continued our series of workshops at the University of
Michigan (2002), the University of Minnesota (2003), Salzburg, Austria
(2004), New York University (2005), the University of Geneva (2008), and
the University of California, Berkeley (2010). Journalists from Turkey some-
times attended the meetings and reported back illuminating accounts of the
discussions. New research papers, each time delivered by a new group of
younger scholars with remarkable archival access, explored what had been
dismissed as excessively controversial subjects.
Historians from Armenia met with those from Turkey and their respec-
tive diasporas. There was no dispute that deportations and massacres had
occurred. The evidence mounted that the forced movement of the Arme-
nians had been ordered by the Young Turk government, that the mass
killing was both the result of government and party action, and that while
there were several moments of Armenian resistance (most notably at Van in
1915), there was no civil war. The two opposing Turkish and Armenian na-
tionalist narratives were replaced by a single shared account based on the
6 Introduction

documented record. Yet many blank spots remained; archival access in Tur-
key remained restricted; and disagreements about the timing of events, the
motivations of the Young Turk leaders, and, most importantly, the question
of whether to call the mass killings genocide had yet to be resolved.
In Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (December 9, 1948),

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing
members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group; c) Deliberately inicting on the group conditions of life calcu-
lated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing
measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group.

A capacious denition, the UNs conception has become standard and

widely accepted, even as it is contested.
It has proved especially difcult to reach agreement on the phrase intent
to destroy. On the motives and aims of the Young Turks, as well as the
timing of their decision to deport the Armenians, major Armenian scholars
claim that the massacre of dissident minorities was a consistent Turkish
practice. They argue that the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s and the
killing of Armenians in Adana in 1909 were precursors of the genocide,
which in turn was a premeditated event planned before the World War.
Others argue that the earlier massacres were discrete events different in
kind from the genocide of 1915 and that the genocide was a largely contin-
gent event that occurred in a moment of radicalization following the cata-
strophic defeat at Sarkam in the winter of 19141915.2 The contention
that the genocide was planned long in advance and realized a consistent
Turkish policy of extermination harkened back to the essentialist notion of
the terrible Turk, an irredeemable enemy of Christians and European civ-
ilization, as well as to the debate in Holocaust scholarship between inten-
tionalists and structuralists.3 But even those scholars who disaggregated
the episodes of Ottoman state violence against Armenians agreed that the
earlier massacres reected a propensity for violent repression. Repeated of-
cial justications based on security requirements, as well as the inconsis-
tent and ineffective responses by the European powers, served only to open
the way for future episodes. As the workshops progressed, there was greater
agreement that the genocide was a distinct event that required contextual-
ization in the particular conjuncture of Young Turk ambitions and the catas-
trophe of their entry into World War I. While it is undeniable that an
anti-Armenian disposition existed among the Turkish elite long before the
war, that some extremists contemplated radical solutions to the Armenian
Introduction 7

Question, particularly after the Balkan Wars, and that the World War pre-
sented an opportunity for carrying out the most revolutionary program
against the Armenians, the factors that brought the Young Turk triumvirate
to ethnic cleansing and genocide came together only after the outbreak of
war, when the Ottoman rulers feared that their rule was in peril and that the
Armenians were particularly dangerous as the wedge that the Russians and
other powers could use to pry apart their empire.
By 2002 the workshops found an acceptance, even legitimacy, in the
Armenian-American academic community and among Turkish university
scholars in Europe and Turkey as well as among others in the public sphere.
The emphasis on scholarship rather than polemic, accusations, or political
pleading allowed discussion to run free without rancor or defensiveness.
WATS managed to hold together while more political efforts, like the Track
Two diplomacy of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission
(TARC), withered.4 Alongside active scholars preparing research papers,
WATS also involved hundreds of people interested in Armenian-Turkish
history and relations through its Internet listserv, armworkshop@umich.
edu, initiated by Fatma Mge Gek.
Among the most exposed and vulnerable scholars were those who lived
and worked in Turkey. Halil Berktay gave an interview to the Turkish news-
paper Radikal in which he afrmed that genocide had occurred but called on
the Turkish state and other governments not to take ofcial positions on
such historical events. Bringing up the issue renders the Turkish state and
society more defensive on this topic and closed within themselves, he said,
and pushes them to become more rigid. Political polarization on this topic
is so strong that even nding the courage to speak on this subject is a great
problem.5 The Turkish state not only did not heed Professor Berktay but
instead intensied the campaign of denial. Some Turkish nationalists even
called for Sabanc University to re Berktay, but the university refused to
succumb to pressure.
The workshop process reached an unexpected climax when Turkish
scholars in Turkey decided to hold their own conference, The Ottoman
Armenians during the Era of Ottoman Decline, in May 2005. Spearheaded
by several veterans of WATS and sponsored by three leading Istanbul uni-
versitiesBosphorus, Sabanc, and Bilgithe conference was suddenly
postponed by its organizers the day before it was to open because of an ag-
gressive campaign of pressure, threats and slander. The then minister of
justice, Cemil iek, had pronounced that holding the conference would be
tantamount to stabbing Turkey in the back, adding I wish I had not
renounced my authority to open criminal cases as justice minister. Despite
intimidation by nationalist protestors, the conference opened at the end of
September at Bilgi University. Unperturbed by about a hundred nationalist
8 Introduction

protestors outside who occasionally threw eggs or tomatoes and despite a

lone woman protestor in the hall, participants heard accounts of Armenian
life in Ottoman Anatolia, the evacuation of some three thousand Armenian
communities, the international media coverage of the 1915 events, rival in-
terpretations of the famous Ottoman Bank incident and the Adana massa-
cres of 1909, and the demographic engineering of the Young Turks. Much
discussion centered on the evolution of Turkish nationalist views generated
in the Kemalist republic on the events of World War I and the way in which
progressively a silence enveloped the memory of what happened to the
Armenians. In an eloquent address to the conference, the Turkish Arme-
nian journalist Hrant Dink, a participant in several of the WATS meetings,
told the largely Turkish audience, We (Armenians) want this land; not to
take it away, but to lie under it!6
As dialogue broadened, as Turkish civil society increasingly explored
through universities, the press, television, and published works the dark
spots of Ottoman history, the backlash from nationalists and the state turned
against journalists and ction writers as well as historians. The Turkish nov-
elist Orhan Pamuk; the editor of the Turkish Armenian newspaper Agos
(Furrow), Hrant Dink; the novelist Elif afak; and the publisher Ragp Zara-
kolu, among others, were either brought to trial or threatened with prison
for remarks insulting Turkishness. Most of the cases were dismissed, but
Dink was convicted and given a suspended sentence. When Pamuk was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2006, nearly every account
mentioned his statement to a Swiss journal that thirty thousand Kurds and
a million Armenians were killed in these lands. Just hours before the an-
nouncement that Pamuk had received the prize, the French National As-
sembly passed a bill criminalizing denial of the Armenian Genocide.
Awareness of a genocide could no longer be obliterated.
While both the Turkish and Armenian governments have asserted that the
question should be left to historians, ofcial Turkish denial, along with more
benign interventions by other governments to recognize the events of 1915
as genocide and to make denial a crime, have taken the issue out of the hands
of the historians and made more difcult the free and full discussion of the
Turkish and Armenian experience. Just as the dialogue among scholars was
reaching the point of rough consensus, activists and politicians hardened
their positions as defenders and deniers. The Turkish Parliament responded
to a proposed French bill with a joint declaration signed by all parties de-
nouncing the bill as motivated by domestic political concerns and predicting
that it would harm Turkish-French relations as well as prospects for normal-
ization of relations between Ankara and Erevan. Opposition deputy kr
Elekda, a former ambassador to the United States, called for sanctions on
Armenia and the deportation of some seventy thousand Armenian illegal
Introduction 9

workers living in Turkey. From the opposite side, Pamuk condemned the
French move as a betrayal of Frances own liberal traditions. Many who had
been tending the delicate dialogue in which history is written, rewritten, and
revised were dismayed by the preemptive strike by legislators. Dink boldly
stated that if the bill passed, he would provoke arrest by publicly denying the
genocide in France.
Hrant Dink never had that chance. On January 19, 2007, a seventeen-
year-old nationalist assassin from Trabzon gunned him down outside his
ofce in Istanbul. The irony of Dinks death is that he was killed in the
name of a particularly narrow notion of patriotism while he was himself a
fervent Turkish patriot. His vision of his native country, however, was of a
modern democratic, tolerant state, the eastern edge of Europe, in which his
own people, the Armenians, could live together with Turks, Kurds, Jews,
Greeks, and the other peoples who had coexisted, however uneasily, in the
cosmopolitan empire out of which the Turkish Republic had emerged. What
he could not tolerate was the denial of the shared history of those peoples, a
history that involved not only the mass killing of Armenians but the on-
going repression of Kurds. Dink was an active participant in the vital civil
society emerging in Turkey, and people who had felt alone suddenly, briey,
felt empowered in the outpouring of grief witnessed by his funeral. Tens of
thousands marched for hours through the streets of Istanbul with signs
proclaiming We are all Hrant; we are all Armenians.
January 19 seemed to shift the landscape for Armenians and Turks. More
starkly than before, Armenians were revealed as symbols in present-day
Turkey, having taken on a variety of meaningsenemy, outsider, foreigner,
victimizer. They further became symbolic of an alternative to the current
impasse, a way out, perhaps to Europe, to greater tolerance, to democracy.
But as cracks in the edice of denial widened, a backlash from nationalists
took on a new force. Dinks assassin was cheered in public as a national
hero. Turkeys mildly Islamist government, facing the deep state of the
military and Kemalist elite, was forced to take a hard line on the Armenian
issue. The question of the genocide became even more difcult either to
suppress or to resolve. The path on which scholars had tentatively tread
turned into a perilous mineeld.
No matter how hard we tried to keep the question of genocide conned
to scholarship, it could not be kept from the public sphere. While we are as
yet unable to express a clear unanimity on whether or not the events of 1915
constitute a genocide, a shared sense of what happened and why has been
established. The problem of the G word is both denitional and political.
Some of the participants hold that public acceptance of the term genocide
would render them ineffective with the Turkish public. Others disagree
with the standard United Nations denition of genocide. The New York
10 Introduction

University philosophy professor Paul Boghossian explored the imprecision

and confusions of this ofcial internationally accepted denition, but he
noted that we all agreed that deportations and massacres had occurred; that
they had been ordered, organized, and carried out by the Young Turks and
their agents; and that the target of these brutal policies had been dened
ethno-religious groups (along with the Armenians, the Assyrians, and some
other minorities as well). If, he asked rhetorically, you accept that all this
happened, and you still do not want to call it genocide, then you must give
us the word.7
Acceptance of the events of 1915 as an instance of ethnic cleansing, avant
la lettre, is much less problematic. And we appear to have achieved a closer
consensus that ethnic cleansing, like genocide, is almost always an activity
organized by state authorities. The line between the two is a thin one, but
ethnic cleansingthe coercive removal of an ethnically dened group of
people from a given territoryneed not involve mass killing, though death
from deportation, forced marches, and deprivation usually accompanies it.
Genocide, on the other hand, is the deliberate, sustained mass killing of a
designated ethnic, religious, or national community with the aim of re-
ducing or eliminating its political, social, or cultural potential.8 Unlike a
pogrom or urban riot, instigated and carried out by one social, ethnic, or
religious group against another, genocide does not simply are up and die
down in relatively short time but is sustained over both time and territory. It
requires some premeditation and planning, however chaotic and messy its
actual execution and consequences. What remains open and in dispute for
some, albeit a minority among scholars, is whether the murder of a nation
in the case of the Armenians and the Assyrians was intentional or an unfor-
tunate consequence of a brutal program of deportations. After more than a
decade of meeting, talking, and further research, a general, if not complete,
consensus was reached that the Young Turks had had no blueprint for
genocide, that is, no carefully drawn out, long-established plans for extermi-
nating the Armenians, but that sometime in March 1915 a decision was
made to deport them systematically and, by issuing oral orders and sending
out secret emissaries, to massacre them in the process. For most of the
scholars participating in these discussions the historical record conrmed
that a genocide had occurred; for others the term itself led to more problems
than it resolved. The title of this volumeA Question of Genocidereects
both the certainty of some and the ambiguity of others, not so much on the
nature of the killings, but how they might most convincingly be described.
There may be no escape from the political aspects of setting the record
straight on any genocide. The Armenian Genocide has been the exemplary
victim of deliberate, sustained falsication. Historians are implicated in
these politics no matter how faithfully they attend to the obligations of
Introduction 11

their craft. As Turkey and Armenia both construct and reconstruct their
historic and present-day identities, they have to deal with the traumas of
their twentieth-century emergence. These two countries and their peoples,
at home and in the diaspora, are fated to live side by side as they have for
half a millennium in the past, their destinies intertwined, their senses of
self intimately wrapped up in the other. For historians, who have done so
much to construct the pasts with which each nation now lives, the task of
reconstruction has become imperative. Essentializing the other as irremedi-
ably evil leads to the endless repetition of the debilitating conicts and de-
ceptions of the last century. At present, the histories preferred by most
Armenians and Turks remain embedded in their respective nationalist mas-
ter narratives, which construct the other people as perpetrator and their own
people as victim. Yet the simplicities of national myths, themselves the
handiwork of historians as well as politicians, must continually be chal-
lenged so that realities created instrumentally to defend particular power
and knowledge structures may be replaced by shared, subversive narratives
that move us beyond nationalism toward truer understanding. This volume
is one small effort in that direction.
This page intentionally left blank
Part I
HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF THE GENOCIDE
This page intentionally left blank
1

Writing Genocide
The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians

Ronald Grigor Suny

Even before the killings had ceased, the writing about the Armenian depor-
tations and massacres had commenced. Eyewitnesses, journalists, diplo-
mats, and itinerant ofcers and missionaries recorded what they were
seeing in anguished diary entries, memoranda to governments, and reports
to their newspapers.1 The contours of how seemingly unprecedented events
would be understood were already being drawn, and nowhere more indel-
ibly than in the diary and dispatches of Henry Morgenthau (18561945), the
American ambassador to the Sublime Porte. These texts, published later as
a memoir, have taken on exceptional importance as a source on Young Turk
decision-making in 19141915. For the genocide scholar Roger W. Smith,
it is the classic, contemporary account of the rst large-scale genocide of
the twentieth century.2 For the Holocaust scholar Robert Jay Lifton, Mor-
genthaus account is a unique and remarkable source because of its view of
genocide from the top: I do not know of any other example of a critical
outsider who had regular access to the highest-ranking planners and perpe-
trators of genocide, even as it was taking place.3 The narrative Morgenthau
presented was considered devastating enough for one of the professional
deniers of the Armenian genocide, Heath Lowry, then the head of the Insti-
tute for Turkish Studies in Washington and later the Mustafa Kemal Atatrk
Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University,
to issue a small book that attempted to undermine the authenticity and
veracity of the ambassadors witness.4 Morgenthau, then, is the proper place
to begin to understand how the history of what later would be called geno-
cide has been written by eyewitnesses, by diplomats in their dispatches, by
missionaries and soldiers in letters and memoirs, and eventually by profes-
sional historians.

15
16 Historiographies of the Genocide

Morgenthaus book was a product of its time. Using material in his orig-
inal diaries, Morgenthaus memoir was written in the last year of World War
I, a time of intense passion about the enemies of the Allied powers.5 Presi-
dent Woodrow Wilson wrote in November 1917 to encourage him to write
up his full exposition of some of the principal lines of German intrigue.6
The preface to the work, dated a month before the armistice, begins: By this
time the American people have probably become convinced that the Ger-
mans deliberately planned the conquest of the world, which he labeled the
greatest crime in modern history.7 While hardly the propaganda piece that
his critics have claimed, the memoir reveals a mind ercely engaged in the
trauma of war and mass murder, with unguarded expression of the kind of
essentialist views of national character that determined the understanding
of human motivation in those years. The ambassador reveals himself as a
keen observer, privileged in his access to power, judicious in his evaluations
of both the political context and the key players, and highly ethical and fear-
less in his defense of his government and his own values.8
For Morgenthau, the driving motivation of Tlt, Enver, and Cemal was no
longer reform but an insatiable lust for personal power.9 Real power in Tur-
key was not in the state but in the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP),
the forty-man executive dominated by Minister of the Interior Tlt Bey. The
triumvirate had achieved full power in the bloody coup dtat of January 26,
1913, and Morgenthau enjoyed an extraordinary intimacy with Enver and
Tlt, not only dining with them and riding together in the Belgrade forest,
but at the same time confronting them with naive frankness about his objec-
tions to their policies. His subtle, rounded portraits of these men betray both
fascination with them as persons and abhorrence at their deeds. He probed
their psychology in a vain attempt to comprehend their actions.
The hulking gure of Tlt, broad backed, with iron grip, was particularly
intriguing to Morgenthau. Tlt rose from humble origins, beginning as a
mailman and then a telegraph operator; he was not an ethnic Turk and was
uninspired by Islam or any religion. I hate all priests, rabbis, and hodjas,
he told Morgenthau.10 By the time the ambassador befriended him, Tlt had
become disillusioned about the possibility of reform in the Ottoman Empire.
I have been greatly disappointed at the failure of the Turks to appreciate
democratic institutions. I hoped for it once, and I worked hard for itbut
they were not prepared for it.11 Tlt, like all the Turkish leadersaccording
to Morgenthauwas motivated primarily by fear, most particularly, fear of
Russia, the most serious threat to the empires territorial integrity. This fear
of Russia, I cannot too much insist, was the one factor which, above every-
thing else, was forcing Turkey into the arms of Germany.12
Morgenthaus text is replete with indelible characteristics of the Turk.
Psychologically primitive, the Turk is essentially a bully and a coward; he
Writing Genocide 17

is brave as a lion when things are going his way, but cringing, abject, and
nerveless when reverses are overwhelming him.13 Here as elsewhere Mor-
genthau used the Turk in the singular to describe Turkish attitudes, men-
talities, and emotions, further homogenizing, naturalizing, and essentializing
nationality. The Ottomans, he claims, reverted in the war years to an older
ancestral type: the basic fact underlying the Turkish mentality is its utter
contempt for all other races. A fairly insane pride is the element that largely
explains this strange human species. The common term applied by the Turk
to the Christian is dog, ... ; he actually looks upon his European neighbor
as far less worthy of consideration than his own domestic animals.14 Yet
there are also positive qualities. Besides a keen sense of humour, one of
the most conspicuous traits in the Turkish character is its tendency to
compromise and to bargain.15 So far as I can discover, he told his readers,
the Ottoman Turks had only one great quality, that of military genius. But,
lest we forget their most essential qualities, Morgenthau went on, Such
graces of civilization as the Turk has acquired in ve centuries have practi-
cally all been taken from the subject peoples whom he so greatly despises.16
The innate attitude of the Moslem Turk to people not of his own race and
religion [is] that they are not human beings with rights, but merely chattels,
which may be permitted to live when they promote the interest of their mas-
ters, but which may be pitilessly destroyed when they have ceased to be
useful. This attitude is intensied by a total disregard for human life and an
intense delight in inecting physical human suffering which are not unusu-
ally the qualities of primitive peoples.17 The most primitive qualities of the
Turk modied over centuries, but after the failure of the democratic revolu-
tion there was an atavistic reversion to the original Turk.18 In contrast to
the Turks instinctive sense of survival, Morgenthau credited the Germans
with strategic vision and a cunning manipulation of the Turks.
Morgenthau was repeatedly appalled by the willingness of the Turks to
resort to violence, which was related to their emotional volatility. The
Turks, Morgenthau suggested, like most primitive peoples, wear their
emotions on the surface, and with them the transition from exultation to
despair is a rapid one.19 When Tlt heard that the English had bombarded
the Dardanelles and killed two Turks, he exploded to Morgenthau: We
intend to kill three Christians for every Moslem killed.20 Measuring Tlts
emotions and waiting for the right moment to make his requests, the am-
bassador noted, Tlt had shown several moods in this interview; he had
been by turns sulky, good-natured, savage, and complaisant, but on occa-
sion he displayed a keen sense of humor. Tlt himself greatly loved a joke
and a funny story.21 The ambassador, who in his own representation was
the epitome of decorum, politesse, and civilization, prided himself on his
ability on some if not all occasions to tame or manipulate the Turkish leader.
18 Historiographies of the Genocide

For Morgenthau, violence is inscribed in Islam. A secret pamphlet that

followed the declaration of jihad mixed religionthe killing of indels
who rule over Islam has become a sacred dutywith anticolonial national-
ismTuran for the Turanian Moslems, . . . Caucasus for the Caucasian
Moslems, and the Ottoman Empire for the Ottoman Turks and Arabs.22 On
November 14, mobs attacked several foreign stores in Istanbulthe Bon
March, an Austrian shop advertising English clothes for sale, and the
Armenian-owned restaurant Tokatlians.23 That was the extent of the Holy
War! While the anticolonialist uprising never occurred, Morgenthau, con-
vinced that the Germans were behind the pamphlet and the proclamation of
jihad, ominously concluded, Only one denite result did the Kaiser accom-
plish by spreading the inciting literature. It aroused in the Mohammedan
soul all the intense animosity toward the Christian which is the fundamen-
tal fact in his strange, emotional nature, and thus started passions aame
that afterward spent themselves in the massacres of the Armenians and
other subject peoples.24 Emotion here is a kind of re that consumes what
it touches and then spends itself.
With the Turkish entry into the war, Cemal went off to Syria to direct the
campaign against the British in Egypt, and Enver commanded the Cauca-
sian front against Russia. With the disastrous defeat at Sarkam in January
1915, a general panic gripped Istanbul. It was feared that the city would fall
to the Bulgarians, who might join the war on the side of the Entente or with
the British, who were rumored to be about to break through the Darda-
nelles. Tlt was the picture of desolation and defeat as the thunder of the
British guns at the straits seemed to spell doom.25There was fear of revo-
lution in the city, and posters denounced Tlt. Toward the end of the month
Enver returned from the front, unsure of his reception by the public after
the losses at Sarkam. The Young Turk leaders planned to burn down the
city if the British broke through; the idea of such a wanton act shocked Mor-
genthau. There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress,
Tlt told him, who care for anything that is old. We all like new things.26
Morgenthau elaborated a number of causes for the deportations and
massacres of the Armenians, many of which became foundational for West-
ern and Armenian historiography of the genocide. He began with the na-
tionalist perspective that the Young Turks were committed to a Turkied
empire and adopted the policy of Abdlhamid II (18761909). Their pas-
sion for Turkifying the nation seemed to demand logically the extermina-
tion of all ChristiansGreeks, Syrians, and Armenians. The error of past
Muslim conquerors had been that they had not obliterated the Christians, a
fatal error of statesmanship that explained all the woes from which Turkey
has suffered in modern times.27 The war presented an opportunity, for Rus-
sia, France, and Britain could no longer stand in the way as they had during
Writing Genocide 19

Abdlhamids reign. Thus, for the rst time in two centuries the Turks, in
1915, had their Christian populations utterly at their mercy. The time had
nally come to make Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks.28
The Armenians, in Morgenthaus account, are innocent. While the fact
that the Armenians all over Turkey sympathized with the Entente was no
secret, they acted with restraint. Their leaders urged them not to be
provoked.29 Rather than being primarily a matter of religious difference or
conict, the decision to carry out the deportations and massacres was a stra-
tegic choice. Undoubtedly religious fanaticism was an impelling motive
with the Turkish and Kurdish rabble who slew Armenians as a service to
Allah, but the men who really conceived the crime had no such motive.
Practically all of them were atheists, with no more respect for Mohammed-
anism than for Christianity, and with them the one motive was cold-blooded,
calculating state policy.30 In a sense they had become Germans.
Already in January and February 1915, fragmentary reports began to
lter in to the American Embassy of killings of Armenians, but the ten-
dency was at rst to regard these activities as mere manifestations of the
disorders that had prevailed in the Armenian provinces for many years.
Tlt and Enver dismissed such reports as wild exaggerations. What the
Armenians would later call the defense of Van in April was declared by
ofcials a mob uprising that they would soon have under control. When
prominent Armenians in the capital were arrested on April 24, Morgen-
thau brought the issue up to Tlt, who replied that the government was
acting in self-defense, that the Armenians in Van had already shown their
abilities as revolutionists, and that Armenian leaders in Istanbul were
corresponding with the Russians, and he had every reason to fear that they
would start an insurrection against the Central Government.31These
people ... refused to disarm when we told them, Tlt explained to Mor-
genthau. They opposed us at Van and at Zeitoun, and they helped the
Russians. There is only one way in which we can defend ourselves against
them in the future, and that is just to deport them. When Morgenthau
protested that that was not a reason for destroying a whole race or
making innocent women and children suffer, Tlt simply added, Those
things are inevitable.32
In a later, extended conversationthis one without Morgenthaus Arme-
nian dragoman present Tlt spoke most frankly:

I have asked you to come today ... so that I can explain our position on the
whole Armenian subject. We base our objections to the Armenians on three
distinct grounds. In the rst place, they have enriched themselves at the
expense of the Turks. In the second place, they are determined to domineer
over us and to establish a separate state. In the third place, they have openly
encouraged our enemies. They have assisted the Russians in the Caucasus
20 Historiographies of the Genocide

and our failure there is largely explained by their actions. We have therefore
come to the irrevocable decision that we shall make them powerless before
this war is ended.33

When Morgenthau attempted point by point to refute Tlts argument, Tlt

interrupted, It is no use for you to argue, ... we have already disposed of three
quarters of the Armenians; there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzer-
oum. The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that
we have got to nish with them. If we dont, they will plan their revenge. He
told Morgenthau that he had asked you to come here so as to let you know
that our Armenian policy is absolutely xed and that nothing can change it.
We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the
desert but nowhere else. In despair, Morgenthau told Tlt, You are making
a terrible mistake, and repeated that three times. Yes, we may make mis-
takes, he replied, butand he rmly closed his lips and shook his headwe
never regret.34 Later he told Morgenthau, No Armenian ... can be our friend
after what we have done to them.35 On August 3, 1915, Morgenthau wrote in
his diary of his meeting with Tlt: He gave me the impression that Tlt is
the one who desires to crush the poor Armenians.36 Tlt reportedly told
friends with pride, I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian
problem in three months than Abdlhamid accomplished in thirty years.37
Morgenthau ended the book where he began, with the question of Ger-
manys role in the war and the Armenian massacres. He reported that the
German Ambassador, Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim, denounced
the Armenians for the unprovoked rebellion in Van, considered them trai-
torous vermin, and declared, I will help the Zionists, . . . but I shall do
nothing whatever for the Armenians.38 The Armenians, the German
ambassador claimed, have shown themselves in this war to be enemies of
the Turks. It is quite apparent that the two peoples can never live together in
the same country. Wangenheim sent a formal note of protest to the Porte
on July 4, 1915, but refused to intervene further with the Turks. But he
insisted to Morgenthau that Germany is not responsible for this [the Arme-
nian deportations and massacres]. Morgenthau told Wangenheim, You
are a Christian people and the time will come when Germans will realize
that you have let a Mohammedan people destroy another Christian nation....
Crimes like these cry to heaven.39 After Wangenheims sudden death in
October 1915, his successor, Paul Graf Wolff-Metternich, did intervene with
Tlt and Enver, an action that his superior, Foreign Minister Arthur Zim-
mermann, considered a mistake.40 Under pressure from the Turks, Berlin
removed Wolff-Metternich.

The themes of Morgenthaus memoir remain among the most powerful

elements constituting both the narrative of the genocide and its explanation
Writing Genocide 21

up to the present time. While other memoirs and documents appeared spo-
radically in the years after the Great War, little distanced reection or schol-
arly attention was paid to the Armenian massacres for almost fty years after
the events.41 What was written either reected the suffering of those who
had endured the deportations and survived or political pleading for appro-
priate recognition of Armenian losses and recompense in the form of terri-
tory or reparations. Armenian political parties, particularly the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun) worked to keep the plight of dis-
persed Armenians before the public, and the image of starving Armenians
was familiar in American and European media. The major powers, however,
lost interest in the Armenian Question after the Treaty of Lausanne (1923),
which by recognizing the Republic of Turkey and failing to mention the
Armenians or to enforce minority protections on the Kemalist state essen-
tially conrmed the effectiveness of deportations and even murderous eth-
nic cleansing as a potential solution to population problems.42 With the
Soviet republic as the only existing Armenian political presence, there was
little incentive for Western governments to deal with this matter. In the new
republic of Turkey there was a cold silence about the events of the late Otto-
man period beyond the heroic nationalist narrative of Kemalist resistance to
foreign aggression. Yet the Armenian Question was not easily laid to rest.
The assassination of Tlt in Berlin in March 1921 by Solomon Tehlirian
and the ensuing trial and acquittal of the assassin, along with the killing of
another architect of the genocide, Bahaeddin akir, by Dashnaks in April
1922, and Cemal in Tiis in July, kept the fate of Ottoman Armenians in the
headlinesfor a while. In November 1933 the renowned writer Franz Wer-
fel published his epic novel Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (The Forty Days of
Musa Dagh), about the courageous but doomed resistance of Armenian vil-
lagers during the genocide. Enormously popular, the novel was deemed un-
desirable by the Nazis, and Werfel, an Austrian Jew, ed to France after the
Anschluss and later to the United States. When MGM Studios announced
plans to make a lm of the novel, the Turkish government applied pressure
through the U.S. State Department and succeeded in stopping production.43
During the Cold War, Turkey decisively joined the anti-Communist
camp, and the Republic of Turkey was widely hailed as a model of secular
modernization and a staunch ally of the West. A pro-Turkish account by
the Princeton professor Lewis Thomas praised the civilizing efforts of
the Turkish state in its treatment of the Kurds and its forging of an effec-
tive anti-Communist democracy.44 In Turkey a former ofcial in Tlts
Ministry of the Interior and a CUP member, Esat Uras, compiled a collec-
tion of documents purporting to demonstrate Armenian culpability in
their own destruction.45 Armenian diaspora activists at the time appeared
more concerned with the conicts over attitudes toward Soviet Armenia
22 Historiographies of the Genocide

and divisions in the Armenian Church than with a politics centered on

1915.46 But a renewed interest in genocide began to emerge in the 1960s.
The very term genocide, invented by Raphael Lemkin during the Second
World War, explicitly included the Armenian events along with the Nazi
exterminations of European Jews. The United Nations Genocide Conven-
tion, adopted on December 9, 1948, established the killing of a people as
an international crime, and with the evolution of new international norms
of human rights and crimes against humanity, interest in historical exam-
ples of such abuses grew. Holocaust consciousness moved from pri-
marily a Jewish concern into the broader public with the trial of Adolph
Eichmann in 1961, Hannah Arendts controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem
(1963), and the growing connection made between the tragedy in Europe
and the survival of the state of Israel. The very term holocaust, which
earlier had been applied (by David Lloyd-George, for example) to the
Armenian massacres, now was nearly exclusively (and with a capital H)
used for the Nazi killing of the Jews.47 With the ftieth anniversary of the
Armenian deportations in 1965, commemorations were held around the
world, none more striking than the demonstrations in Erevan that
demanded mer hogher (our lands) and led, rst, to the removal of the
local Communist Party secretary and, later, to the building of an ofcial
monument to the genocide at Tsiternakaberd. In an unprecedented way, in
the following decades public expressions, political demands, and new
scholarly interest in the events of 1915 created among diverse elements of
Armenian communities a more coherent sense of Armenian identity and
purpose.48The greatest misfortune that had befallen Armenians, ironically,
became the source of shared national consciousness, lessening the
distance between Soviet Armenia and the diaspora and reducing the
antagonisms among diaspora political parties.
Armenian genocide consciousness fed on the persistent and ever
more aggressive denial by the Turkish government and sponsored
spokesmen, including some with academic credentials, that the deporta-
tions and massacres had been ordered by the Young Turk government in an
attempt to exterminate one of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, that
1915 t the United Nations denition of genocide. More deadly were the
actions of Armenian terrorists, from 1973 into the early 1980s, who tried to
raise the visibility of the issue by assassinating Turkish ofcials and setting
off bombs in public places. Out of the political and historiographical strug-
gles of the 1970s emerged the rst serious scholarship. Richard G. Hovan-
nisians 1978 bibliography of sources on The Armenian Holocaust
demonstrated both the availability of primary sources for anyone who cared
to learn about 1915 as well as the thinness, indeed absence, of academic
historical research on the topic.49 In those years one had to turn to the
Writing Genocide 23

French physician Yves Ternon, who moved from his studies of Nazi med-
ical atrocities to the Armenian genocide.50 As a small number of Armenian
scholars, notably Richard Hovannisian, Vahakn Dadrian, and Levon
Marashlian, as well as a few non-Armenians like Robert Jay Lifton, Leo
Kuper, Ternon, and Tessa Hofmann, began to write about an Armenian
genocide, a defense of the Turks by Heath Lowry, Stanford Shaw, and Justin
McCarthy led to clashes over such basic questions as the number of vic-
tims, the role and responsibility of the Committee of Union and Progress,
and whether 1915 should be considered an asymmetrical civil war or inten-
tional, state-directed extermination of a designated people, that is, geno-
cide. At the same time, a number of Holocaust scholars, seeking to preserve
the uniqueness of the Jewish exterminations, rejected the suggestion of
equivalence between the Armenian and Jewish genocides. As Peter Novick
reports, Lucy Dawidowicz (quite falsely) accused an Armenian writer of
turn[ing] the subject into a vulgar contest about who suffered more. She
added that while Turks had a rational reason for killing Armenians, the
Germans had no rational reason for killing Jews.51 Armenians were upset
at the reduction of the Armenian presence in the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum and by the Israeli governments attempt to close down
an international genocide conference in Tel Aviv in 1982 after the Turkish
government protested the discussion of the Armenian case. Prominent
American Jews, including Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and Arthur Hertz-
berg, withdrew from the conference, but the organizer, Israel W. Charny,
went ahead with it.52 Several American-Armenian scholars refused to attend
as well, in protest over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that was taking place
as the conference held its sessions. As one state after another ofcially rec-
ognized 1915 as a genocide, the United States and Israel soon became the
two most notable exceptions, along with Turkey. Activists in Europe and
North America organized a series of campaigns to pressure the holdout
states toward genocide recognition.
Two years after the crisis over the Tel Aviv conference, the Permanent
Peoples Tribunal, a civil society organization founded in 1979 by the Italian
Senator Lelio Basso, held a trial examining the Armenian massacres to
determine if it constituted a genocide. Meeting in Paris from April 13 to 16,
1984, the jury heard the accounts of scholarsamong them Hovannisian,
Jirair Libaridian, Christopher Walker, Hofmann, Ternon, and Dickran
Kouymjianand examined the arguments of the Turkish government and
its supporters. In its verdict the Tribunal determined that

The extermination of the Armenian population groups through deportation

and massacre constitutes a crime of genocide... . [T]he Young Turk govern-
ment is guilty of this genocide, with regard to the acts perpetrated between
24 Historiographies of the Genocide

1915 and 1917; the Armenian genocide is also an international crime for
which the Turkish state must assume responsibility, without using the pretext
of any discontinuity in the existence of the state to elude that responsibility.53

By the late 1980s, the rst serious academic scholarship in the West on
the fate of the Armenians began to appear in essays, collected volumes, and
comparative studies. A new eld of genocide studies legitimized serious
attention to an event that had been all but erased from historians memory.54
Still, much of the energy spent in these debates centered on whether geno-
cide had taken place. The Turkish denial had set the boundaries of the dis-
cussion, to the neglect of important issues of interpretation and explanation.

Much of the early literature did not deal explicitly with questions of causa-
tion. For deniers of genocide there was simply no need to explain an event
that had not occurred as stipulated by those who claimed it had. What did
occur, in their view, was a reasonable and understandable response of a
government to a rebellious and seditious population in a time of war and
mortal danger to the states survival. Raison dtat justied the suppression
of rebellion, and mass killing was explained as the unfortunate side-effect of
legitimate efforts at establishing order behind the lines. The denialist view-
point might be summarized as: There was no genocide, and the Armenians
were to blame for what happened; they were rebellious, seditious subjects
who presented a danger to the empire and got what they deserved. There
was no intention or effort by the Young Turk regime to eliminate the Arme-
nians as a people.
Even though the denialist account fails both empirically and morally, its
claims shaped much of the debate. Many historians sympathetic to the
Armenians shied away from explanations that might place any blame at all
on the victims of Turkish policies. Because a nuanced account of the back-
ground and causes of the genocide seemed to concede ground to the deniers,
Armenian scholars in particular were reluctant to see any rationale in the
acts of the Young Turks. Explanation, it is claimed, is rationalization, and
rationalization in turn leads to the denialist position of justication.
The political scientist Robert Melson labeled the denialist viewpoint ap-
propriately the provocation thesis. The thesis, he argued, claims: (1) that
Armenians and Turks lived in relative harmony for many centuries, and that
that peaceful coexistence was undermined by noxious outside inuences
American missionaries, Russian diplomats, Armenian revolutionaries from
the Caucasuswho worked to destroy the territorial integrity and political
system of the Ottoman Empire; (2) that the response of the government to
Armenian rebellion was measured and justied; and (3) that Armenians,
therefore, brought on their own destruction. As a form of explanation the
provocation thesis remains on the political-ideological level and makes no
Writing Genocide 25

effort to probe the negative features of the Ottoman social and political
order. No explanation is offered to elucidate why small groups of Armenians
turned to resistance, besides their own greed and ambition, or why the
overwhelming majority of Armenians acquiesced to Turkish rule and did
not participate in rebellion. Like other conservative views of social discon-
tent and revolution, arguments such as those put forth by Western histo-
rians such as William L. Langer and Stanford Shaw and Turkish apologists
like the former foreign ministry ofcial Salahi R. Sonyel neglect to evaluate
the social and political conditions out of which resistance and protest grew
and lay the blame on outside agitators and Armenian ingratitude.
The provocation thesis changed its form over time. Some writers
limited their criticism to diminishing the number of victims, claiming that
no more than 200,000 lost their lives.55 Others rejected the notion of geno-
cide because a premeditated policy of extermination could not be linked to
the Young Turk leadership. Still others spoke of a civil war in Anatolia in
which Armenians and Turks alike were killed and in which violence to pro-
tect the motherland from usurpers and separatists was justied.56 The rst
fundamental criticism to be made of the idea that outside agitators dis-
rupted the relatively peaceful relationship that had long existed between the
millet-i sadka (the loyal millet), as the Armenians were known early in the
nineteenth century, and the ruling Turks is that such an imagined past,
rather than being based in reality, was the cultural construction of the
dominant nationality, its ideologues and rulers, and was not shared by the
subordinate peoples of the empire that lived in a limbo of legally enforced
inferiority. The Armenians, like the other non-Muslim peoples of the
empire, were not only an ethnic and religious minority in a country domi-
nated demographically and politically by Muslims, but given an ideology of
inherent Muslim superiority and the segregation of minorities, they were
also an underclass. However high they might rise in trade, commerce, or
even governmental service, Armenians were never to be considered equal to
the ruling Muslims and would always remain gvur, indels inferior to the
Muslims. For centuries Armenians lived in a political and social limbo in
which their testimony was not accepted in Muslim courts on a level equal to
that of Muslims, where they were subject to discriminatory practices (for
example, they were forced to wear distinctive clothes to identify themselves),
and where they were not allowed to bear arms, when most Muslims were
armed. Muslims as well as non-Muslims lived without the predictability of
enforced laws. Their property and person were subject to the arbitrary and
unchecked power of state ofcials and local lords, but non-Muslims bore the
additional indignities of being indels.
According to scholars of the millet system, active persecution of non-
Muslims was relatively rare in the earlier centuries of the Ottoman Empire,
26 Historiographies of the Genocide

but discrimination was permanent and indeed necessary, inherent in the

system and maintained by both Holy Law and common practice.57 The
inferiority of the gvur, unlike that of slaves and women, was voluntary; they
chose not to believe in Islam. Unbelievers were to stay in their place and
not appear to be equal or better than the Muslims. Trouble arose when Jews
or Christians were seen to be getting too much wealth or too much power
and enjoying them too visibly.58 Beginning in the eighteenth century, the
decline of Muslim power outside the empire and the myriad effects of com-
merce and social mobility permitted enterprising Armenians and other non-
Muslims to improve their economic and social standing, thus radically
reversing the traditional and religiously sanctioned status hierarchy in the
empire with Muslims on top and gvur below. The reforms of the Tanzimat
period, when reforming rulers and bureaucrats eliminated some of the
most repressive practices against their subjects and attempted to create the
basis for a Rechtsstaat (a state ruled by law) in the empire, improved the con-
dition of Ottoman Christians, but the inconsistent application of the reforms
only increased the distance and tension between stated objectives and the
actual inequalities and abuses that shaped the lives of non-Muslims.59
Beginning in the late 1870s and through the following decade the Arme-
nians of the provinces began to petition in ever larger numbers to their
leaders in Istanbul and to the European consuls stationed in Eastern Anato-
lia. Hundreds of complaints were led; few were dealt with. Together they
make up an extraordinary record of misgovernment and corruption, of arbi-
trary treatment of a defenseless population, and a clear picture of the lack of
legal recourse.60 Though the most brutal treatment of Armenians was at the
hands of Kurdish tribesmen, the Armenians found the Ottoman state of-
cials either absent, unreliable, or just one more source of oppression. Turks
as well suffered from it, but the Armenians had the added burden of not
belonging to the favored Muslim faithful. It was hard to say which was
worsethe presence of Turkish authorities or the absence in many areas of
any palpable political authority. When Armenians resisted the extortionist
demands of the Kurds, either individually or collectively, the response from
the Turkish army was often excessive. Massacres were reported from all
parts of Eastern Anatolia, particularly after the formation in the early 1890s
of the ofcially sanctioned Kurdish paramilitary units known as the
Hamidiye. Against this background of growing Kurdish aggressiveness,
Western and Russian indifference, and the collapse of the Tanzimat reform
movement, a small number of Armenians turned to a revolutionary strategy.
As part of the provocation thesis, William L. Langer, Stanford Shaw,
Ezel Kural Shaw, and others argued that the Armenian revolutionaries
were willing to sacrice their compatriots in order to create a separate,
independent Armenian state in eastern Anatolia. Langer contends that
Writing Genocide 27

the rst major Armenian revolutionary party, the Hnchaks, believed that
massacre of their peasant constituents was required to interest Europe in
the plight of the Armenians and was the price to be paid for the realiza-
tion of the fantastic national-socialist state of the fanatics.61 He and those
who have followed him seriously distort the aims and motives of the rev-
olutionaries.
The Armenian revolutionary parties arose from a number of self-defense
groups within Turkey, a tradition of resistance to state intervention charac-
teristic of some highland Armenians, like those of the remote mountain
towns Zeytun and Sassun, and from the radical intelligentsia of Russian
Transcaucasia. Ironically, these small groups became a model for radical
young Turks who admired, envied, and even feared the Armenian commit-
tees. The Hnchaks indeed believed that no one would take the Armenian
cause seriously if Armenians themselves did not act to raise the issue of
their political freedom. Here was no cynical plan to have Armenians massa-
cred in order to provoke European intervention, like that in Bulgaria, but
rather a pessimism about dependence on European goodwill and a commit-
ment to organizing activity and stimulating national consciousness among
Armenians. The revolutionaries were aware that their activities would result
in Turkish reprisals, but they believed that it was no longer feasible to
remain hostage to those fears. If they did not act soon, it was feared, Arme-
nians as a distinct people would disappear.62 Undeniably the Hnchaks raised
the banner of resistance, but the extreme view of Langer that the Hnchaks
deliberately and cynically carried out provocations in order to call down
upon the Armenians the wrath of the offended Turks is based on a mis-
reading of the sources, a disregard for the causes of Armenian resistance,
and inadequate consideration of the reasons for the Turkish perceptions of
the Armenian threat.63
The provocation thesis makes even less sense in the period after the
decline of Hnchaks and the rise of its rival, the dominant party after 1896,
the Dashnaktsutiun, which proposed a program of autonomy within the
Russian and the Ottoman empires, a free Armenia (azat Haiastan). This
vague formulation, carefully chosen to avoid charges of separatism, was
rened in 1907 to make even clearer that the Dashnaks favored the forma-
tion of autonomous regions within two federative states, one Ottoman, the
other Russian. In alliance with oppositional movements of other Ottoman
peoples, most importantly the Young Turks, the Dashnaktsutiun expected
European pressure on the Ottoman Empire to combine with the internal
revolution to bring down Abdlhamids autocracy. Later the party aban-
doned its hopes of European intervention and became more overtly socialist.
Disciplined and dedicated to a revolutionary strategy, the Dashnaks faced
the same dilemma as their predecessors, the Hnchaks: both passivity and
28 Historiographies of the Genocide

resistance led to the same resultthe progressive destruction of the Arme-

nian people.64
From 1908 until the Genocide of 1915, all Armenian political parties,
including the Hnchaks, worked within the parliamentary system of the
Ottoman Empire and abjured revolutionary activity. Despite continued dis-
crimination and attacks on Armenians (most violently in the Adana massa-
cres of 1909), Armenians continued to operate as loyal subjects of the
empire, and many public gures held high ofce and were visible in society.
As late as January 1913, the foreign minister of the Ottoman Empire, Gabriel
Noradunghian, was an Armenian. The great majority of Armenians in the
empire, despite the discrimination and abuse that many of them suffered,
remained loyal and hopeful that reforms, introduced either by Ottoman
reformers or outside powers, would improve their situation.65

Confronted by the denialist construction of the Ottoman past, some authors

relied on essentialized notions of how Turks customarily act.66 Like Morgen-
thau, they argued that core Turkish beliefs, culture, and customary practices
led to the systematic killing of Armenians during World War I. Related to
the essentialist argument that massacres, including genocide, are intimately
connected to the nature of the Turks was the tendency to collapse quite dis-
tinct historical events into a single coherent, organic narrative. Thus, the
Hamidian massacres of 18941896, the Adana killings of 1909, and the
Genocide of 1915 (and even the Kemalist battles of 1920) all became part of
a consistent pattern of Turkish violence aimed at elimination of the Arme-
nians and Turkication of Anatolia. The differences between regimes and
their various objectives, the different contexts of the violence, as well as the
perpetrators, are effaced. Abdlhamids efforts to restore order by punish-
ing rebellious subjects is blended into the urban riot of 1909, which at
least initially was directed against the Young Turks, and the genocidal depor-
tations and massacres by the Young Turks in 1915, which aimed at the effec-
tive elimination of a whole people from Anatolia. Continuities between
Abdlhamids policies of modernizing the empire through centralization,
bureaucratization, population transfers, and a pan-Islamic alliance and the
Young Turks program of greater Turkication also involved massacre as a
means to the rulers ends, but the old sultans ruthlessness did not extend
as far as genocide.
Explanations for the Armenian Genocide have generally circled around
two poles: nationalism and religion, sometimes a combination of the two.
The prolic genocide scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian has largely relied on argu-
ments from religion. His views have shifted over the years, but in his two
major works, he makes an argument that genocide stems primarily from
religion, though also from nationality.67 Dadrian connects the genocide to
Writing Genocide 29

earlier ethnic conicts in the Balkans in which Turkish authorities used

massacres as a weapon to deal with outbreaks of internal nationality con-
icts.68 A culture of massacre, he writes, developed at the same time as a
culture of denial that rationalized the necessity of state violence.
Dadrian demonstrates that as Islamic rulers the Ottomans were tolerant
of non-Muslims only as long as they recognized their inferiority and
remained loyal. Even the Ottomanist ideology of the early Young Turks,
which ostensibly was based on the legal equality of all subjects of the empire,
concealed an idea of Turkish superiority. When European powers intervened
in the empires affairs in defense of oppressed Christians, the effect was to
raise the political hopes of non-Muslims and the resentment of Turks. Dis-
persed throughout Anatolia, Armenians were seldom a majority in any dis-
trict, but where they were most concentrated, in eastern Anatolia, they
presented the greatest geopolitical threat to the empire. The Ottoman leaders
perceived that threat as particularly acute when they went to war with Russia
at the end of 1914. Dadrians portrait of Young Turk attitudes is convincing,
but he argues that these attitudes stemmed from ideology and political am-
bition and were largely xed and unchanging. With little discussion of the
complex social interrelations of Turks, Armenians, and Kurds on the Arme-
nian plateau, Dadrian deduces Turkish motives primarily from their reli-
gious conviction of inherent and deserved Muslim Turkish superiority.
In Warrant for Genocide Dadrian argues more starkly that the genocide
was the culmination of a deep-seated Turk-Armenian conict that existed
for centuries and was rooted in the incompatibility of the theocratic Otto-
man state, guided by the precepts of Islam, with rule over a heterogeneous
population divided by religion, language, and culture. Islam could not tol-
erate the reforms that Turkish bureaucrats and European powers attempted
to implement in the nineteenth century that would have created more egal-
itarian relations with the non-Turkish peoples of the empire. The reforms
were a repudiation of fundamental socio-religious traditions deeply
enmeshed in the Turkish psyche, and institutionalized throughout the
empire.69 He writes, The Ottoman Empire, for most of its history, was and
remained a theocracy which, by denition and fact, cannot be secularized;
laws that are predicated upon permanently xed and intractable religious
precepts cannot be modied, much less reformed.70Besides this ideolog-
ical factor, Dadrian argues that the Ottomans had an inclination to use vio-
lence to prevent reform or concessions to minorities. Genocide, then, arose
from the repressive and sanguinary aspects of Ottoman culture.71The
dominant element in Ottoman political culture was a spirit of belligerence
that in principle could not tolerate conict with subordinate subject minor-
ities. That culture of belligerence came from a conuence of the forces of
Islamic dogmas and the ballast of martial traditions.72
30 Historiographies of the Genocide

For their part Armenians moved from acquiescence in Ottoman rule to

self-assertion and self-protection, thus providing the excuse for (not cause
of ) massacres. Armenians were progressively squeezed by Muslims
in-migrations into Anatolia, intensifying the Turk-Armenian and Kurd-
Armenian conicts. The differential in power between the Armenians
and the TurksArmenians were much weaker and therefore could be
victimizedmade a policy of violence possible. The Hamidian massacres
were a prelude to, if not a rehearsal for, the World War I genocide.73
Whereas earlier the European powers had occasionally restrained the
Ottoman government from massacres, World War I provided the oppor-
tunity structure, that is the necessary condition, for genocide. The
restraints were gone, and Turks feared the armed power of Armenians,
who now had the right to bear arms and had been mobilized into the
Ottoman army.
Dadrians analysis not only removes all agency from the Armenians, who
are presented only as passive victims rather than as active Ottoman subjects
with their own political aspirations and organizations, but presents Islam as
an unchanging doctrine, a consistent and coherent dogma from which rules
of behavior and attitudes may be deduced. Muslims act in accord with doc-
trine, and their behavior is consistent and predictable. Yet, while certain
precepts of Islam may thwart egalitarian reform, some Muslims, like West-
ernizing Ottoman bureaucrats, pushed for reform in a European direction
at the same time that conservative clergy and army ofcers opposed the
Tanzimat. Arguing that a theocracy by denition and fact cannot be secular-
ized appears to be contradicted by the long European transition from medi-
eval to modern times. Polities infused with and sanctioned by religion
managed over time to become more secular not only in Europe but to some
degree in Turkey in the nineteenth and (even more so) twentieth centuries.
Religious orthodoxy, certainly a powerful inhibitor to effective reform,
proved to be a surmountable barrier, as reforming Ottoman bureaucrats,
Young Ottomans, Young Turks, and Kemalists sought to demonstrate. The
argument that theocracy cannot tolerate heterogeneity also fails before ve
centuries of imperial rule. Empire, indeed, may be dened by its preserva-
tion, even enforcement, of heterogeneity. Distinction and discrimination,
separation and inequality were hallmarks of Ottoman imperial rule (and,
indeed, of all empires). That heterogeneity was marked in the millet system,
an imperial structure through which the Islamic state managed other reli-
gious communities. As Islamic as the empire conceived of itself, religion
was often used instrumentallyby Abdlhamid in the formation of Kurd-
ish units to police eastern Anatolia and by the Young Turks in their policies
toward the Arabs. Finally, as Morgenthau noted, the revolutionaries who
seized control of the empire in 1908, were not religious fanatics but secular
Writing Genocide 31

modernizers devoted to bringing technology, science, and greater rationality

and efciency to their country. Suspicious of, even hostile to, conservative
clerics who blocked reform, they were, however, willing to deploy Islamic
rhetoric when it served their strategic ends. One has to question seriously
whether the Ottoman Empire was in any meaningful sense a theocracy, that
is, a state ruled by a clerical elite, rather than a dynastic empire held by the
House of Osman.
The beautifully written popular history by the poet/memoirist Peter Bal-
akian reproduces in evocative detail the horrors of what happened to the
Ottoman Armenians, but his narrative only hints at a causal argument and
does not attempt a sustained explanation of why genocide happened.74 Fol-
lowing Dadrians Warrant for Genocide, Balakian sees mass killing as a prod-
uct of religionthe deep antagonism of Islam toward Christianityand he
refers to the proclamation of jihad by the Ottoman Sheik ul-Islam and its
inuence on ofcers and ordinary people who carried out the killings. In
fact, as historians and eyewitnesses from Morgenthau on have shown, there
was little immediate response to the call for jihad other than the destruction
of a rather exclusive Armenian restaurant, which, it turns out, was staged
by the CUP. In the Ottoman Empire religion was foundational to the iden-
tication of a community. It marked one group from another, the early
modern equivalent of ethnicity or nationality. It was an identity both
imposed by the state and generated from within the community and gave
meaning to whom one could trust and whom one had to fear. Religion was
a marker of difference and similarity that kept communities separate, but
even as a source of difference and conict, it was not the inevitable source
of violence and mass killing. Religious feelings may have fueled the hatred
toward the Armenians, but neither Dadrian nor Balakian explain why reli-
gion should have led to genocidal violence in the rst year of the World War
but not throughout Ottoman and Islamic history when Armenians and
Turks managed to live together for centuries without mass killing. More-
over, the initiators of the Armenian Genocide were not religious fanatics
but secular men who embraced the fashionable science of the day. Medical
doctors and military ofcers, they saw themselves as paragons of modernity
and reform.
If the Armenian Genocide was not carried out primarily for religious
motives, and if religion did not prevent other outcomes such as coexistence
or reform, perhaps the source of violence was nationalism, the all-purpose
explanans for modern mass killing. The argument that two nationalisms
even two competing nationsfaced each other in a deadly struggle for the
same land has been made nowhere more eloquently than in the words of
the eminent scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, words that can be read as an
implied rationale for the Turkish massacres of Armenians:
32 Historiographies of the Genocide

For the Turks, the Armenian movement was the deadliest of all threats. From
the conquered lands of the Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians, and Greeks, they could,
however, reluctantly, withdraw, abandoning distant provinces and bringing
the Imperial frontier nearer home. But the Armenians, stretching across Tur-
key-in-Asia from the Caucasian frontier to the Mediterranean coast, lay in the
very heart of the Turkish homelandand to renounce these lands would have
meant not the truncation, but the dissolution of the Turkish state. Turkish and
Armenian villages, inextricably mixed, had for centuries lived in neighborly
association. Now a desperate struggle between them begana struggle
between two nations for the possession of a single homeland, that ended
with the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians
perished.75

In this transparent paragraph Lewis subtly rewrites the history of Anato-

lia from a land in which Armenians were the earlier inhabitants into one in
which they become an obstacle to the national aspirations of the Turks,
who now can claim Anatolia, rather than Central Asia, as their homeland.
He places the Armenians nearer [the Turkish] home and in the very
heart of the Turkish homeland, employing language that already assumes
the legitimacy and actuality of a nation-state. Yet the logic of nationalism
does not have universal relevance, certainly not for dynastic or imperial
states that evolved out of and still worked within a contradictory logic of
empire. Although the Ottoman Empire had long existed within an interna-
tional system of powerful nation-states and an increasingly hegemonic
Western conviction that the nation, however dened, was the principal
source of political legitimacy, like other empires it continued to mark dif-
ferences among its constituent peoples and maintain a hierarchy of rulers
and subjects. The nature of that system and its self-justications were
changing as the empire attempted to modernize itself, but Lewiss
reading of a notion of ethnic homogeneity as the basis for a national repub-
lic of the Kemalist type, which lay in the future, into the moment of Arme-
nian annihilation is ahistorical.
Such a scenario that the Armenian Genocide was primarily a struggle
between two contending nationalisms, one of which destroyed the other,
presupposes that two well-formed and articulated nationalisms already
existed in the early years of the war. Among Armenians, divided though
they were among a number of political and cultural orientations, identica-
tion with an Armenian nation had gained a broad resonance through the
nineteenth century.76 Yet Turkish identity was not as clearly focused on the
nation. The term Turk was in the early twentieth century still infre-
quently used except as a pejorative for country people. Turkish nationalists
were beginning to exploit the concept of Turk, which was based on the
linguistic afliations of a group of languages, in a more positive way, but
Writing Genocide 33

Turkish identication was still weak, confused, and mixed in with Islamic
and Ottoman identities. Turkish became an articulated identity gradually,
growing in popularity and potency with the catastrophic losses of the Balkan
Wars of 19121913. As Lewis is well aware, in the last years of the empire
conicting and contradictory ideas of Turkish nationality, some deeply
racist, vied with Pan-Turanism, Pan-Islamism, and various strains of Otto-
manism in an ideological contest for new ways of reformulating the state.
The argument from nationalism has dominated much of the historiogra-
phy on the Armenian Genocide.77In one of the most sophisticated interpre-
tations Stephan H. Astourian attempts a structural-cultural analysis,
beginning with the broad context of the Ottoman Empire as an imperial-
colonial state in which Armenians were second-class citizens within the
millet system of separate religious communities.78 The Tanzimat reforms of
the mid-nineteenth century, which aimed at a more tolerant egalitarian in-
tegration of the peoples of the empire, broke down the traditional hierar-
chical relations between ethnoreligious communities and accelerated
Armenian cultural self-denition. But the reforms resulted in a sense of
relative deprivation both for Armenians and Turks, and frustration and hos-
tility eventually translated into mass killing once the state permitted and
organized the expression of popular hatred against the Armenians. Reli-
gious conservatives and traditionalists such as Abdlhamid II perceived
Armenians and other indels as overstepping the boundaries of their posi-
tion in society, being ungrateful and disloyal to the empire, and constituting
a danger to its territorial integrity.79 Through an innovative study of idioms,
proverbs, and sayings, Astourian reaches down into popular mentality.
Turks, he shows, perceived Armenians as avaricious and greedy, and as un-
faithful friends, cheats, and social climbers. Turkish nationalism (Turkism
and Pan-Turkism) and ideas of national economy (mill iktisat), most clearly
expressed in the writings of Ziya Gkalp, excluded the ghiaours [indels]
from the nation and denied the identity of the Kurds, thereby promoting a
racially and culturally homogeneous nation: modern Turkey.80There simply
was no place for Armenians in this new, nationalist vision of the Ottoman
Empire. Astourians reading extends the nationalist approach to a broader
political culture shared by Turks, and in other research he supplemented
this ideological emphasis with close study of the social and economic struc-
tures and dynamics, particularly centered on landed property, to provide the
comprehensive environment in which genocide became possible.81
One of the most unmoored signiers in historical writing, nationalism
simply has too many meanings to be unproblematically invoked. Some
widely shared sense of collective consciousness may have played a role in the
individual and shared mentalities that made genocide conceivable, and
Astourian comes closer than anyone in demonstrating what that concept of
34 Historiographies of the Genocide

self and other, at least for ordinary Turks, may have been. But there is a danger
of overgeneralizing from such material, which might lead some to assume
that more complex and contradictory attitudes toward the Armenians living
among them did not also exist among the Turks. Hostile stereotypes may
under particular circumstanceselite encouragement or material conicts,
for examplecontribute to conict and violence, but seeing Armenians as
deceitful or avaricious does not lead one to murder them. Like Morgenthau,
those historians who emphasize nationalism and political culture provide
insight into the thinking of the key leaders involved in the most fateful
decisions, but the specic conjuncture of the period 19121915 must also be
factored in any explanation of the genocide.
The experience of the Balkan Wars (19121913) had a galvanizing effect
on Young Turk thinking. As contemporary witnesses and later scholars have
testied, the Young Turks quite swiftly shifted away from the liberal Otto-
manism from which they had sprung and perceived that the security and
unity of the empire required it to become more Turkic.82 Key leaders per-
ceived Turks and Muslims to be more trustworthy and dependable allies in
the imperial mission than Christians, with their ties to Europe, Greece, and
Russia. To certain highly placed, inuential Young Turks, Ottoman Turkey
was to become a more nationalized empire, with Turks as the Herrenvolk
ruling over subordinate nationalities and religious communities, and not
the multinational state of distinct nations with institutionalized privileges
that the Ottomanists had envisioned. Yet it would be anachronistic to ima-
gine that the Committee of Union and Progress was aiming at creating a
homogeneous ethnic nation, Kemalists avant la lettre. Rather they were
modernizers ailing around, searching unsuccessfully to nd ways to pre-
serve their multiethnic, polyglot empire. The imperial mission of the CUP
still involved ruling over Kurds and Arabs, as well as Jews, Greeks, and even
Armenian survivors, in what would essentially still be a multinational Otto-
man Empire, but a far more Turkic and Muslim state. Recent scholarship
has revealed more clearly than ever that the Young Turks embarked on rad-
ical demographic engineering that involved all the peoples of the empire,
Muslims and non-Muslims alike.83
In a word, the rulers of the empire during World War I were primarily
state imperialists, empire preservers, rather than fully committed ethnon-
ationalists. Their demographic policies stemmed primarily from ideas of
security in a moment of perceived acute danger, rather than nation-building.
Security, however, was conceived, tragically, early in the war to involve the
removal of the Armenians as a deadly threat to the continuance of the
empire. Inuenced by ideas of nationalism, race, and the Social Darwinist
conception of a zero-sum game among peoples and states and pressed by the
exigencies of a state in mortal danger, the CUP came to the fatal conclusion
Writing Genocide 35

that the survival of their state and race required the greater homogeniza-
tion of Anatolia. This meant the removal in one way or another of some of
their subject peoples. While they did not have a nation-building project in
mind, by carrying out the deportations and genocidal murders, the Young
Turks engaged in a nation-building process, the founding crime on which the
empires successor, the present republic of Turkey, would be built.

Among the baleful effects of the denialist claims about the Armenian Geno-
cide was the sense on the part of many scholars (particularly Armenians)
that they needed to present a united consensus on what had happened and
why. Normal scholarly debate was restrained and channeled into the polar-
izing struggle with those who rejected the thesis that the Ottoman state had
initiated and carried out a deliberate policy of ethnocide. Only in the late
1990s and the rst decade of the new century were differences about the
genesis of Young Turk policy, questions of intentionality, radicalization, and
timing of decision making aired publicly. At the same time increasing
numbers of non-Armenian scholars took up the topic. Perhaps most extraor-
dinary of all, beginning with the former Turkish activist Taner Akam, a few
scholars of Turkish and Kurdish origin explored the blank spots of their own
history.84 Archival access and skill in reading Ottoman elevated the writing
on the tragedies of the late Ottoman Empire to new levels of professional
authority. The burgeoning eld of Holocaust studies and the comparative
study of mass killing by political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists
opened up the study of the late Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Geno-
cide in new ways.
As with Holocaust scholarship so with historians of the Armenians and
Turks, once the static produced by denial was reduced, the relevant but con-
tested questions of why and when genocide occurred and who initiated it
could be dealt with seriously.85 The historiography on the Armenian Geno-
cide was far thinner than that on the Holocaust, but in important ways
scholars ranged from those who focused on the intentions of the perpetra-
tors to those who elaborated structural and environmental context. Among
the principal recent volumes on the Armenian Genocide that beneted from
engagement with and intimate acquaintance with Holocaust literature are
works by the British historian Donald Bloxham.86 Taking an international
and comparative approach, Bloxham centers responsibility for genocide on
choices made by state leaders, which were shaped by perpetrator ideology,
the most important element in genocide, and seeks to explain not only
mass killing but the continued denial of it. Turkish nationalism, which he
sees as the ideology of the CUP, alone could translate its agenda into
mass expropriation and murder of Christians.87 His analysis employs the
notion of cumulative radicalization, rst used by the German historian
36 Historiographies of the Genocide

Hans Mommsen to analyze the Holocaust. Bloxham begins by noting, By

1914, on the eve of war and genocide, no nationalist formulation envisaged
Ottoman Christians within the contract of mutual obligation.88Rather than
inherent or essential to Turks, nationalism was a response to great power
interference in Ottoman internal affairs that exacerbated existing Ottoman-
Armenian tensions and suspicions.89 Like Jews in Germany, Armenians
were constructed in inuential Turkish minds to be economic parasites,
competitors for land and wealth, as well as agents of the empires enemies.
Great powers, Britain and Russia in particular, put the Ottoman Armenians
in a precarious position: they were subjects of the sultan but in many ways
the wards of other states. Yet even when these powers cynically proclaimed
themselves the protectors of the Armenians, their own state interests led
them to accommodate the Turkish authorities repeatedly and to leave the
Armenians defenseless on the crater of a volcano of race hatred about to
explode.90 Along with Turkish nationalism and external powers policies, the
activities of small numbers of Armenian nationalists added to the toxic mix
that led Tlt and Enver to believe that extermination of Armenians was the
means to the end of imperial survival. In a careful reconstruction of the
genocide itself Bloxham shows how state policies became progressively
more radical over time. First, Greeks were moved for security reasons but
not murdered. The rst massacres of Armenians were a warning against
future unrest, and the punishments were explicitly publicized as such.91
Later deportation caravans were systematically massacred, and still later
mass killing dealt with those who had managed to reach the end of the jour-
ney in the Syrian desert.
In contrast to scholars who see Young Turk nationalism as more amor-
phous and inconsistent, Bloxham portrays the nationalism of the CUP as a
drive for ethnic homogeneity and national territorial integrity in the heart-
lands of the Ottoman empire, and political and economic independence for
Turks as an ethnic-national group.92The various goals and different content
of Young Turk, Armenian, and later Kemalist nationalisms are to a large
degree homogenized in his narrative. But the security goals of imperial
rulers dedicated to holding together a still heterogeneous realm, now with a
stronger core of Turks, is not the same as Kemals vision of an ethnically
homogeneous Turkish state, and both of them can be distinguished from
the national (nonseparatist) aspirations of non-Muslims driven to despera-
tion by the ruling elite and predatory social competitors. At the same time,
however, Bloxham provides insight into how the very logic of nationalism
reies and dichotomizes different groups. By assuming that the nationalism
of Armenian leaders reects the authentic feelings of their collective na-
tion, Ottoman state authorities came to believe that reprisals against all,
not the few, were necessary. This simple conation, implicit in the discourse
Writing Genocide 37

of the nationthat the people possess naturally, essentially, and unprob-

lematically national sentiment if not full consciousness (that is, they have
the potential to become a full-edged nation)opens the way to action
against a whole people so distinguished and dened.

In recent decades the deepening interest in the Holocaust and the widening
occurrence of civil and ethnic violence led a number of social scientists away
from the investigation of interstate warfare to the study of internal and civil
wars, mass killing, violence, and genocide, which in the second half of the
twentieth century became the major source of violent deaths.93 While the-
ories of ethnic conict shifted from traditional primordialist narratives of
deep cleavages between peoples based on ancient antipathies to rationalist
accounts of the instrumental employment of ethnicized rhetoric by elites to
mobilize masses for murder, some scholars emphasized how democracy
correlates highly with ethnic and civil peace, while others challenged any
domestic democratic peace argument and demonstrated that the very
process of democratization is fraught with violence, both intrastate and
interstate.94 The roots of genocide, a relatively rare instance of mass killing,
were variously connected to war, revolution, radical state elites, and a capa-
cious concept of modernity.95
Reversing an older image of ethnic violence as bubbling up from the
masses below, strategic interactionist approaches have located initiative at
the top, while provoking the question of why ethnic appeals have such pow-
erful resonance below. A few killersthugs, sadists, fanatics, and opportun-
istscan with modern weaponry (or even with machetes) slaughter
thousands with little more than acquiescence from the surrounding popula-
tion.96 Genocide in particular is an event of mass killing, with massive
numbers of victims but not necessarily massive numbers of killers. The
thugs, like the Tekilat- Mahsusa (Special Organization), set loose by the
political elite, create a climate of violence that radicalizes the population,
renders political moderates less relevant, and convinces people of the need
to support the more extremist leaders. Warfare itself helps harden hostile
group identities, making it rational to fear the other group and see its
members as dangerous threats.97 This is not to say that thugs and ordinary
people do not use the opportunities offered by state-permitted lawlessness
to settle other accounts with neighbors, take revenge, or, more mundanely,
simply grab what they can.98
In his grand comparative study of modern mass killing, the historical
sociologist Michael Mann suggests a combination of ideological, economic,
military, and political power as important ingredients in mass violence.99
When, for example, an immanent ideology that reinforces already-formed
social identities combines with a transcendent ideology that seeks to move
38 Historiographies of the Genocide

beyond existing social organization, this toxic mix of ideological power in-
creases the likelihood of violence. Both interstate warfare and the overlap-
ping of ethnicity with economic inequality enhances the probability of civil
and ethnic conict. Struggles over sovereignty are closely connected to such
outbursts of violence. Looking at who the perpetrators of violence are, Mann
identies nine kinds of killers: ideological killers who believe in the value-
rationality of murderous cleansing; bigoted killers who simply hate the
other; violent killers who enjoy killing; fearful killers who feel threatened;
careerist killers who use killing to get ahead; materialist killers who kill for
economic gain; disciplined killers who comply with legitimate organized
authority; comradely killers who respond to peer-group pressure; and bu-
reaucratic killers who obey out of habit.
Mann rejects the view that Turkish governments had a consistent, long-
term genocidal intent. Like Bloxham, he emphasizes the radicalization of
Turkish policies from the exemplary repression of Abdlhamid II through
the encouragement and then forced application of Turkication, on to de-
portation (ethnic cleansing), and nally organized mass killing, genocide.
Like other historic empires, the Ottoman Empire preferred compliant sub-
jects to dead ones. Exemplary repression was designed and carried out bru-
tally precisely to discipline peoples into compliance with the norms and
practices of the imperial order. At times Ottoman rulers used policed depor-
tations to move populations around, either as punishment or to populate
distant provinces. But this was a far cry from genocide, which involved the
intentional killing of an ethnic group in order to remove them permanently.
Against a background of economic competition between Muslims and
Christians and resultant popular economic resentments, the rise of Turkish
nationalism and the radicalization of the Young Turk leadership are central
to Manns argument that the Ottoman regime entered the danger zone of
murderous ethnic cleansing by 1913, when radicals took over the state and
were faced by a competing group, the Armenians, with its own historical
memory/myth of a state, which plausibly could have been achieved with the
help of the Russians. Even as the Young Turks became more radically na-
tionalist, they nevertheless might still have turned toward traditional
methods of exemplary repression combined with a more radical program
of forcible Turkication. Indeed, Mann claims that this is precisely what
radical Ittihadists discussed in the period 19101914coerced assimilation,
selective repression, and limited deportations. This was not yet genocide.
He then follows Akam in emphasizing the sense of humiliation and vic-
timization that the Young Turks experienced after the Balkan wars and the
imposition of the Great Power plan for inspectors in eastern Anatolia. In the
eyes of the Young Turks the European powers and Ottoman Christians to-
gether were undermining the Ottoman state and thwarting the modernizing
Writing Genocide 39

ambitions of the Turkish leaders. The Young Turks had become state cen-
tralizers, while the non-Turkish peoples of the empire sought greater au-
tonomy and a decentralized state structure. There was little doubt, certainly
among Turkish leaders, that the Armenians preferred Russian rule over
Turkish, and although more than 200,000 Armenians would be conscripted
and serve in the Ottoman army, the authorities were deeply suspicious of
Armenian loyalty. Several thousand Ottoman Armenians, indeed, crossed
over to serve as volunteers with the Russian army.
World War I provided both stimulus and opportunity. The Russian dan-
ger made the Armenian threat all the more real. War removed external
restraints on radical solutions to the ethnoreligious tensions of the empire.
Genocide was a developing process.100 The Young Turk Plan A, dominant
over two decades, given a last try in early August 1914, was for alliance with
the Armenian nationalist parties against their common opponents. Some-
time between August 1914 and February 1915, Plan A was replaced by Plan
Bforcible deportations. But this approach was unstable as military pres-
sures threatened retreat and a last stand would take place in the Turkish
heartland where a disloyal people lived. In the conditions of war and the
defeats of early 1915, deportations moved rapidly into Plan Cdeporting
Armenians from all vulnerable communications routes and front areas,
which might involve the whole of Anatolia and almost all Armenians.101
Finally, they adopted Plan D, the simplest and most coherent planwhole-
sale extermination. Increasingly radical, Turkish policy moved extremely
rapidly from alliance to removal of the Armenian political elite, on to repres-
sion and deportation, and, nally, to mass murder by the late spring of 1915.

With the breakthroughs in historical and social scientic writing in the last
decades, as well as the engagement of scholars in vigorous and serious
debate, it has become possible to work out a plausible causal story of the
Armenian Genocide. While there is not yet an overwhelming consensus on
why the Ottoman government undertook the extermination of the Arme-
nians, three main factors are central to the explanation. First, there was a
shift in the nature of the Ottoman Empire itself, from a traditional multire-
ligious imperial state, discriminating and even repressive toward non-Mus-
lims but recognizing their distinctions, to a modernizing, centralizing state
that increasingly adopted Turkish nationalist, Pan-Turkic, and Pan-Islamic
ambitions. Traditionally the Ottoman Empire had used its military power
ruthlessly to repress those they perceived to be rebellious, such as the Bulgar-
ians and Shiite Arabs, as well as policies of physical removal, exile, and
deportation (srgn). Abdlhamid II used massacres in the 1890s to attempt
to restore the traditional imperial order that his own policies of bureaucratic
centralization and reduction of local power were undermining. He ended
40 Historiographies of the Genocide

the Tanzimat reforms aimed at an Ottomanist equality among all the sul-
tans subjects and adopted a Pan-Islamic policy of allying with the Kurds (the
Hamidiye) against the Armenians that further alienated the Armenians and
encouraged a minority among them to turn toward revolution. Revolu-
tionary and technological changes in the West had rendered the Ottoman
Empire a backward and vulnerable society, and within the empire differen-
tially successful adaptations to modern life by the various milletswith the
Christians and Jews ahead of the Muslimscombined with the ideas of na-
tionalism to undermine the political legitimacy of the traditional order and
provide alternative visions of the future.
Second, the attitudes of many Turks toward Armenians and Armenians
toward Turks shifted toward greater suspicion and hostility toward the
Other, and the hardening of boundaries between them. After centuries of
governing the loyal Ermeni milleti as a separate ethnoreligious commu-
nity, Ottoman state authorities and Turkish political elites, including the
Young Turks, began to see Armenians, framed in the ever more potent dis-
course of nationalism, as an alien people, disloyal, subversive, separatist,
and a threat to the unity of the empire. This perception was compounded
more broadly by anxiety about the relative economic success of Armenian
businessmen and craftsmen, the competition for the limited economic
resources, particularly land, between Kurds, Turks, and Armenians in east-
ern Anatolia, and a sense that Armenian progress was reversing the tradi-
tional imperial status hierarchy with Muslims above the dhimmi. The fears,
resentments, and ambitions of the Young Turksand many others in the
empireformed a hostile affective disposition toward the Armenians,
seeing in them an existential threat to the survival of the empire and the
Turks.102 Though these perceptions and feelings were distorted, exagger-
ated, and pathological, they, nevertheless, disposed Young Turk leaders to
conceive of deportation and the killings of hundreds of thousands of their
own subjects as reasonable and necessary.
Third, the World War, with the real danger from the Russians and the
British, and the imagined threat from the Armenians, presented the most
radical Young Turks with new opportunities to deal with the Armenian
problem. A series of options was considered: alliance with the Armenians,
selective repression, removal of political leaders, deportations, and mass
murdereach one more radical than the preceding. When in the rst year
of war the empire suffered a series of defeats in the east, its principal leaders
became convinced that Armenians presented an existential threat to their
power. Sometime in March 1915, they decided to carry out a vicious policy
of deportation, combined with selective killing, to clear the region of Arme-
nians. Social hostilities between Armenians and Turks, Kurds and Arme-
nians, fed the mass killings, which the state encouraged (or at least did little
Writing Genocide 41

to discourage), though most of the actual killing was not done by the broad
population. Unlike the earlier practice of srgn, the tehcirler (deportations)
came to be seen as an opportunity to rid the empire of the Armenian prob-
lem, which had been used as a wedge by Russians and other Europeans to
interfere in the Ottoman Empire. While nationalism and Pan-Turanism
played a role in formulating the mood of the leaders who ordered the depor-
tations, so did strategic notions, a perverse sense of justice, and a desire for
revenge against an internal enemy.
The story as told here, while not differing radically from many of the ele-
ments brought out in earlier historical writing, moves beyond certain widely
held arguments. This account argues that the Armenian Genocide was not
planned long in advance but was a contingent reaction to a moment of crisis
that grew more radical over time. Yet the choice of genocide was predicated
on long-standing affective dispositions and attitudes that had demonized
the Armenians as a threat that needed to be dealt with. The genocide should
be distinguished from the earlier episodes of conservative restoration of
order by repression (18941896) or urban ethnic violence (1909). Though
there were similarities with the brutal policies of massacre and deportation
that earlier regimes used to keep order, the very scale of the Armenian
Genocide and its intended effectsto rid eastern Anatolia of a whole
peoplemake it a far more radical, indeed revolutionary, transformation of
the imperial setup. The story here is that the genocide was neither reli-
giously motivated nor a struggle between two contending nationalisms, one
of which destroyed the other, but rather the pathological response of des-
perate leaders who sought security against a people they had both con-
structed as enemies and driven into radical opposition to the regime under
which they lived for centuries.
The Armenian Genocide, along with the killing of Assyrians and the ex-
pulsion of the Anatolian Greeks, laid the ground for the more homogeneous
nation-state that arose from the ashes of the empire. Like many other states,
including Australia, Israel, and the United States, the emergence of the
Republic of Turkey involved the removal and subordination of native peo-
ples who had lived on its territory prior to its founding. The connection
between ethnic cleansing or genocide and the legitimacy of the national
state underlies the desperate efforts to deny or distort the history of the
nation and the states genesis. Coming to terms with that history, on the
other hand, can have the salutary effect of questioning continued policies of
ethnic homogenization and refusal to recognize the claims and rights of
those peoples, minorities or diasporasAborigines, Native Americans,
Kurds, Palestinians, or Armenianswho refuse to disappear.
2

Reading Genocide
Turkish Historiography on 1915

Fatma Mge Gek

Scholars note that history and its recollection are especially crucial to
nationalist projects.1 It is through the remembrance of the past that a col-
lectivity acquires a national identity capable of uniting them through
shared meaning. The construction of such an identity was especially daunt-
ing in the case of the Turkish Republic. The new nation-state was built on
a disintegrating empire with frequent episodes of violence and trauma, the
most signicant comprising the ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Arme-
nians in 1915.2 In building the Turkish nation, the Republican leaders
made a conscious decision to concentrate on the nations future, on pro-
gress, and on catching up with the contemporary civilization signied by
the West. In doing so, they consciously omitted and repressed the past. As
they ofcially dened this future focus as the second aim of Turkish
nationalism, past incidents of violence and trauma became even more
marginalized and a possible return to the previous Ottoman form of gov-
ernment more delegitimated.3
With time, a mythicized Turkish historiography developed. It valorized
the Turkish achievements, whitewashed the crimes, blamed especially the
minorities and the West for all past defeats, and silenced the violence com-
mitted against others. Between 1923 and 1975, this historiography went on
to produce and reproduce itself without any interruption. It was able to do
so during the Second World War and the Cold War, when the focus on na-
tional security trumped all other concerns. The era between 1975 and 1986
witnessed a surge of collective violence against Turkish diplomats. In order
to draw world attention to the injustice that the Turks had committed against
the Armenians in 1915, the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide
(JCOAG) and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia
(ASALA) carried out a series of assassinations of Turkish diplomats and

42
Reading Genocide 43

bombed Turkish sites. These violent acts caught the Turkish state and so-
ciety totally unprepared, unaware, and uninformed. Then, parallel to the
foundation myth of the Republic, an ofcial narrative on 1915 emerged,
placing the blame for the Turkish massacres of the Armenians squarely on
the latters seditious activities, a stand that persists to this day.

ORIGINS OF TURKISH OFFICIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY: MUSTAFA KEMALS

SPEECH

As nationalism is predicated on building a narrative for the nation, the

newly constructed Turkish nation required an ofcial narrative. In 1927, the
eventual leader of the Independence Struggle, Mustafa Kemal (Atatrk),
single-handedly provided such a story with his famous Speech (Nutuk).4 In
it, he provided an autobiographical account of the creation of the Turkish
nation that commenced with his alighting in Samsun on May 19, 1919, to
start the War of Independence. At the second convention of the Republican
Peoples Party, specically from the 15th to the 20th of October 1927, Mus-
tafa Kemal narrated for thirty-six and a half hours how the Turkish Indepen-
dence Struggle had created the Turkish nation.5 This narration not only
identied and legitimated him as the primary founder of the Turkish na-
tion, but also underscored the unique singularity of the Turkish experience
as a self-contained case. Mustafa Kemals text was then ofcially adopted as
the ofcial Turkish national narrative and became sacralized by the state.
This text sets the basic parameters of the Turkish ofcial historiography
on the Armenian ethnic cleansing of 1915. Focus on what was said and
unsaid is therefore essential. It is evident that the text commences the birth
of the Turkish nation with 1919, removing in the process the demise of the
Armenians in 1915 through state violence to the realm of Republican pre-
history. Hence at the point of the Turkish Republics inception, the Arme-
nian problem has already been temporally removed to the Ottoman past.
In addition, the patriots comprising the Turkish nation that Mustafa Kemal
addresses in the text are clearly Muslims, especially Turkish Muslims who
had been explicitly mobilized during the War of Independence to defend
their homeland. Thus the multiplicity of ethnic groups in Anatolia, in-
cluding the Armenians, was also spatially excised from the foundation
myth.
Turkish society has not been able to engage this text critically or consider
and discuss alternate formulations to it because of the penal codes that ren-
der it a crime to do so. These have increased the societal tendencies in Tur-
key, not only to imagine the past, but also to mythologize it.6 What was to
have been a collective memory of the past eventually has been transformed
44 Historiographies of the Genocide

instead, especially after the death of Mustafa Kemal, into a collective

myth.7 Turkish society was presented with a simplied and whitewashed
version of past events, loosely based on, though always legitimated by,
Atatrks Speech, told from the selective viewpoint of the Turkish nation and
its struggle for nationhood. The speech gloried the feats of the Turks and
placed the blame on the Christian minorities and the West.
Such a collective myth is also fraught with amnesia in relation to the vio-
lence of the nations birth and existence up to the present.8 The amnesia is
necessary because nationalism is, after all, predicated on the twin principles
of remembering and forgetting. Those who are forgotten, silenced, excluded
from the collective myth of the Turkish Republic correspond exactly to the
three social groups of Armenians, Kurds, and Greeks, who comprise the
ofcial past and present minorities in Turkey.9 Indeed, the collective vio-
lence committed against the minorities at the inception and during the
Republican era has been totally eliminated from the Turkish collective
myth.10 Throughout the decades, this myth was ofcially distributed and
reproduced through the entire centralized Turkish mass education system.

EMERGENCE OF THE NARRATIVES ON THE ARMENIAN ETHNIC

CLEANSING OF 1915

Upon the signing of the 19221923 Lausanne Peace Treaty, the Turkish na-
tion-state assumed it had once and for all resolved the Armenian problem
that had so challenged the Ottoman Empire. It therefore entered a state of
shock and disbelief when it was faced with the sudden attacks of JCOAG
and the ASALA. These attacks aimed at drawing world attention to the still
unaccounted historical injustice the Turks had committed against the Arme-
nians in 1915. As these incidents persisted, the Turkish state had to resort to
commissioning a number of retired diplomats to renarrate what had hap-
pened in the past in accordance with the dominant ofcial Turkish histori-
ography. These mostly amateur historians selectively picked the
documentation that bolstered their narrative from the Ottoman state
archives. They only employed the material that valorized the Turks and
damned the Armenians, leaving aside what did not support their argument.
This emerging ofcial Turkish historiography on the alleged Armenian
Genocide was based on the selective use of past documentation that in turn
drew and built on preceding layers of denial. Also included in this stand
were two historical elements pertaining to Turkish history: the emotional
trauma of the Muslim losses during 19121922, which had hitherto been
unaddressed, as well as the current tragic loss of the murdered Turkish dip-
lomats. These attacks against and assassinations of Turkish diplomats
Reading Genocide 45

during 19751986 awakened a fervent sense of injustice among the Turkish

populace. Due to this mythicized version of the past the Turkish populace
had been taught for so many decades, the populace could therefore not at all
comprehend why the Armenians had engaged in such heinous acts.
So ingrained was the mythicized version of the past and so nal was the
solution of the Armenian problem that when some of the Armenian per-
petrators of the attacks were later tried in Western courts, the Turkish For-
eign Ministry did not possess a single English-language text to send to the
Western public prosecutors to inform them of the Turkish state position on
1915. The most signicant consequence of these attacks was the develop-
ment through the 1980s of a narrative of the Armenian issue penned mostly
by retired diplomats along the lines of the mythicized history taught in the
schools since the inception of the republic. That ofcial narrative and the
historiography it subsequently produced have been presented as the sole
explanation of what has transpired in the Turkish past.
This essay argues to the contrary, contending that the contextualization
of the Turkish ofcial historiography on the Armenians reveals three dis-
tinct, concomitant narratives. These comprise, rst, the Ottoman Investi-
gative Narrative based on contemporaneous accounts that attempt to
surmise the reasons behind the 1915 deportation and massacres of the
Armenians. This is followed by the Republican Defensive Narrative based
on later works written with the intent to document and justify the nation-
alist master narrative of the Turkish state; it explicitly denies that an Arme-
nian genocide occurred in 1915. The third and nal Post-Nationalist Critical
Narrative comprises recent works that are critical of the nationalist master
narrative. It often does not focus specically on 1915, but is instead more
concerned with the silences in Turkish history in general and its ethnic co-
mposition in particular.

Ottoman Investigative Narrative on 1915

The works in this category comprise the ofcial reports11 prepared by the
Ottoman state such as the one by Hseyin Nazm Pasha, the memoirs12 of
Ottoman ofcials such as Said, Kamil, Tlt Pasha, Mehmed Asaf, and Dr.
Reid Bey, and the investigation records13 of the Ottoman military tribunals
that tried those accused of perpetrating the massacres. The reports14 of the
Turkish negotiations of the Lausanne Treaty and the collections15 of Otto-
man documents ostensibly published by the Turkish state to deny the geno-
cide allegations also contribute to this narrative.
A critical reading of these works reveals two distinguishing characteris-
tics. First, none of these works, originally penned around the time of the
events of 1915, question the occurrence of the Armenian massacres
46 Historiographies of the Genocide

(genocide did not yet exist as a term). They instead focus on the question
of what happened and why. Second, they display a very strong tension
between two transforming worldviews. Some ofcials, like Said and Kamil
Pashas, maintained a more traditional Ottoman imperial view, seeing the
existing structure of empire as just and the position of the Armenian sub-
jects within it as reform-able. They blamed the massacres on easily ma-
nipulated Armenian subjects and corrupt Muslim ofcials. Others, like
Tlt Pasha and Mehmed Asaf, exhibited a more protonationalist view,
perceiving the existing structure of the empire as inadequate, and the posi-
tion of the Armenian subjects within it as problematic. While they were
unclear about what to do about these inadequacies and problems, their pri-
ority lay above all else with the preservation of the state and its Muslims.
They justied and legitimated their actions accordingly.
The central tension in the Ottoman investigative narrative emerges over
the attribution of responsibility for the crimes committed against the Arme-
nian subjects. The memoirs of Ottoman ofcials reveal a chronological shift
in the allocation of responsibility. The later ones, increasingly imbued with
protonationalist sentiments, view the committed crimes as a duty necessary
for the establishment and preservation of a Turkish fatherland. The ofcials
are aware these are crimes, and they willingly sacrice themselves for the
sake of the fatherland. The tension over responsibility mounted after World
War I with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman state at that
time was manned not by the Committee of Union and Progress, which per-
petrated the massacres, but rather by the opposition party that for the most
part took a stand against them. The state not only acknowledged what hap-
pened, but also printed a book to that effect.16 The state also distributed as
supplements to the ofcial newspaper Takvim-i Vekayi the proceedings of
the Ottoman military tribunals that tried some of the perpetrators. Yet the
advent and eventual victory of the Turkish War of Independence destroyed
the Allied efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. In addition, with esca-
lating Turkish nationalism, these newspaper issues containing the military
tribunal records slowly disappeared. To this day, no complete set exists in
any Turkish public library.
Soon after the military tribunals, especially with the transition from the
Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state, the ofcial attribution of re-
sponsibility for the crimes gradually shifted from the perpetrators to the
victims. To legitimate the Armenian massacres of 1915, ofcial reports rst
noted the seditious activities of the Armenian committees as well as the
19171918 Armenian atrocities committed against the Turks in the eastern
provinces. Signicant in this shift was the strong connection between the
Committee of Union and Progress and the Nationalist movement. While
the former justied the Armenian tragedy as an unfortunate consequence
Reading Genocide 47

of their attempts to protect the Ottoman state, the latter gradually adopted
this Unionist stand as its own. The Ottoman state documents published by
the newly founded Turkish national state also repeated the argument of its
predecessors. This argument also contained the subsequent defensive
Republican narrative that developed into its own by the mid-1970s.

Republican Defensive Narrative on 1915

The works considered here emerge in three clusters. The rst cluster com-
prises the foundational works, namely the two that provide the basis for all
subsequent studies. The second consists of all those that dene the major
elements of the agenda of the Republican Defensive Narrative, all written
with the intention to defend the interests of the Turkish state. The third
cluster covers all those works in the 1990s that repeat and reproduce various
components of the earlier studies, thereby attempting to further legitimate
the Turkish Republican narrative by constantly referring to it.
The foundational 1953 works by Y. G. ark and Esat Uras comprehen-
sively contain the previous existing knowledge on the Armenians.17 Even
though one can still depict a nationalist bent in the coverage of the topics,
there is nevertheless an attempt to present all the available material on a
particular issue. This all but disappears in the second cluster, written in the
1970s and the 1980s with direct or indirect state support. As these are
penned in reaction to the JCOAG and ASALA murders, they very selectively
draw on the previous works with the intent to promote state interests.18 The
third cluster comprises the works from the 1990s to the present. It either
reproduces the same arguments made in the 1970s and 1980s, or attempts
to bring in a new perspective within the nationalist paradigm.19
The Republican nationalist narrative traces the origins of the 1915 tragedy
to the intervention of the Western powers in the affairs of the empire. It
argues that the subversive acts of the Armenian committee members justify
the Armenian relocations and subsequent massacres. This narrative fails to
recognize the signicance of the preexisting Ottoman structural divide
between the Muslims and non-Muslim minorities as well as the subsequent
naturalized Muslim superiority it produced. It also does not take into ac-
count that Turkish nationalism was one of the many nationalisms that
emerged during this time period with claims that were no more just than
those made by any of the other social groups. The lack of self-reection pre-
vents the narrative from acknowledging that Turkish nationalism merely
happened to triumph over the others at their expense. This nonrecognition
of naturalized Turkish superiority cloaked by nationalism leads the Repub-
lican state to assign the entire moral responsibility for Armenian deaths and
massacres to anyone other than the actual Ottoman Turkish perpetrators.
48 Historiographies of the Genocide

As a consequence, in this narrative, alongside the guilty Western powers,

the Armenian victims themselves tragically and ironically emerge as the
main perpetrators of the crimes. Any feeble attempt to assign blame to the
Turkish perpetrators is immediately dismissed with the defense that what
happened was a tragic but necessary act for the preservation of the state.
During the development of this narrative, the ofcial state scholars
researching the Armenian deportations and massacres of 1915 naturalize
the inherent nationalism because of their inability to historicize the pre-
1919/1923 period. They could identify as the culprits of the Armenian
tragedy only the two others of Turkish nationalism, namely the Western
powers and the Ottoman Armenians themselves. Their interpretations of
the actions of these two others are so colored by Turkish nationalism that
they fail to see that the actions of the Ottoman Turks had been just as de-
structive. Not only do they dismiss the claims of the massacres, but they
argue instead that the Turks themselves were not the perpetrators, but the
victims. The emergence of a Turkish nation-state on the ashes of the Otto-
man Empire precluded the discussion of any claims on the homeland that
the Turks have by now identied as theirs. It is no accident that Mustafa
Kemal states, and the Turkish state constantly continues to reiterate, that
there is not a hand-span of their fatherlands soil (bir kar vatan topra)
they would give up without ghting until the last drop of their blood
(kanmzn son damlasna kadar). The peoples willingness to annihilate
themselves for a vision demonstrates both the ideological strength of Turk-
ish nationalism as well as its incredibly destructive power.
This nationalist tone dominating the Republican defensive narrative was
radicalized during two signicant historical periods. The rst was the period
of Russian occupation in 1914 and later in 1917 as well as that of the Allied
occupation after 1918, a period marked by the massacres of the Muslim
Turkish populace by the Armenian committees. The death of approximately
4060,000 Turks during this period became central to the Republican narra-
tive and these were later frequently employed to counter the 1915 Armenian
massacres. The second radicalizing period was a reaction to the JCOAG and
ASALA murders of Turkish diplomats between 1975 and 1986. These mur-
ders enabled Republican Turkey to fully develop, in a nationalist move, its
defensive narrative on the Armenians.
When the works are reviewed chronologically, no signicant studies on
the Armenian deaths and massacres appear until the 1950s. The two
works that then emerge contain declarations of loyalty to the Turkish na-
tion-state. This strategic act reveals the precariousness of the boundaries
of Turkish identity and belonging, one that has to be constantly professed
to the Turkish state at every opportunity. These two early works forming
the proto-nationalist seeds of the Republican defensive narrative are
Reading Genocide 49

then followed two decades later in 1976 by the narrative boom in response
to the JCOAG and ASALA assassinations. Authors then not only give their
pledge of allegiance to the Turkish nation-state as citizens, but they selec-
tively employ historical knowledge to preserve Turkish state interests at
all costs.
The thirty-year gap immediately following the foundation of the Turkish
Republic (19231953) may be explained, rst, by the general trauma and
devastation of the war years, and second, by the need to come to terms with
a simple historical fact: the Unionist leadership perpetrating the Armenians
massacres used the resources thus gained to fund the War of Independence.
The same Unionists also staffed and provided leadership to the emerging
Turkish nation-state.20 By 1926, Mustafa Kemal effectively pacied the
Unionist leadership he regarded as a potential threat to his rule. The series
of radical reforms the young Turkish Republic underwent during Mustafa
Kemals reign within the format of a single-party rule also precluded the
public discussion of signicant social and historical issues. The subsequent
promulgation of the laws of treason against the Turkish state and against
the person of Mustafa Kemal also rendered any mention and interpretation
of events that countered the ofcial version subversive. After Mustafa
Kemals death, the same political framework dominated during the rule of
his successor and close friend smet nn (18841973). During this pe-
riod, Turkey also had to come to terms with the severe economic impact of
the Second World War. The 1948 transition to the multiparty system and the
subsequent sweeping electoral defeat of the reigning Republican Peoples
Party initially liberalized the censorship over the media, leading to the emer-
gence of the works of Uras and ark.

Post-Nationalist Critical Narrative on 1915

These works emerge in three disparate clusters in terms of the knowledge
they provide on both the Ottoman and Turkish Armenians. The rst cluster
comprises works specically penned on the events of 1915 with the intent to
understand the historical context within which the events occurred. They
therefore critically analyze the reasons behind the contemporary Turkish
denial of these events. Also contained in this cluster are works aimed at
informing the contemporary Turkish reader about the historical transfor-
mation of the Armenians from the past to the immediate present.21 The
second cluster contains studies of recent Turkish history on topics that do
not directly focus on the Armenians, but instead provide ample new infor-
mation on the historical background of the events of 1915. This indirect
consequence is a consequence of the critical approach they take. They do
not silence the role of the Ottoman minorities in their accounts the way the
50 Historiographies of the Genocide

Republican defensive narrative does.22 The third cluster includes literary

works that reveal the worlds of meaning the Armenians created within both
the Ottoman and the Republican periods. Here, the Armenians emerge, for
the rst time, as cultural actors.23 It is important to note that none of these
works are written to defend a particular thesis; their publication is also not
supported by the Turkish state. They are not colored by Turkish nationalism,
emerging rather as post-nationalist products of the burgeoning civil society
in contemporary Turkey.
The most signicant dimension of this post-nationalist critical narrative
is its willingness to recognize Turkish society not as an imagined commu-
nity of nationalist compatriots of Turks, but rather as a cultural mosaic that
at present includes many diverse social groups such as Kurds and Alevis, as
well as the much atrophied former minority groups such as Armenians,
Assyrians, Greeks, and Jews. At this particular moment, Turkish society
starts to explore these social groups through their literatures and historical
narratives. If this exploration gradually transforms into a larger social and
political movement around the recognition of human rights, and if it is then
able to overcome the resistance of the nationalist elements embedded in
Turkish society and especially in the military, one can conjecture that the
Armenian deportations and massacres of 1915 would nally be recognized
as the genocide that they were.

TOWARD A POST-NATIONALIST HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE ARMENIAN

ETHNIC CLEANSING OF 1915

Another methodological contribution to the recognition of the violence in

the Turkish past may be problematizing the parameters of current ofcial
historiography. When the current Turkish historiography pertaining to the
Anatolian Armenians is analyzed in detail, it is particularly the element of
Turkish nationalism that needs to be critically examined and deconstructed.
The domination of the ideology (Turkish nationalism) that has diffused into
much of the existing scholarship on Turkey at the moment remains unex-
amined. Scholars approach historical sources uncritically and often accept
the textual rhetoric as historical reality. Yet such histories epistemologically
manipulate the role and signicance of certain social groups (Sunni Turks)
at the expense of all others through their selective employment and deploy-
ment of history. In so doing, they outright eliminate certain possible choices
and trajectories (nonnationalist solutions) not only from history but, by im-
plication, from scholars analyses as well. They thus introduce a certain his-
torical fatalism whereby the nationally triumphant groups (the now
secularized Turkish elites) always persevere by soaring to historical success
Reading Genocide 51

against all odds; the vanquished (the rest of Turkish society, including all
minorities) seem destined to failure.
An example of this is the construction of the point of origin of the ofcial
historiography of the Turkish Republic. The famous 1927 Speech (Nutuk) of
Mustafa Kemal laid the foundation stone for the ofcial historiography of
the Turkish Republic. In that speech, Mustafa Kemal narrated his own his-
toriography of the War of Independence, and that particular historiography
eventually became that of the Turkish nation. Like other leaders, Mustafa
Kemal also attempted to create a nationalist history for the new Turkish
Republic. Public narratives were employed to create foundational narratives
for aspiring nationsa task similar to the creation of the story of American
nation-building.24
The rst sentence of Mustafa Kemals speech actually declares the point
of origin of his own historiographyand therefore, by implication, of all the
ofcial Turkish historiographies thereafteras follows: I alighted in Sam-
sun on the 19th day of May of 1919. The ensuing text not only covers the
events from the year 1919 onward, but does so from the vantage point of
1927, namely four years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic and
the suppression of various revolts throughout Anatolia. It is noteworthy that
at the particular historical juncture when Mustafa Kemal narrated his ver-
sion of this new nations past, all the minority groups in Turkey, including
the Armenians, had already been effectively marginalized. Given these epis-
temological parameters, it was virtually impossible to recover and recognize
fully the agency of such ethnic and religious groups in Turkey.
The ensuing Turkish nationalist discourse neatly categorized these eth-
nic and religious groups along strictly maintained boundaries of inclusion
and exclusion. It dened the included Turkish secular elites as historically
triumphant and then proceeded to naturalize their norms and values into
society as historical reality. The nationalist ideology also idealized the
emerging Turkish secular elites, giving them exclusive power over the
course of Turkish history and also purifying them of all the vice they once
engaged in by censoring history. It thus presented the Turkish elites mor-
ally and metaphorically as pure white. By the same token, Turkish nation-
alist ideology articulated and narrated the excluded minorities as the
vanquished and then proceeded to attribute to them the exact opposite char-
acteristics. The excluded were stripped of most of their agency, and the very
little they were permitted to exercise was of course depicted within parame-
ters dened by the triumphant group as totally subversive and immoral.
Turkish nationalist ideology thus embellished history by selectively employ-
ing only those historical events that portrayed the excluded minorities in a
negative light, thereby saturating them with vice, conveying them morally
and metaphorically as dark black. When scholars, socialized within the
52 Historiographies of the Genocide

Turkish nation-state where such an ideology was predominant, approached

this highly selective representation of Turkish history, they, too, directly or
indirectly reproduced historical actors as either black or white, with no con-
sideration of either the possible shades in-between or other colors.
The ofcial Turkish nationalist historiography selectively retold the his-
torical events before 1915 in a way that both legitimated what happened to
the Anatolian Armenians and took pains to demonstrate that the same, if
not more, happened to the Turks as well. This epistemological restructuring
of the past, undertaken to emphasize the unavoidability of 1915, enabled
Turkish nationalist historiography to deny both its extent and its intentional-
ity. Hence 1915 was employed to structure all existing Turkish historical
accounts within the nationalist narrative with insurmountable force and, in
so doing, obliterated in the process all critical historical analysis and elimi-
nated all events, institutions, and social groups that might not have fore-
shadowed this ultimate demise. Anatolian Armenians were portrayed in
history as an initially wealthy and content loyal social group who turned
ungrateful and treacherous mostly at the instigation of the Great Powers. By
the same stroke of the pen, the same Powers were also described as moving
on the Turks to wrest the empire away from the rightful owners. As a con-
sequence, both the Turks and the Armenians were depicted as suffering
equally during World War I, brought upon them by the Great Powers.
In ofcial Turkish historiography, both the hegemony of Turkish nation-
alism and the hegemony of 1915 ended up dramatically limiting the histor-
ical repertoire of the scholars engaged in the research of Turkeys past. The
ofcial employment of history very selectively portrayed the social condi-
tions of the Ottoman Empire, the agency of various social groups within,
the repertoire of choices these groups had, and the range of historical events
they encountered. Given this state of affairs, it is not possible for the ofcial
Turkish historiography to make any signicant empirical and methodolog-
ical advances. It needs to rst reconstruct its framework by engaging in
critical analysis so that its narrative is not solely based on the naturalized
nationalist history of the Turks, but rather on the intersections of the expe-
riences of both the Turks and the minority groups, in this case the Anatolian
Armenians, of the empire. Only through the reconstruction of such a
common history of Turks and Armenians can the complexity of the Anato-
lian past that is so bereft in the ofcial Turkish historiography be nally
captured.
Part II
ON THE EVE OF CATASTROPHE
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3

The Silence of the Land

Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity, and Power

Stephan H. Astourian

Ethnic cleansing, a broad concept that encompasses phenomena as diverse

as forced deportation at one end of the spectrum and genocide at the other,
is often associated with crimes against property as well as peoplethat is,
stealing and theft, both on the part of the state and of individuals.1 Such
crimes may precede the ethnic cleansing itself, accelerating the process of
polarization between ethnic groups that results in the ultimate catastrophe.
The wave of postwar decolonization and the resulting formation of new
states plagued with ethnic strife, as well as the more recent dissolution of
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union (and the concomitant wave of large-scale
ethnic cleansing or local pogroms stretching from Kosovo and Bosnia to the
Caucasus and Central Asia) have stimulated academic interest in ethnic or
ethnoreligious conicts.2 Examining the context in which this violence
occurs, some sociologists stress that ethnic conicts and protests erupt when
ethnic inequalities and racially ordered systems begin to break down.3 Inspired
by ecological theory, they suggest that racial and ethnic violence tends to
occur under conditions of niche overlap, that is, competition for the same
resource environment. To the extent that two ethnic or ethnoreligious
groups remain in separate niches and accept the power dissymmetry
between them, stable, accommodative ethnic relations usually result. How-
ever, when two or more ethnic groups compete for scarce or valued resources,
such as jobs, land, or housing, ethnic boundaries intensify. Conict is most
likely to occur when various processes raise the level of ethnic competition
to its apex. These processes include migration and immigration, economic
contraction, segregation and dispersion from niches, and increasing pros-
perity for the disadvantaged ethnics. Two factors give further impetus to
ethnic competition: the occurrence of political struggles and challenges,
and diffusion of events over time and across regions, in other words,

55
56 On the Eve of Catastrophe

imitative behavior or contagion.4 Often, modernization seems to play a sig-

nicant role in these processes, for it breaks down polyethnic social systems
stratied on the basis of religion, birth, service to the State, or a combina-
tion thereof. As these systems are characterized by a signicant power dif-
ferential between the dominant group and the subordinate one(s), their
breakdown intensies ethnic competition in the political and economic
arenas, resulting in niche overlaps.5
This chapter examines apparently dissimilar cases of niche overlap in
two regions of the Ottoman Empire: Eastern Anatolia and Cilicia, both
inhabited by large Armenian populations. In the former, Armenians were
dispossessed from the 1850s to 1914; in the latter, they bought land from
the 1870s to World War I. Niche overlap occurred in Eastern Anatolia when
the Kurdish emirate of Bedr Khan (Bedirhan) was defeated by the Ottoman
army, resulting in anarchy, the emergence of sheikhly families in the Kurd-
ish leadership, and the accelerated transition of hitherto Kurdish pastoral
nomadic tribes to sedentary life. The Armenian peasantry was faced with
massive land usurpation and diverse forms of oppression and violence. In
Cilicia, on the other hand, economic niche overlap occurred mainly from
the 1870s on, when non-Muslims were allowed to buy and own large-scale
land, a historical prerogative of the dominant group. In both regions, inter-
ethnic polarization resulting from niche overlap was intensied by the par-
tial resettlement of Muslim refugees (muhacirs)from the Caucasus at
rst in the late 1850s and the 1860s, then also from the Balkans between
1878 and 1914in the midst of the Armenian population. Armed Muslims
thus competed for scarce resources with an existing, unarmed Christian
population, whom they associated with the Christian enemies who had
expelled them from their previous homelands. Both cases ended in vio-
lence: the rst in the large-scale massacres of 189496 and the subsequent
sporadic, localized violence; the second in the so-called Adana massacres
of 1909. Ethnic relations in these regions foreshadowed the larger disaster
to come.
The failure of the Ottoman State to remedy the plight of the Armenian
peasantry resulted in the internationalization of that issue in 1878. The so-
called Armenian Question was born, which historians have essentially
treated from the perspective of political history, combining in their narra-
tives the diplomatic exchanges of the European Powers with a survey of the
political evolution of the Ottoman Empire.6 Yet, the Armenian Question is
fully embedded in a number of other questions: the agrarian and Kurdish
questions, the demographic Islamization of Anatolia during the period in
question, and the attempts of the Ottoman state at modernizing and central-
izing the empire. The Armenian Question is as much a Kurdish and Otto-
man Question as it is an Armenian one.
The Silence of the Land 57

While nineteenth-century Armenian-Turkish polarization cannot be

reduced to the process of niche overlap alone, agrarian factors played a key
role. These factors also offer a useful prism through which to consider the
broader question of land relations in the late Ottoman Empire. The impact
of the Land Law of 1858 on these two regions will be a central concern of
this study. That law was part of a series of reforms, enacted mostly between
1839 and 1878, that aimed at centralizing the empire and modernizing its
institutions and state apparatus. Two imperial rescripts constituted the
pivots of that period known as the Tanzimat (Re-Ordering): the Hatt- erif
of Glhane (Noble Rescript of the Rose Chamber) in 1839 and the Hatt-
Hmayun (Imperial Decree) in 1856, both of which promised reforms,
greater justice, and equality among all Ottomans, be they Muslims or non-
Muslims. In a nutshell, transformation of the traditional society (legitimized
by religion and the right of conquest) was supposed to result in a legal-
rational type of society, based on universal norms.7 The transition was ulti-
mately a failure and, among other things, Armenians were to be one of its
main victims.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Donald Quataert, an economic historian of the Ottoman Empire, once

wrote, the Land Law of 1858 is like the elephant of the blind man as it ap-
pears to scholars in different guises.8 While some historians have stressed
that it was a result of European pressures in favor of the development of
private ownership in the empire, others claim that it was an effort at reas-
serting the control of the state and at increasing its revenues.9 A recent essay
erases this dichotomy and argues that the constitution of individual owner-
ship rights signaled the total control of the central government over land
that was the primary economic resource.10 This statement might be too
strong, but it points rightly to the scal concerns of the state.
Rural stability and maintenance of cultivation seem to have been para-
mount goals of the state. Fiscal considerations also played a signicant role
in shaping the law.11 The Land Law was a fairly thorough attempt at catego-
rizing and regularizing the various forms of land tenure inherited from the
past and at updating rules and terminology outmoded since the demise of
the ef system.12 As such, it was part of the modernizing project of the late
Ottoman state. The application of the Land Law resulted in varied outcomes
in landholding patterns; these stretched from small family farms to large
estates.13 In view of such diversity, recent syntheses have emphasized that
the Land Law did not in itself determine the subsequent landholding pat-
terns, which depended on a number of variables.
58 On the Eve of Catastrophe

These include soil and climate, previous patterns of landholding, the changing
availability of labor, capital, and land, the presence of sedentarized and
nomadic tribes, transport systems, regional and international market
opportunities for both agricultural and animal products, the coercive power of
local notables, the degree of centralized political control, and the land legisla-
tion itself.14

Research on landholding and actual land registration is lacking, preventing

us from making precise statements about the impact of the Land Law.15
In addition, sedentarization of the indigenous nomadic populations char-
acterized the eighteenth and, to a greater extent, the nineteenth century.16 In
the latter, sedentarization programs coincided with a massive inux of refu-
gees, a combination that drastically reshaped rural life.17 There are few
studies, however, that analyze the socioeconomic and political impact of sed-
entarization, in particular in the case of the Kurds, who constituted at least a
plurality in most parts of eastern Anatolia, while the Armenian peasantry, an
estimated 70 to 75 percent of the total Armenian Ottoman population, is
unaccounted for in Ottoman historiography written in Turkish or European
languages. In the unusual instances when Armenians factor into agrarian
developments, it is in the form of the urban Armenian moneylender cap-
turing the lands of indebted Muslim peasants.18 There is little doubt that the
Armenian and Kurdish populations, once combined, formed a clear ma-
jority in the eastern provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In this context, the effects of state power in relation to ethnic groups and
immigration is generally neglected in Ottoman historiography.
Five to seven million refugees settled in the quickly shrinking Ottoman
territories between 1783 and 1913.19 Besides approximate demographic
data, we know little about their socioeconomic history and their impact on
rural life and interethnic relations. More generally, it is known that the Otto-
man state encouraged immigration from the end of the eighteenth century
onward.20 As a corollary, did it develop programs to welcome the immigrants
and refugees as best as it could? Was there a pattern, or a motivation, in the
choice of the regions where they were resettled? On what lands did that
resettlement take place? Did demographic, ethnic, or economic factors play
a role? Answers to these questions should shed some light on the land ques-
tion in the late Ottoman Empire.

THE EASTERN PROVINCES: LATE 1860s1914

The socioeconomic and interethnic relations in the eastern provinces from

the 1860s on, and not European diplomacy, are the core of the Armenian
Question. On November 27, 1870, a special commission was appointed by
The Silence of the Land 59

the Armenian National Assembly in Istanbul to compile and examine the

numerous occurrences of oppressive acts in those regions. Its First
Report on Provincial Oppressions was submitted to the Sublime Porte [a
synecdoche referring to the Ottoman Government] in the Name of the
Armenian National Assembly on April 11, 1872. The report consisted
mostly of a summary of the types of exactions the commission had encoun-
tered in the eastern provinces and of respectful suggestions to the sultan on
how to remedy them. Not much came out of this endeavor. On September
17, 1876, the commission submitted a Second Report on the Oppression of
the Armenians to the Armenian National Assembly, which provided a
detailed census of oppressive acts that had occurred in about 320 locations
from April 12, 1872, to the end of August, 1876.
A rudimentary analysis of these incidents provides some insight into the
role of land in the origins of the Armenian Question, and incidentally into
the relationship between economic development and ethnic conict in East-
ern Anatolia. That insight differs from what many Ottomanists have sug-
gested, especially those who rely on Immanuel Wallersteins world-system
approach, which argues that the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into
the world economy in the nineteenth century beneted the non-Muslim
bourgeoisie and generated Muslim resentment that led to communal strife
or massacres.21 In fact, nearly all of the incidents occurred in villages (308),
and very few in towns (5) and cities (7). Most of those villages had little, if
anything, to do with capitalistic development and were untouched by the
impact of the world-economy. They were rather backward places, existing at
the level of subsistence economy and local trade. The overwhelming ma-
jority of oppressive acts consisted of land usurpation (272 cases), mostly
by Muslim aghas and beys, but also by mullahs and sheikhs (175). Eleven
such events specically mention a disregard for title deeds, though one sus-
pects there were many such cases included under the category of land
usurpation. For most incidents, the ethnic background of the perpetrators
is unspecied. Kurds are named in 68 incidents, but it seems highly prob-
able in view of the ethnic composition of Eastern Anatolia, in particular its
countryside, that many of the aghas and sheikhs were also Kurds. Nineteen
Ottoman ofcials were involved in those incidents, but it is not to be ex-
cluded that some of the aghas and beys were also Ottoman ofcials. Lack of
due process and legal remedy is typical of most of the cases, which suggests
indeed that title deeds were often disregarded. The commission gave the
following diagnosis for the ills it had described:
The principal causes of this fatal and intolerable state of things are the non-
diffusion among the Mohammedan people of the idea or sentiment of equality
and the decient administration of justice. Particularly those ofcials who
occupy inferior posts in the provincial administrations have, through their
60 On the Eve of Catastrophe

ignorance, prejudice, and bigotry, never shown any disposition to propagate

and diffuse among the masses the principles of equality, nor have they shown
any aptitude for the regular administration of justice, while these were their
sacred duties, as our newly-crowned Sultan distinctly says in his Hatti-Sherif.22

The report singles out two groups. It points rst to the nefarious role of
Circassian refugees, tens of thousands of whom were resettled in the Arme-
nian-inhabited regions of Erzurum, Sivas, or Diyarbakr in the eastern prov-
inces, and those of Aintab (Gaziantep), Kilis, Zeytun (Zeytin), and
Alexandretta (skenderun) in Cilicia. Indeed, an estimated 500,000 to over a
million Circassians, with the latter gure being more probable, migrated to
the Ottoman Empire between 1856 and 1878. Resettled mainly in Asiatic
Turkey until 1863, they were thereafter also established in Rumelia.23 The
second group comprises Kurdish, Avshar, and Turkish derebeys (lords of the
valley), or leaders of pastoral nomadic tribes. Illegal, forced taxation, arbi-
trary rule, violence toward women, unpunished robberies and murders, and
nonadmission of evidence presented by Christians before Islamic courts of
law, were common features of Armenian life in the eastern provinces.
Land relations in the late Ottoman Empire were colored by the survival in
some provinces of semifeudal practices. In the Sassun region, the Arme-
nian peasant had to pay the har (also hapir or kiar) to the Kurdish tribal
leader or landlord. Remitted yearly in produce or artisanal products, the
har, which symbolized the protection Kurdish lords extended to the
Armenian peasants, often exceeded the amount of taxes levied by the gov-
ernment. In addition, those peasants were expected to perform some com-
pulsory yearly service, known as olam, reminiscent of the feudal corve.
Marriages were an occasion for the beys to claim half of the dowry as gift;
some beneted from the right of the rst night (ius primae noctis, or droit
de seigneur). The Armenian peasantry of the eastern provinces was the only
Christian element of the empire forced to offer winter shelter (klak) to the
Kurdish tribesmen, sometimes for four to six months a year, a practice that
led to violence of all kinds, especially toward Armenian women.
Termen, the Russian vice-consul in the Van province at the beginning of
the twentieth century, described two economic practices that enriched the
Kurdish beys and reduced the Armenian farmers to the status of sharecrop-
pers or serfs. The rst was a loan in cash or grain called selem or selef. Of-
fered to the Armenian peasants on usurious terms, it was repayable in kind
after the harvest. As a result of those lending conditions, the borrowers fre-
quently defaulted on their loans, and lost their land. The second, a practice
closely related to the selef, was known as miribe, whereby the Kurdish leaders
advanced seed and livestock to the Armenians in exchange for half of their
future crop. The combination of these practices brought about the emer-
gence of a landless Armenian peasantry. Ottoman provincial authorities
The Silence of the Land 61

supported the enrichment of the Kurdish leaders, for it resulted in substan-

tial gifts to them.24
Finally, some Armenian farmers, called zer kurri, were bought with gold. In
fact they are bought and sold in much the same manner as sheep and cattle by
the Kurdish beys and aghas. The only difference is that they cannot be dis-
posed of individually; they are transferred with the lands which they cultivate.
The chief appropriates as much as he wishes from their yearly earnings, cap-
ital or goods; and in return he provides them with protection against other
Kurdish tribes.25

Some Ottoman intellectuals were well aware of the plight of the Arme-
nians. Osman Nuri, the popular biographer of Sultan Abdlhamid II, wrote:
There were a few things which caused the conict between the Armenians
and the Muslims. The aggression of the Kurds and the corruption of the
local ofcials.... However much the Armenians were complaining of the
evil of the Ottoman administration, they did not fail to consider the Rus-
sians also as a great danger for themselves.26 If many Armenians of the
eastern provinces subsequently put their hopes in Russia, it was because
they had lost faith in the enactment of Ottoman reforms. Little did they
know that Russian policies from the 1880s on would prove detrimental to
their welfare, since they thwarted various European schemes to introduce
reforms in their regions, turned a blind eye to the occurrence of massacres
in 189596, and even supported the formation of a Kurdish confederation
with a view to creating an autonomous Kurdistan under Russian tutelage.27
Sultan Abdlhamid II was cognizant of the circumstances of the Arme-
nian peasantry, but he chose to co-opt Sunni Kurdish tribes in the context of
a policy of Islamic unity. Such a policy pursued a number of goals: to counter
non-Muslim discontent in the eastern provinces; secure the borderlands
with Russia; and bring the unruly Kurdish population to a great extent
under his control.

Provincial Politics
Abdlhamids policies in the eastern provinces took advantage of the under-
lying causes of the injustices against the Armenian peasantry, which were
rooted in the socioeconomic structure, ethnic composition, and cultural
worldview of the Muslim population of those regions. In the countryside
and in small towns, two well-dened groups, often ethnically Kurdish, dom-
inated society: the aghas and the sheikhs, whose power was founded on
agrarian wealth and religious leadership, respectively. These groups wielded
great inuence on the Kurdish and other pastoral nomadic tribes (airets)
and on the masses in general. In the larger towns and cities, where the cen-
ters of the Ottoman provincial administration were located, the notables
62 On the Eve of Catastrophe

prevailed. After 1839, at the beginning of the Tanzimat period, they were
variously called vcuh-i memleket, vcuh-i belde, mteayyinan, or mutebaran
in administrative correspondence and were given the title of agha. They sat
on the various regional and local bodies (the provincial general councils,
the provincial administrative assemblies, and the municipal assemblies)
created during the Tanzimat era, beneted most from the Land Law of 1858,
inuenced provincial state authorities, and opposed any consolidation of
centralization, which would have curtailed their power. By bringing ofcial
pressure to bear on the tribal leaders and the rural aghas, the notables also
controlled them to a certain extent.
The Tanzimat reforms had promised equality among all Ottomans and
allowed non-Muslims some participation in the newly formed provincial
and local councils, measures that in the medium run threatened to under-
mine the power of the notables in the provinces. Using their positions on
the councils and courts, the latter either delayed or prevented the applica-
tion of these reforms. They were particularly embittered by the reforms that
favored the Armenians, who constituted a plurality in some areas of the six
eastern provinces and a signicant minority in most of them. They held the
Ottoman central bureaucracy responsible for such distasteful changes.28
These notables supported or condoned the various crimes committed
against the Armenian peasantry, and land usurpation in particular, of which
they were sometimes the beneciaries.
The expropriation of the Armenian peasantry gained momentum in
1876 after the accession to power of Sultan Abdlhamid II. While the Kurd-
ish exactions reduced the farmers to poverty, the state legalized the process
of conscation using two mechanisms. The Ottoman authorities cons-
cated the lands of Armenian peasants whose taxes were overdue, and the
Agricultural Bank seized the lands of those who could not pay back their
loans. In the latter case, it mattered little that most of the loans did not
exceed one-tenth to one-fth of the value of the lands in question. The goal
of the Ottoman policies was clear: to settle Muslim immigrants from the
Balkans and the Caucasus in the six eastern provinces (Erzurum, Harput,
Sivas, Diyarbakr, Van, and Bitlis) inhabited by a dense Armenian popula-
tion. To this end, conscated Armenian lands were handed over to the new
refugees.29
The socioeconomic, political, ethnic, and cultural background of the east-
ern provinces makes it easier to understand why the Tanzimat reforms were
irrelevant to the life of the Armenian peasantry. It also sheds light on the
worsening of their condition from the 1860s onward. The Turkish and
Kurdish elites viewed the reforms of the Tanzimat leaders not merely as
acting against their interests, but also as acting in favor of the Armenians.
Their response was simple: they sabotaged the reforms, condoned violence
The Silence of the Land 63

against the Armenians, and refused to bring the guilty parties to justice.
Such behavior reminded the Armenians of their vulnerable, powerless posi-
tion and the central government of its incapacity to change things in the
eastern provinces without the consent and collaboration of the local elites.

The Kurds
The centralization of the empire from the 1840s on and the concomitant
splintering and decay of the pastoral nomadic, tribal, semifeudal organiza-
tion in the eastern provinces had much to do with the overall anarchy and
oppression of the Armenians. In the 1820s and 1830s, the descendant of an
illustrious Kurdish princely family, Bedr Khan (Bedirhan), created a confed-
eration of major tribes, which he ruled with an iron st. This emir, whose
domains in 1845 stretched from Bitlis to Mosul and from Diyarbakir to the
proximity of Urumiya, revolted against the Ottoman state to prevent the
recentralization of his territories and their division into two eyalets (prov-
inces). His 1843 massacre of the Nestorians of Tiyari (region of Hakkari),
carried out with the acquiescence of the Ottoman governors of Mosul and
Erzurum, brought about protests from the British and the French.30 In
response to European pressure, the Porte took action, defeated Bedr Khan
in 1847, and exiled him and his family to Crete. It took another two years to
subdue the other prominent leaders of his emirate who controlled such
regions as Van and Bitlis. The defeat of Bedr Khan and the other emirs
proved disastrous for the Armenians, for their control had tempered the
rapacious, anarchical instincts of their underlings. Though the Armenian
peasantry had not enjoyed a good life under their rule, things had been pre-
dictable, fairly peaceful, and taxes only due to the Kurdish lords. Indeed,
Bedr Khan recognized the value of the Armenian peasantry, who were
willing to colonize abandoned villages or entirely new sites. Without these
Kurdish princes, the situation deteriorated drastically.
In their absence a free-for-all occurred, with tribes violating each others
pastures, and moving through agricultural areas in which they had no eco-
nomic interest, beyond exploiting them as much as they could before
moving on. Kurdish tribes had always billeted themselves on peasant vil-
lages during the winter months. While this was extremely unpopular, partic-
ularly with Armenians, it was an accepted fact of life. In 1838 Ainsworth [a
traveler] had already noted how many Armenians were migrating to Rus-
sian-occupied parts of Armenia.
Now a new tendency arose of [Kurds] stripping villages on departure. Since
this could now be done with impunity, it was not long before Kurdish chief-
tains and their men were also abducting Armenian girls and killing those who
opposed them.31
64 On the Eve of Catastrophe

The fairly tolerant religious tradition of the Kurdish princes was su-
perseded by the fanaticism of the local Su leaders. These sheikhs lled
the power vacuum left by the major emirs, replacing them as mediators
of tribal disputes. As they married into the families of secondary tribal
chiefs, they promoted religious intolerance, which they used as political
weapons against the Christian and Yezidi populations. As one scholar of
Kurdistan puts it, Bitlis ... was transformed from the seat of the cul-
tured Badirkhnids/Rozhakis [princely dynasty] to a center for fanatical
religious activities under the direction of the Su masters of the Naqsh-
bandi mystic order.32 The latter gained considerable power, as the Naqsh-
bandi order was the fastest spreading order among the Kurds, and since
their sheikhly families beneted most from the Land Law of 1858, reg-
istering the lands of their areas in their name.33 Land usurpation also
stemmed from the slow process of Kurdish sedentarization, especially
after the Russian-Turkish War of 187778, which increased demand for
land, a requirement for settled life.34 Finally, a signicant change occurred
in Armeno-Kurdish relations upon the reestablishment of Ottoman con-
trol in the eastern provinces. Prior to that period, most Armenians lived
in areas controlled by powerful Kurdish emirs, who protected them
against exactions carried out by other Kurdish tribes. After the establish-
ment of Ottoman rule and the destruction or exile of the prominent
Kurdish princely families, the remaining Kurds treated Armenians
as Ottoman sympathizers and subjects. They viewed Armenians as
fair game.35
Sultan Abdlhamid II was well aware of this situation, as it served his
main political goals. These consisted of consolidating centralization of the
country, reasserting Islamic superiority, promoting Islamic unity within
and without the empire, and getting rid of the Tanzimat reforms, in partic-
ular those reforms favorable to the Armenians. To consolidate centraliza-
tion, he needed to gain control of the provincial notables and tribal leaders.
He accomplished this by bringing about a rapprochement between state of-
cials and the urban notables under his Islamic anti-Armenian policy. From
1891 on, he co-opted the Kurdish tribes by organizing them with much cer-
emony and pomp into light cavalry regiments directly attached to his per-
son, hence their name, Hamidiye. In his policy of dividing Ottoman
religious, ethnic, and social groups to establish his hegemony, Abdlhamid
used these Kurdish regiments as a threat against the decentralizing ten-
dencies of the urban notables.36 By organizing the Hamidiye, not only did he
endorse the Kurdish exactions against the Armenians, but he also nipped in
the bud the nascent Armenian revolutionary movement in the 1890s. Last
but not least, he brought the Kurds themselves under his control to a signif-
icant extent.37
The Silence of the Land 65

The Massacres of 189596, the Land Question,

and Demographic Policies
Altering the demographic makeup of the eastern provinces by driving
Armenians out of their lands became a pillar of the Ottoman governments
centralization policy from 1877 on. This was also the goal of the Hamidian
massacres of 189596. As late as 1913, thirty-seven years after the Second
Report on the Oppression of the Armenians, Gerald Henry Fitzmaurice,
Chief Dragoman and First Secretary at the British Embassy, reected on
land usurpations, which he considered to be the touchstone of Armeno-
Turkish relations and of the genuineness of Turkish reforms in Armenia.
He went on, placing them in a political context.

The Turkish Government, after the Treaty of Berlin, realising that a sense of
nationality cannot easily live without a peasantry, and that if it succeeded in
uprooting the Armenian peasantry from the soil and driving them into the
towns or out of the country, it would in great part rid itself of the Armenians
and the Armenian question, condoned and encouraged Kurdish usurpation of
Armenian lands. This retail process was repeated on a wholesale scale after
the massacres of 18956. After the revival of the Constitution in 1908, large
numbers of Armenians returned, especially from the Caucasus, and, though
the Committee of Union and Progress repeatedly promised to deal with the
matter, especially in the case of Armenians who are in possession of the title-
deeds of their lands, nothing has been done. . . . This failure to settle the
usurped lands question has been interpreted by the Armenians as evidence of
bad faith on the part of the Committee, and of their secret intention to persist
in the old methods of breaking up the peasantry.38

Fitzmaurice was right. By analyzing the 135 reports presented to the

Ottoman governments from 1890 to 1910, the Commission of Usurped
Lands established by the Armenian Chamber of Deputies on November 16,
1909 found 7,000 cases of such spoliations in thirty-ve districts (sancaks) of
the eastern provinces. What those reports suggest is a systematic policy of
expropriation, abuse, and condoned violence aimed at reducing the Arme-
nian settled peasantry to misery and emigration. The goal was to de-Arme-
nianize the Armenian plateau. The commission established that 741,000
hectares of Armenian lands had been usurped or conscated during the
previous decades. This process led to the massive emigration between 1870
and 1910 of an estimated 100,000 Armenians.39 Adding to that gure the
death toll of the 189496 massacres (probably between 150,000 and 200,000)
and that of the Adana massacres of 1909 (at least 20,000), and taking into
account the massive settlement of Turkic refugees in those same regions
from the 1860s on, one realizes that Ottoman demographic engineering
was quite successful. A secret report sent by one of the Ottoman governors
66 On the Eve of Catastrophe

of the Armenian plateau to the sultan and intercepted by the Austrian mili-
tary attach in Constantinople at the end of 1896 made this obvious. After a
description of the demographic impact of the massacres of 189596, its con-
clusion reads: Now, thanks to the wise steps taken by Your Majesty, the
majority [of the population] is everywhere secured for the Muslims.40 This
telegram must be set against Sultan Abdlhamids broader goals, to wit, his
understanding of the need to Islamize and Turkify Rumelia, and especially
Anatolia, through immigration and assimilation:

Times are no more such that we would stick splinters in our own esh by
welcoming sectarians [sectateurs] of alien religions. Within the limits of our
State, we can tolerate but members of our own nation [peuple] and believers
[sectateurs] in our own faith. We must see to reinforcing the Turkish element:
we must systematically channel back the ux of Muslim expansion which is
coming back to us from Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as from Bulgaria.
This colonization is a vital question for us. Now what we have to do [Il sagit],
by means of this immigration, is to augment not merely national power, but
also the economic power of the Empire. We must reinforce as much as pos-
sible the Muslim element in Rumelia, and quite especially in Anatolia; rst of
all, what we have to do is to assimilate to us the Kurds.41

After the constitutional revolution of 1908, substantial evidence indicates

that the Young Turks essentially ratied the land usurpations that had taken
place under Sultan Abdlhamid and sided with the Kurdish aghas, the land-
lords, and other provincial notables. Land usurpation, forced Islamization,
and sporadic localized cases of violence continued unabated.42 As one
scholar puts it, the CUP [Committee of Union and Progress] as a body
never seems to have envisioned changing the status quo in the countryside
by ending the social, economic, and political domination of the landlords.43
They also encouraged the resettlement of Muslim refugees in the Arme-
nian-inhabited areas of the eastern provinces, and condoned continued land
usurpation.44 Even after the Adana massacres of 1909 had gone unpunished
for two years, the hegemonic Armenian party in the Ottoman Empire at the
time, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun), which had
supported the ruling Committee of Union and Progress since 1908, had still
not lost hope that the Young Turks would carry out reforms in the eastern
provinces.
The central items of the agenda the federation prepared in early 1911,
with a view to reaching an agreement with the committee, are revealing.
They include the end of feudal structures and practices in Anatolia, eco-
nomic development in the region, solutions to the agrarian question (land
usurpation, resettlement of muhacirs, etc.), fair and legal taxation, and safety
of life, honor, and property.45 Despite promises on the part of the Com-
mittee, nothing was done and no formal accord was reached that year. In
The Silence of the Land 67

February 1912, however, after the annexation of Tripoli and Benghazi by the
Italians (November 1911) and during the period of incubation of the forth-
coming First Balkan War (October 1912), the Young Turks consented to sign
an agreement comprising the same items.46 Only in the fall of 1912 did the
Dashnaktsutiun reach the conclusion that reform in the eastern provinces
would never be carried out, as the agreement was a dead letter. It then put
its faith in the internationalization of the reform issue.
The outcome of that process and of painstaking negotiations between the
European Powers and the Ottoman Empire was the Reform Act of February
8, 1914. It divided Eastern Anatolia into two separate Armenian-inhabited
regions, each to be administered by a foreign inspector-general serving as
the supreme civil authority. So central was the land question that the act
stipulated that Agrarian conicts [would] be settled under the direct super-
vision of the inspector-generals.47 By that time, however, the Committee of
Union and Progress had already settled on a policy of Islamization and
Turkication of Anatolia and its immediate surroundings, the only substan-
tially Turkish-inhabited area of the remaining territories of the empire.48

CILICIA: 1830s1914

The tale of ethnic relations in Cilicia is quite different. Cilicia, or Kilikya in

Turkish, is an appropriate example of socioeconomic change in the Otto-
man Empire, for along with the region of zmir it was the most economi-
cally dynamic province of that state at the turn of the century. Encompassed
by the irregular semicircle delimited by the cities of Mersina (Mersin),
Tarsus, Adana, Sis (Kozan), Hadjin (Hain), Zeytun (Zeytin), Mara
(Kahramanmara), Aintab (Ayintap and later Gaziantep), and skenderun
(Alexandretta), Cilicia was made up of two economic units from the mid-
nineteenth century until the end of World War I. Its western part, coin-
ciding with the eyalet (governorate) of Adanait became a vilayet
(governorate led by a vali) in May 1869centered on Adana and the port of
Mersin. The economy of its eastern part, corresponding grosso modo to var-
ious areas of the eyalet of Aleppo, such as Zeytun, Mara, Aintab, Kilis, and
skenderun, revolved around Aleppo and the port of skenderun.49 The
eyalet of Aleppo, in turn, was transformed into a vilayet in March 1866.
These two economic regions were obviously not cut off from one another,
since trade was carried out between them. From the 1880s on, Cilicia was
one of the most coveted regions in the ongoing economic rivalry between
France, Germany, and Great Britain. Yet, the integration of Cilicia into the
world economy did not so much result from this economic competition as
from earlier and quite different events.
68 On the Eve of Catastrophe

Agricultural Development: C. 1800 to the End of the 1850s

What was the economic situation at the turn of the nineteenth century and
why and how did Cilicia emerge as one of the most prosperous economic
regions of the Ottoman Empire by the 1870s?
Research into the history of Cilicia in the eighteenth century is almost
inexistent. One essay tries to close that gap, but it has serious limitations, as
it focuses on the ukurova only (the coastal plain around Adana) and lacks
any statistical data. Although this essay is prone to generalizing on the basis
of scant information, it sketches some of the socioeconomic developments
in the second half of that century.50 Large agricultural estates, or iftliks
(chiftliks), seem to have appeared in the ukurova toward the end of the
eighteenth century as a result of the indebtedness of the peasantry. The
creditors are said to have been the holders of malikne, state lands held as
tax-farms for life by a quasi-private owner whose heirs had preferential
rights in bidding for those lands upon his death. They accumulated some
nancial power, lent money to the peasants, and ended up acquiring the
lands of those indebted.51 On the whole, although some iftliks did exist in
the ukurova in the second half of the eighteenth century, most of them
were undoubtedly formed after 1870.52
Cilicias signicant development stemmed from the conquest and occu-
pation of that region between 1832 and 1840 by brahim Pasha, the son of
the viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. In his capacity as governor of Greater
Syria and of the district of Adana after the peace of Ktahya was signed in
May of 1833 by the Sublime Porte and the Egyptians, brahim Pasha pro-
ceeded to pacify Cilicia and to develop and exploit its rich resources. His
many contributions to Cilicias economic improvement include the system-
atic development of the culture of cotton and the introduction of sugar cane,
the exploitation of the timber and mineral resources available in the Taurus
and Amanus mountains, the building of new roads (for example one that
linked Tarsus with the Cilician Gates), the development of the port of Mer-
sin, and the settlement of Syrian and Egyptian fellahin in the fertile yet un-
inhabited plain of Adana.53 In a nutshell, Egyptian rule revealed that the
economic potential of Cilicia was great and that its exploitation depended on
competent administration. The Ottoman state tried to follow this example
in Cilicia upon regaining control of that region in the 1840s.
This early economic growth of Cilicia continued until the mid-1860s. In
the 1840s and 1850s, most trade was carried out with the interior, Syria and
Cyprus, and trade with Europe was secondary.54 Cotton, wool, wheat, and
barley constituted the main exports. In 1842, the Ottoman government let
out on lease to the Artus Brothers from Marseilles the shing and exporta-
tion of leeches from the province of Adana, a prospering business since
The Silence of the Land 69

1837.55 Imports, such as English manufactures, sugar, coffee, and soap,

came from Beirut and Syria; some came from Cyprus. Rice was imported
from Egypt.56 The paalk (pashalik, or governorate) of Adana had close com-
mercial ties with the region of Kayseri to the northwest as it sent caravans of
camels carrying cotton to the region twice a month.57 Most of the tradesmen
were indigenous, although quite a few were nonresident Ottoman Greeks or
Armenians who had settled in the small city of Tarsus for the winter.58British
consular sources indicate that maritime trade was dominated by Greek and
Arab vessels, the value of their cargos for 1836 being more than ten times
higher than those of British, Austrian, and French vessels combined.59
The increased demand for cereals during the Crimean War (185455)
resulted in the reduction of cotton growing in the Aleppo province.60 This
shift in production did not last long, however, for the outbreak of the Amer-
ican Civil War (18611865) ushered in the second phase of Cilician eco-
nomic development, characterized by the expansion of cotton cultivation.
The war drastically disrupted cotton production in the American South,
which was then Great Britains main cotton supplier. As American exports
to Europe were cut off, cotton prices reached unprecedented heights on the
world market. Prompted by the British (in particular the Manchester Cotton
Supply Association) to improve and develop cotton production, and keen on
taking advantage of increased demand, in 1862 the government of Sultan
Abdlaziz exempted from customs duties cotton-processing equipment and
other agricultural machines. It purchased modern agricultural machinery
and cotton seeds to distribute in cotton-growing areas, and embarked on a
program of road-building to link productive regions with ports. A ve-year
exemption from tithes was also granted to those who attempted to cultivate
cotton in heretofore barren areas.61
Not only did these measures result in a remarkable extension of cotton
culture, but they brought about a signicant increase in the quantities of
cotton produced and exported. A large-scale survey of cotton culture in the
Ottoman Empire conducted by the Foreign Ofce in 1864 established that
land under cotton cultivation in the Adana-Mara-Aleppo district expanded
from 310,000 to 745,000 acres between 1863 and 1864.62 British consular
sources, whose reliability is questionable, also suggest an important increase
in the production of cotton. Some assert that the 1863 cotton crop of the
Aleppo province was ten times as large as that of 1857.63 Others contend that
cotton production increased from 2,800,000 pounds (1,333 tons) in 1862 to
19,600,000 pounds (9,333 tons) in 1863.64 These consular data coincide
more or less with the estimates of Donald Quataert, who suggests that in
1862, the ukurova plain produced perhaps 10,000 bales [1,590 tons approx-
imately]; and in the following two years, annual average levels rose more
than sixfold.65
70 On the Eve of Catastrophe

Along with the increase of cotton production, the rst cotton-processing

factories appeared in Cilicia. In 1864, Justin Daudet, a French engineer,
founded in Adana the rst factory equipped with cotton gins. The next year,
James Kot, a British merchant, built three cotton-sorting factories in Adana,
Mersin, and Tarsus. Soon thereafter, the Tripani brothers constructed a
modern, steam-powered factory with cotton gins in Adana.66 In that same
city, a Mr. Simyonolu owned a cotton-sewing factory, while in Tarsus an-
other such establishment belonged to a Mr. Mavromati.67 These rst at-
tempts at developing processing industries paved the way for the relative
mechanization and industrialization of Cilicia at the turn of the century.

Pastoral Nomads, Their Pacication, and Immigration

During the period of combined industrial and agricultural development
(1830s to 1860s) the population of Cilicia was also undergoing signicant
changes. Population transfers and immigration as well as the forced settle-
ment of the local nomadic tribes were the two main causes of those changes.
Before they were forcibly settled, various Turkoman tribes had domi-
nated Cilicia and its surrounding plateaus, the Ottoman ofcials in the
region merely being powerless gureheads. Their life and that of their
herds were patterned on their seasonal moves. Their summer pastures
were located on the plateaus surrounding Cilicia, in a semicircular, south-
west-northeast area from Ereli to Nide, Kayseri, Grn, and Elbistan.
Their winter quarters, where they would return in late October or the begin-
ning of November, were in the ukurova, on the foothills of the Taurus,
further east in the Gvur Da and the Amanus (Amanos) mountains, and
north of Antakya.68
Their winter quarters on the foothills of the Taurus were a region inhab-
ited by sedentary Armenians engaged in crafts, agriculture, viticulture,
horse-breeding, and mining. Other Armenian settlements existed in the
mountains to the north of the plain and in the caravan centers of the plain,
like Adana and Misis, where they were mostly poor peasants and small
traders.69 In addition to the Turkomans, four Kurdish nomadic tribes also
settled for the summer around Kayseri and spent their winters near Mara.70
According to the anthropologist Wolfram Eberhard, the Turkomans pat-
tern of winter settlement was protable for both the pastoral nomads and
for the Armenians:
As far as the settlers had agriculture, their elds were empty after October;
therefore, they did not mind the tribes having their cattle graze on the elds
and fertilize them. As far as they had arboriculture, the animals also did no
harm to the trees, once they had lost their leaves. Moreover, the nomads
were good customers who bought city products as well as staple food for the
The Silence of the Land 71

winter and sold wool, butter and cheese which they had produced in the
summer camp.71

Under these circumstances, Eberhard asserts that the question of land

ownership probably was originally not relevant,72 for, in view of the eco-
nomic complementarity of the Armenians and the Turkoman tribes and of
the seasonal presence of the latter, there were few causes for conict related
to landholding. These views will be discussed in the second part of this work.
The modicum of order brahim Pasha had maintained in Cilicia col-
lapsed after the evacuation of the Egyptian army in 1840, following the Con-
vention of London (July 15, 1840) signed by Britain, Russia, Austria, and
Prussia with ekib Efendi (the Ottoman envoy), and the British military
intervention in Lebanon (SeptemberNovember 1840), which resulted in
Egyptian defeat.73 Nominally under Ottoman authority, Cilicia was in fact
now under the control of Kurdish and Turkoman derebeys (lords of the
valley) and of various nomadic tribes. The irrelevance of the Tanzimat
reforms in Cilicia and the powerlessness of the pasha of Adana are best il-
lustrated by the adventures of a German traveler who tried to visit the Arme-
nian Catholicos of Sis (Kozan) in October 1853. The English vice-consul of
Adana told him to give up his project, for Kozanolu, a Turkoman derebey,
controlled the region between Adana and Sis, was prone to shoot travelers,
and had successfully repelled an attack by the pasha in the summer.74 Mid-
nineteenth-century travel accounts in Cilicia are rich in such stories.
To put an end to this state of anarchy, the sultans government sent a
military force called the improvement division, or rka-i islahiyye, to pacify
the region. The Ottoman state pursued a number of goals in so doing. It
reasserted the power of Istanbul at a time when the Provincial Regulation of
1858 made governors the chief and sole representatives of the central gov-
ernment in the provinces. It avoided a possible European intervention in
Cilicia after the 1862 Armeno-Turkish communal conicts in Zeytun. Fi-
nally, it could replenish by conscription the badly depleted manpower of the
Ottoman army after the Crimean War. Its immediate goals, however, were
the subjugation of the derebeys and tribal chiefs, the forcible settlement of
the nomads, and the inception of colonization and agricultural develop-
ment.75 Started in March 1865 and led by Dervi Pasha and Cevdet Pasha,
the process of pacication came to a successful close in 1866, notwith-
standing some minor rebellions in that same year and in 1867.
Besides facilitating political centralization, the rka-i islahiyye completed
the second phase of the economic development of Cilicia. It brought the
lands of the ukurova under cultivation, settled the local nomads (at least
in the short run), and improved the infrastructure of Cilicia, such as the
ports of Mersin and skenderun. By promoting the cultivation of cotton, the
72 On the Eve of Catastrophe

rka-i islahiyye laid the foundation for the ourishing economy at the turn
of the century. It also began a new cycle of colonizationa process that had
started under Egypts Ibrahim Pashaby Muslim immigrants, designed to
alter the ethnoreligious composition of the Cilician population and to
improve prospects for agricultural development.
The rst wave of population movement into Cilicia had taken place under
Egyptian rule in the nineteenth century. In fact, brahim Pasha brought so-
called fellahs from Syria to develop the agriculture of Cilicia. He also trans-
ferred black Egyptians and Africans to the region, though their numbers are
not known.76
As a result of the Crimean War, around 20,000 Nogay Tatars were settled
in the Adana eyalet, mostly along the Ceyhan River.77 Between 1859 and
1861, about 30,000 Circassian refugees from the Caucasus, who had ed
Russia following the defeat of Sheikh amils rebellion, were strategically
placed around northern and northeastern Cilicia, more precisely Zeytun,
Mara, and Hajin. The Ottoman government knew that two of those cities
(Zeytun and Hajin) contained an overwhelming majority of Armenians and
that the third (Mara) had a signicant Armenian population.78 The Otto-
man state intended to use the Circassians against them. Even though the
1862 attack of the Ottoman army against the remote, quasi-autonomous
Armenian town of Zeytun failed, it marked the beginning of centralization
in northern Cilicia.79
These rst waves of immigration, especially of the Nogay Tatars and the
Circassians, paved the way for subsequent movements in and after 1878.
This would result in the further Turkication of Cilicia.

.
The Social Impact of the Frka-i I slahiyye and Landownership
(mid-1860sc. 1890)
The cessation of the American Civil War brought about a lowering of cotton
prices, which resulted in the suspension of the governments programs in
1865. Nevertheless, the 1860s marked a shift in the relations between Cili-
cias economy and that of the outside world. The impetus given to cotton
production stimulated the tribal chiefs interest in cultivating it on the vast
stretches of land they had acquired after the pacication. The tribal aristoc-
racy transformed itself into a new class of large landowners, attuned to the
needs of the world market. World demand was felt in Cilicia even more in-
tensely at the beginning of the twentieth century, when cotton again became
a most valuable crop. The ranks of the already extremely wealthy landowners
of tribal origins were then joined by rich high functionaries, judges, and
traders who invested their capital in the land.80 How did this semi-feudal
landlordism result following the success of the Improvement Division?81
The Silence of the Land 73

There are two accounts of how the rka-i islahiyye changed landowner-
ship in Cilicia. The historian Andrew Gordon Gould contends that although
Cevdet Pasha promised to give individual title deeds to the tribesmen, there
is no evidence in the archives of the Ofce of Land Registry (Tapu ve Kadas-
tro Umum Mdrl [italics mine]) that these land grants were ofcially
recorded,82which would have taken place between 1871 and 1884. He
doubts that many tribesmen showed interest in sedentary agricultural life in
the early years of settlement and suggests that the land was in fact put up to
auction, for they had no title to it.83
It is not clear who would have bought those lands and why the govern-
ment, which had planned to forcibly settle the nomadic tribes, would have
allowed them to be auctioned off. At any rate, Gould indicates that minor
tribal dynasties ended up beneting most from the process of settlement,
for the exile of the derebeys, formation of towns and registration of land all
worked together to advance families of secondary importance to the fore.84
Gould does not explain how these dynasties ended up owning a signicant
proportion of the land. On the whole, however, his conclusion ts in part
with the second version of the events.
Unlike Goulds interpretation, which relies on Ottoman archives, Wol-
fram Eberhards draws from popular tales and ballads as well as from oral
history. He sets the question of landownership against the broader back-
ground of Ottoman policies aimed at co-opting the tribal leaders into the
state apparatus by giving them titles that indicated a certain position within
this [Ottoman] bureaucracy, invested them with prestige and guaranteed
them a certain income.85 According to Eberhard, the tribe as a whole
received the land, but in view of most tribesmens reluctance to settle at
once, the leaders family, already much more accustomed to settled life,
remained on the land and began to regard this as their own private land.86
As unused land for pasture kept diminishing, owing to the extension of rice
and cotton production, the nomadic tribesmen were slowly forced to settle
by becoming tenants on the lands owned by their tribal chief. This process
of sedentarization was completed by the subsequent settling of the big tribal
landowners in the local cities, a setting more opportune for their power and
status.87 Thus, they became regional notables who, through intermarriages
with other tribal landowning families, remained powerful until at least the
mid-1950s. In fact, semifeudal landlordism, whereby tribal leaders, aghas,
and beys owned the land, capital, and agricultural implements used by the
peasants, was widespread in eastern and southeastern Turkey in the 1930s
and even as late as the 1950s and 1960s.88
Although Goulds research does not support Eberhards version of
events, his ndings corroborate the latters conclusion that tribal leaders
became large landowners and local notables. The main difference is that
74 On the Eve of Catastrophe

while Gould stresses that land registers dispel the notion that all the land
in a village was concentrated in the hands of one tribal leader,89 Eberhard,
relying on oral tradition, suggests land concentration in the hands of a few.
In order to assess the validity of these two interpretations, one should set
them against the backdrop of the Ottoman Land Law. To be sure, Goulds
version of the process ts with article 8 of the Land Law of 1858, which for-
bade the adjudication or concession of all the lands of a populated village or
commune to its inhabitants as a whole or to one or two landholders, and
stipulated that each inhabitant separately had to receive a title of possession
(tapu) of his lands. Goulds argument also ts with the rst half of article
130, which forbade adjudication of the lands of a populated commune as a
farm (iftlik) to only one individual.
The second part of article 8, however, supports Eberhards thesis. It stip-
ulates that if the population of the commune had dispersed, if its lands
were to be surveyed and registered and new farmers could not be settled on
them and given separate plots, thus returning the village to its original
form (heyet-i asliyesine), then the lands of the commune could be granted
as a whole to one or several persons for exploitation.90 Thus, if most of the
tribesmen left the lands allocated to them after the forcible settlement of
the 1860s, because they had little interest in sedentary agriculture; if the
leaders families, being more aware of their value, stayed on those lands or
claimed ownership to them in the name of their tribe; and if the registra-
tion of those lands occurred between 1871 and 1884; then tribal leaders,
along with those tribesmen who adopted a settled life, would have received
most of them.
Although the Ottoman state succeeded in bringing Cilicia under its con-
trol, by the 1870s it had failed in settling the nomads. Thus, two French
scholars who visited the region in 1874 report that all the stone-built villages
of the Turkomans and Kurds who had been forcibly settled in the mid-1860s
were falling in ruins, for their inhabitants had reverted to their old, nomadic
ways.91 While investigating the local situation in 1879, a British ofcer, Lieu-
tenant Herbert Chermside, reported that the immense majority of these
populations. . . mostly of Tukman [sic] originhave resumed their no-
madic habits; they have deserted their villages and abandoned agriculture,
their houses they have quitted, in many cases destroying them and removing
the beams for fuel or for sale. Ruined, deserted, village after village can be
seen in some districts.92 All those lands could thus have been claimed by
the tribal leaders.
Article 78 of the Land Law also supports this interpretation of how land-
ownership evolved, for it granted to whoever had possessed or cultivated
some state land or land in mortmain for ten years, with or without title deed,
ownership of said land. If it was vacant when occupied illegally, then the
The Silence of the Land 75

person who settled on the land and cultivated it for ten years could still own
it after payment of the tax for the title deed. Only if that person refused to
pay the tax would the land be auctioned off to the highest bidder.93
Two remarks should be made about article 78 and its application. First,
this article shows that the Ottoman state did its best to avoid that state lands
remain vacant and to encourage their exploitation. Second, if one assumes
that Ottoman law was enforced in Cilicia, it made little sense for tribal
leaders who had settled on vacant lands without title deedsand these
were given only after 1871not to pay the tax on the title deeds to own
those lands.
Beyond the law, there were late Ottoman practices. From a legal point of
view, Eberhards thesis seems more probable than that of Gould. In the
Ottoman Empire, however, the Land Law was often not applied or enforced.
Therefore, it is necessary to consider Ottoman practices, as they are often
described in diverse consular reports pertaining to different regions. What
they all show is that the way the law was enforced worked in favor of the
aghas and beys.
In fact, their claims to the land were often based on bribery, local inu-
ence, recourse to traditional right, or simply on the possession of the
title, for they were aware of how important the legality of title was, whereas
the villagers either cannot or will not understand the matter.94 Lieutenant
Chermside aptly describes the behavior of the derebeys and aghas, espe-
cially in the mountain districts, that is, in the region of Marash and fur-
ther north:
These men claim as their own the villagers lands, and take from them in kind
pretty much what they like as rent. If a goat wanted to be killed for guests it is
taken from peasants and so on. In most cases these men being Notables are
themselves the members of local Councils; redress for the peasants is impos-
sible. The local Governor being either powerless, or, more probably, in their
hands, they are far too strong for him to oppose; and if he, as he may be, is
obliged by the conditions under which he obtained ofce to gain money by
dishonest practices, even though naturally upright, their connivance is, of
course, necessary to him. Their power is almost absolute; a man who opposes
them will be thrown into prison on a charge of debt, or on a false charge.95

The degree of lawlessness depicted above was more typical of northeast-

ern Cilicia than of the ukurova around 1880. Yet, the situation in the east-
ern ukurova was not good either. There are indications, for example, that
the disastrous exodus of the nomad populations from their settlements
was not merely the result of the local ofcials powerlessness. As Chermside
reports, Beys of communities have assured me that they bribed the Gover-
nors, and I am inclined to believe it.96 If the beys bribes could efciently
undermine state policies in relation to the settlement of nomads, even more
76 On the Eve of Catastrophe

so could they be potent in matters of private economic interest. For instance,

the Christian Ottomans of the kaza of Payas complained in 1880 that the
kaymakam of the sancak of Cebel-i Bereket and his binba (commander), a
former derebey named Ali Bey, were directly involved in the theft of their
cattle and other valuables.97
Ottoman ofcials, who were not above corruption, were one of the main
causes for the gap between law and its application in the late Ottoman
Empire. Ironically enough, it is these ofcials who produced some of the
archives that contemporary historians use in their research. In a thorough
and detailed report, Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson, Her Majestys Consul-
General in Anatolia, describes the situation: The land registers are false;
lands are assessed from one-fth to one-tenth below their value in the of-
cial records, to defraud the Government; land titles are falsied, village
lands are seized by local Beys and magnates, and I have visited very few
villages in Anatolia in which land and boundary disputes have not been
brought before me.98 A literal interpretation of both the law and the docu-
ments produced in the process of its application may thus result in histor-
ical ction.
Last but not least, the evidence available for the twentieth century sup-
ports Eberhards view. It shows that a small number of big landowners
owned a signicant portion of the agricultural lands in the ukurova. By
way of comparison, his thesis is somewhat parallel to the manner in which
the Land Law was applied in Lower Iraq; Goulds is closer to its application
in the region of Konya, where the registration of tribal settlements and the
distribution of title deeds took place in a more equal fashion, mostly between
1871 and 1884.99

The Economic Impact of the Firka-i Islahiyye and Cilicias Closer

Economic Ties with Europe
From the 1860s on, Cilicias ties with the European economy became tighter.
The strengthening of central power in Cilicia and government action to pro-
mote its agricultural development paved the way for its growing participa-
tion in international trade, which in turn led to an increase in agricultural
production.
The agricultural boom in the western part of the Lower ukurova made
it into a magnet for immigration from the other provinces. This led to the
regions urban development.100 Besides the population of its cities in gen-
eral, that of the Adana sancak as a whole jumped from 75,500 to 174,602
between 1868 and 1890, that is, a 131 percent increase.101 Most of the
immigrants were Ottoman refugees from the Balkans who had ed the Rus-
sian advance in 1877 and the beginning of 1878 and Ottoman Armenians
The Silence of the Land 77

and Greeks from central Anatolia. All of these groups were interested in
making economic gains by cultivating the land and expanding their area of
cultivation.102 In the eastern part of the ukurova, however, the lands on
which tribal groups were forcibly settled were poorer and the settlers less
interested in and knowledgeable about agricultural production. The high
level of mortality among the tribal settlers from malaria, other diseases,
and perhaps the trauma and difculties of sedentary life also explains the
slower growth or stagnation of the population in the eastern ukurova.103
On the whole, the number of villages in the Adana sancak grew by 84 per-
cent between 1868 and 1890, but increased by only 13 percent in the Cebel-
i Bereket sancak in the eastern section of the ukurova.104

Change in the Division of Ethnoreligious Economic Niches and Some

of the Origins of Ethnic Conict
From the 1870s onward the Armenians began to acquire large landhold-
ings. By 187576, many Armenians and Greeks were already rich landed
proprietors around Adana. Their lands likely belonged to Muslim Otto-
mans who became unable to pay their taxes and all their arrears. Seized by
the state, such lands were sold to the highest bidder, usually a native Chris-
tian.105 Another reason for the transfer of property to Christians was the
inability of their former Muslim proprietors to repay a debt to a Christian
moneylender. From the late 1870s onward, this process resulted in foreclo-
sure.106 Armenians and Greeks continued to acquire land into the 1880s.107
By 1891, they were introducing new methods and machines in commer-
cial agriculture, to which their landholdings were devoted: Despite draw-
backs of climate, improvement and progress in agriculture are everywhere
apparent, chiey induced by the native Christian (chiey Armenian) and
foreign Greek elements, which are largely engaged in agricultural enter-
prise, and are slowly, but surely, ousting the apathetic Moslem element.108
Beyond apathy, a factor difcult to appreciate, the long conscription of
Muslim youth away from homethe Christian Ottomans were not con-
scripted thenmust have been conducive to this situation. Around Mer-
sin, Adana, and Tarsus, this transfer of land beneted urban moneylenders
and merchants.109
Economic factors contributed signicantly to the Adana massacres of
1909. An eyewitness to the killingshe later played a leading role in Cilicia
during the Turkish War of Independence and became the deputy of Adana
to the rst Grand National Assembly under Kemal Atatrkgives full vent
to the Turkish bitterness about the growing wealth of the Armenians and
their steady migration to Cilicia. He provides some insights into the percep-
tions and motivations of the Turkish masses.
78 On the Eve of Catastrophe

The Armenians were the richest and most prosperous, well-to-do class in the
region [memleket]. In the city of [Adana] and towns, there were few crafts-
people and artisans among the Turks. The Armenians had reached a high
level of life.... In every eld, they were ahead of the Turks.110

Massive popular participation in the massacres was prompted not only

by the opportunity of looting, but also by the opposition of the Turkish pop-
ulace to the new technology (tractors, reaping-machines, steam-powered
threshers, etc.) that Armenian landholders were introducing from abroad,
as evidenced by many cases of Luddism.111 So great was the Muslim resent-
ment at Armenian large-scale immigration to Cilicia and consequent land
purchases that a Turkish historian considers these two phenomena to be the
main causes of the Adana massacres of April 1909.112 A traveler, whose prej-
udice toward Jews and Armenians is noticeable, reports that Armenians
wanted to create a kingdom in Cilicia, an idea commonly held by Muslims
at the time.113 While exposing the unconceivable unwisdom [sic] which
Armenians so often display in their larger dealings with Moslems, he
claims that the name of the future king was bandied about, no aloof nebu-
lous personage, but, it is said, a well-known Armenian landowner of the
Cilician plain, held in particular disfavor by Moslems. That the imagined
king of the imagined Armenian kingdom of Cilicia was a much disliked
landowner is telling, for his socioeconomic background was an ideal target
for the hatred of the Turkish masses.114
There were several reasons why Christians were able to acquire and
invest in land starting from the second half of the 1870s. First, the various
credit-giving institutions the government had created failed to relieve the
Ottoman peasants of their chronic indebtedness. The provincial credit
banks (memleket sandklar) established in 1863, the public benets banks
(mena sandklar) founded in 1883, or the Agricultural Bank (Ziraat
Bankas) created in 1888, all partook in inefciency, corruption, and blatant
lending bias in favor of big landowners. While the Agricultural Bank fared
better than the older institutions, its funds were inadequate for the task at
hand and were often used by the government and the sultan for expenses
unrelated to agriculture. The poorer cultivators, who needed loans the most,
shunned the bank, for they disliked its lengthy paperwork, preferred the
faster and more informal services of the moneylenders, and were reluctant
to use their property as collateral. Landless sharecroppers and wage la-
borers, having little else to offer as security but their labor, simply could not
use the Agricultural Bank.115
The second reason that allowed Christians to acquire land was a legal
one. In the past, Islamic law and article 115 of the Land Law of 1858 had
prevented lenders from seizing mortgaged lands owned by the state but dis-
tributed to the debtor (arazi-i mrye) or lands the debtor held in mortmain
The Silence of the Land 79

(arazi-i mevkufe).116 Articles 116 and 117 also restricted the possibility of
transferring mortgaged lands to a creditor as a result of an unpaid debt.117 A
law promulgated in 1871, however, modied the Land Law and allowed the
creditor to ask legal authorities to put up for auction as much of the above-
mentioned lands as well as the vakfs msakaffat and mstagallt of the
debtor as was needed to pay off his debts.118 Various legal provisions re-
stricted arbitrary behavior on the part of the creditors. For instance, if the
debtor showed that income from his real estate could pay off his debt within
three years, that income was ceded to the creditor and the properties not put
up for auction.119 That law had been preceded by two others in 1869 and
1871 allowing the sale of these types of properties after a debtors death.120
The 1871 law explains partly why land transfer to the Christians seems to
have occurred mostly from the mid-1870s on. Prior to that time, the real
estate of the debtors was not put up for auction, except for privately held
lands, or mlk. Two factors may explain the lag between the date of the pro-
mulgation of the law and the transfers of property.121 First, the law provided
that the debtor should be given an opportunity to repay his debt with income
derived from his real estate within a period of three years, if he so wished or
could. Second, it took time to enforce legal changes in the Ottoman Empire.
The underlying reason for the transfer of real estate to non-Muslims was
article 14 of the Hatt- Hmayun (Imperial Rescript) promulgated on Febru-
ary 18, 1856. In it, Sultan Abdlmecid stipulated that as the laws regulating
the purchase, sale, and disposal of immovable properties are common to all
the subjects of My empire, foreigners will be allowed to own landed prop-
erties in My States. This stipulation was conditional on foreigners respect
for Ottoman laws, payment of dues similar to those of the indigenous popu-
lation, as well as on subsequent arrangements with foreign powers. It fol-
lowed that non-Muslims were given the right to acquire all kinds of
Muslim-owned lands, including freehold property (mlk) or those held by a
pious foundation. As landownership had a political and religious signi-
cance in the eyes of the Muslim Ottomans, they opposed the sale to non-
Muslims of what they viewed as Muslim lands. Ottoman ofcials did their
best to undermine (under various legal, religious, and customary pretexts)
the changes that article 14 ushered in.122 A fairly knowledgeable traveler
reported that non-Muslims were usually tilling the worst elds in the worst
locations, so that he could recognize at a distance whether a village was
inhabited by Christians or Muslims.123
It took more than two decades for article 14 to be partially enforced in
some areas of the empire. In 1860, a British consul reported that fear ... of
unfair treatment deters ... [Christians] from becoming landholders.124 The
European Powers expatiated in the second half of the 1860s on the failure of
the Ottoman ofcials to put into practice the right of the non-Muslims to
80 On the Eve of Catastrophe

buy cultivable lands and urban real estate. Equality before the law, another
promise of the Hatt- Hmayun, was a mere abstraction.125 Since article 14
of the Imperial Rescript had mostly remained a dead letter, a new law was
passed in 1876, reasserting the right of non-Muslim Ottomans to buy farms
and cultivable lands belonging to the state or to vakfs even when an old
usage had prevented them from doing so.126 Discrepancy between the law
and reality was a common feature of the late Ottoman empire. Commenting
on the Land Law of 1858, a former French consul, high ofcial of the Impe-
rial Ottoman Bank, and authority on Ottoman land legislation wrote: As in
the case of the great majority of Turkish laws, the regulations in regard to
land tenure are prepared intelligently but frequently are not respected in
their execution.127

CONCLUSION

Agrarian relations played a central role in the emergence of the Armenian

Question and in interethnic relations. They were shaped by extralegal fac-
tors such as land usurpation, illegal taxation, and violence; by legal changes
(the Land Law and its partial implementation); and by political transforma-
tions. The relatively stable early nineteenth-century order prevailing in east-
ern Anatolia under Kurdish rule and in Cilicia under Egyptian rule was
replaced by anarchy and interethnic competition resulting from the mod-
ernizing projects of the Tanzimat, of Sultan Abdlhamid II, and of the
Young Turks. These aimed at greater administrative centralization, the sed-
entarization of nomadic populations, the resettlement of Muslim refugees,
and more effective Ottoman state intervention.
The causes of interethnic tension varied from region to region. In east-
ern Anatolia, Muslim power, weak centralization until the 1870s, and the
prevalence of nomadic, seminomadic, and settled Kurdish tribalism allowed
usurpation of Armenian lands and growing tensions among the various
nationalities. In Cilicia, Armenian economic success, which resulted from
the development of cotton production under Egyptian rule and the subse-
quent integration of that region in the world economy, from their predomi-
nance in the crafts and trade, and from the delayed application of the land
laws, led to resentment. Both patterns fueled the hatred that made riots,
massacres, and genocide possible.
In the nal analysis, the role of state power must be emphasized, for the
state initiated and administered the sedentarization programs and refugee
resettlement policies that are essential to our understanding of agrarian
relations and interethnic conict. The Ottoman State determined the geo-
graphic patterns of refugee resettlement and of land allocation, and it alone
The Silence of the Land 81

had the ability to manipulate interethnic relations, which in turn had conse-
quences for landholding and land usurpation.128 From the 1870s onward,
the role of the state became even more signicant as Sultan Abdlhamid II
encouraged anti-Armenian exactions and the Young Turks condoned them
and refused to correct the injustices of the sultans reign. To be sure, the
state and its Land Law were not the only agents shaping land allocation and
landholding patterns. State and societyprovincial administrators, nota-
bles, and tribal leadersnegotiated both allocation and landholding.
However, extralegal processesland usurpation and what looks like fraud-
ulent land registrationas well as power relations were often central to the
negotiation.
The case of Cilicia after the Constitutional Revolution of 1908 suggests
that modernization in the Ottoman context contributed to bringing eth-
nicity and interethnic competition into prominence. Indeed, modernization
has been marked by the breakdown of social stratication based on birth,
occupation, or religion; by theoretical, and sometimes effective, equality
among the members of a given population; by the development of some
form of participatory politics (at the municipal, regional, or national levels);
and by large-scale commercialization of agrarian economies and the rise of
protoindustrial and then industrial activities. It is worth noting that global-
ization, which includes the spread of some form of free market economy
and of democracy among the less developed countries, has also led to an
accentuation of ethnic identities and a proliferation of ethnic antagonism in
the late twentieth century.129
In order to give a voice to the land, in this case to eastern Anatolia, the
power differential between ethnic groups and between the state and those
groups should be integrated into the narrative of late Ottoman history.
Power is a crucial factor, for propertyin this case landis not merely a
thing, but a right. As the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others
have argued, property is power and so is at the heart of the political ques-
tion.130 Armenians had been deprived of that right in the eastern provinces
and their accession to that right generated resentment in Cilicia. To quote a
Turkish scholar: it is no exaggeration to say that while Armenian deporta-
tion and massacres resolved the so-called Armenian Question for the cen-
tral government, it did the same with the agrarian question in favour of the
usurpers.131
4

What Was Revolutionary about

Armenian Revolutionary Parties
in the Ottoman Empire?

Gerard J. Libaridian

Armenian political parties were founded at the end of the nineteenth century
for the purpose of giving a new direction to their Armenian constituents.
They spoke, negotiated, and made decisions on behalf of the Armenians; and
they sought to dominate the Armenians cultural and religious institutions
while transforming their collective identity. Alternately called nationalist
and secessionist, these parties were considered separately from the polit-
ical order of the Ottoman Empire, as though they were alien to the states
body politic. Often overlooked is the fact that these parties were active players
in Ottoman political life, so active, in fact, that by 1908 they were widely con-
sidered as having replaced the church as the main intermediary between the
Ottoman authorities and their Armenian subjects. They worked with Young
Turk and other Ottoman organizations, took part in Ottoman elections fol-
lowing the Young Turk Revolution in alliances with other Ottomans, held
seats in parliament, and deliberated on matters relevant to the whole empire.
Even less recognized is the fact that participation of Armenian political
parties in Ottoman politics arose from their ideological underpinnings and
programs, even though they have been seen, by and large, as nationalist
and antistate. The shadow cast by the genocide is so vast that it obscures to
this day our sense of the choices that were available to the leaders of the
Ottoman state, and, to a lesser extent, to the Armenian parties, prior to that
event. The Ottoman leaders had the option to work with Armenian and
other groups to solve the problems of the Ottoman Empire and, in the end,
they decided not to. The Armenian parties could have acted strictly on an
antistate platform or, as the church did, not act at all. Instead they strove
toward conditional cooperation.

82
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 83

Ofcial Turkish historiography portrays these parties as independence-

seeking terrorists, as if the pursuit of independence were blameworthy in
and of itself. This depiction is cited as the reason why Armenians repre-
sented a threat to the Ottoman state and to Turks in general, and, by impli-
cation, were deserving of massacres, or worse. Turkish condemnation of
Armenian political parties is based solely on the rhetoric of the writer rather
than on the words and deeds of those being judged. The problem, simply
phrased, is that historians and others who have tried to tell the story of Turk-
ish/Armenian relations toward the end of the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries have been unable to imagine a common history, one that
accounts for the complexities each found in its situation and the areas where
common thought and action evolved. Scholars must apply a more integrated
approach if the critical period of Turkish/Armenian relations leading to the
First World War and the genocide are to be accurately reconstructed. Unless
we understand and assess adequately the lines of contact between the two
political forcesTurkish and Armenianin the waning decades of the
Ottoman Empire, we will continue the sad situation of writing two separate
histories: one of the Armenians, and the other of Turks, a situation that
perpetuates the polemical views of the past that have dominated the litera-
ture on the subject.
This chapter does not aim to present a history of the revolutionary parties;
nor is it a history of their relations with the Ottoman state. Rather, it is an
attempt at delineating boundaries of political imagination developed by
Armenian revolutionary organizations at their inception, boundaries cre-
ated and crossed by ideology and praxis.

ARMENIANS AND TURKS

In the context of late Ottoman society, the terms Armenian and Turk are
inadequate, denoting ethnic categories in their most inert, essentialist
sense. Turks and Armenians are individuals and groups whose actions
cannot be explained strictly by their ethnic identity. Various groups of
Turks and Armenians adopted different, and at times opposing policies
at different times and under different circumstances. Being Turkish or
Armenian cannot be equated with having predetermined, self-evident, and
immutable political agendas. Similarly, terms such as nationalism and
revolutionary are problematic when substituted for precision.
To understand the evolution and character of Turkish-Armenian rela-
tions within the Ottoman Empire, it is necessary to make another clarica-
tion. Armenians are commonly referred to as a minority, but what does
that really mean? The term rst came to be used after the World War I to
84 On the Eve of Catastrophe

describe ethnic or religious groups in emerging nation-states. Empires did

not have minorities; they had peoples who had been conquered. Such termi-
nology ascribes a large degree of inevitability to the ultimate domination of
an undened majority and takes for granted that right to majoritys su-
premacy. This ahistorical approach is useful if the historian wishes to reduce
Armenians to a mere ethnic or religious group, easily categorized as a vic-
tim (or a threat). For more sophisticated analysis, however, the term mi-
nority introduces confusion and places limitations on the contexts within
which Turkish-Armenian relations can be understood. Furthermore, it is
not clear in what geographic context Armenians can be described as a mi-
nority. Armenians certainly did not consider themselves a minority within
historic Western Armenia, even if numerically they did not constitute a ma-
jority. (In fact, no ethnic group constituted a majority at that time.) When a
people live on their historic lands, they may be feel privileged or oppressed,
conquered or dominant, but not a minority in the sense of the postWorld
War I nation-states.
Of the various terms chosen to describe the Armenian political parties
under discussion, revolutionary is one that the parties themselves used.
One question we should ask, then, is: What was revolutionary about these
parties? This in turn leads to others: What problem or problems did they try
to resolve? And if they constituted a threat, whom or what were they threat-
ening? What, in fact, was the character of the conict with which historians
and others struggle?
The parties in question are the Social Democratic Hnchak Party (estab-
lished in 1887, Geneva) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation or
Dashnaktsutiun (1890, Tbilisi).1 These are the parties most closely identied
with developments in the Ottoman Empire and most commonly discussed
by scholars who study Turkish-Armenian relations prior to the First World
War. The question concerning the revolutionary nature of these parties is
critical for our understanding of their ideologies, strategies, and actions.
Within such a context we can also analyze their attempt to reshape the per-
ceptions of Armenians both by others and themselves, as well as their
self-conscious distancing from institutions that had previously spoken on
behalf of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. These differences between
the political parties and these institutions characterized both what was most
promising and most risky in the formers undertakings.
The establishment of these parties was part of an effort to turn Arme-
nians into more active participants in their own history and the history of
the Ottoman Empire. The founders idea was to transform Armenians from
objects of history into participants, which required no less than the transfor-
mation of the Ottoman Empire itself. In trying to achieve this goal, these
parties also assumed responsibility for their choices, decisions that must be
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 85

assessed in the larger context of Ottoman state priorities and the Great
Powers intervention in Ottoman affairs.2
The rst program released by the Hnchak Party stated: The situation of
the Turkish Armenian people is today the sickest. And it is the responsibility
of the whole of the Armenian people to cure that disease today.3 The lead
article of the second issue of Droshak, the Dashnaktsutiun organ, begins
with the following assertion:
Any political party undertaking a struggle for an ideal can hope to achieve
success or failure [sic] only when the following two conditions are present:

1. When the people, on whose behalf the struggle is being waged,

understands that that struggle is necessary and participates in that
struggle directly or indirectly, at least through its best representatives.
2. If the means and methods selected to wage that struggle correspond
fully to the present realities and the demands of circumstances of the
historical moment.4

The second point was an indirect criticism of the Hnchaks. As I will show,
even the revolutionaries did not agree among themselves.

REVOLUTIONS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

Many sources cast the term revolution in a negative light, suggesting

potential for violence and recklessness, as opposed to a quest for change.
Additionally, since a revolution challenges the concept of state, it is, by
denition, contemptible to those who place the interests of the state above
all. This view still prevails in current debates concerning the Ottoman
Empire and its relations to its Armenian population; the Young Turk and
Kemalist revolutions are considered acceptable, because they saved the
state; the Armenian revolution is not. I pose the question about the revo-
lutionary nature of these parties in a somewhat neutral sense: more pre-
cisely, I am concerned with what was radically new in the ideas, ideologies,
goals, and behaviors of the parties in question; what made the founders of
these parties use the term revolutionary to describe themselves; and how
the closely related question of the loyalty of Armenians can be assessed
within this perspective.

The Party System

The rst, and possibly most revolutionary innovation introduced by the
Hnchak and Dashnaktsutiun parties was the establishment of a political
86 On the Eve of Catastrophe

party structure in Armenian life, that is, their attempt to redene the Arme-
nian population as a political rather than a religious community. The Arme-
nian Apostolic Church had dominated the political scene for centuries,
owing its primacy to the disappearance of Armenian statehood and the feu-
dal system that had dened political life in Armenias early history. The
church was assigned the role of speaking on behalf of the Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire due to the millet system established by the Ottoman sul-
tans, a religion-based system that regulated the communal life of non-Mus-
lim communities such as Christians. In doing so, the Ottoman state was
also able to limit the areas in which Armenians had any kind of self-gover-
nance or voice, while providing for extraterritorial self-government in many
civil matters.
Smaller political groups had formed earlier, the Armenakans (1985) being
the most prominent among them, and they can be partly credited with intro-
ducing the idea of parties as an alternative mechanism for the Armenians
expression of grievances in the Ottoman Empire. Yet none had been able to
develop the political scope and momentum to become nationwide parties
that could supplant the church as the Armenian mouthpiece.
Despite the formally high position in which the church and its leader, the
patriarch, were held in the eyes of Ottoman administrators, it became in-
creasingly evident that their power was limited and, depending on the griev-
ance, also useless. When the millet leadership, once democratized in the
1860s, attempted to reach beyond the connes of church-related affairs
(clergy, churches and monasteries, properties, civil affairs, and to some
extent education) to deal with social and economic problems plaguing the
poor Armenian population in the provinces, the Porte made it clear that
such concerns were not within the mandate of the patriarchate or the struc-
tures in its control. Archbishop Khrimian, the hero of the common people,
resigned in frustration in 1873, accusing the government and the leaders of
the Armenian community in Istanbul of blocking every effort at putting the
plight of the provincial Armenians at the center of the National Assemblys
agenda. Later, in 1878, when he returned from Berlin disappointed with the
results of the Treaty of Berlin, Khrimian gave a number of sermons in Istan-
bul and the provinces. He explained that the reason why Armenians had lost
ground in the treaty was that the weapon they were using to bring about
change was made of paper, and that to take a share of the soup being of-
fered in Berlin an iron ladle was needed.
It is true that for decades a new intellectual class, in both the Ottoman
and Russian sectors of the Armenian people, had challenged the status quo,
from the battle against classical Armenian in favor of the vernacular, to the
spread of general education, and their disputing the preeminent role of the
clergy. Yet, at least in the Ottoman Empire, this was not enough to challenge
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 87

the church-led millet structure, nor did it call into question the role of the
church as the representative of the Armenian people. The rise of the revo-
lutionary parties was a conrmation of the failure of the church struc-
turewithin the patriarchate and National Assembly in Istanbuland of
the inability of reformist and liberal intellectuals to adequately address is-
sues which they were not equipped to deal with. In fact, the Ottoman sultans
never intended the church to perform a political function within the state,
serving instead the interests of the state by depoliticizing the Armenians.5
During their early years the parties functioned without any formal con-
tact with the church. One exception was the Kum Kapu antisultan demon-
stration in Istanbul in 1890, organized by the nascent Hnchak party, which
started with a challenge to the leader of the millet and the church. Armed
leaders of the local Hnchak organization rushed into the cathedral where
Patriarch Ashekian was ofciating. They stopped mass, read their demands
on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and demanded that the patriarch join
the demonstration. When Ashekian refused, he was forced (some say
beaten) to get into his carriage and lead the demonstration until govern-
ment forces intervened. Alerted by a priest, they surrounded the demonstra-
tors, released the patriarch, and jailed the leaders. Ashekian denounced the
actions of the demonstrators and apologized for them. Four years later he
would be the target of an assassination attempt.6
Within the new community redened by the parties, differences between
Apostolic, Catholic, and Protestant Armenians, for example, became irrele-
vant, relegated to the realm of personal belief. The parties imposed, at least
conceptually, a new distinction: between those who adopted a larger vision
for the future and were ready to contribute actively to achieving it, and those
who accepted the status quo. The parties consolidated the secular/ethnic
understanding of the Armenian, battling against a denition based on
religion. Focusing on the plight of the peasants and craftsmen in historic
Western Armenia, they also reterritorialized the concept.7 The revolutionary
shift brought about by these parties was rst and foremost within the Arme-
nian world. The radical intelligentsia and guerrilla leaders replaced the
church-based and, to a large extent, wealth-based leadership. Thus the rise
of the revolutionary parties signaled nothing less than a change of govern-
ment within the Armenian populations of the Ottoman, but also Russian
and Persian empires.

Empowerment Of The Weak Through The Positive Laws Of History

The Hnchak and Dashnaktsutiun parties were founded by Russian-Arme-
nian radical intellectuals who modeled their organizations after Russian
secret associations. They also borrowed elements from the Balkan peoples
88 On the Eve of Catastrophe

struggles for independence. Both recruited adherents among Ottoman

Armenians, segments of which seemed ready to nd new expressions of
resistance, having concluded that armed rebellion against Ottoman oppres-
sion was the only option. Paradoxically, the new leaders were self-appointed;
there was no other way, it seems, to establish political parties dedicated to
the liberation of Ottoman Armenians. Their perspectives combined reliance
on the inexorable forces of history with the actions of individuals. They
had the march of history on their side, they argued, and were convinced that
history would prove them right; their claim to legitimacy was the ostensible
scientic basis of their ideology. Yet legitimacy on the ground was to be
secured through the self-sacrice of the ghters who would emerge. The
Armenian Question, with its universal, national, and individual dimen-
sions, was a struggle that was part of the larger struggle for human pro-
gress; and, Armenian political aims were seen as integral to the laws and
values of progressive humanity as dened by the Western Enlightenment
and the French Revolution. This legitimacy had to be earned, rather than
inherited, or else transferred from success in other elds.
Party programs articulated this new universalism, offering a whole-
some and coherent worldview, and claiming a rational alternative to inher-
ited wisdom. A scientic approach to history and its future displaced
tradition and reex as the principles of political discourse. This univer-
salism, linked to the liberation of people with common problems, would
eventually open the path for a variety of strategic choices.
The founders of both the Hnchak and the Dashnaktsutiun parties framed
the Armenian Question as part of a universal struggle based on the laws
of history. The Hnchaks, who professed to be closer to the mainstream Marx-
ist views of the time described their Long Term Goal thus:

The current social organization of humanity relies on injustice, on the power

of the st, and on slavery. Based on economic slavery, that organization pro-
duced in mankind strong sts, strong rulers, who exploit the majority of
humankindthe working worldand thus create the injustice of inequality
within the relations of mankind. That inequality is expressed in every dimen-
sion of human life: economic, political, social as well as material . . . This
complex and unjust state of affairs can be reformed only through the socialist
organization [of society] by the respect for [the principle] of direct legislation
by the people and [through that means] giving every member of society to
participate factually in all decisions of public relevance ...
The Hnchak group, being socialists in their fundamental beliefs, accepts
the socialist organization of society as its ideal, its ULTIMATE GOAL [capital-
ized in the original] as it applies to the Armenian people and its fatherland.8

The Dashnaktsutiun, too, saw the Armenian plight in the context of

human experience:
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 89

Since the time when mankind set foot on the path to civilization, since the
time when it started to have its history, there have been at all times and in all
places rulers and subjects, exploiters and the exploited, those who cause suf-
fering and the sufferers ... That is how it was in the past, that is how it is
today, but that is not how it will be tomorrow, we are convinced of that. We can
see very clearly how the ruling classes are falling more and more physically
and morally, how labor is increasingly achieving its rights, how the exploited
is moving with giant steps toward its complete victory ...

But how can that future be achieved?

There was a time when the reformers of mankind appeared with this or that
ideology, with their credo, to cure all mankinds ills, to eliminate all inequal-
ities and to establish brotherhood, liberty and equality. . . . Many centuries
passed, one ideology replaced the other, many reformers were martyred; yet,
nonetheless, we can see that a segment of humanity refuses to be convinced
[of the need for change]the segment that must be convinced since it holds
the key to injusticesince it is not in its interest to do so. Try to convince the
English lord that he has no right to exploit the Irish, try to convince the highly
educated factory owner that he is unjustly pocketing the labor of the worker,
try to convince our beys and aghas that they should leave peasants alone, try to
convince, nally the Kurd that he had no moral right to expropriate the home
and the family of the man of Alashkert.9

The Dashnaktsutiun program analyzed the social and economic con-

ditions in the Ottoman Empire and then listed the grievances specic
to Armenians and peasants, and those relevant to all subjects of the
Ottoman Empire that had to be addressed. These conditions, argued the
authors of the program, could not be removed by goodwill and good
intentions or utopian ideologies; change could only come through armed
revolution.
The Dashnaktsutiun had tried in an early stage to include the Hnchak
Party in a federation of revolutionary and oppositional groups. That attempt
failed, probably because of the Dashnaktsutiun leaders suspicion of the
wholly ideologized view of the world adopted by the Hnchaks. The Dashnakt-
sutiuns rst formal program, formulated over a two-year period, and pub-
lished in 1892, stated:

The sad and cruel lessons of history have demonstrated clearly that to achieve
victory it is not sufcient for the suffering segments of humanity to under-
stand its own condition, or even to develop the willingness to see it changed;
that it is necessary to obtain real power. But since that power cannot be created
overnight, and since that power is the consequence of existing conditions and
changes accordingly, it is obvious that any form of social organization, how-
ever ideal, cannot be instituted at once, and that such an institution becomes
possible only through the reform of existing conditions.
90 On the Eve of Catastrophe

It is for this reason that we do not come forth as proponents of this or that
Utopian ideology; it is our purpose that our program be basic. Our attention is
focused on the present condition of our land. Our goal is to subject ... to an
objective critique the causes that have given rise to the present condition ...
to identify the causes of that condition based on the positive laws of the social
sciences; and at the same time to wage a relentless struggle against the factors
that have conditioned these causes.10

The Dashnaktsutiun program constituted, in part, a direct critique of the

Hnchak approach. Obviously, the two parties had major differences, even
though they both relied on positivist and universal laws governing the devel-
opment of human history, at least in their respective understanding of the
Armenian condition. Initially evident in their conict on the ideological
level, such differences had immediate consequences for their practical
goals.
The main goal of the Dashnaktsutiun was reform in Ottoman Armenia.
In fact, the rst issue of Droshak published the reform plan for this region
developed by Patriarch Nerses Varjabedian in connection with the treaties of
San Stefano and Berlin in 1878. The plan called for autonomy for the region,
an Armenian governor-general appointed by the sultan in consultation with
the Great Powers, equal participation of Armenian and Muslim populations
in administrative and legislative bodies, and measures to improve the con-
ditions of all. The explicit endorsement of the patriarchal plan created a
problem for the new party, however: If the Varjabedian plan was acceptable,
then what reason was there to create a new revolutionary party? In an edito-
rial note, the second issue Droshak claried:
In the previous issue of Droshak we had written that our current demands are
approximately the same as those formulated in the plan presented by Nerses
Patriarch. Because these words have given cause to misunderstandings, we
deem it important to state, that when writing that we had in mind a circum-
stance when the Sultan, through his own goodwill, would introduce the
reforms in Turkish Armenia proposed by Nerses Patriarch, which is very un-
likely. By his behavior, the Sultan is convincing everyone that there is no salva-
tion for Turkish Armenia but through revolt.11

The Hnchaks, who had set socialism as their ultimate aim, needed to
bridge the present conditions and a full-out socialist regime. The problem
was solved when the partys founders introduced the intermediate step of
independence for Turkish Armenia. The Ottoman system was so backward
and decrepit, they argued, that it was impossible to hope for a direct leap
into socialism. Independence became the immediate goal of the party. In
practice, however, the party wavered. In an introductory note to the Hnchak
program, the founders explained that their program was tentative, and that
it would be possible that various elements would be revised over time.12 The
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 91

objective of Turkish-Armenian independence was nally abandoned after

the sixth [congress], the Hnchak Congress of 1909, following the Young Turk
Revolution of 1908 and the establishment of a parliamentary system in the
Ottoman Empire. In the public statement relating the decisions of the Con-
gress in Istanbul, the Hnchaks wrote:
The Congress, in view of all the above factors and in support of class struggle,
in accordance with the principles of social democracy, emphasizes one more
time the necessity of the actualization of the harmony of nations, recognizing
as a condition the necessity of the right of historical-individual existence of
nations, rejecting on one hand the idea of secession (separatism), and, on the
other, the supremacy and domination of one nation over the other.13

For both parties the question of independence was a complicated one.

The Hnchaks considered independence to be a necessary tactical step, but
following the Young Turk Revolutionwhich they interpreted as the
necessary bourgeois transformation of Ottoman societythey decided
that socialism was in fact possible in the Ottoman Empire as it stood. For
the Dashnaktsutiun, the goal was a more modest, if less clearly dened,
freedom. This meant liberation from the oppressive political system and
an end to Ottoman policies that led to the disintegration of the Ottoman
Armenian economic base. Their agenda clearly stopped short of requesting
the establishment of an independent state, focusing instead on reform.
In July of 1904 a major confrontation erupted between Armenian guer-
rilla ghters and the Ottoman army in Sassun, west of Lake Van. Two of the
leaders of the Sassun rebellion sent a letter to the foreign consuls who
were interested in the demands of the revolutionaries. The lengthy letter
was signed by the then-well-known Dashnak guerrilla leaders Andranik and
Serop, and states:
Our enemies cry out: Armenians seek no reform, they demand sovereignty
and independence! To this we solemnly declare that the agitation and efforts
of the Armenian revolutionists have never aimed at, and do not now aim at
any interference with the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or at any
form of political separation. Armenians claim no sovereignty over the races
living with them; they simply claim such administrative reforms as will pro-
tect their persons and property from the attacks of the local authorities, from
Turks and from Kurds.14

Independence would not become an ofcial issue for the Dashnaktsutiun

until 1919, when an independent Armenia had already been established in
the Russian segment of historic Armenia.
Although both parties shared the vision of a European-style democracy in
the future autonomous or independent Armenia, their differences far out-
weighed their similarities. Disagreement devolved into an antagonism that
92 On the Eve of Catastrophe

lasted for many decades, through the years of armed struggle, the constitu-
tional period following the Young Turks Revolution, the genocide, the es-
tablishment of independent, then Soviet Armenia, in Eastern Armenia
ruled by Russia, and in the Diaspora.
The ideological difference between the two parties was summed up by
Kristapor Mikayelian, one of the founders of the Dashnaktsutiun, during a
debate in 1903:

You are speaking of the surplus labor that the bourgeoisie exploits to its ben-
et; but we are dealing with surplus blood which is being shed everyday
because of the Turkish government.15

The Hnchaks remained the dominant party among Armenians until the
massacres of 18941896, when hopes for autonomy evaporated. A erce
debate within the Hnchak Party regarding the causes of the massacres and
the role of socialism led to a schism. Many Western Armenian Hnchaks
left the Social Democratic Hnchak Party to establish the Veragazmial or
reconstituted Hnchak Party. They regarded socialism as a distraction
that may have antagonized the sultan and the Great Powers more than
necessary.
The Dashnaktsutiun, too, had to make adjustments in its party strategy
following the wave of massacres. But the more practical ideological perspec-
tive it had adopted made it possible to focus more on adjustments: the new
strategy included a wider organizational basis and better preparation; ex-
ploring more seriously cooperation with Kurdish tribes and groups, an ac-
tive search for allies among Muslim, including Turkish liberal groups; a
European campaign more geared toward intellectuals and the public and
not limited to government leaders, and so forth. These adjustments intro-
duced following the massacres allowed the Dashnaktsutiun to emerge from
the crisis as the dominant Armenian party; the Hnchaks never fully recov-
ered from the shock of the massacres and the split that followed.
The antagonism between the parties continued, despite appeals from
both parties to work together for the common cause. The Hnchaks criticized
the Dashnaktsutiun for being opportunistic and for exaggerated claims of
success and inuence, all aimed at securing nancial resources. The
Hnchaks, true to their professed Marxist position, were also miffed by the
insensitivity of the Dashnaktsutiun toward ideological purity. In their 1910
congress, they berated the Dashnaktsutiun for their meddling in the affairs
of the patriarchate, and their attempts to control it by electing a political
patriarch: They argued that the church has a religious character that must
be respected; that religion is a matter of conscience; and that the church
belongs to the faithful and as a socialist party the Hnchaks would not want
to disturb the peace of the community of the faithful.16
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 93

The Dashnaktsutiun, in turn, had long ago found the Achilles heel of the
Hnchaks. A lead article in the main organ of the party, written by one of the
founders of the Dashnaktsutiun Rostom (Stepan Zoryan), conveys the char-
acter of the acrimonious relations:

The Hnchak group appeared on the arena as a socialist revolutionary [group].

From the start it stated that it will not be satised with a democratic national
independence; rather, its goal is socialism. But what was this socialism and
how it could be actualized it was impossible to form a clear opinion from the
articles in Hnchak [the Hnchak organ], because the editorial group of the
Hnchak itself had no specic idea and still does not today.
A chaos, a cacophony of ideas and the total absence of specicities: this is
what one can see in the views expressed by the Hnchak.17

Rostom continued his critique of the Hnchaks, accusing them of not

having learned from the seven years of their experiment with the future of
Armenians. Rostom was the most Marxist of the three founders of the
Dashnaktsutiun.
The differences between the parties became more marked after the
Young Turk Revolution. The Dashnaktsutiun embraced the change, while
the Hnchaks displayed more caution. The latter considered the Young Turk
Revolution a truncated one, which is how they had described the Midha-
tian reforms of the 1870s. The Hnchaks had spurned earlier advances from
the Young Turks in Paris, considering them too nationalistic.18 The Dash-
naktsutiun continued its policy of cooperation with the Young Turk move-
ment by aligning with the ttihad ve Terakki or Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP) Party and trying to work through it to achieve its own goals.
That cooperation lasted until 1915.
In view of the events that were to follow, these differences appear funda-
mental. Should Armenians have concluded soon after the euphoria pro-
duced by the Young Turk had dissipated that there was no hope from the
Ottoman government for reforms of any kind? Should Armenians have
expected the worst and returned to the idea of a defensive war, prepared for
an all-out defense, as the Hnchak advocated, instead of trying to nd a com-
promise with the ruling ttihad ve Terakki, the Turkish party in power? To
what extent the differences between the two parties were ideologically
inspired and to what extent they reected practical/political considerations
is a question yet to be studied.
This antagonism, essential to the Armenian history, and disregarded by
most scholars, reached its climax with the Sovietization of Armenia. The
First Republic of Armenia, where the Hnchaks had little inuence, was
established in 1918 under the Dashnaktsutiun leadership. When the repub-
lic was Sovietized at the end of 1920, the Dashnaktsutiun became a party in
94 On the Eve of Catastrophe

exile. The Hnchaks, true to their original beliefs, endorsed it as the realiza-
tion of their goal, a socialist Armenia.

The Nation As Class, with a Focus on the Peasantry

The new political parties introduced the concept of class struggle to the dis-
course about the Armenian situation, having each adopted a form of so-
cialism as the basis of their scientic approach to history and politics. Until
their founding, the tensions within the Armenian millet of the Ottoman
Empire had been articulated as a conict between azgaser (nation or com-
munity lover) and hayrenaser (fatherland lover or patriot), loosely corre-
sponding to the Armenians of the urban centers who controlled the millet
institutions and the poor Armenians in the provinces. Azgasers were con-
tent with the amenities provided by the millet system, and their identity was
dened mainly by religion, on which the millet system itself was based. In
essence a diasporan, extraterritorial world of Armenian-ness, the focus on
community affairs constituted an adjustment to a new identity away from
the historic homeland, an adjustment to an extraterritorial identity centered
around the church and ostensibly, faith, which unlike a homeland could not
be carried by a emigrants such as their ancestors had been.19 The Azgaser
world, as represented by the Armenian millet National Assembly in Istan-
bul, was consumed by an agenda limited to azgayin or community institu-
tions, such as churches, schools, and cemeteries. The provincial Armenian
issuesprovincial from the point of view of the Istanbul community
leaderswere inconveniences at best, if not threats to the well-being of the
middle- and upper-class Armenians in Istanbul, the segments of Armenian
society that dened the azg, or the nation.
A hayrenasers main concern was the worsening situation of Armenians
in the provinces. During the second half of the nineteenth century, deterio-
ration due to economic transformation (monetization of taxation, wholesale
destruction of home industries due to increased imports from an industri-
alizing Europe) led to increased and often wanton lawlessness, land grabs
by resettled Muslim refugees from Russian and Balkan wars in areas inhab-
ited by Armenians had created a situation that reached crisis proportions for
Armenians in the eastern provinces or in historic Western Armenia. These
Armenians constituted the majority of the Armenian people and lived as
they had for centuries, on their ancestral lands in the Ottoman Empire, even
if other peoples had come to join them later.
In political terms, the conict within the Armenian community pitted
the conservatives and the liberals against one another. The Azgasers, or
conservatives, considered any attempt to use millet structures for the pur-
pose of advancing social and economic grievances a subversion of the
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 95

system. They viewed such attempts as a threat to the interests of the na-
tion and to their own delicate economic standing vis--vis the imperial gov-
ernment. The hayrenasers considered the millet structures as a legitimate
vehicle for the articulation of grievances most threatening to those living in
the historically Armenian provinces.20
Once the political parties framed their cause as one of the poor and eco-
nomically threatened, including the peasantry, they redened the new polit-
ical community, or the people, primarily as a class. Their opposition to
the status quo was not motivated strictly by the non-Armenian-ness of the
state but also by its oppressive and exploitative nature. According to their
worldview, wealthy Armenian classes constituted part of the problem, un-
less they actively contributed to the struggle. The parties adopted socialism
and the class struggle paradigm as the framework within which to explain
existing conditions and alignment of forces inside and outside the Ottoman
Empire. According to these parties, the Armenian people could avoid class
struggle among themselves if ethnic afnities with their oppressed and
exploited brethrenthe majority of the peoplecompelled rich Arme-
nians to transform themselves into supporters of the cause by transcending
their class interests and supporting the greater cause. Instead of the well-to-
do urbanites who were only concerned with their own security, the parties
would take the reins, determining Armenian interests, and giving a voice to
the poor that constituted the Armenian nation.
For party activists, the nation stood for more than an ethnic groupor a
minorityit was an active agent in its history, and did more than simply
exist, content with preserving its cultural or religious peculiarities. Yet, in
another sense, the parties considered the nation to be less than an ethnic
group, since its basis would be an economically dened people that could
dispense with the privileged elites who did not accept the primacy of the
cause of the poverty-stricken majority. In a sense, the people represented
a democratized nation.
The parties socialist perspective placed the peasantry and the poor front
and center. This was no accident. The founders of these parties were Rus-
sian-Armenians who had been radicalized and sensitized to the problems of
the peasantry by the social struggles within the Russian Empire. The Russo-
Turkish war of 187778 and its aftermath had brought the plight of Otto-
man Armenians close to home.21
It was not clear to these intellectuals, however, what role socialism
should play in the actual management of the struggle for liberation. Did the
parties represent the whole nation or only a segment or a class? Class
struggle could be a guide only in its most general sense, placing in opposi-
tion poor and rich, oppressed and oppressor, distinctions for which
Ottoman Armenians did not need a whole new science. The lack of clarity
96 On the Eve of Catastrophe

may have been deliberate, giving the parties room to adjust their tactical
thinking.
For the Hnchaks, for example, the strategy to achieve the immediate goal
of independent statehood was altogether at variance with socialism; it in-
cluded the use of existing resources, such as the last remnants of the impov-
erished Cilician nobility in Zeytun, and collaboration with the rebellious
Armenians who still kept their arms in that region. Yet, with a few strokes
of the pen, the Hnchaks not only introduced independence and socialism,
but reconciled the two, placing them along a continuum in which one led to
the other. The idea of an independent Armenian state was not altogether
new. Elements in Armenian society, from clergymen to merchants had spo-
radically pursued independence and devised projects to this effect.22
The Hnchaks, however, were the rst to introduce the idea of a modern
nation-state. Except for the analysis of socialist and Marxist writers, in-
cluding Marx himself, on the Eastern Question, the transformation of
Marxist ideology inspired by the Communist Manifesto into a political pro-
gram for the Ottoman territories was, to say the least, a genuine innovation.
It was a new approach, even if it was really an oversimplication (if not dis-
tortion) of what Marx and others had articulated as the positive laws of his-
torical development. The Hnchaks easily undertook the task of transformation
by sequencing but not integrating the national and social projects. If, as
Marx claimed, a socialist society could only evolve from a bourgeois society,
then it was rst necessary to create a bourgeois society; and since a bourgeois
society could not be created within an Ottoman administration, it was
necessary to create an Armenia where that would be possible.
The Dashnaktsutiun, less ideological than the Hnchaks, adapted its dis-
course to local conditions, and used socialism to color its demands for
reforms and a projected transformation of the Ottoman state. Socialism was
also useful when the party decided to bring in European public opinion to
press their governments on reform in the Ottoman state; it provided the
bridge to European socialists critical of imperial designs and protective of
oppressed peoples. Yet socialism remained a thorny issue for many, if not
most, Ottoman Armenians; it ultimately caused the split of the Hnchak
Party in 1896, and brought the Dashnaktsutiun close to a similar fate in 1907.
The parties focus on, and idealization of the Armenian peasantrythose
still living on their historic lands in the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to the
mostly urbanized diasporas in the Russian and Persian empires, and the
relatively secure peasantry in Eastern or Russian Armeniatended to terri-
torialize an Armenian problem that had initially arisen as a broader social
and economic issue. The concept of a Hayastanwhich denotes Armenia
in Armenianhad never disappeared from the political and popular imagi-
nation. In fact, it did not disappear from maps of the Ottoman Empire until
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 97

its waning days. After all, the Empire was proud to name the various lands
it had conquered. In the early debates within the millet structure regarding
reforms in the Eastern provinces, the Armenians from Istanbul referred to
those in the provinces as Hayastantsis, or people from Armenia. Their use
of the term referred to a geographic location, and not to the place of their
forefathers. But in the provinces Hayastantsi meant much more. Folklore
had kept alive the memory of the kings of Armenia (the last Armenian king-
dom in the historical lands had collapsed in 1045), as well as those of Arme-
nian Cilicia, where the last king was taken to Egypt as a prisoner after having
been defeated by the Mamluks of Egypt in 1375. For most provincial Arme-
nians, the term Hayastan evoked happier times, before the yoke of the
Turk had been pressed on their necks.
The Treaty of San Stefano rst gave political impetus to the term Hayas-
tan when it referred to the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire as the
Armenian provinces, a term that denotes not only the population to which
article 16 referred but also the history of these provinces. The term was
revised in article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin to the Eastern Provinces, and
concerned Armenians considered this a major defeat.
Patriarch Varjabedians proposal for reforminitially highly praised by
the Dashnaktsutiunwhich included the idea that the provinces in question
be governed by an Armenian governor-general, constituted the next step in
the process of territorialization. The solution offered by Khrimian, that is,
reform through the millet system, was no longer viable. With the treaties of
San Stefano and Berlin reforms were to be implemented by integrally
merging territory and governance.
The territorialization of the Armenian Question had not occurred in an
intellectual and historical vacuum. The Armenian cultural revival in the
nineteenth century had produced a national history and geography, reviving
memories of Armenian dynasties. These scholarly revivals had also been
translated into a popular revival with the printing of textbooks along the
same lines and the spread of education through an expanding Armenian
school system. It was the political parties nonetheless, most of all the
Hnchaks in their rst program, that took the territorialization of the Arme-
nian Question to a new level: democratic administration by subjects-turned-
citizens in a republican Armenia. The Hnchaks, followed less enthusiastically
by the Dashnaktsutiun, proclaimed the necessity of providing governance to
Armenians, by Armenians, in historic Armenia, because that was a political
requirement, if not a natural right, since the Ottoman Empire had been in-
capable of achieving any reforms. Armenians were ready for the progress
and civilization that the Western Enlightenment had ushered in, while the
Ottoman stateand by extension the Turkish peoplewere not. Arme-
nians were different from Turks, the Hnchaks argued, meaning they were
98 On the Eve of Catastrophe

capable of understanding the laws of nature, including the nature of history;

after all, the Turks had not complained about their regime, and had shown
no signs of an awakening. Territoriality was integral for the success of the
Hnchak program of change. Historical memory and immediate exigencies
had coalesced in an ideological leap.
For both parties, a key component in this step was the establishment of
democracy in the Armenian state or autonomous region that was to be cre-
ated. The point was to turn subjects into citizens. Ottoman and Turkish
rulers would not be replaced by Armenian ones; there would be no rulers. If
in the popular imagination Armenian kings symbolized happier times, in
the imagination of the founders of the political parties, the right to govern
of future ethnically Armenian leaders would be contingent on a democratic
electoral process, in which all citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion,
would be equal and participate. The problem was governance; the solution
was a democratized society of the kind introduced by the French Revolution.
Beyond programmatic pronouncements, changes, and differences, the
parties shared one fundamental motivation: the economic base of the ma-
jority of the Ottoman Armenian population in the provincespeasants,
farmers, craftsmen, and small merchantswas disintegrating fast; impov-
erishment and dispossession of land had accelerated; and the people were
threatened.
The Eastern Armenian background of the party founders presented a
problem for some Western Armenians. This background would also create
problems for the founders in later historiography. Yet, their personal in-
volvement in Russian narodnik (populist) movements, based on the idea of
the liberation of the Russian peasantry, had made them sensitive to the
problems of the peasantry in Western Armenia, in ways the azgasers and
even some of the hayrenasers, with a more urban orientation, were not. The
parties ideological framework, whether the orthodox Marxism of the
Hnchaks or the looser socialistic one of the Dashnaktsutiun, had become
the intellectual tools with which the founders of these parties transformed
the Armenian people from object into the subject and agent of history.
Universalistic and positivistic frameworks also mediated between the foun-
ders idealism and the existential threat they sensed to the life of Armenians
in the heartland of historic Armenia. They considered the peasantry and
their rural economy to be the last bastion of a threatened people, whose ur-
banized elements had shown signs of embourgeoisement in the capitals
and big cities of the Ottoman and Russian empires, and that had turned
Armenians into azgasers at best.
The parties, it seems, were responding to two different, at times conict-
ing, impulses: The historical expectation of salvation from the West, im-
plying a territorial dimension; and the political process that involved change
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 99

from within: The exhaustion of domestic means for reform, from the Tanz-
imat to the democratization of the millet and the hopelessness that domi-
nated the postBerlin conference period. The parties moved from one to the
other for a dominant framework, in a manner that was often confused
between tactic and strategy, and between strategy and purpose.

Armed Struggle and Terror

Another dimension of the parties revolutionary nature was their willing-
ness to use arms and shed bloodtheir own or othersas part of their
activities. Non-Muslims being prohibited by law from carrying arms, this
decision constituted a daring rejection of the established order. Taking up
arms against Ottoman imperial rule was not unheard of; Greeks and other
Balkan peoples had provided precedents. But this phenomenon was new in
Ottoman Armenian history, especially as a strategic choice to be exercised
by the people. Certainly there had been acts of resistance to encroachments
by the Ottoman central government, for example in Zeytun, which had
nominal autonomy, the most celebrated instance being the rebellion of
1860. But such incidents were strictly defensive efforts, even though poets
and intellectuals interpreted resistance and revolt as signs of national re-
vival and celebrated them as symbols of a new Armenian ghting spirit. The
armed struggle advocated by the parties aimed at changing the status quo,
and at acquiring new rights rather than preserving old ones. The parties
spent enormous amounts of energy not only preaching their rights to peas-
ants, and inspiring self-condence in them, but also developing channels to
smuggle arms from Russia and Iran. They celebrated new heroes, and com-
posed songs to put in relief their feats against Turkish and Kurdish oppres-
sors and their martyrdom.23
Despite all this, it was never clear what the purpose of taking up arms was.
On the most basic level, armed resistance was an assertion of the natural
right of self-defense against marauders, armed local chieftains, exactions,
and kidnappings. If the government was not capable or willing to protect the
lives of its subjects, then the subjects had the right to protect themselves.
Beyond self-defense, however, why did the parties arm themselves? Were
armed activities and guerrilla warfare tactical means or a strategic choice? At
times, operations amounted to raids on gendarmerie stations or punitive
actions. On occasion, the parties geared up for rebellions: against the local
chieftains, against regional authorities, and against the state.
The parties knew they did not have the numbers to overthrow the regime
or even the local rulers through a solely Armenian revolution. They real-
ized they would have to enlist the support of other ethnic and religious
groups, such as the Kurds, normally considered an enemy. This was part of
100 On the Eve of Catastrophe

the new strategy adopted by the Dashnaktsutiun following the 189496 mas-
sacres. They connected with various Ottoman opposition groups, especially
in Europe, where most of them were headquartered. The parties also
engaged European public opinion, especially socialist leaders and parties, as
a means of compelling the Great Powers to refocus on the Armenian Ques-
tion. The Dashnaktsutiun was particularly active and successful in this arena.
In their program, the Hnchaks had adopted a policy of cooperation and win-
ning the sympathy of other peoples, such as Assyrians, Yezdis, and Kurds,
but there is little evidence that they focused on it in practice.
Until 1908, the two parties continued to entertain hope for external inter-
vention, even if on many occasions, especially at the start of the movement,
they insisted that Armenians could not rely on foreign powers to achieve
their goals (the Great Powers had been tested in this respect, and had failed).
Some large-scale operations were also considered as tactical steps to either
ignite a larger uprising or compel the Great Powers to deal with the Arme-
nian Question by intervening in favor of reforms. The parties knew that
such activities would invite harsh measures from the government, and that
blood would ow. They preempted that concern by arguing that the lifelines
of the people were being severed any way, and that there was no salvation
without sacrice. In the end, they believed, the sacrice would be justied.
The provocation thesis often cited in this respect is correct to the extent
that leaders of the parties accepted the consequences of their strategy,
although it is unclear if they expected the harshness of the Ottoman reaction,
particularly the onslaught of the 189496 massacres. The argument that the
parties invited repression and massacres, in order to achieve Great Power
intervention on their behalf is a false one. It is an argument that takes for
granted the existence of Ottoman policies of collective punishment of a whole
people through massacres, and thus shifts the responsibility for massacres
from the Ottoman government to the victims. Other states have seen rebel-
lions, and have not massacred a whole people. Leaders and states that did
massacre were duly held responsible for their actions, or should have been.
The armed struggle continued after the 18941896 massacres, albeit with
some changes. The Dashnaktsutiun, now in ascendancy, determined that the
struggle required better and more widespread preparation. Meanwhile, the
massacres had produced the May 1895 Reforms, proposed by the Great
Powers on the basis of the Treaty of Berlin, and accepted by the sultan. True
reform was soon forgotten.
One aspect of the armed struggle deserves special attention since it oc-
curred in both parties, and that is the terror, the assassination of individ-
uals who were held personally responsible for acts considered particularly
odious by the revolutionaries. The Hnchak program devotes a whole section
to this dimension:
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 101

The purpose of terror is to protect the people, when it is subject to persecu-

tion, to raise its spirit, to inspire and elevate a revolutionary disposition among
them, to show daring on behalf of the people protesting against the govern-
ment, and thus to maintain the faith of the people toward the task on hand, to
shake the power of the government, to abase its reputation of being powerful,
to create extreme fear [in its ranks]. The means to achieve these goals are: to
annihilate the worst Turkish and Armenian personalities within the govern-
ment, to annihilate the spies and the traitors.24

The Dashnaktsutiun, too, adopted assassination as a defense against

external and internal enemies. This tactic continued to be used by both
parties throughout their history, although the early abuse of the method
against Armenian victims prompted the Dashnaktsutiun to decree in 1892
that only the central authority of the party had the right to issue a verdict to
that effect, and specify that: The death sentence against Armenians can be
applied only in cases of proven treason.25
The best-known case of terror was the Dashnaktsutiun attempt in 1906 to
assassinate Sultan Abdlhamid II, the man widely held responsible for the
18941896 massacres. The Dashnaktsutiun had planted a time bomb in a car-
riage outside the mosque where the sultan prayed every Friday. The attempt
would have been successful had the sultan, a close adherent of his routine,
not been delayed when walking out of his Friday prayer.26 It is useless to spec-
ulate what would have happened if the attempt had been successful. That the
assassination attempt heightened the sultans paranoia, there is no doubt.
The revolution, to the extent that it involved the use of violence, as-
sumed many forms. Assassination attempts against the worst enemies of the
revolution became a critical component of the Armenian struggle for libera-
tion. In many cases there were practical consequences, such as the elimina-
tion of spies and traitors, who, nonetheless, were replaced easily by the
Ottoman authorities. The assertion of the right to armed violence seems, in
the end, more an act of desperation than a strategy that would bring about
the changes sought by the parties. Such use of violence represented, possibly,
an assertion of the right to resist. A nation cannot be forced to die, without
resisting, without hoping for the best, and doing its best to survive. In the
end, the confusion the parties showed in their tactics and strategies did not
stem from their ideologies. Rather, it stemmed from the existential choices
they were confronted with, once they decided that the people should resist.

One Nation Concept

Both parties imagined all three segments of the Armenian people, then
living under the Ottoman, Russian, and Persian empires, to be part of one
nation. They considered the international borders separating them to be
102 On the Eve of Catastrophe

articial and of secondary importance. The parties focused on Ottoman

Armenians because of their urgency of the social and economic situation.
According to these parties, the Ottoman Armenian plight ought to have
been of concern to all Armenians. The Hnchaks were the clearest formula-
tors of what might be called a trans-state nation, when they articulated as
their ultimate goal the liberation of the three Armenian segments from im-
perial rule and their unication in one federative state. In support of their
operations in Turkish Armenia, both parties created organizational bases in
Russia and Iran.
From the start the Dashnaktsutiun had focused on Turkish Armenia. And
yet, when the tsarist government initiated a policy of Russication and
attempted to conscate Armenian Church properties and shut down Arme-
nian schools during 19031905, the Dashnaktsutiun used its organization in
Russian Armenia and the Caucasus to mount a resistance to the move. It
was not difcult for the socialistic Dashnaktsutiun to join forces with the
left wing in Russia during the rst Russian Revolution against the tsarist
regime in 1905. More importantly, when civil war broke out between the
Tatars and Armenians in many parts of the Trans-Caucasus, the Dashnakt-
sutiun was mostly responsible for the organization of ghting units. That
shift included the redeployment of experienced Western Armenian guerrilla
leaders from the Ottoman to the Russian sector. In addition, both parties
provided support to the Constitutional movement in Iran in 1907.27
That year was critical for the Dashnaktsutiun, not only because the party
was now involved in Russia and Iran, but the Young Turks had become
active themselves, providing hope for change in the Ottoman Empire as
well. The fourth World Congress of the Dashnaktsutiun met in Vienna in
1907, under these difcult, yet promising circumstances. Western Arme-
nian representatives, especially some of the guerrilla leaders, were critical
of the partys engagement in Russian and Iranian politics; they accused
Russian Armenian leaders and intellectuals of forgetting why the party
was founded. Some young socialist Russian Armenian participants pro-
posed that the party be split along Turkish-Armenian and Russian-Arme-
nian lines. The party could not ignore the struggle for social and political
rights of Russian Armenians, they argued, but this battle had a different
character than the one in Turkish Armenia, which was largely a national
liberation struggle. The leadership managed to preserve the integrity of
the party, arguing that the unity of the nation was necessary for the suc-
cess of the movement, whatever their particular character in each case.
The party also claried its goals by amending for the rst time the pro-
gram of 1892: now the Dashnaktsutiun aimed at the establishment of fed-
erated Ottoman and Russian states, an Armenian component being part
of each.28
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 103

Eventually the two parties, and especially the Dashnaktsutiun, would also
be involved in the Constitutional movement in Persia. This extension of the
struggle to the Russian and Persian sectors was also a challenge to the extra-
territorial nature of the millet system, within which an Armenian living in
the Balkans or Istanbul had the same standing as the one in Van or Erzurum.
In fact, Armenians in Istanbul had dominated the politics of the millet,
which made it easier for the Ottoman government to control its direction
and activities. The concept of nation had changed, and so had its leadership.
The involvement of the parties in the revolutions of the three empires
where Armenians lived constitutes as much a manifestation of the serious-
ness of their devotion to constitutionalism as an indication of their national
character.

Struggle for the People by the People

Finally, these parties worked toward making grassroots participationboth
in politics and in a ghting forcea part of the transformation process. The
role assigned the people in the strategy of achieving freedom was unlike that
in earlier efforts at liberation, where the people were seen at best as a
tactical means. Having proclaimed the welfare of the people as the goal of
the movement, the parties realized that their participation was integral to the
process of bringing about change. The parties measured other valuesfrom
loyalty to the territorial dimensions that the transformation might imply
by the degree to which the people could be part of a solution to the problem.
Under section 4 of its program, the Hnchak founders proposed four sep-
arate components to the struggle. Other than the rst, terror, these were
(a) widespread revolutionary organizations among the peasantry, (b) wide-
spread revolutionary organizations among the workers, and (c) revolution-
ary-war organizations among both the peasantry and the workers. These
people-based organizations were considered essential not only for the up-
coming struggle but also for the creation of social and political institutions
after the successful war and the defense of the independence.29
Criticizing those who relied on demonstrations by the few to advance
their cause, the Dashnaktsutiun argued that such measures had only limited
impact:
Demonstrations alone, in distant centers at that, have never liberated and will
never liberate a people. [Liberation] requires a steady disposition and a battle
that has potent force which can occur only with the direct participation of the
majority of the Armenian people.30

Whatever role they assigned to the Great Powers in their sometimes con-
fused and confusing strategies, the revolutionary parties could not conceive
104 On the Eve of Catastrophe

of liberation without the full participation of the people. It was their liber-
ation, after all, and not simply a matter of changing rulers. Both parties
went to great lengths in their programs to detail the nature of that future
society, that future Armenia, imagining it to be as fully democratic as the
constitutions of most states today. For the most part, the parties considered
using ethnicity as a basis of that future society a questionable element,
seeing that it was forced on Armenians by the discrimination of an Ottoman
state that refused to reform and accept principles of governance to provide
equality, fairness, and justice with a view of allowing citizens and society to
develop to their fullest potential.
This is not to say that the parties were not also inspired by the precedents
of the Balkan peoples struggles for independence or, as in the case of the
Hnchaks, of the Lebanese struggle, won in 1863, all with the support of the
Great Powers. Nonetheless, in the programs of both parties the nature of a
future society was at least as important as the vessel within which the so-
ciety would evolve. And both programs were sufciently exible that they
could accommodate a reformed Ottoman state. This exibility was as much
a product of the ideological roots of the founders as of their realization that
their strategic options were limited. Where Armenians were most vulner-
able were areas that were no longer homogeneous in population. The party
leaders argued that, although the democratic nature of a future society
would protect non-Armenians and non-Christians, an Armenian-based so-
ciety was necessary, because the Turkish or Muslim peoples had manifested
no drive toward the highest ideals of a progressive society, whether socialist
or socialistic, and certainly no impulse toward democracy.
In the parties view, the Armenian people constituted a beacon of enlight-
enment and human progress. Did they need to wait for all their neighbors
to wake up, while their existence was being destroyed by the policies of a
despotic sultan who made sure the fundamentals of the relationship
between state and subject would not change?
The sultan considered Armenians to be a Christian conquered people
who should be satised with their status as a People of the Book, a distant
memory of the Prophets tolerant view of non-Muslims. According to him,
Armenians should be satised with the generosity of Ottoman rulers, who
had allowed them to be constituted as a millet and to run their internal af-
fairs. Affairs of state were not, and could not possibly be the business of
Christian communities. The Armenian revolutionary political parties saw
the nation as following an ideological trajectory that was closer to the mod-
ern understanding of a nation than that assumed by the Balkan peoples in
their liberation struggles. In fact the Armenian trajectory foreshadowed the
national liberation ideologies of a century later, with their strong social and
economic components, in addition to their anticolonial foundation. With
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 105

their insistence on democratic governance, the Armenian parties were

threatening to the Ottoman and Russian empires.
Even between the two parties there were certainly differences in the po-
litical imagination of the nation. The Hnchaks imagined an ideal hu-
manity, and decided the nation was the vessel, or the means to achieve it
(a convenient metaphor for reconciling inherent contradictions in their ide-
ology). The Dashnaktsutiun dened the nation as the peasantry and the
downtrodden who were in need of and worthy of salvation. They felt the
nation should be allowed to develop to its fullest potential, and thus become
part of humanity.

A QUESTION OF LOYALTY

The activities and very existence of the revolutionary parties raise the question
of loyalty. It was a concern for the Ottoman leaders of the late empire, and
remains one for ofcial Turkish historians. Yet, such a question is problem-
atic. Applying todays values to a historical period when the imperial mindset
was dominant is a grave error. In addition, those who accuse Armenians of
disloyalty never make it clear what the charge consists of: Were they supposed
to be loyal to the empire, its territorial integrity, the sultan or the CUP?
The fusion of progressive ideologies and the worsening conditions of the
majority of the Armenian population, especially in the provinces, had pro-
duced programs aimed at creating a better society. That is where, nonethe-
less, the parties priorities rested ultimately. These parties sought to change
the nature of the state and its relations with its subjects; in short, to transform
subjects into citizens that had a contractual agreement with the state. The
Ottoman state would be acceptable if it were based on the equality of its
citizens, and if its purpose were their welfare, not merely its self-perpetua-
tion. The Ottoman government could claim the loyalty of its subjects only if
and when it changed the basis of its legitimacy.
Loyalty to the state could have been possible. All their programmatic
goals notwithstanding, the parties were ready to endorse the state, and did
so after 1908. But such loyalty could no longer be taken for granted or of-
fered unconditionally. The Ottoman state and its system were concrete real-
ities for its subjects, not abstractions dened by the sultan and, later, the
CUP. Within such a context, Armenians could have been part of the solu-
tion, if the men in charge had cared as much for their subjects as they did
about the regime. Instead, having permitted, if not encouraged, the situa-
tion to deteriorate, and having created an environment where armed resis-
tance, rebellion, and appeals to the Great Powers remained the only options,
the sultan and the CUP deemed the Armenians as a threat. That demands
106 On the Eve of Catastrophe

for such political and economic reforms came under the rubric of a revolu-
tion may be misleading to some extent. That this revolution was supported
by a segment of the Ottoman society that happened to be ethnically Arme-
nian, is the actual conundrum. Were the land and economic crises less sig-
nicant because they were felt most by Armenians who were able to
articulate and, at some point, try to act on them? Who was responsible, ulti-
mately for the Armenianization of the economic and political crises?
What should Armenians have done in order not to be seen as a threat or as
disloyal subjects that they did not try to do?
When the parties challenged the state, they empowered society; and they
ended up collaborating with others who had apparently similar aims but
who ultimately ended up hurting their cause. The Young Turks initially
empowered themselves in the name of the Turkish people, but ended up
placing a higher premium on the survival of the state. When the Dashnakt-
sutiun was cooperating with the CUP during the Constitutional period, the
Armenian leaders urged the CUP to spread the ideas of equality and democ-
racy among the Turkish Muslim peoples of the region, to ensure that the
Constitution would have grassroots support, and thus solidify its hold on
the general population. The CUP did reach out to the people, but only to
solidify its rule, and make sure that they would follow the dictates and
designs of the CUP. The empowerment of the latter excluded the participa-
tion of the people.31 It is not a coincidence that the state which the CUP
imagined, and which eventually came into being, was anything but demo-
cratic, and remained a one-party system for a long time.
No analysis today can illustrate so poignantly the problem of loyalty as
the exchange that took place in May 1915during the last session of the
trial of the Hnchak leadersbetween Khurshid (Hurit) Bey, the presiding
judge of the Ottoman court, and Paramaz, the main Hnchak spokesman. It
is worth quoting extensively. The Hnchaks had been accused of incitement
to insurrection and secessionism and were awaiting their sentence. Before
condemning the group to death, Khurshid (Hurit) Bey reected:

The attributes of history in our reality are arranged in such a way that what
constitutes patriotism for one is viewed as destructive treason by the other.
And thus the mutual relations between nations living together amount to the
negation of international law and social concepts. Today is the last session of
these trials and it is with great pain in our heart that we are visualizing in our
inamed memory these few days that we spent here with you. There was
something unusual and unqualiable in these trials. Unqualiable because
neither you nor us had enough wisdom to penetrate each others [worlds]....
You cannot imagine, effendis, that it is with such grief that I will pro-
nounce the depth of my conviction regarding the patriotism accumulated in
you. What can be more heartbreaking that warm blooded beings like you full
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 107

of life have sacriced logic to sentiments; your false beliefs have placed you on
a path that leads to an impasse.... What great deeds vigorous individuals like
you could have accomplished, if the ideal of a common welfare had been pur-
sued under one banner.... What benets could have been borne from a mu-
tual understanding that eluded [us], the other end of which is sad and dark.
You languished with the idea that you are struggling against injustice; while
have felt, every minute, that the rules of the world are abasing higher ten-
dencies under the weight of cruel necessities.32

Paramaz was visibly moved when he took the stand:

A while ago Khurshid Bey made some statements here and I, who has never
cried in my lifeI who was unmoved when, after many years of absence from
home returned and realized when my child did not recognize meI am not
ashamed to say that I was deeply moved by the sincerity of Khurshid Beys
speech ... and I cried, I, Paramaz, because Khurshid Bey put his nger on the
wound when he stated What good deed could have been accomplished....
I cried because in those words I found the brilliance of truth.
[Yet] We would be asking that same question, and add, What was left that
we did not do for the welfare of this country. We accepted such sacrices, we
spilled so much blood and spent such energy to bring about the brotherhood
of Armenians and Turks; we lived through such suffering to elevate each other
through trust. And what did we see? Not only did you condemn our gigantic
efforts to sterility but also consciously pursued our annihilation.... You
encouraged crime and oppression and tried to silence every expression of
protest .... You started massacring us when one day we decided to do some-
thing to defend our dignity... . You left us outside the protection of the law
when we tried to benet from the rights granted us by the truncated Midha-
tian Constitution....
Gentlemen, judge people by their work, by their traditions, within the
realm of their ideas. I am not a separatist from this country. On the contrary,
it is [this country] that is separating itself from me, being incapable of coming
to terms with the ideas that inspire me.33

HOW REVOLUTIONARY?

The ideologies and strategies of these two revolutionary parties were made
complex by the social, economic, and political dimensions of the struggle
for liberation; they also required a degree of exibility that bordered on the
uncertain. They rejected the status quo, both among the Armenian people
and within the Ottoman state; they rejected the idea of a politics whose pur-
pose was the perpetuation of the state at the expense of its citizens. On one
level, at least, these parties were far from revolutionary: both parties assigned
Great Power intervention a large, though shifting role. There is no question
108 On the Eve of Catastrophe

that the founding of both parties was related to the Armenian frustration at
the nonimplementation of reforms promised rst in the Treaty of San Ste-
fano, then revised in the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.34
In their founding documents, the revolutionary parties explicitly refer
to the reforms mandated by the Treaty of Berlin. Yet, their subsequent
behavior manifested a distinct lack of clarity on whether they regarded the
provisions of that treaty as the main goal or looked on the failure of that
strategy as a basis for the legitimation of a new kind of struggle. In the
end, it was the realities on the ground that dictated the parties increasing
reliance on Great Power intervention. The Ottoman state proved to be
more resilient than the revolutionaries expected, ready to use the harshest
measures of repression. Guerrilla warfare, however heroic the actions of
the ghters, however large the support from many segments of Armenian
society, failed to topple the state. In addition, by the end of the nineteenth
century, following losses in the Balkans, Anatolias signicance for the
Ottoman Empire and for the British-Russian rivalry had increased. The
Armenia of 1900 was not the Greece of 1830, and it was certainly not the
Serbia of 1880.
Objective analysis, ideological coherence, the adoption of universal
values, and thus partaking in the logic of human progress may have been
sufcient to shake the Sultans throne, as revolutionaries had hoped, but
was not enough to bring about the outcome for which they ultimately hoped.
And shifting the focus of lobbying by the revolutionaries in Europe from
unreliable statesmen to principled socialist and liberal leaders in order to
gain support for reforms did not change the game the Great Powers were
playing; after all, they had become great by playing with smaller nations,
exploiting their weaknesses and beneting from their woes.
Among the innovations revolutionary parties introduced to the Arme-
nian subjects was the use of arms, a tactic familiar to the Greeks. But the
fact that some Armenians had adopted the use of arms certainly represented
a threat to those who placed the state above society as well as to the more
conservative Armenians in the capital. Similarly, the idea of one nation
identied through a common history and predicated on the negation of bor-
dersconstituted a recognizable and threatening aspect of the struggle
unleashed by the parties; but it is also one that would have been equally
threatening to Russia and Persia. Yet, given the threat that the Ottoman state
presented to the individual and collective well-being of Armenians in the
empire, the parties considered armed struggle as a legitimate course. The
internal Armenian revolution, the concept of class struggle, the primacy of
the interests of the peasant and craftsmen classes, and the strategization of
grassroots participation in politics, were new and revolutionary not only for
the Armenian community but also for the Ottoman state.
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 109

The socialist dimension of the Armenian movement was dangerous to

the Turkish elites, especially to the ultimate winner of the rivalry within the
Young Turk movementthe ttihad ve Terakki or CUP. Integral to the CUP
vision was the kind of state that could resist Great Power intervention in its
internal affairs, and allay, if not reverse, the disintegration of that empire. It
was not sufcient that the eventual state be Turkish; it was also necessary
that it be a strong state, free of the burdens of democracy and parliamen-
tarianism. By the early twentieth century, peoples and otherwise distinct el-
ements inhabiting the empire would be assessed by Turkish elites in terms
of their potential contribution toor detraction fromthe creation of such
a state. Thus, in addition to religious and ethnic differences, Armenians
had become a political liability; the Hnchak and Dashnaktsutiun parties had
come to be seen as representatives of a people that generated a different
logic than that of the state.
The Armenian political parties constituted a threat, but it was a threat to
the regime of Sultan Abdlhamid II, against which Turks themselves ulti-
mately acted. Most revolutionary or otherwise threatening dimensions of
the Hnchak and Dashnaktsutiun party programs disappeared with the rein-
statement of the Ottoman Constitution in 1908, including the Hnchaks goal
of Armenian independence, the use of arms, and appeals to the Great
Powers. What remained were the demands for a participatory parliamentary
system and for economic, especially agrarian reforms.
Partly due to their ideological concern for the lower classes and awareness
of the need to be pragmatic, the parties had shown their willingness to ac-
commodate the state, but they were not ready to accommodate any regime
that failed to deliver on its promise of reform. It was the CUPs failure at
reform that compelled the parties to return to their earlier strategy of ap-
pealing to the Great Powers some time after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.
Another way to answer the question I raise in this chapter is to address
what was negotiable in the ideology, program, strategy, and tactics of these
parties and what was not. In the end, it was their opposition to a repressive
and regressive regime that was consistent. On a practical level, agrarian and
administrative reforms in the empire remained nonnegotiable as far as the
Armenian revolution was concerned. If the rulers of the Ottoman state
were unwilling to introduce such reforms throughout the empire, these
parties, as well as the patriarchate, demanded that reforms be introduced in
the Armenian provinces. But even that was too much for the CUP. That
says as much about the CUP regimeits concerns, its visualization of the
future, the framework within which they perceived the world and them-
selvesas it does about the Armenians.
The CUP and the dominant majority had a choice to change the char-
acter of the state in ways that accommodated its various minorities, by
110 On the Eve of Catastrophe

making the state serve society. Instead, by making the state a self-serving
entity, they chose to change its demography. Their failure to implement
reforms promised under the Tanzimat, Abdlhamid II, and the CUP, had
led to the internationalization, territorialization, as well as the radicaliza-
tion, of the Armenian problem. This, in turn, assured that Armenians
would be considered incompatible with the CUP vision. It is paradoxical
that the Armenian revolutionary parties, which came to be seen, and are still
viewed by some, as a threat to the Ottoman state, came closest to offering a
solution that may have assured the survival of the Ottoman state. This raises
the question of the elites own loyalty toward the Ottoman state. It is pos-
sible that, consciously or not, they were already imagining a different kind
of state, one within which reformseconomic or politicaldid not gure
as the most important component of change.
The Ottoman state lacked an integrative component or program for non-
Muslims particularly, except on rare occasions, when Armenians supported
it fully. It was an empire, created through conquest; as such, it was keen to
preserve the politics of rulers and the ruled and maintain ethnic, religious,
and other divisions, making an exception only for selected individuals from
all backgrounds who need not be reminded of their place in government.
The systems components, including the millet system, ensured that Arme-
nian subjects would cling to their past, and at some point transform these
differences into assets. If the legal and social system of segregation and
discrimination made certain that Armenians felt inferior, the Armenian
past and collective memory ensured that, when these subjects were forced
into a corner and ready to become citizens, they would emerge as a force
that was not only conscious of its ethnic identity but that it would be that
dimension of their identity that would be invested with the new ideas, en-
ergy, and program.
Yet the primacy of economic, domestic, political, and social issues, and
the ideological underpinnings of party programs provided an avenue for the
newly dened Armenian nation to reach out to the Ottoman state, a signi-
cant act of Armenian nationalism. Obviously, this move took on a dif-
ferent character than that of the millet, where subservience was assumed.
The parties constituted the link between universal principles and the ever-
worsening economic crisis inicted on the majority of Ottoman Armenians.
Armed with the laws of history, energized by universal rights, and pressed
by conditions on the ground, the parties could reach out more easily to
Turks and Kurds who might have shared their principles, ideals, and con-
cerns, than Armenians who felt secure in their millet-based identity and
politics could.
In the nal analysis, however, one cannot properly assess the politics
adopted by the Armenian parties by looking only at the Ottoman state and
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties. . . 111

society. For the dynamics of this period were propelled by three factors: the
state, societyincluding its Armenian componentand the Great Powers.35
We must understand the dual-nature of each of the three elements to assess
their consequences: the Ottoman state, repressive and regressivetech-
nical and technological modernization notwithstandingbut vulnerable to
the Great Powers; the Armenians, victimized by the state, but reaching out
to the Great Powers; and the West, with the liberating inuence of its
ideals of freedom, equality, and human progress, and the debilitating impact
of its imperialism on the Ottoman state, and indirectly on the subjects of
that state. Both Armenians and Turks suffered the consequences of these
tensions, but the price Armenians paid was far more dear.
By all accounts, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 represented the best
opportunity for the Armenian and Turkish movements to nd common
ground and continue cohabitating as part of one state. There is not yet a
consensus as to whether a multiethnic empire was still possible as a parlia-
mentary democracy in 1908, but it is possible that the answer will differ for
Balkan and Arab peoples and for Armenians, whose home was in Anatolia,
a more sensitive and contested region, with a mixed population. The Young
Turks envisioned a liberal state, and were willing to try parliamentarianism;
on the other hand, the Armenian parties were willing to compromise and
adopt a similarly liberal position, as long the state ensured reforms. Yet,
absent on the Young Turk side, was any social dimension; by and large, so-
ciety and social concerns remained tangential to their ideology. Theirs was a
revolution from above, concerned mostly with the preservation of the state,
gradually imagined as a Turkish one. While Armenian revolutionary parties
were not representative of all Armenians, they primarily articulated the con-
cerns of its majority. The addition of the Ramgavar Party, in 1908antiso-
cialist, antirevolutionary in the sense of rejecting violent means, and liberal
bourgeois, in the classical sensemeant that most segments of the Arme-
nian people were now represented through the three political parties. All
three endorsed the 1908 revolution and committed themselves to its suc-
cess. The Dashnaktsutiun partnered with the CUP and vested its whole po-
litical capital on that relationship. One question that may be asked is, why
was there no Turkish equivalent to the Armenian revolutionary parties con-
cerned with their social and economic interests? For Muslims a primarily
religious and increasingly ethnic self-identication with the leaders of the
state provided them with a false sense of sharing in the power of that state.
In a sense, the separation of the two histories, Turkish and Arme-
nian, started from the time the Ottoman Empire added Armenian popu-
lated regions to its territory. Armenians were never fully integrated into
Ottoman society, although some elements took part in the economy. Their
status as second-class subjects ensured that separation. The economic and
112 On the Eve of Catastrophe

social woes of the empire during its waning decades affected all subjects,
however, especially non-Muslim peoples in Anatolia; the state provided sup-
port to true Kurdish tribal leaders and resettled Balkan muhacirs, Muslim
deportees from the Balkans, in the region.
There is no question that the two Balkan wars preceding World War I,
and the imperialistic machinations of the Great Powers, including the use
of the Armenian pleas for intervention to their benet, pushed the CUP
leadership in a more dictatorial, nationalist, and state-based direction, away
from any concerns for social and economic reforms that might benet the
Armenian element.36
Inherent in the Armenian parties position was a paradox. Reform being
the nonnegotiable component of their programs, often at the expense of
ideology, they were able to make compromises and reach out to the Young
Turks. That same logic led them to ask for assistance from the Great
Powers when the state was unwilling to deliver on such reforms, promised
many times. Yet, the Great Powers were the same instruments that threat-
ened the Ottoman state and the survival of Turkey as imagined by the
leaders of the state. In brief, the problems collided but the solutions did
not meet. The exchange between Khurshid Bey and Paramaz cited above
constitutes a most telling testimony to two phenomena: the historical
depth of the two histories ensconced in the current debates, as well as the
missed opportunities.
5

Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and

the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War
of 19121913

Fikret Adanr

The Balkan War of 1912/13 was a traumatic experience for late Ottoman
society. The debacle entailed the loss of practically all of European Turkey
and laid the groundwork for a CUP (Committee of Union and Progress)
coup and the establishment of a single-party dictatorship under the tutelage
of the military that was to last until the end of World War I.1 Ottomanism,
which had aimed to transform a premodern empire comprising multiple
religious denominations into a secular multiethnic state, was abandoned for
all intents and purposes, to be replaced by a vindictive nationalism that
aspired to a new mobilization along Turkish-Islamic lines.2 This ideological
reorientation within Unionist circles was paralleled by an equally momen-
tous shift in the attitude of the Armenian political leadership toward the
Ottoman state. Already by 1911 the relations of the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation (ARF) with the CUP were no longer based on mutual trust.3 The
failed attempts at forming a new electoral alliance in early 1912 deepened
the rift further.4 Impressed by the Ottoman collapse in the Balkan War, the
opinion among Armenians favored once again seeking Great Power inter-
vention, as this seemed to promise a better chance of solving the Armenian
Question.5 Once World War I broke out and the Ottoman Empire aligned
itself with the Central Powers, a constellation emerged that hardly boded
well for the future.6 The imminent participation in a war against a coalition
of powers that seemed in the recent past to have consistently supported the
Armenian national cause gave rise to strong doubts in the minds of the
Unionist leaders as to the sincerity of the loyalty professed by the Ottoman
Armenian community.7
In the following I depart from the view that Ottoman military consider-
ations in the early phase of World War I affected the fate of various population

113
114 On the Eve of Catastrophe

groups in Asia Minor in a signicant way. As one author accurately observed,

the designation of the Armenians residing in the command-and-control
zone of the IIIrd Army as a dangerous internal foe was the dening moment
of the World War I Armenian genocide. It was the alpha and omega of the
plea of military necessity put forth by the High Command of the Turkish
army.8 Distrust pervaded the minds of Ottoman decision-makers. Their
fear that Armenian citizens might betray the empire entailed not only
detaching the Armenian recruits from the active units and putting them
into special labor battalions, but also a countrywide campaign of dis-
arming the cadres of a would-be Armenian militia.9 This chapter analyzes
the conditions under which Armenians as non-Muslims came to serve in
the Ottoman army in the rst place. Second, it offers a description of how
the non-Muslim recruits in the army were blamed for having caused the
Ottoman defeat in the Balkan War of 191213. Finally, it shows how the
outcome of that war created an ideological climate that proved conducive to
ethnic homogenization policies in Asia Minor that foreshadowed the course
of the events leading to mass persecution and massacre of Armenians in
1915 and thereafter.
Conventional wisdom sees the Ottoman armies marching against Chris-
tian Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as composed of
warriors pledged to Islamic jihad. But research has shown that the impor-
tance formerly ascribed to religious zeal call for reconsideration.10 Appar-
ently, the empire had had from early on a military tradition of Muslims and
non-Muslims serving side by side. Not only the Christian sipahi, who
belonged to the Ottoman military (asker) in the fteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, but also the Christian martolos from a more modest social back-
ground had been armed, either serving in border fortresses or policing the
Balkan rural areas.11 The Catholic tribes of northern Albania boasted of their
heroic deeds in the wars of the Porte against Christian powers as late as
18771878.12 In the eet it was common practice to have Christian sailors
serve with Muslims; the crews of Ottoman warships were traditionally
recruited from Muslim as well as Christian populations of Asia Minor and
the Aegean islands.13
The situation changed, however, with the commencement of national
liberation movements in the Balkans in the rst half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Until then the Porte had been quite willing to arm local Christian peas-
antries when it served the interests of public order, as was the case during
the krcali disturbances in the 1790s or the rst phase of the Serbian up-
rising in 180407.14 But the experience of the Greek Revolution (18211829),
which was above all a religious revolt (M. S. Anderson), led to disillusion-
ment in this regard.15 This explains why the polarization of society along
religious divides gained ground, although Ottoman ofcials were bent on
Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War. . . 115

achieving civic equality irrespective of religious afliationsomething they

believed was essential for military modernization and consequently the sur-
vival of the empire. Thus Mahmud II (18081839) understood perfectly well
the need for universal conscription if the empire was to survive the chal-
lenge of ethnoreligious separatism.16 Even though the abolition of the Janis-
sary Corps (the household troops of the sultan) in 1826 was followed by the
establishment of a modern army under the designation Victorious Soldiers
of Muhammad and the subsequent war against Russia was opened by a
declaration of jihad,17 the emerging modern army was in no way purely
Muslim: the new cavalry units of 1826 comprised not only Tatar and Turkish
horsemen, but also Christian Cossacks including their chaplains in the pay-
roll of the Ottoman state, and by 1832 Christian Armenians were being
recruited to serve in the engineer corps.18
The reform Edict of Glhane (1839) ofcially ushered in the era of Chris-
tian-Muslim equality, thereby also implying equal military service for all.19
The years of the Crimean War (18531856) especially saw some successful
attempts toward the recruitment of Christians for the Ottoman armed
forces.20 As Roderic H. Davison has emphasized, however, it soon became
obvious that the Christians would rather continue to pay than serve, while
the Muslims balked at giving the Christians equal opportunity for promo-
tion to the ofcer corps.21 And nally, the developments during the Eastern
Crisis of 18751878 bore witness to the rather delusionary character of the
whole project: When the issue of military service for non-Muslims was dis-
cussed in the Ottoman parliament on June 2, 1877, it transpired that the
average Ottoman Christian was quite content not to have to endure the
rigors of army life and risk the chance of death on a battleeld.22 Given
these conditions, carrying arms continued to be regarded as a Muslim priv-
ilege and the exclusion of the non-Muslim subjects of the sultan from
recruitment a result of religious distrust.23
During the long reign of Abdlhamid II (18761909) the issue was
shelved. But the period witnessed new developments that anticipated some
major traits of future Turkish nationalism. It produced the rst examples of
an tatist interpretation of national economy that implied in the long run
the elimination of non-Muslim intermediary groups, the so-called com-
prador bourgeoisie.24 Perhaps more signicant in this context was the emer-
gence of a new awareness of the strategic importance of certain regions as
well as of the overall demographic realities of the empire. At the beginning
of the Russo-Turkish War of 18771878, the sultan was surprised to learn
that the approaches to his capital, the plain of Eastern Thrace and the Straits
region, were populated by non-Muslim groups who likely sympathized with
the enemy. Therefore, he demanded a new policy geared to changing the
demographic situation in those areas.25 And from the 1880s onward, special
116 On the Eve of Catastrophe

commissions toured Asia Minor in search of suitable areas for the settle-
ment of Muslim refugees, but again with a view to changing the demo-
graphic structure of strategic localities.26
With the oppositional Young Turk movement gaining momentum
since the 1890s, the question of equal rights and duties for all citizens
found renewed urgency.27 The idea of general conscription, which was an
important point in the CUPs program of 1908, was not welcomed, how-
ever, in every quarter.28 As might be expected, opposition came mostly
from the Greek-Orthodox clergy. The archbishop of Drama, for example,
demanded that Christians only be expected to serve in the Ottoman Army
after a preparatory phase of ve years and even then only in separate units
commanded by Christian ofcers. Furthermore, their ag should show a
cross, since it was impossible for a Christian to go into battle with the
Crescent as his banner.29 At this stage, the Porte had its own reasons for
not insisting on general conscription, especially since the armed forces
entertained serious doubts about the loyalty of some population groups,
for example, the Greeks. The army general staff was prepared to grant the
privilege of military service at rst only to Armenians and Bulgarians
and then only under the condition that they be ready to serve in religiously
mixed units.30
The counterrevolutionary movement of spring 1909 gave the political
organizations of the non-Muslim groups the rst opportunity to demon-
strate their goodwill toward the Young Turk regime. The CUPs appeal to all
political forces to participate in a revolutionary Army of Action (Hareket
Ordusu), which would march on the capital in order to suppress the reac-
tionary movement, received an enthusiastic response, especially from
former guerrilla groups in Macedonia. Hundreds registered as volunteers,
and with the exception of the adherents of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate,
who showed some sympathy for the counterrevolutionary movement, the
representatives of the Macedonian Slavs cooperated closely with the CUP.31
Thus Mahmud evket Pashas motley forces, which appeared at the gates of
stanbul on April 23, 1909, included about 1,200 Macedonians under the
leadership of Yane Sandanski. Dressed in Ottoman uniforms, they partici-
pated in the street ghting against regiments professing loyalty to Abdlha-
mid II.32 The presence of Albanians and Bulgars of the wildest types, who
patrolled the streets of Constantinople, attracted the attention of many for-
eign observers.33 Already on May 16, 1909, the British military attach could
report that in anticipation of the passing of a law permitting the enrollment
of non-Muslims in the Ottoman army 49 Greeks and 37 Armenians in
Bandrma alone had volunteered, Mahmud evket Pasha himself, the new
military chief in the Ottoman capital, being strongly in favor of the enrol-
ment of non-Mussulmans.34
Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War. . . 117

The crushing of the opposition secured for the CUP decisive inuence
in the government; as part of feverish legislative activity, preparations for
a new law on the general mandatory conscription were sped up.35 How-
ever, the issue continued to be viewed, especially within the Greek com-
munity, as a step toward Turkication of the empire. It was Greek
susceptibilities which provoked the British military attach to make the
following comments:
It is evident that the desire of the Greek clerical and educated party is to be a
nation within a nation. The Greeks are to remain Greeks, are to speak Greek,
associate only with Greeks, and be led by Greeks, when they would be pre-
pared to serve in the Ottoman army, almost, one would say, as allies! Not a very
reassuring prospect for the stability of the Ottoman Empire [ ... ] The Arme-
nian is much more capable of living in harmony with the Turks than is the
Greek. Mixed regiments of Turks and Armenians will get along with a min-
imum of friction. They would, of course, require their priests and the recogni-
tion of certain ftes and holidays. But they put forward no absurd demand for
separate regiments as do the Greeks.36

Despite all protests by the Greeks, the law on general conscription was
passed in July 1909, and a circular was sent to the vilayets in early August
announcing that all men eligible for military service that year would draw
lots and that no exemption tax would be exacted from the non-Muslims
henceforth.37 Attach reports from Constantinople indicated that the law
was generally well received and that military authorities were making no
difculties as to freedom in the exercise of religion or observances of
fasts.38 For example, Christians were allowed to perform their oath of loy-
alty on the Bible, the Jews on the Pentateuch, and the Muslims on the Koran
respectively.39 The problem of exemptions also seemed, at least on paper, to
have been resolved.40 Thus the dispatch of the rst group of non-Muslim
recruits from Salonika to the Ottoman capital in March 1910, altogether
1,600 men including 42 Jews, and the distribution of another group of over
2,000 Christian recruits among various units of the First Army Corps in
stanbul in April of the same year, were perceived as encouraging signs.41
Nevertheless, the new conscription law encountered innumerable dif-
culties in everyday life. Especially ominous was the tendency demonstrated
by young Greeks of the Aegean islands to simply refuse to appear for their
medical examination in the local recruiting ofces. Many local leaders
would plead that it was their communes vested right not to send their youth
to the army. Some would openly threaten that ofcial insistence on the con-
scription would compel many a young man to emigrate or to apply for Greek
citizenship.42 Equally discouraging protests came from some Jewish com-
munities. For example, the chief rabbi David Papo of Baghdad practically
bragged about the fact that enlistment was unpopular among the local
118 On the Eve of Catastrophe

population. Only about 1,000 persons out of his community of 50,000 were
ready to serve under the colors. He himself entertained serious reservations
as to the possibility of observing the kosher practices in the barracks. More-
over, he did not believe in the ideal of a Jewish-Muslim fraternization; on the
contrary, he was convinced that the new liberty promised by the Young
Turks was hardly going to translate into real equality.43
Neither did the neighboring Balkan countries, especially Greece and Ser-
bia, view the new direction toward more equality among religions and races
in the Ottoman Empire with any favor. When the Chimariotes, the inhabi-
tants of a mountainous region in the Epirus, protested against conscription
in early 1910, they received unequivocal support from Athens. The Greek
government even tried to persuade Great Britain to intervene at the Porte
on behalf of these Christian mountaineers, the minister for foreign affairs
expressing his gravest misgivings in face of the Turkish policy of disre-
garding ancient customs and privileges and attempting to enforce a dead
uniformity throughout the Empire.44 Even more remarkable were the
views of Milovan Milovanovithe Serbian foreign minister in 1908-1912,
the prime minister of Serbia in 1911-1912, and an architect of the Balkan
Alliance of 1912regarding the prospects of the Young Turk regime,
expressed in early 1910 in an interview with the British ambassador in
Vienna:
For him that rgime is an eccentricity imported from Europe and grafted on
the surface of the complicated Ottoman national life; it is not due to a reviving
spirit which has sprung from the inner Turkish life and therefore has sunk no
roots into the vital parts of the Turkish race... . Dr. Milovanovitch observed
that there was only one source of vitality still left in the Ottoman dominions,
and that lay in the old Turks who were held together by faith in their religion
and who would never admit that the Christian races were on a level with them-
selves. The Young Turk ideal that all the races who live on Turkish soil can be
welded together into one nation by a sense of patriotism is a dream.45

In the summer of the same year, the Serbian foreign minister was
reported as having said that personally he did not believe that the Young
Turkish rgime had any great vitality in itself. He thought it would fail
because it was not a real Mahometan movement.46
There were other internal as well as external factors that worked against
a systematic implementation of the conscription law, or of any reform
measure during this last phase of Ottoman rule. Secessionist aspirations
put their mark on politics. The CUP-dominated government did not hesi-
tate to implement authoritarian measures, suppressing civic liberties and
even manipulating elections.47 Protracted uprisings in Albania and Yemen
since 1910 further undermined any faith in the future of the multiethnic
empire. Politically discredited and socially alienated from the masses, the
Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War. . . 119

CUP was totally deprived of its inuence by the time the Italians invaded
Ottoman Tripoli (Libya) in 1911.
From May 1911, when the last CUP member resigned from the cabinet,
until Enver Beys coup in January 1913, the Unionists were not only margin-
alized politically but also persecuted by the police. On May 18, 1911, for
example, their newspaper Tanin was banned. However, the cabinets of Said
Pasha (September 30, 1911July 16, 1912) and Ahmed Muhtar Pasha (July
22, 1912October 29, 1912) had their hands full with attending to the most
elementary business in order to keep the various parts of the dissolving
empire together and could hardly contemplate implementing any signi-
cantly new policy, except perhaps that the rather pronounced centralism of
their Unionist predecessors was now replaced by a more conciliatory ap-
proach to local demands for autonomy. For example, the new minister of
foreign affairs in the cabinet of Ahmed Muhtar Pasha, Gabriel Noradung-
hian Efendi, assured the German ambassador on July 27, 1912, that his gov-
ernment was determined to satisfy all Albanian wishes regarding autonomy
in a very generous way and that the same would apply afterward to Macedo-
nia and perhaps Arabia.48
Contemporary observers were unanimous in their opinion that the Porte
was very much worried about a conagration in the Balkans in the summer
of 1912. Ironically, it was perhaps this readiness to grant autonomy to an
Albania that would also have encompassed the Kosovo and parts of the
Yanina vilayets that prompted the Balkan states to go into action.49 Already in
March 1912, Serbia and Bulgaria had reached an agreement on their respec-
tive zones of inuence in Ottoman Macedonia, and on July 2 of the same
year these two Balkan states signed a military convention directed against
the Ottoman Empire. By August, the Ottoman general staff was aware that
Bulgaria and Serbia had started to reinforce their border units, but con-
sciously waived the necessary countermeasures lest Bulgaria get irritated.50
On September 21, the cabinet in stanbul held an extraordinary meeting to
discuss urgent reports arriving from the envoy in Soa who warned that the
Balkan states were going to create a military fait accompli within the next
few days. Yet, the Porte decided to remain calm, and no preparations were
to be undertaken, as the German ambassador reported to Berlin.51
This astonishing immobility had to do with the desolate military situa-
tion of the empire.52 Major Tyrrell, the British military attach in stanbul,
diagnosed the Ottoman plight two weeks before the beginning of hostilities
in Thrace with remarkable precision: The Ottomans were nally compelled
to issue orders for a general mobilization (October 1). All classes of reserves,
including mustahfz (men up to 45 years of age), in the 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 6th
Redif Inspections, in other words, in the whole empire except Kurdistan,
Mesopotamia, and Arabia, were summoned to the colors. Since the regular,
120 On the Eve of Catastrophe

that is, the nizam infantry in Europe was numerically weak, ten reserve
(redif) divisions of the 2nd Class were assembling, but these have had little
training, are very short of ofcers, and their quality may be taken as poor.
In his opinion,
the Turkish position in Thrace, which would probably be the scene of the
main operations, is [ . . . ] by no means an enviable one to be in when
the country is on the brink of war [ ... ] Abdullah Pasha, who will command
the main army on this side, is very despondent. He told me that he sincerely
hoped that war might yet be averted; that owing to the dismissal of so many
men recently, and to the hopeless dislocation of the forces by the formation of
the Smyrna and Dardanelles armies and by the expeditions to Albania, they
were in an impossible situation; the battalions were mostly not more than 300
strong, and that it was impossible to mobilise or concentrate in time.53

Could the Ottoman High Command count on the loyalty of the non-
Muslim recruits, who made up one-fourth of the whole mobilized army, in
the approaching war with the Christian Balkan states?54 Aram Andonian,
whose daily description of the course of the war appeared in an stanbul
paper during 19121913, maintained that it would be too much to expect the
Greeks, the Bulgarians, and the Serbs to ght enthusiastically against their
conationals and that, therefore, only the Armenians and the Jews would
serve loyally.55 The Ottoman High Command agreed, but it had other worries
as well. For example, the employees on the railroad lines in European Turkey
were mostly of Bulgarian or Greek descentwould they not try to sabotage
the Ottoman mobilization efforts?56 This question received no satisfactory
answer throughout the war, especially since the railway in Thrace had dete-
riorated by October into an unserviceable state. The director of the oper-
ating company pointed out that defeated soldiers and especially ofcers in
ight had forced their way to the trains at stations, demanding immediate
departure under threat of arms. No wonder that the entire personnel had
disappeared.57
The mobilization was from the outset a failure. No enthusiasm for the
war could be discerned anywhere in the empire. A German ofcer, who
happened to be in Syria in the fall of 1912, noted that Christian Arabs
were being urged by their clergy and community elders not to enter the
army. The overwhelming majority thus either bought themselves free or
ed.58 Disturbing news also arrived from Mamratl-Aziz vilyet, where
men of military age were eeing to North America.59 In Cilicia, too, the
military preparations made slow progress, as was reported to the German
embassy. Whoever could, tried to evade the conscription. The local branch
of the Deutsche Orientbank was approached by many for an advance of
about 40 pounds, the exact amount needed to buy exemption from ser-
vice. The port of Mersin was placed under police cordon with a view to
Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War. . . 121

hindering desertion. Yet many young men managed to escape to Cyprus

by sailboat via the port of Silifke.60
Ottoman authorities took some precautionary measures against treason.
Directors and teachers of the Bulgarian schools in the vilyet of Edirne were
summarily arrested and deported to stanbul, where they were detained in
the Selimiye barracks. The Bulgarian exarch pleaded their innocence,
reminding the authorities that while he was not against the punishment of
traitors, these people as well as the detained priests and notables in Macedonia
were loyal citizens, their wives and children left behind in a wretched and
precarious situation.61 From an answer of the general staff to an inquiry of
the Ministry of Interior regarding this question, it becomes clear that this
group of suspicious persons (bheli ehas) arrested in Edirne comprised
105 Bulgarians and one Muslim.62 But many others were also arrested and
deported (to Diyarbakr, Sinop, and Kastamonu, among other places). Some
Greeks, whose whereabouts were a mystery as late as May 1913, were
detained one night while observing with ashlights in hand the passage of
Ottoman artillery near Edirne. The Ministry of War answered an inquiry by
the Ministry of Interior in this connection by pointing out that such arrests
had been carried out under express orders from the Ministry of Interior and
that the Ministry of War did not possess any information on the missing
persons. On the other hand, it was quite possible that they belonged to that
group of people arrested under political charges and then transferred to
various localities in Asia Minor; in that case, it was utterly impossible to
supply information about them.63
Some Bulgarians and Greeks deported to zmit were later exchanged
against Ottoman civil servants in Edirne, who were exposed to retaliation
after the town had been occupied by the Bulgarian army (March 26, 1913) on
account of their presumed role in the arrest of Bulgarians during the mobi-
lization.64 Also interesting is the case of some peasants, 22 men and 18
women, all reapers (orak) in a farm near Byk ekmece, who had been
detained, evidently on account of the proximity of their location to atalca,
and then deported all the way to Sinop on the Black Sea. Even after peace
had been concluded (July 10, 1913), nobody seemed to miss them. It was the
mutasarrf of Sinop who applied on September 29, 1913, for their return,
arguing that since the war was over there was no serious reason to keep this
people away from their homes, not forgetting to add that feeding them was
a burden on the local treasury, each receiving ve piastres per diem by way
of public support.65
The hostilities along the Bulgarian-Ottoman border in Thrace began on
October 22, 1912. As predicted by the experts, it was immediately clear that
the Ottoman army was not prepared for this war. A German ofcer in Otto-
man service, who had taken part in these frontline operations, put it:
122 On the Eve of Catastrophe

Men, demoralized by bad weather, inadequate clothing, especially the miser-

able footwear, since days without rations, without ofcers who could do some-
thing, [ ... ] had already at the outset run out of ammunition on account of
shooting erratically. Since no new ammunition was coming in, a battalion had
started to retreat, dragging along the other, advancing columns as well.
Nothing was lost yet, apparently the enemy had not noticed anything.66

Who was responsible for such panic? From the start, observers were pre-
occupied with this question. Colonel Tupschoefski, who had participated in
the battle near Vize in Thrace, described the situation of the Ottoman army
in rather optimistic terms. In his opinion the regular troops were ghting
well. The redifs were causing recurrent panic, and it was a great mistake of
the Turks to have employed them in the front lines of the army anyway. He
insinuated that the pro-Entente faction around Kamil Pasha in stanbul, as
well as the local Russians and Greeks, should be held responsible for the
all-pervasive defeatism.67

The British military attach, a keen observer, offered the following explanation:
I now nd that when the mobilization took place the men, who had already
been under arms, including those who had just been dismissed from their
nizam service (two classes), were for the most part unwilling to come out
again, saying that it was now their neighbours turn, etc. The Government
did not feel able to deal with this sort of thing. There was already enough
discontent in the country on account of the continual calls to arms, as has
been shown by various cases of insubordination and mutiny which had
arisen among troops clamouring to be dismissed. The Constitution has
taught even the Anatolian peasant to exact his legal rights, and he is no
longer the passive instrument of orders given by superior authority that he
was in the bad old days.68

What role did the non-Muslim recruits play in this debacle? Mahmud
Muhtar Pasha, the minister of the navy and the son of the grand vezir, was
the commanding general of the divisions on the right ank of the front in
Thrace. Writing immediately after the war, he tried to counter the impres-
sion that the Ottoman army was demoralized primarily by the lack of patri-
otism of its non-Muslim soldiers. It was true that many Christians had
changed sides already during the rst encounters with the enemy. But how
about the subsequent defeats? One could hardly attribute them to the trea-
son of some Christian recruits, for already in the second battle ... there
was no Christian soldier left in our ranks.69 Obviously, this was not a state-
ment conducive to the clarication of the question.
There were contemporaries who were more straightforward in their ap-
praisals. The Austro-Hungarian consul Herzfeld, who experienced the siege
of Edirne (Adrianople) from within the fortress, openly blamed Ottoman
Christians, specically the Bulgarians and Greeks, for having contributed to
Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War. . . 123

the catastrophic defeat: As soldiers they often went over to the enemy, or
they deserted; as peasants they destroyed railway tracks, blew up bridges
and cut telegraph lines, as irregulars they served virtually as ersatz until the
Bulgarian troops arrived.70
Lt. Colonel Bernard Boucabeille intimated that the non-Muslim recruits
had exercised at best a negative inuence on their Muslim comrades.71
According to Richard von Mach, a prolic journalist of the period, however,
the Ottomans had resorted to most foolish means: Statements by prisoners
indicated that Christians, even elderly men of over 40 who had never served
before, had been goaded together in order to ll the ranks.72
The assessment by another prominent military journalist of the period
reads like a virtual apologia for the army of Abdlhamid. It was true that
the Hamidian army was not well trained in comparison with its counter-
parts in Europe, but it had preserved its religious unity; only Muslims were
allowed to serve in it.73 Interviews that Leon Trotsky conducted as a war
correspondent in Bulgaria support this remarkable impression. Trotsky
concluded that the enlistment of Christians was bound to undermine the
conviction that Islam was the only moral tie between the state and the
armed forces, something that contributed to the demoralization of the sim-
ple-minded Muslim soldier.74 Especially ill-boding for the future was the
report of yet another foreign observer who quoted a Turkish ofcer lying
wounded in the Glhane Hospital in stanbul as having told him that all
the disasters had been caused by the Christians in the army and the Bulgar-
ian Komitadjis within Turkish lines. He manifestly believed the statement,
and a similar conviction, even more forcibly expressed, exists amongst the
lower classes.75
The prevailing opinion among the European observers of the theaters of
war crystallized the conviction that the non-Muslim recruits, mostly Greeks
and Bulgarians, had made common cause with their co-nationals and
thereby introduced the rst germs of confusion into the Turkish lines.76
Modern research has mostly neglected the question delineated above. Thus,
Glen W. Swanson, in an otherwise interesting article, simply points out that
while most Muslims accepted their military duties, non-Muslims and other
formerly exempt citizens usually shrugged off their opportunity to be equal
to the Muslim Anatolian peasant in military service.77 In a more recent
study we nd again the claim that the army could hardly rely on the nu-
merous Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs residing within the empire to ght
loyally against their co-nationals.78 It is evidently in full conformity with
this general trend, when the author of a publication authorized by the Turk-
ish general staff, while admitting that the causes of the Ottoman failure
were manifold, nevertheless claims that one of them was surely the partici-
pation of Christian and Jewish recruits in the rst battles.79
124 On the Eve of Catastrophe

How did the Ottomans react in the wake of such a traumatic defeat? At
the outset, there was a wave of ofcial persecution and punishment of trai-
tors. For example, a certain Nicholas and four of his comrades, who,
although Ottoman subjects, had fought against the Ottoman troops during
the Greek occupation of Lesbos, were condemned to death by the military
tribunal of zmir.80 Persons who had molested the Muslim population in
the vilyets of Aydn, Edirne, and Cezayir-i Bahr-i Sed (Aegean Islands)
were arrested and condemned to heavy penalties by the military tribunals of
zmir and Adrianople.81 And there was an inquiry into the property of a
certain Lefter Efendi, the former surgeon on board the Ottoman destroyer
Yarhisar, who had deserted to Greece.82 But many reported cases of treason
were to remain uninvestigated, since the next great war was just around the
corner.83
As indicated in the beginning, however, historically crucial was the fact
that the Balkan War of 191213 marked the end of Ottomanism as a multi-
cultural project. Muslim intellectuals in a now diminished empire tried to
draw lessons from the catastrophe. The general tenor of their discussions
was that the humiliation of the defeat meant simultaneously the chance for
a national rebirth, as expressedat a time when the cannonade at atalca
could be heard in Constantinopleby Kprlzade Fuad, one of the distin-
guished personalities of the future Turkish republic.84
The atmosphere of national humiliation enabled the CUP to return to
power by a military coup in early 1913, establishing a virtual dictatorship.
Under the new conditions, a more effective mobilization was feasible, the
chief ideological proponents of which were Ziya Gkalp (18761924) and
Yusuf Akura (18781935). An adherent of solidaristic corporatism la
Durkheim, Gkalp regarded free market economy and representative parlia-
mentary democracyfundamental goals of Young Ottoman liberalism
since the 1860sas anachronistic institutions, aspiring instead to a tripar-
tite synthesis of cultural Turkism, ethical Islamism, and Durkheimean soli-
darism.85 This predicated a restructuring of the political system according to
the principle of occupational representation and a national economy in
the interest of (Muslim) small-producers, the latter goal being championed
by Akura, the founder of the journal Trk Yurdu, who had already written
off multicultural Ottomanism as a viable policy in 1904 in favor of a Pan-
Turkist ethnic nationalism.86 Of special interest in the context of this chap-
ter is Akuras Darwinist perception of society, which seemed to justify his
characterization of the native Jews, Greeks, and Armenians in 1916 as
the agents and middlemen of European capitalism and his belief that if
the Turks fail to produce among themselves a bourgeois class [ ... ], the
chances of survival of a Turkish society composed only of peasants and of-
cials will be very slim.87
Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War. . . 125

This shift of emphasis was also reected in practical politics. The Treaty
of Constantinople between Bulgaria and the CUP government, signed in
September 1913, provided for a reciprocal exchange of populations living in
a specied zone along the common border. The pertinent populations,
roughly 50,000 on each side, had, however, already ed, so that the treatys
stipulations had meaning only with regard to regulating property matters in
retrospect.88 Worse befell the Ottoman Greeks living in Western Anatolia in
the rst half of 1914, a large number of whom were compelled to seek ref-
uge on the nearby islands. The agents of this ethnic cleansing were no
marauding soldiers but local Muslim peasants, so peaceful and honest,
whose tranquility and gentleness are proverbial, who were incited to attack
their Greek neighbors.89 These violent events paved the way for another
population exchange, this time between the Greek and Ottoman govern-
ments, which reached an agreement in June 1914 stipulating a regulated
exchange of the Muslims of Macedonia for the Greek Orthodox of the prov-
ince of zmir and Eastern Thrace.90 Before this agreement could be imple-
mented, however, World War I broke out, and the remaining Greeks of
Aegean Anatolia were deported to places in the interior.91
The Unionists must have viewed the coming of the war as a chance to
solve the national questionin fact the whole Eastern Questionin confor-
mity with their ethnic engineering inspired by positivism and Social
Darwinism.92 More comprehensive and radical measures taken against the
Armenians in 191516 can be seen in this frameworkmeasures that were
accompanied by recurrent massacres, culminating in the complete destruc-
tion of the Armenian communities of Asia Minor.
6

From Patriotism to Mass Murder

Dr. Mehmed Reid (18731919)

Hans-Lukas Kieser

Dr. Mehmed Reid was among the founders of the ttihad ve Terakki Cemiy-
eti (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP).1 But unlike cofounder Dr.
Abdullah Cevdet, or other migrs from Russia, Dr. Ali Hseyinzade and
Yusuf Akura, he did not excel intellectually. Neither was he a member of
the hard core of the CUP that had been forming since 1906. Rather idealis-
tic, and fancying himself to be incorruptible, he lacked the pragmatic sense
of power of colleagues such as Dr. Nzm and Bahaeddin akir, or of his
future boss, Minister of the Interior Tlt Bey. All the more, he can be seen
as a typical representative of the ttihadist generation with a middle-class
background and Western-style education, while at the same time, a dis-
trustful, proud and radical nationalist. How could a well-educated, upright
patriot become a mass murderer?
Born in the Russian-administered Caucasus in 1873, Mehmed Reid
ahingiray moved with his family to stanbul in 1874. He became an Ottoman
subject, grew up in the Ottoman capital and studied at the Military Medical
School. After the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908, he decided to change
over from medicine to the civil administration and became a governor of the
district and nally, in 1915, governor (vali) of the province of Diyarbakr. A
small elite, made up of a few dozen people led by a handful of gureheads,
profoundly affected the fate of Turkey between 1908 and 1938. Dr. Reid was
particularly implicated in the expulsion of Greek Christians and the exter-
mination of Armenians and Assyrians (Syriac Christians) in 19141916.
The ofcious Trk Ansiklopedisi (Turkish Encyclopaedia) in its volume 32,
published in 1978, presents him as a perfect patriot. Mithat kr, CUP
secretary general during World War I, says that many members of the party
thoroughly shared the opinions of the vali of Diyarbakr, but that after the
cease-re of 1918 they changed their language.2

126
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 127

Dr. Reid is a terrifying gure, but there is also something tragic about
him. A victim of the dynamics, fears, and ideals that he shared with the
members of his party, he, unlike many others, did not have the time to
rewrite his past. The writings he left behind therefore retain, in all their
subjectivity, a rare authenticity.3 Indeed he met an atypical end. Unlike the
vast majority of ttihadists (CUP members), he was unable to manage his
personal transition from the war regime under Tlt and Enver to the na-
tional movement under Mustafa Kemal. Neither did he manage to ee
abroad, as did the great party leaders. A few days after the armistice he was
arrested by the Ottoman authorities, who accused him of being responsible
for the massacre of the Armenians and the murder of two kaymakams who,
in 1915, had opposed his anti-Christian policies in the province of Diyarbakr.
He realized that he would be executed and therefore took his own life in
February 1919, after having previously made an attempt to escape.
Mehmed Reid ahingiray is part of what can be called the rst Young
Turkish cohort. Like the second Young Turkish cohort, it came primarily
from the middle class and from outside the capital, where it generally stud-
ied at the state elite schools. Unlike the second cohort, its seminal intellec-
tual experience was not the Turkist awakeningthe ethnonationalist
self-articulation as members of a Turkish nation in the 1910s. Rather, its
rst concern was how to save the Ottoman Empire, considered as the last
defense of the Islamic world against imperialist European powers. This was
particularly true for the Turks (term used as synonym for the Muslims)
from Russia who lived as migrs in stanbul, the seat of the sultanate and
caliphate. Mehmed Reid was part of a social stratum of often bourgeois
Russian Muslim immigrants who decisively inuenced the Turkish national
movement from the end of the nineteenth century. It is within the circles of
Turkish-speaking Muslims from Russia that from the outset Islam was inte-
grated into Turkish nationalism, and Turkism was born. This prepared the
move to the general ethnonational awakening among educated Turks in
the 1910s within the broad movement of the Foyers turcs (Trk yurdu and
Trk oca).4 It is worth noting that the atmosphere in late tsarist Russias
urban centers and particularly among its diasporas in Western Europe and
stanbul led to the creation of movements that decisively shaped the Eastern
European and Middle Eastern world in the twentieth century: revolutionary
socialism as well as revolutionary ethnic nationalism among Poles, Arme-
nians, Muslims, Jews, and others. These diasporas were hotbeds of Turkism,
Zionism, Armenianism, and other nationalisms.5
Revolution in the political history of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies means legitimizing violence against those considered enemies of the
project to be realized. The revolutionary project to be realized in the n de
sicle was the abolition of Abdlhamids despotism in order to make
128 On the Eve of Catastrophe

progress and strengthen the empire. The Turkist project to be implemented

in the 1910s was different: it was to inject, as the founders of the Foyers put
it, into a whole academic generation the great national goal, that is, awak-
ening, educating, and building up a modern ethnonation from the Turkish-
speaking Muslims in Anatolia.6 In 1897, Mehmed Reid, pointing to the
Hamidian system, had declared war on those who harass the fatherland
from within.7 As sincere as the patriotic commitment of the young doctor
may have been, it carried in itself a powerful categorical vision of evil. Prob-
ably at the end of 1896, he asked for permission to hire some bloodthirsty
anarchists and send them to assassinate the sultan, known as the great
despotic satan.8 The revolutionary hatred was openly expressed in the
Young Turks early imaginations against Abdlhamid. They frequently used
medical and biological metaphors to argue scientically what they con-
sider wrong with their enemy.9
Whereas the broad and inuential movement of the Foyers turcs, founded
in 1911, had a strong Turkist molding, the Committee of Union and Pro-
gress, founded twenty-two years earlier, was nationalist in an Ottoman Mus-
lim sense. Signicantly, both movements originated at the Military Medical
School, Mekteb-i Tbbiye-i Askeriye, in Constantinople.10 At the end of the
century, the Military Medical School was the meeting point of three ele-
ments fundamental to the Turkish national movement of the following
decades: Western science, elitist political conspiracy, and military institu-
tion. A former Tbbiyeli (student of this school) from the end of the century,
conveyed the atmosphere and attitude among the students:
The teachers and students were dominated by a deeply rooted Tbbiyeli spirit.
[ ... ] This school was the rst window of the Ottoman Empire open to the
Western world. Those who studied there turned towards the West. The
Tbbiyeli knew the difference between the East and the West, and bitterly
resented the pain of being backward. For this reason, it was a hotbed of patri-
otism, of love of freedom, and of efforts to deliver us from oriental sloth and
to raise us as quickly as possible to the high level of civilization peculiar to
other countries. The Tbbiyeli always assumed a rebellious attitude toward the
despotic and reactionary administration of the last Sultans of the Ottoman
Empire.11

The classrooms and the rooms of the nal-year students were all centers of
learning. There, one read, wrote, treated and discussed everything, writes
Cevr (probably a pseudonym for Dr. Reid).12 On May 21, 1889, according to
Cevr, ve students from the Military Medical SchoolArabkirli Abdullah
Cevdet, Kafkasyal Mehmed Reid, Ohrili brahim Edhem (Temo),
Diyarbakrl shak Skti, and Konyal Hikmet Eminformed the conspira-
torial core that would soon assume the name of ttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti,
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).13 They were all convinced that
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 129

the dear fatherland was heading for disaster. Mehmed Reid wondered
how a large secret society could be erected that might win the battle against
the great despotic Satan, Abdlhamid. brahim Temo reassured him by
pointing to the example of the Greek committee Etniki Heteria.14 The con-
spiracy was sealed by handshake. In 1893, a large majority of the Asker-i
Tbbiyeli were to be members of the CUP, each with numbers and code-
names to ensure secrecy.
It was a students pleasure which delighted me no end, that we would
mock the administration, the sultan, people in high positions and other
grave matters, and that we would make fun of religion, wrote one Tbbiyeli.
The Tbbiyeli called the school laboratory the edice of wisdom.15 Man
was natures product, determined by the laws of nature, by race, and by the
law of survival of the ttest. In place of God was impersonal nature as
conceived by the leading sciences of the end of the century (biology, chem-
istry, physics). Religion and devotion to the Hamidian system went hand-
in-hand. Religious education, which was mandatory in school, culminated
in the phrase: Be a soldier under Abdl Hamid Han / He must be obeyed
by order of the Koran. Every evening, in accordance with military disci-
pline, the Tbbiyeli fell into rank to shout Long live the sultan. But they
preferred to remain silent or to transform the phrase into a curse, and so by
contrast devised slogans exalting the fatherland, the nation, freedom and
science.16
In a booklet written in 1909, Cevr informs us of open student propa-
ganda activities in response to the great anti-Armenian pogroms of 1894
1896:
After the painful event which the massacre of the Armenians (13101312)
was, we decided on a new strategy, which on the one hand consisted of attract-
ing the attention of Europe, and on the other, of informing the people of the
crimes committed by the despotic government.17 This greatly frightened the
government, for in spite of strict police surveillance, we distributed pamphlets
in public places and put up many declarations for example on the walls of
police stations and the palace, or in mosques, schools, boats and trams.

What was the content of these leaets? Cevr sums it up:

All peoples bearing the title of Ottoman are brothers. The massacre of the
Armenians in stanbul [August 1896] is a shame to Ottomans, but without a
doubt, it is not the Turks, but the Hamidian government and its executioners
who are to blame. Europe, demanding reforms in Turkey, is making use of
this motif and wants to declare Turks barbarians and incapable of reforms. In
order for the Yldz [the sultans palace] not to fall into this trap, one must
strive to unite the different Ottoman peoples, and to topple the despotic gov-
ernment. In short, if we do not wish our destruction, let us unite all Ottoman
peoples, and let us strive for freedom and to reinstate the law.18
130 On the Eve of Catastrophe

Another CUP leaet of 1896 used a language less favorable to the Arme-
nians, reproaching their deance of our state through insolent activ-
ities.19 Moreover, the persecution by the Hamidian government and
anti-Christian clichs, reinforced by the Russian Muslim migrs, wiped
out the major crime of the massacres of 189496 in the memory of the
ttihadists; nonetheless, this crime was still prominent in the booklet pub-
lished in 1909 (probably) by the CUPs cofounder.20
In 1894, Dr. Reid became assistant to the German professor, Dring
Pasha, at the hospital of Haydarpaa. When the Hamidian police learned of
his membership of the secret organization, he was arrested and exiled to
Libya in 1897. Soon after his arrest he explained himself to soldiers return-
ing from the Greco-Turkish War of the same year, for whom he uses the
honoric term gazi:

Like you, we have waged war for the fatherland. You have waged war against
those who have attacked our fatherland from outside, and you have won. We
have declared war on those who harass the fatherland from within, and we are
sure that we will win. We call to account those who ruin our country, exploit
our villages, and cause our enemies to insult our religion and our nation. [ ... ]
The Ottoman element is shrinking. Ottoman land is disappearing piece by
piece. Of this, we are witnesses, and we know who the culprits are. In order to
make all this evil disappear, in order to rescue our working village dwellers
and feed them well, we have declared war on these libertines, these tyrants,
these enemies of the fatherland [ ... ]. Speaking these words, I experienced a
nervous shudder. I understood that these words that sprang from my mouth
mixed with tears were making a strong impression on our guardians.21

This strong feeling of evil, fear of loss, and deadly hate of those considered
culprits, make up the core of Reids radical personality.
For ten years, Reid stayed in Tripoli as a doctor in state service. There,
sometime in 19011902, he married Mazlme Hanm, daughter of adju-
tant major Ziya Bey, who was also living in exile. He seems to have had a
happy time there, devoted to his family, to his job at the hospital, to discus-
sions with his friends, and to some endeavors in education. In 1900 he
prompted the exiles to open a library in which lectures were given to the
inhabitants on basic subjects.22 After the Young Turk revolution, in August
1908, Mehmed Reid returned from Tripoli to Constantinople with his
other exiled friends. In December, he was promoted to adjutant major, and
worked as a military doctor for a couple of months. At the end of 1908, he
tried to establish himself politically in the capital. It is during this time
that he very probably wrote a booklet on the genesis of the Young Turk
revolution.23 In order better to serve my country, I found it necessary to
change my profession. On 20 August 1909, he resigned from military
service.24
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 131

In the capital, the old exile became involved in politics. It seems sur-
prising to see him temporarily associate himself with the movement of
Prince Sabahaddin, which was constituted as a liberal party, Frka-i Ahrar, in
September 1908.25 Why did Reid Bey want to join them? We lack sufcient
information to provide a clear and straightforward answer. Like the other
surviving founders of the CUP, he was no longer at the center of the party
he had founded. What appealed to him in Sabahaddins group was no doubt
the emphasis laid on private initiative, for he was skeptical of the state as it
presented itself at the time, with Hamidian functionaries still in place.26
Besides, he was not against decentralization on condition that it would take
place under the roof of Muslim unity.27 But the princes consideration for
minorities could hardly have pleased him. In the tense atmosphere prevail-
ing in the capital after the attempted coup of April 1909 (31 Mart Vakas),
those with political ambitions had to tread carefully. As a matter of fact, in
the same year, Dr. Reid found himself no longer associated with Sabahad-
din. Looking back, Ahmet Bedevi Kuran, a friend and disciple of the prince,
wrote: Recognizing that the Committee for Union and Progress was un-
willing to compromise, a few gures from Teebbs ahsi [Sabahaddins
Party of Private Initiative] ... came to terms with Union and Progress by
accepting the positions offered to them.... Dr. Reid was among those who
changed sides.28
On October 9, 1909, Mehmed Reid was installed as kaymakam of
stanky in the Archipelago. In February 1910 he was promoted to mutasarrf
of Hums in the province of Tripoli (Lebanon), only to be removed in June
1911, accused by the provincial authorities of having failed to remain impar-
tial in the administrative affairs of the sancak.29 A memorandum on the state
of Tripoli, probably addressed to the vali, sheds some light on the reasons
behind the mutiny. Dr. Reid complains of the grave insufciency of med-
ical care and preventative measures for civilian travelers in the kaza of
Msrat. He gives advice, and warns of the possibility of dire consequences
for the entire province. This conduct, as justied as it might have been, was
rather audacious for a kaymakam but was framed by a militant patriotic
discourse: My life bears witness to the fact that your servant does not waste
his time on speeches, but instead devotes himself to action and to effort. I
am proud of having been, at the age of seventeen, among the founders of
Union and Progress... . Since that time, my life has served to bewail the
misfortune of my nation and my country and to exact revenge on those re-
sponsible for this misfortune.30 He gave an example of his zeal for the
defense of the rights of his country by retelling an event that had occurred
during the month preceding the revolution of 1908, when the parliament of
the city of Tripoli (Libya) presided by Hasan Pasha wished to give one of the
most respectable landed properties to the Italians out of friendship for
132 On the Eve of Catastrophe

Nejad Bey, son of the vali. Mehmed Reid regarded this action as a crime
against the fatherland: In order to excite religious fervor [gayret-i diniye] and
national zeal [hamiyet-i milliye], I was not ashamed to execrate the entire
despotic government, including Abdl Hamid. In a note above the line, he
explains: In crying out publicly that all those who perpetrated such a
crimeAbdl Hamid, the vali, the city councilwere traitors, I took nei-
ther my situation nor my future into account, nor even my own life, and
proved that life would be without value to me if the fatherland were lost.31
Here again is a demonstration of Reids radical personality as a committed
patriot.
His patriotic confession was coupled with the conviction of having ren-
dered excellent services as governor of Hums. He emphasizes the order and
discipline acquired thanks to his kaymakamlk. Toward the end of the text,
he declares, Consequently, it is clear that I shall continue, as I have always
done, to pursue with all my strength the duty which I consider as sacred as
my honor.32 One hardly doubts the good faith of the author of this memo-
randum, who proudly presents himself as founder of the CUP, fervent pa-
triot, and man of action. Even so, his intransigence is disconcerting. With
the fervor of a Jacobean, he declares himself prepared to sacrice everything
for the highest patriotic value. Reserving no special treatment for either
local notables or higher authorities, he wants to vent his anger on all those
responsible in his eyes for the sufferings of my nation. By the outbreak of
the War of Tripoli (September 1911October 1912), we are dealing with a
functionary Reid prepared to go very far for his ideals.
After a brief intermezzo as mutasarrf of Kozan, on July 25, 1911, Reid
Bey was appointed mutasarrf of Lazistan (Rize), a post from which he was
removed on September 10, 1912, for his belligerent behavior. Administra-
tive inquiries followed that would, on November 7, 1912, return to Mehmed
Reid the right to continue in his ofce. Sleyman Nazif, at the time
employed in the vilayet of Trebizond, in a retrospective article described the
mutasarrf of Lazistan as a legalist (kanunperest). But his incorruptible char-
acter inspired personal respect, and promoted discipline within the admin-
istration.33 It is not until after the establishment of the CUPs dictatorship
on January 23, 1913, that we see Mehmed Reid once again solidly installed
in a position. On June 7, 1913, he was very briey reinstalled in Lazistan,
and then, on July 8, 1913, appointed mutasarrf of Karesi (province of
Balkesir), where he remained until July 23, 1914.34
At Karesi, for the rst time, the patriotic fervor of Dr. Reid was expressed
through large-scale anti-Christian actions. He was one of the protagonists of
the policy of illegal expulsion of Greeks from the Aegean coast, a violent
policy hardly concealed from diplomatic circles, and executed by party and
government organs. The ttihadists saw it as retaliation for the evil which,
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 133

according to them, the Muslims under Greek domination had been suf-
fering since the Balkan Wars.35 The person of the mutasarrf of Karesi united
party and government afliation. His hasty deployment to the region seems
to have served appropriate plans. Foremost, he devoted his ofce to the ex-
pulsion of the Rumlar (Greek-Orthodox Ottomans) and to the resettlement,
to Bulgaristan, of the Bulgarians from the cities and villages of his govern-
ment. Anti-Christian attitudes among ttihadists had come to the political
surface and become radicalized during the Balkan Wars of 19121913. A
year before the entry of the Ottoman Empire into World War I, the key
players in the CUP had formed a highly destructive view of the Anatolian
Christians as a mortal worry, as a race and a privileged class to be com-
bated; as a tumor requiring an operation. Celal [Bayar] Bey, head of the
Smyrna cell of the CUP in 1914, conrms in his memoirs that the CUP and
the ministry of war, run by Enver since January 3, 1914, were, parallel to the
regular activities of the government, working toward the liquidation of
concentrations of non-Muslims in the Aegean region, and he details the
methods of intimidation used in order to encourage them to emigrate. 36
Especially after the international reactivation of the reform issue for the
Eastern Provinces in 1913, the ttihadists established negative views of the
Armenians similar to those of the Rumlar. The reactivation of the Arme-
nian reforms had to do with the fact that the CUP had not been able to
solve, as had been agreed with the Armenian Dashnaktsutiun (its electoral
partner since 1908), the agrarian question in the Eastern provinces, which
would have meant the restitution of Armenian property taken, mostly by
Kurds during the great pogroms in the 1890s.
The Balkesir Notlar of Mehmed Reid contain a blend of social frustra-
tion and nationalistic aversion. During an excursion between July 29 and
August 7, 1913, he recorded the then current state of affairs, and projected
a better future without Rumlar, writing on paper bearing the letterhead
Secretariat of the mutasarrk of Karesi.37 The dream of a modern admin-
istration and infrastructure went hand-in-hand with the establishment of
unrestricted Turkish-Muslim political, economic, and demographic domi-
nation. What resulted, was a polarized image: on the one hand, the Rumlar,
socially envied and viewed all the less favorably because they were pros-
pering in many places; and on the other hand, the good Muslims and their
(sic!) state, which must be strengthened at all cost, because they were sub-
ject to exploitation and Christian intrigues.
In summer 1913, Mehmed Reid was thus a high ttihadist functionary
who, in his private notes, no longer considered the Ottoman Rumlar as com-
patriots (vatandalar), but as foreigners and internal enemies against
whom the severest measures needed to be taken, including expropriation
and expulsion. His life journey seems to have been the preparation for this.
134 On the Eve of Catastrophe

In Karesi his rigorousness fueled dispositions that bore the imprint of social
and national hate and of social, economic, ethnic, and demographic engi-
neering. The goal was the installation of modern national structures, visible
through good roads, tramways, beautiful public buildings, and the absence
of multiculturalism. One had to shatter the regional reality as it then existed.
The towns and villages needed to be replanned in order to strengthen the
Muslim element and concentrate economic prosperity into its hands. Func-
tionaries were needed who were more nationalist, as well as a police force
that was better equipped.
Let us take a closer look at the Balkesir Notlar. On the rst day in vrindi,
he notes, The [local] Rumlar have stayed perfectly Rum, made rich thanks
to the Balya [mining] Company.38 The following day in Edremit he accused
the kaymakam of being too closely and disagreeably connected with the
[Orthodox] metropolitan. With regard to the villages, he writes, In this
region, the villagers [Muslims] do relatively well. But they cannot duly prot
from their produce or, better said, from their hard work. The monopolists
and oppressors [Rum] do not permit them to open their eyes. Here once
again, the social cleavage which the author denounces is also seen in terms
of ethnic opposition. Continuing, he writes, In Edremit, a national and a
commercial sentiment have awakened. A rivalry directed against the Chris-
tians has arisen.39 What also disturbs the modernity projected by Reid is
the nomad phenomenon. Here [in the region of Ilca] there are Wallachs,
coming from Teselya as nomads... . By the fact that they are mobile and
nomadic, they constitute a risk to security. Some of them work as sawyers.
They must all be expelled.40
Ayvalk appealed to Dr. Reid, but it was unfortunately a Greek [Yunan]
city. The city is extremely prosperous, very ordered, the houses are very
pretty. But the inhabitants are generally Rum. The writings in the shops are
Greek [Rumca]; even the street names are Greek. The government has not
been paying enough attention here.41 To counter the weight of the Rumlar,
he suggested as an urgent measure to attach a few Muslim villages to the
kaza and to establish active and prosperous [Muslim] traders and farmers
on the territory of the kasaba. He considered it necessary that in Ayvalk,
the police ofcers were not indigenous non-Muslims, but that they still
knew the [Greek] language. What he found particularly detestable was
the fact that the town hall building was the property of the metropolitan. On
Yunda, an exclusively Rum island near Ayvalk, the mutasarrf deemed it
reasonable to introduce suitable immigrants [muhacir] there. Establishing
a business-oriented and prosperous colony of Muslims who know the olive
trade will help in keeping an eye on the Rumlar [Rumluk].42 At the next halt
in his journey, in Burhaniye, a kasaba of 1700 houses, of which around 700
are Rum houses, he once again complained of the fact that unfortunately,
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 135

the Rumlar were in control of commerce.43 A visit to the Balya Company

conrmed his anti-Rum views. The top management is made up of a few
strangers, generally Rumlar and in particular, Greeks [Yunanl], the lower
employees are Laz, Kurds and Turks. In order better to control the rm, he
deemed it appropriate to dismiss the secretary general of the rm, Prodro-
mos, the chief engineer Kokitos and the head worker.44 He henceforth
appeared to conceptualize late Ottoman society in sweeping antagonistic
categories of Islam and Turkishness versus Christianity, Rumluk and Erme-
nilik [Armenians].
The anti-Christian discourse, fed by social envy, became even more rad-
ical with regard to the Armenians portrayed as leeches on the Muslim ele-
ment.45 According to him, as secretaries and bookkeepers to sheikhs, aghas,
and Kurdish beys, they have subjected the latter to the slavery of their
economy. As to the acts of violence committed by the tribes, in his eyes the
rst victims were the Muslim villagers, while the Armenians remain
unscathed due to the toadyism and base attery peculiar to them. We see
here the same set of arguments as can be found in the anti-Semitism of the
time. We nd also the specter of biologism. In their prosperous and fortu-
nate villages, the Armenians increase their population. Contrary to ofcial
ttihadist statistics careful to show a decreasing number of Armenians, Dr.
Reid insisted the Armenian population was growing and used this as an
argument against claims that they were being persecuted. Contradicting his
and the CUPs own earlier sayings, he suppressed his knowledge about the
anti-Armenian mass crimes of the 1890s.
In his categories he blended together the enemy of race, class, and
religion, as did most Turkists in the 1910s. Due to privileges too easily
given, and also due to their own initiative, wrote the Turkist and later
Kemalist writer Moiz Kohen Tekinalp, the Christians of Asia Minor were
always more prosperous, increasingly driving out the true masters [sic!] of
the land. According to Tekinalp, the Armenians had enriched themselves
thanks to their good relations with the English. With regard to the sacred
goal of a national economy, mill iktisad, he ascertained with satisfaction,
and without the slightest remorse that the widespread boycott movement
(carried out before the secret expulsions in the rst half of 1914) had ruined
hundreds of Greek and Armenian tradesmen.46
Unlike earlier cases, Mehmed Reid does not seem to have ended his
time in ofce in Karesi after falling out with local notables or regional au-
thorities. He did pride himself on having removed the Rumlar without
giving rise to protest.47 It was to the perfect satisfaction of the central gov-
ernment that he appeared to have fullled his task of organizing the depor-
tations and grappling with infrastructural modernization. He found himself
promoted to the rank of vali in July 1914, while at the same time his close
136 On the Eve of Catastrophe

party comrade, the minister of the interior, Tlt Pasha, proposed a particu-
larly delicate post to him. In a letter of July 19, 1914, Tlt insisted on of-
fering him the charge of secretary general of the inspectorate of the
provinces of Van, Bitlis, Diyarbakr, and Mamuretlaziz, while commend-
ing his devotion, his capabilities, and his efciency.48 The international
reform plan for the six Eastern Provinces, signed by the Porte under diplo-
matic pressurealso from Germanyon February 8, 1914, made provi-
sions for two powerful inspectors from neutral countries. They were to
control the process of reform, designed to stabilize the fragile coexistence of
ethnic groups, enable the participation of all groups in regional politics, and
establish a functioning rule of law.
But this plan ran counter to the CUPs will to centralization, full sover-
eignty, and Turkist nationalization of Anatolia at the expense of the regions
and the Christians. Indeed, the plan was rigorously denounced by the CUP
as a rst step toward Armenian autonomy, which would nally lead to Rus-
sian annexation. It was therefore necessary to hinder the imposed inspec-
torate as much as possible. The person best suited for this task was Dr.
Reid. Yet he would not take up his new ofce. The First World War offered
the opportunity to get rid of the embarrassing question of reforms, which
had been persistently raised diplomatically ever since the Congress of Berlin
(1878).49 On August 13, 1914, three days before his superior, Inspector Gen-
eral Hoff, would be called back from Van, and without a replacement being
appointed, Reid Bey was named vali of Diyarbakr.50
He immediately saw himself placed into other postings closer to the
front: From September 10, he was vali of Basra, which fell on November
20.51 From November 24, 1914, until December 25 he was vice vali of Bagh-
dad, probably to keep an eye on the vali, Sleyman Nazif, a critic of the
rgime.52 At that point I found the mutasarrf of Lazistan to have changed! ...
Instead of the old poised character and calm, there was an appalling arro-
gance and anger, wrote the old vali in 1919, remembering that month in
1914.53 From January 10 to February 25, 1915, Dr. Reid was vali of Mossul.
Finally, he replaced Governor Hamid (Kapanc) Bey, whose valilik in
Diyarbakr from September 17, 1914, to March 25, 1915, was distinguished
by a relatively tolerant policy toward the Armenians, contrary to the wishes
of the CUP.54 Reid Beys judgment of Hamid Bey was harsh. My prede-
cessor did not govern. Totally indifferent, and giving himself to pleasure and
amusement, he threw the affairs of the government into great chaos, and
reduced the states hold to zero.55 Dr. Reid governed the province of
Diyarbakr until March 2, 1916.
Thus, a functionary and party member who had been radicalized in his
thoughts and actions since 1909 and deeply frustrated by the rst months of
the war, became governor of Diyarbakr in 1915. According to his own
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 137

words, he removed from his province 120,000 Armenians, of whom the

majority were massacred, or died from exhaustion.56 This gure is nearly
double the ofcial Ottoman number of Armenians in the province of
Diyarbakr.57 It corresponds roughly with that given by contemporary ob-
servers for the autochthonous Christians killed in the province.58
What happened in Diyarbakr was already evident from testimony from
foreign observers who were political friends of the Ottoman Empire. On
July 31, 1915, the German ambassador in Constantinople informed the
Chancellor of the Reich, Bethmann Hollweg, in Berlin of the murder of the
Christians, saying, Since the beginning of this month, the vali of Diyarbakr,
Reid Bey, has begun the systematic extermination of the Christian popula-
tion in his province, without distinguishing between race or creed.59 Why
did the vali act in this way? A few months later, he explained himself during
a conversation in Constantinople with Mithat kr (Bleda), secretary gen-
eral of the CUP at the time. His words express open social envy, an obses-
sion with a general conspiracy, and the Social Darwinist idea that it was
necessary to kill collectively in order collectively to survive. We will liqui-
date them before they eliminate us. There is the vision of a politically poi-
soned Armenian people, extending to a dehumanizing image of Armenian
bandits and microbes within the organism of the fatherland. To elim-
inate them was the duty with which the vali Dr. Reid saw himself to be
charged. Explicitly, he abandoned the medical code of ethics where the sal-
vation of Turkishness was concerned.

Either they us, or we them. In this situation, I thought to myself: Hey, Dr

Reid! There are two alternatives: Either the Armenians will liquidate the
Turks, or the Turks will liquidate them! ... Faced with the necessity of having
to choose, I did not hesitate for long. My Turkishness triumphed over my
identity as a doctor. Before they do away with us, we will get rid of them, I said
to myself.... But I did not accomplish this deed either to satisfy my personal
pride or to enrich myself. I had seen that the fatherland [vatan] was about to
be lost, therefore, I proceeded eyes closed and without consideration, con-
vinced that I was acting for the welfare of the nation. If my own [national]
history were to call me to account for this, my conductnothing doing. The
history of other peoples may write about me what it will, it does not trouble
me in the least... . The Armenian bandits were a load of harmful microbes
that had aficted the body of the fatherland. Was it not the duty of the doctor
to kill the microbes?60

When Reid Bey arrived in Diyarbakr at the end of March 1915, he was
confronted with a situation difcult in several regards. The state had little
authority, the security forces were weak, the population was agitated and anx-
ious, while the large number of deserters, Muslims and non-Muslims, made
internal security problems more acute. The Muslims feared an invasion by
138 On the Eve of Catastrophe

the Russians, who had been victorious since the Ottoman defeat at Sarkam,
while on the western front, the British were preparing the invasion of Galli-
poli. What was feared by some was a hope to others. The Christians had
suffered the most from frequently brutal requisitions since general mobiliza-
tion in August 1914. Their stores in the bazaar in Diyarbakr had been burnt
and looted on August 19, 1914.61 The memory of the great massacres of the
end of the century was still fresh. To many Armenians and especially the
young people, a good number of whom were deserters, the abolition of the
reform plan for the Eastern Provinces and the voluntary entry into the war on
the side of Germany had destroyed any acceptable prospect of life under the
regime currently in place, whose downfall they were hoping for. Sometimes,
they audaciously expressed their views in the streets or in the cafs. They
were aware of the disarming of the Armenian soldiers, separated into work
battalions since February and exposed to massacre. Aggravating the situation
in the provinces was the fact that, ever since the centralizing reforms of the
Tanzimat, the tribes, mostly Kurdish but also Nestorian, were rebellious and
the institution of the state did not function properly in their region.
Mehmed Reid learned of the great number of Armenian deserters (he
does not mention the numerous Muslim deserters). He was appalled by the
fact that they moved freely even in the city. They were impertinent in his
eyes, and he thought he heard them say, in the hope of a rapid Russian
breakthrough: Up to now, you have been the ruling nation [millet-i hkime],
but now it is for us to dominate, and for you to be subjugated.62 He saw or
believed to see them as well armed, organized, and conspiring to stage a
general rebellion. In equal manner, an important number of Muslims in the
city were also seized by the specter of a Christian conspiracy. These he ably
succeeded in submitting to his will and organizing, before he delivered a
fatal blow to the Christian minority. More than fear, however, it was prob-
ably booty that compelled them to line up behind, or even urge on the new
vali. If Sleyman Nazif is to be believed, many Muslims feared him and
hated him for his brutality. According to Nazif, it was exclusively the lower
masses, together with the militia and policemen brought in from outside,
who participated in pillaging and murdering the Armenians. I have learned
with satisfaction that in Diyarbakr, not a single notable has been involved in
the matters of deportation and massacre, Sleyman Nazif wrote in 1919.63
This however is not entirely true. Rather it is a statement typical of the
months after the First World War, when Muslim patriots, among them
Nazif, made up the Association for the Defense of the National Rights in
the Eastern Provinces. The propaganda of this association had an interest
in placing all blame on Dr. Reid and the men he brought with him. The
fact is that several local notables had closely collaborated with the vali,
among them Pirinizde Feyzi and Cemilpaazde Mustafa, both sons of
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 139

local dignitaries and responsible for the anti-Armenian massacres in 1895.

That earlier massacre, as well as the existence of a self-assured local com-
mittee called Young Turk (of which by the way young Nazif had been a
propelling ideologist), not to mention a long, strongly anti-Armenian tele-
gram defying the sultan that had been sent to the sultan by this committee
on November 4, 1895, all suggest a powerful long-term anti-Christian
potential and agency in Diyarbakr. This has to be considered as a factor for
the particularly murderous outcome in that province, beside reasons re-
lated to Dr. Reid himself.
Several of the notables cooperating with Dr. Reid threw their lot in with
the nationalist organization put up in 1919.64 This is true, for example, of
Pirinizde Feyzi, a deputy of the Ottoman parliament and representative
of the CUP club in the city. Together with a second deputy of Diyarbakr,
Zl Bey, he had agitated for the dismissal of the moderate vali, Hamid. As
his interview with the British vice-consul of Diyarbakr on August 27, 1914,
demonstrates, Feyzi believed in a funny mixture of Panislamism and Pan-
turkism, hopinglike Enverfor miracles from the war to come. If the
Armenians were really loyal, he said, they would instigate rebellion against
Russian rule in the Caucasus in favor of the Ottomans. In a language sim-
ilar to that of other high CUP members in 1914, he openly threatened the
Armenians with destruction.65 He was vice-president of the local High
Council, which the new vali founded and presided over, and organized the
murder of deportees by Kurdish tribes. Thus at the end of May 1915 he
seems to have made a trip to the region of Djezireh (Cizre), bargained there
with Kurdish chiefs and nally taken with him as aides-de-camps Amaro
and Mustafa, the sons of the late brahim Pasha, head of the tribal confed-
eration of the Milli. Whereas brahim had protected all Christians under his
inuence during the pogroms of 1895, Amaros men were organized as
murderers of the deportees.66
Dr. Reid had brought with him a loyal troop of around 30 men, mainly
Circassians. It was a strike force, probably linked to the Tekilat- Mahsusa.67
They were joined by the policemen already there. Furthermore, a militia of
about a thousand volunteers, partly criminals, was organized under the
command of Cemilpaazde Mustafa.68 Strengthened by this support, the
vali succeeded in searching all the Armenian houses in the city, arrested
hundreds of deserters, and conscated a large quantity of arms.69 In per-
fect keeping with what had been organized in the cities of other provinces,
the vali of Diyarbakr demanded the immediate surrender of the deserters
and their arms, and, in order to intimidate and paralyze the Armenians,
had the heads of the community arrested and tortured. Among the 1,600
notables arrested in April and at the beginning of May, there were also
Assyrians.
140 On the Eve of Catastrophe

On May 25, 1915, the mfti (religious ofcial) listed the names of the
prisoners that had been assembled in the court of the prison and read them
a telegram from the capital that announced their deportation to Mosul.70
According to one source, the mfti Ibrahim and the kadi Necib asked in the
following decisive meeting of the High Council to spare the Armenian chil-
dren from the planned comprehensive destruction by converting them to
Islam. But Dr. Reid, Feyzi, Zl, and others were opposed.71 In June, when
the general deportation began, the mfti succeeded, however, in convincing
several families to apostatize in order to save their lives. According to the
Dominican missionary J. Rhtor, 350 Armenian families of the Gregorian
(Armenian Apostolic) faith, 25 Armenian Catholic, and 12 Chaldean fam-
ilies converted. For each conversion the family of the mfti was said to have
received a considerable sum of money.72 But these Islamized families were,
nevertheless, later deported in agreement with the explicit policy of the min-
istry of the interior.73
A witness by the name of Floyd Smith, a doctor associated with American
missionaries (the ABCFM) in Diyarbakr since 1913, describes the searches
and arrests as follows: The police in searching houses took anything they
wished. Books and papers were sure to bring condemnation to a household.
Rape of women was a common accompaniment of police research. Finally
the prisons were full and typhus began.It had been present throughout
the winter in the city.74 Right up to the rst weeks of the valilik of Reid, Dr.
Smith enjoyed intact relations with the government. Afterward, the vali
refused any meeting with the colleague. Because of his work, Dr. Smith
was perfectly aware of what was happening in the Christian quarter. He
conrms the governments precarious position in view of the general prob-
lem of desertion before the arrival of Mehmed Reid:
During the winter many Armenians had evaded military service by means of
the roofs. (One who knows Diyarbakr realises that it is possible for an expert
to go all over the city and not descend unto the street.) A far larger force of
police than was at hand would have been necessary to apprehend these men.
They nally became so condent of their ability to avoid capture that they
played cards etc. almost under the Valis nose (this was the rst vali [Hamid
Bey] we had during our stay). He at last became incensed and gave the Grego-
rian Bishop [Tchilgadian] to understand that unless these men surrendered,
drastic measures would be undertaken. On the strength of this the Bishop and
the Dragoman of the vilayet [Dikran Ilvanian] went upon the roofs and lec-
tured the men, telling them that they were bringing ruin upon themselves and
the whole Christian quarter. As a result quite a number surrendered. This
occurred the last of February.

Floyd Smith makes it clear to what extent the situation worsened with the
arrival of the new governor:
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 141

The vali was superseded early in March.75 By getting a large force of police and
gendarmes the new vali [Reid Bey] succeeded in apprehending the larger part
of these men. He soon started the imprisonment of prominent Armenians
using as justication the false statement that they were sheltering de-
serters... . Then a search for arms was made and several bombs unearthed,
some ries and ammunition found. Evidently there was a revolutionary com-
mittee and some ideas in some heads of doing things, but I am sure that the
large majority of Christians were opposed to any such proceedings. Most
people had weapons in their houses in remembrance of the event of twenty
years ago, but I feel positive that there was no idea of a general uprising.
About the rst of April a proclamation was posted demanding arms. Men
were imprisoned right and left and tortured to make them confess the pres-
ence and place of concealments of arms. Some went mad under the torture.76

Confessions of some sort were extracted. An Armenian close to the ABCFM

was made to sign an absurd document saying that the ABCFM was pre-
paring an insurrection in Diyarbakr and that its agent, Dr. Smith, was an
Armenian.77 According to what he wrote in 1918, Dr. Reid seems to have
believed the shocking confessions extracted under torture. Recently pub-
lished minutes of those interrogations give, between the lines, moving
insights into the despair and disunity of the local Armenians.78
Even in the extreme case of mass murder in the province of Diyarbakr in
1915, where the border between victims and perpetrators was ethnoreli-
giously given, the perpetrators wanted that some representatives of the tar-
geted group admit to have concretely acted as traitors against the existing
order. Contrary to Turkish apologetic schemas, the Van rebellion after
April 20, 1915, could not serve as proof for the Armenians general up-
rising and thus as an argument for their removal, since the systematic anti-
Armenian persecution in Diyarbakr simply began earlier. The prisoners
who did not die under torture were massacred after the end of May, when
the full-scale liquidation of the Christians commenced. Expelled, Dr. Smith
was made to leave before the nal drama started. The government cons-
cated the property of the ABCFM within the city.79 The rapid and voluntary
deterioration of intact relations between local functionaries and the ABCFM,
an organization rooted in the vilayet of Diyarbakr for three generations, is a
strong sign of the negative new spirit that the emissaries of the CUP
brought with them to the Eastern Provinces in the Spring of 1915. 80
In application of the Law on abandoned property of May 25, 1915, Dr.
Reid founded a commission for the administration of the deportees prop-
erty. As in other places, instead of its declared goal, that is, protection, the
commission served to transfer the Christian goods to the Muslimsmass
murder cum robbery (Christian Gerlach). Contrary to the rgimes inten-
tion however, the members of the High Council proted the most.81 On May
142 On the Eve of Catastrophe

30, 1915, the arrested Christian representatives of the provincial capital

were brought to the Tigris near the town, put on kelek (rafts) on the Tigris
and several days later were slaughtered at agreed places. Walter Holstein,
the German vice-consul in Mosul, told the embassy what was happening in
the neighboring province. On June 10, Holstein wrote:

614 Armenian men, women and children banished from Diyarbakr have all
been slaughtered on the journey here by raft; Keleks arrived here empty yes-
terday; for a few days now, corpses and human body parts have been oating
by in the river. Further transports of Armenian emigrants are on the way
here, with the same fate awaiting them. I have expressed my deepest revulsion
toward these crimes to the local government; the local vali expresses his
regret, noting that the vali of Diyarbakr alone bears responsibility... . The
massacre of the Armenians in the vilayet of Diyarbakr is becoming increas-
ingly known here and is creating growing unrest among the local population,
which can easily give rise to unforeseen consequences in face of the incom-
prehensible irresponsibility and weakness of the local government. In the dis-
tricts of Mardin and Amadia, conditions have developed into a true persecution
of Christians.82

The vali now had the community stripped of its leaders and began to
dispatch it (sevkiyat [dispatchment] was the ofcial term for the deporta-
tions). In June, thousands of people of the provincial capital, among them
the 3,750 Gregorian families, followed a handful of policemen. A great
number of them were massacred on their way through the province; a few
passed through Mardin.83 Simultaneously, the vali turned to the other towns
and villages of his province. Often, as in Djezire, this meant the nearly com-
plete massacre of the Christian population, without the effort of organizing
deportations. Two kaymakams, Nesimi Bey of the district of Lice and Sabit
Bey of the district of Beiri, who opposed the policy of the vali, were
ambushed and assassinated. Lice was the only place invaded some months
later by the Russian army. Armenian soldiers of its vanguard were said to
have then committed acts of revenge against the Muslim population.84
The German diplomatic service mentions vali Reid several times already
in June 1915, informing the embassy in Constantinople of the general mas-
sacres of Armenian men, women, and children then in progress in the prov-
ince of Diyarbakr. In July, German diplomacy began attending to the matter
of vali Reid on a higher level. On July 12, 1915, the ambassador in Constan-
tinople, Wangenheim, gave the following note in French to the minister of
the interior, Tlt: The German Embassy has just learned the following
from a reliable source: The vali of Diyarbakr, Reid Bey, has recently orga-
nized regular massacres among the Christian population in his district,
without distinguishing between Armenians and Christians belonging to
other denominations, and without worrying about whether they were guilty
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 143

or innocent.... Under the orders of Reid Bey, policemen from Diyarbakr

went to Mardin and there arrested the Armenian bishop together with a
large number of Armenians and other Christians, 700 people in total; all of
them were driven to a place outside the city during the night and slaugh-
tered like sheep. The total number of the victims of these massacres is esti-
mated at 2000 souls. If the Imperial Government does not take measures
against Reid Bey, it must be feared that the lower classes of the Muslim
population from the surrounding vilayets might themselves rise up to
indulge in a general massacre of all Christian inhabitants.85
This intervention by the embassy seems to have been the consequence of
a dispatch by Holstein of July 10, which had demanded the immediate re-
moval of the vali of Diyarbakr.86 But Tlt simply passed over the German
meddling. It is true that on the same day (July 12), he conveyed the Ger-
man note, partly word for word, to his subordinate comrade, and urged him
not to apply the anti-Armenian measures to the other Christians. What un-
settled the minister of the interior when confronted with the German
reaction was the bad publicity and also the fact that Reid was applying to
the Assyrians the same disciplinary measures [tedbir-i inzibtiye] intended
for the Armenians, as Tlt calls them in the encrypted telegram. In this
respect the boss harshly criticized his subordinate in a second telegram of
July 20, 1915, urging him to stop the indiscriminate anti-Christian measures
that were very detrimental to the country.87 It seems that Tlts telegram
of July 12 resulted in an amnesty for the non-Armenian Christians. But this
did not last long and was, according to Rhtor, an opportunity for the local
rulers to extort more money from those hoping to be granted an amnesty.88
The allys diplomats could not, or would not, understand that, basically,
the vali of Diyarbakr had been acting by mutual agreement with his supe-
rior from the outset. By the time of the illegal expulsion of the Rumlar
during the rst half of 1914, Tlt had already successfully concealed a
policy that he would not acknowledge in front of the foreign diplomats. On
August 14, 1915, Holstein unsuccessfully reiterated his demand for the re-
moval of Reid Bey and called the atrocities ofcially committed in the
province of Diyarbakr historically unique.89
The persecutions continued until the month of September. A telegram
from the embassy to the foreign ministry of September 10, 1915, conrmed
the general fact of the central governments two policies, one ofcial, one
concealed, as well as the direct implication of the regular army in the mas-
sacre of the Armenians. In particular, the telegram highlighted two charac-
teristics of the extermination in Diyarbakr under Governor Reid: In this
case, it affected all Christians, not just the Armenians, and it included men,
women, and children. Compared to other governors who usually had the
men massacred on the spot, and the women and children deported to the
144 On the Eve of Catastrophe

camps in Syria, the vali of Diyarbakr carried out a program of maximal

killing; unlike other provinces, he did not seem to distinguish between Syr-
iac and Armenian Christians.90
The weeding out of Christian communities went on until autumn. On
September 28, 1915, the vali sent a telegram to the minister of the interior,
stating that he had removed 120,000 Armenians from his province.91 On
October 19, 1915, a friend named Halil Edib, vice governor of the district of
Mardin, sent Reid Bey his congratulations for the kurban bayram [reli-
gious holiday] by telegraph from Mardin, saying, I kiss your hands, you
who have gained us the six [eastern] provinces and you have opened to us
access to Turkestan and to the Caucasus.92 He somewhat exaggerated the
salutary Panturanist effects of the valis deeds. This telegram neverthe-
less is a clue to the strong Panturanist views of this friend of the vali and the
vali himself.
Vali Dr. Reid was responsible, or at least co-responsible, for the murder
of two kaymakams who opposed the anti-Armenian policy, even if, under
the threat of the tribunal, he vividly defended himself in his Mlhazt
against the accusation of having organized the assassinations.93 His incred-
ible version of the two murders and his conceited tone, moreover, cast a
dark shadow on the intellectual honesty of the author of this long text, the
bulk of which concerns the Armenians. In the minutes of the police inter-
rogations, recently published, there is no evidence of a general Armenian
plan to massacre the Muslims, as he contended. That evil powers called
Armenians wanted to annihilate the Ottoman nation was the ide xe of his
radicalized mind.94 There are nevertheless some pertinent elements in his
Mlhazt: He himself did not know the terrain; he had few trained security
forces; there was great fear among the Muslims of losing their position as a
ruling group; the situation in the province was chaotic; in short, an orderly
evacuation of 120,000 Armenians was impossible from the outset.
An incontestable point is the fact of Reids hatred against the Christians,
particularly the Armenians, by the time he arrived at Diyarbakr. Linked
with this was an attitude that made clear to all his subordinates that the
death of the group designated as traitors was legitimate and necessary for
the sake of nation and religion. It was not always necessary to give specic
ordershis entourage knew what Dr. Reid and the CUP wanted. It could
anticipate what they would order and what they would welcome. Such a
picture corresponds with ndings on how the Shoah really began in Eastern
Europe in 19411942. It shows the importance of local agencies whose mur-
derous actions were only possible because they were in agreement with su-
periors in the center. The ideological articulation had prepared the ground
for deeds that, in a cumulative and systematical radicalization, but without
full preliminary blueprint, took the form of a total genocide.95 From this
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 145

point of view Dr. Reid was neither the servile instrument nor the enfant
terrible of the central CUP regimehe was rather its convinced and con-
sistent executioner. He was explicit and did not use the double language
and apologetic lies made up in the capital for the Germans and other
foreigners ears.
Reid Bey was eager to serve the fatherland in accordance with the will of
the party. He was well integrated into the CUP power structure during the
years 19131916. Despite his pride and his difcult character, he was
respected, or at least seen as very useful by the ttihadist center. The latter
was at the time dominated by his superior and party brother, Tlt Bey, as
well as by his colleagues from the School of Medicine, Nzm and Bahaed-
din akir. His rapid promotion and his appointment to important posts con-
rm this view. He was sent to particularly difcult places, beginning with
the Aegean region in 1913, where at the end of the same year, a secret policy
of expelling Christians was established for the rst time. Important ofces
in the Eastern Provinces followed, where since the spring of 1915 a policy to
remove the Armenians completely was applied. In autumn 1916, this enor-
mous goal had been more or less achieved.
After the success of the anti-Armenian policy, the regime had gained a
prime interest in cooling things down, so as not to compromise its future on
the international scene. At this point Dr. Reid became an inconvenience to
those in power, partly because his misdeeds had not passed unnoticed by
the foreign powers. They had even led to vivid protests by the German ally.
The name of the vali of Diyarbakr had become a symbol for the premedi-
tated murder of Christians. In addition, Reid Bey, as vali of Ankara (between
March 26, 1916 and March 27, 1917), turned against the system then in
place, which was full of corruption and war proteers. His intransigence
and straightforwardness began seriously to upset the regime. Confronted by
corruption among functionaries in the vilayet of Ankara, on the other hand,
Dr. Reid could not remain inactive. It is not clear whether stories telling of
Dr. Reids enrichment while in ofce are true.96 His efforts to make a living
through trade in 19171918 and his familys poverty after 1919 seem to sug-
gest the contrary.97 But possibly after 1913 he became both licentious in his
hate against Christians, and, like so many other ofcers, corrupt and greedy.
Unlike more Machiavellian gures such as Tlt, or his two colleagues men-
tioned above, the patriot Reid Bey probably believed at least partly in the
view of the Armenians as exploiters, bloodsuckers, tumors, and
microbes. This dehumanized and pseudo-scientic vision of internal foes
seems to have coexisted with the tenderness of the family father Reid Bey,
even if he was mostly absent, taken by his beloved service for the state (again
an unsurprising nding if compared with perpetrators of the Jewish geno-
cide in the Second World War).98
146 On the Eve of Catastrophe

It was Reid Beys known and irrefutable implication in the murder of

the Armenians that made him embarrassing to the CUP politicians, who,
faced with defeat, wished to save their heads, and also, their national project
in Anatolia. To wide political circles, it was thus tempting to point at certain
ttihadists, and to portray the vali of Diyarbakr as exceptional. Rightly, S-
leyman Nazif asked in 1919, Beyond Diyarbakr, there is a whole other
group of men like Reid. What will they do?99 Mehmed Reid was hardly
wrong in feeling himself to be the scapegoat for an entire large group, when
after his arrest, he wrote in his diary that he alone was held responsible.100
Others could have wanted his suicide, but there is no evidence. Once the
Turkish national movement had won its battle and had established itself
internationally, it was no longer so necessary to distance oneself from Reid.
This crops up again, however, in the interview by a journalist from Resimli
Tarih with Mithat kr, during which, in an account of his conversation
with Reid Bey, the former portrays himself as being above all criminal
suspicion.101
By taking the impoverished family of Dr. Reid into its care after his
suicideeven though in itself an irreproachable act by the Great National
Assembly of Angorathe republic at the same time explicitly appropri-
ated the political gure of Reid Bey. This second act bore grave conse-
quences. Dr. Reid once again became the loyal and deserving servant of
the state, according to the image he himself cultivated in his notes. A few
lines written by Mithat kr Bleda on Reid Bey in his memoirs are very
signicant in this regard. Contrary to the interview in Resimli Tarih, the
secretary general of CUP from 19161918 speaks clearly here. In no way
does he question the behavior of the vali of Diyarbakr. On the contrary,
Mithat kr portrays Dr. Reid as an infallible man of science who,
rightly and for the supreme salvation of the Turkish nation, had been
resolved to annihilate the illness and the ill, meaning the minorities
and the Armenians here perceived as mentally illa kind of judgment
that condemns its author and its authors ideology. Social Darwinism, hy-
gienic discourse, a cult of raison dtat, and political resentments blend
together in his extraordinary vindication:

Vali Dr. Mehmed Reid Bey was a doctor who, amid the most difcult of con-
ditions, did not shy away from bearing the responsibility for the heavy duties
he had been charged with.... Regarding the question of how the fatherland
[memleket] could be liberated from its pains, after he diagnosed the disease in
question and took all responsibility onto himself, and, as doctor and states-
man, showed the courage as well as the maturity to accomplish the task he
had been accorded... . This was during the most critical period of Turkeys
political life, in the years 19081918. Vali Dr. Mehmed Reid Bey was then
From Patriotism to Mass Murder 147

serving in the civilian administration. He diagnosed the mental illness [ruh

hastalklar] of the minorities. For they supported England, Russia and France,
who for centuries had desired to partition Turkey, and were nally also of
help to the United States, in that they referred to the principles of President
Wilson. In conjunction with the diagnosis, Vali Dr. Mehmed Reid Bey also
pointed out the last possible cure during the nal period: Either to destroy the
illness and the ill, or to see the entire Turkish people and its country perish at
the hands of maniacs [deliler]. Vali Dr. Mehmed Reid Bey was a scientist. His
outlook and his behavior could not be wrong, and were not. Vali Dr. Mehmed
Reid Beys behavior was sanctioned by the National Assembly of Turkey by
according his children an annuity in return for his services to the fatherland,
and also recognized by Atatrk.102

How can we explain Dr. Reids thoughts and actions? An important

underlying factor of vali Reids nal stance was the power- and state-
oriented socialization at the Military Medical School, where young men,
members of the Muslim ruling class (millet-i hakime) worried about their
future and their states future, vexed by the specter of its end. Those seen
guilty for this specterrst Sultan Abdlhamid, then the Ottoman Chris-
tians, above all the Armeniansneeded to be eliminated. Power, politics,
and fatherland stood above ethics and historys judgment. As far as our
sources show Reid became openly anti-Christian only as governor of
Karesi in 19131914, when he was deeply involved in the expulsion of
Greek-Orthodox compatriots. At the beginning of the First World War, he
took ofces near the front where he saw defeat. He became anxious,
angry, and arrogant. When in March 1915 he arrived in Diyarbakr he was
radicalized enough to do what he did between March and September. The
material presented in this chapter gives the impression that he arrived
with the determination once and for all to get rid of the Christians in his
province where a strong anti-Christian potential already existed. Dr. Reid
just needed specic orders from the center.
He believed that the Ottoman nation would be annihilated by inner and
exterior foes, that the Muslim nation with which he identied was in a
deadly battle between Muslims and Christians, between Turkish power and
the effrontery of the traditionally subordinate gvur this is the basic
tenor of Mlhazt, his apologetic text of the end of 1918.103 Reid set the
decline of its own nation against the genocide of others. For its salvation
he felt compelled to destroy an entire community. The patriotic mass
murderer declared ill and incurable, and therefore a target of mass killing,
this community of defenseless victims. The fact that both Young Turkish
generations, including the founders of the Republic of Turkey, counted Dr.
Reid among its heroes, and not among its tragic and criminal gures,
betrays a more general setting of the course of history. This has cast dark
148 On the Eve of Catastrophe

shadows on the historical conscience of several Turkish generations to

follow. One ought not simply to dismiss Dr. Reid as a demon, but to ana-
lyze and contextualize his personality, career, and actions. At long last, facts
should be faced as to what criminal point this upright patriot, and with
him the CUP, the great organization of the Turkish national movement,
had arrived at in 1915.
Mehmet Tlt (Tlt Pasa).
Andrew Goldberg,
Two Cats Productions.

Enver Pasa.
Andrew Goldberg,
Two Cats Productions.
 Cemal Pasa.
Andrew Goldberg,
Two Cats Productions.

Bahaeddin Sakir.
Andrew Goldberg,
Two Cats Productions.
 U.S. Ambassador
Henry Morgenthau.
Library of Congress.

Raphael Lemkin. Andrew Goldberg, Two Cats Productions.

 Demonstrator at the
funeral procession for
Hrant Dink, January
2007; the sign reads,
We are in mourning,
with the date of Hrant
Dinks birth. Tens of
thousands marched
through the streets of
Istanbul, holding signs
that read, We are all
Hrant Dink, We are
all Armenian. From
Hepimiz Hrant Dinkiz
[We are all Hrant Dink]
(Istanbul: Agos, 2007).

Armenian Revolutionary Fighters. Andrew Goldberg, Two Cats Productions.

Celebration of the Young Turk Revolution, July 1908, in Pera, the European Quarter
of Istanbul. Andrew Goldberg, Two Cats Productions.

Panoramic View of Adana after the Pogrom of Armenians, April 1909.

From the Collection of the Armenian Genocide Museum, Erevan, Armenia.
 Armenians Deported
by Train, 1915.
Andrew Goldberg,
Two Cats Productions.

Turkish Irregular Forces, 1915. Andrew Goldberg, Two Cats Productions.

Armenians Deported, 1915. Andrew Goldberg, Two Cats Productions.

Armenian Victims, 1915. Andrew Goldberg, Two Cats Productions.

Russian Soldiers Witnessing the Outcome of Massacres of Armenians in the Villages
of the Mush Region. From the Collection of the Armenian Genocide Museum, Erevan,
Armenia.

Sultan Abdl Hamid II.

Andrew Goldberg,
Two Cats Productions.
Part III
GENOCIDE IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
This page intentionally left blank
7

The Politics and Practice of the

Russian Occupation of Armenia,
1915February 1917

Peter Holquist

The Russian empire played an important role in the dynamics leading up to

the slaughter of the Armenian population in the six eastern provinces of the
Ottoman empire. Arguably, Russias roleboth in terms of intended and
unintended consequenceswas greater than that of any other party, aside
from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) itself. The CUP asserted
that Ottoman subjects of Armenian and Assyrian background were a fth
column acting on behalf of Russia. In fact, actual Russian policy was far
more conservative. Despite the importance of this issue, few studies have
endeavored to analyze either Russias formal policy or its actual conduct in
any depth. Instead, treatment of Russian policy has usually been relegated
to the ambit of other narratives: an Armenian-national narrative about the
struggle to achieve national independence in the face of the duplicitous Rus-
sian government; an Ottoman and subsequently Turkish narrative of a rapa-
cious, aggressive Russian state seeking the dismemberment of the Ottoman
empire; or, a narrative of imperial Great Power aspirations, one indebted to
Soviet documentary publications, presenting the Russian imperial state as
another iteration of an imperialist state relentlessly looking to dismember
the Ottoman empire.
Literature focusing on the Turkish side has echoed the Ottoman states
fears during the war and has portrayed a Russian imperial state driven by
anti-Muslim bias that, in religious solidarity with the Armenians, sought to
help them at the expense of the regions Muslim population.1 Works that
treat the Russian occupation as a pivotal moment in Armenian national his-
tory focus on the cynicism and mendacity of the Russian state, a state they
present as rhetorically committed to the Armenian cause but actually

151
152 Genocide in International Context

seeking to depopulate the region of Armenians in order to pursue a policy

of Russian colonization.2 (Thus works in Turkish history accuse the Russian
state of being anti-Muslim and pro-Armenian, while much of the literature
in the eld of Armenian history charges, on the contrary, that the Russian
state was pro-Muslim and anti-Armenian.) More general treatments of this
occupation in studies of the First World War predictably cast it as a manifes-
tation of the imperialist agenda endemic to all Great Powers.3
All these approaches, I believe, err in three respects. First, they portray
Russian policy as uniform and coherent. Second, they tend to present Rus-
sian policy as relatively constant over time. Finally, these treatments exam-
ine Russian policy as governed entirely by one dynamic: the dynamic of
either Russian-Ottoman (or, often, Russian-Muslim) relations; or, for
scholars of Armenia, of Russian-Armenian relations.4 That is, they are less
concerned with the formation of Russian policy in its own right than as a
factor in another narrative. The policies pursued by various Russian institu-
tional actors in the occupied regions of the Ottoman Empire, in fact, grew
out of overarching governmental policies and had analogues in other occu-
pied regions. Russian policies in Armenia must be situated within these
overarching agendas and more long-term trends.
In this chapter I examine the changing parameters and content of Rus-
sian policy in the areas of Turkey occupied by right of war, in particular to
highlight these regions as an arena for conict among various institutional
actors within the Russian state.5 My goal is to present Russian policy within
a broader chronological and institutional context. First, I show the Russian
state to be a complexin the sense of compound and multivalent
actor in the immediate prewar and war period. We now have excellent
studies of both the Ottoman state and of the German state that portray state
policy as the outcome of an interplay among a variety of actors: ministries,
dipomats, military men, missionaries.6 Russia, no less than Germany, pur-
sued a policy that was complicated and riddled with contradiction, inter-
nally fractious and uncoordinated.7 To portray Russia as a unitary entity
simply pursuing a cynical policy gets one as far as describing the Otto-
mans as duplicitous, Germany as myopically focused on Weltmacht, or
Britain as driven only by concerns of empire.
Second, the conduct of the Russian state in the face of CUP irredentist
agitation and attempts to rouse the Muslim population of Kars and Batum
against Russian rule provides an instructive parallel to Ottoman measures.
The Russian army believed it confronted an irredentist challenge and form
of insurgency like the one the Ottomans believed they faced from the
Armenians. Yet despite contemplating comprehensive expulsion plans for
the Muslim population of this region, the Russian government eventually
abandoned these grandiose programs. The reasons for scaling back such
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 153

comprehensive punitive measures demonstrate important institutional

constraints at work in the Russian state that were absent in the CUP.8 Fi-
nally, I seek to show that the Russian militarys policy toward occupied
Armeniafrequently characterized as the instrument for carrying out
some overarching government policyin fact proceeded according to its
own dynamics. These dynamics produced policies that were callous and
frequently brutal, yet they rarely had the purposefulness that is so often
ascribed to them.

Accounts of Russian policy toward Armenia during the First World War
frequently emphasize the Russian states desire to dupe the Armenians and
use them against the Ottoman Turks, as part of the Petrograd governments
overall plan to annex Turkish Armenia and settle it with Russians.9 In fact,
Russian policy was far more cautious and divided. The historian Donald
Bloxham is right to note that Russian policy was less offensive than defen-
sive.10 One need only compare Russian occupation aims and conduct in
Austrian Galicia with those in Armenia to see the degree of cautiousness in
the Armenian case.
From 1912 through early 1916, Russias ofcial positionmeaning the
position of the Russian Foreign Ministry (MID)regarding the future
status of eastern Anatolia was consistent. In 1912 Russia had argued that
this region should remain under Ottoman sovereignty, but with the addi-
tion of international oversight to uphold the rights of Christians in the
region. This program took formal shape in the February 1914 reform act,
which was signed but never implemented.11 The main force behind these
reform efforts was Andrei Mandelshtam (Andr Mandelstam), a protg of
Russias leading scholar of international law, Fedor Martens, and close col-
league of Boris Nolde, head of the Legal Advisory Ofce in the Russian
Foreign Ministry.12 The reform act was clearly an important moment in
Great Power competition and also served to unsettle the local population,
particularly the Kurds.
From August until October 1914, when the Ottomans began military oper-
ations against Russia, the Russian government sought to avoid any measures
that might antagonize the Ottomans.13 Russia believed that pressing the
reform project might provoke the Ottomans to declare war, and hence
planned no action until after the wars end. At that pointat the conclusion
of the European warthe Russian government envisioned enforcing its
original proposal for oversight but with solely Russian representation. The
Ottoman empire was to retain formal sovereignty over the region.14 This po-
sition toward Armenia stands in stark contrast to Russian plans for occupied
Austrian Galicia, which the Russian government proclaimed from the outset
would be directly annexed upon the wars conclusion.15
154 Genocide in International Context

Once the Ottoman Empire initiated military operations against Russia in

late October 1914, some sections of the Russian government looked to the
Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire as a potential ally and as an
irredentist threat to its foe. To this end it sought to retain the commitment
and devotion of Armenians to the Russian state. Emperor Nicholas II fa-
mously proclaimed to the Armenian Catholicos Kevork V that a most bril-
liant future awaits the Armenians. In early 1915, Foreign Minister Sazonov,
in an address to the State Duma (Russias lower legislative chamber),
declared that at the conclusion of the war, this exceptional state [the peace
negotiations] will be employed by the Imperial government in a direction
desirable for the Armenian population.16 Historians sympathetic to the
Armenian cause read these proclamations as promises of Armenian au-
tonomy, if not outright statehood. (These soothing statements, it should be
noted, were intentionally vague. The Russian government never made as
unambiguous a statement about the future disposition of Armenia as it did
for Poland and Galicia.) Clearly, the Russian imperial government was
seeking to buttress the allegience of Armenians within Russia and win over
the Armenian population of Anatolia.17 Others within the Russian govern-
ment, however, wished to see a pro-Kurdish policy. And Russian military
men proved skeptical about the use of nonregular military detachments.
Nevertheless, these plans fanned Ottoman fears of the the prospect of a
major Armenian irredentist threat.
Most Ottoman Armenians, it must be stressed, did not take part in either
Armenian revolutionary formations or join the small number of Russian-
sponsored Armenian military formations. Nor did the formation of such eth-
nic formations lead other states to engage in mass deportations and slaughter
of their suspect populations. Austria-Hungary did not pursue such violent
measures toward its Serb and Czech subjects. Equally, the Russian state did
not engage in measures like those of the CUP toward those populations
recruited by hostile powers: Muslims, Poles, Finns, and even Ukrainians.
When the Russian government learned of the systematic Ottoman mas-
sacre of Armenians, it pressed its Allies to issue a statement condemning
the genocide and proclaiming that Ottoman government ofcials would be
held personally accountable for these crimes. Issued on May 24, 1915, this
was the rst international text to contain a reference to crimes against hu-
manitylanguage inserted by the Russians. While most accounts present
this measure as a purely cynical act, it had a far more complicated gene-
alogy. The Russian initiative built on earlier measures by the Russian gov-
ernment throughout the nineteenth century for humanitarian intervention
on behalf of Christian peoples of the Ottoman empire, as well as its decades-
long insistence, in its efforts to codify the international law of war, that there
existed laws of humanity.18
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 155

As regards the postwar plans for the regions of the Ottoman Empire
inhabited by Armenians, however, Russian policy remained unchanged
down to early 1916. In February 1915, in the aftermath of the Russian vic-
tory at Sarkam and advance into Ottoman territory, the Foreign Ministry
drew up a draft of Basic Principles for the Future Ordering of Armenia.
This was essentially the 1914 reform agreement with more vigorous over-
sight, to be provided by a European governor-general. This general policy
was restated in July 1915, by which time the Russian government was fully
aware of the massacres of Armenians.19 Foreign Minister Sazonov instructed
Ambassador Benckendorff in London that the formation of an autono-
mous Armenia under the sovereignty of the Sultan and under the tripartite
protectorate of Russia, France, and England would be the natural result of
the longstanding favorable attitude not only of Russia, but of its Allies as
well, toward the Turkish Armenians.20
In February 1915, during the drafting of the above guidelines, Minister of
Agriculture Krivoshein proposed to Foreign Minister Sazonov that the suc-
cessful results on the Caucasus Front raise the possibility of correcting our
borders and rounding out our holdings in Asia Minor and Armenia. In
particular, Krivoshein proposed incorporating the region of the upper Arax
river, usually termed Armeniaencompassing the Ottoman vilayets of
Erzurum, Van, and Bitlis.21 This memo, often cited as a demonstration of
the annexationist ambitions of the Russian imperial state, in fact reected
ambitions specic to the Ministry of Agriculture.
Krivosheins desire to annex Armenia was not adopted as government
policy in early 1915. This was due in large part to the fact that the Armenian
movement within the Russian Empire had made the Russian government
reluctant to add any more territories with large populations of Armenians.
In March 1915, the Russian Ambassador to London, Count Benckendorff,
informed the British Foreign Ofce that the Emperor did not wish to have
much to do with [the Armenian vilayets] and was not at all keen to incorpo-
rate them.22 Such was indeed the overall policy of the Russian government.
In discussing developments on the Caucasus front, the Council of Minis-
ters expressed concern that the Viceroy for the Caucasus, Illarion Ivanovich
Vorontsov-Dashkov, was pursuing a pro-Armenian policy. (His wife,
Countess Vorontsova-Dashkova, was widely reputed to have a special sym-
pathy for Armenians.) The Council of Ministers was worried that Vorontsov-
Dashkov was dictating military policy in the Caucasus in order to benet the
Armenian cause, using the Caucasus Army to liberate the areas of Ottoman
Turkey with large Armenian populations. The Chairman of the Council of
Ministers observed that the creation of an Armenia will only be a burden
for us, and will become a future source of various complications in the east.
Agriculture Minister Krivoshein concurred: we see that authorities in the
156 Genocide in International Context

Caucasus are prepared to sacrice Russian interests for Armenian ones.23

The Council of Ministers most denitely wished to avoid the creation of a
Great Armenia, or the annexation and incorporation of large swaths of
territory with an Armenian population.
In an extensive 1915 report to the emperor, General Kuropatkin argued
that Russia should extend its sphere of inuence over the region: but he
did not argue for annexation or for a program to settle Russians there.24 And
while Pavel Miliukov, leader of the oppositionist Constitutional-Democrat
Party, discussed the annexation of those portions of Turkish Armenia with
Armenian majorities, his rationale was to safeguard the claims of the
regions Armenian population, rather than to settle Russians there.25 Certain
segments of educated society went further, arguing for the incorporation of
Armenia as compensation for Russias losses in the war.26 But even such
activistswho constituted a small minorityviewed this as a project to be
pursued after the war, not during it, and envisioned directing Russian set-
tlers to plots alongside the existing Armenian population, not in place of it.
The Russian governments formal position on annexation changed radi-
cally in early 1916. By this time the Russian Army in the Caucasus had
achieved a major military breakthrough, seizing the crucial fortress city of
Erzurum in February and taking the port city of Trebizond (now Trabzon) in
April. But the shift in Russian policy was the result not of changing military
fortunes, but of the Sykes-Picot accords, initialed in January 1916 by the
British and French governments in order to divide the Near East into zones
of inuence for the Great Powers.
The Russian government was not party to the initial Sykes-Picot
agreement. Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot visited St. Petersburg in early
March (new style) 1916 to inform the Russians of their agreement. The ac-
cord was an unpleasant surprise to Foreign Minister Sazonov.27 In partic-
ular, the improvised extension of French claims all the way to Diyarbakr
and the Persian border unsettled him. After all, Sazonov noted, you know
how complex this problem is for usthere are at least 1,200,000 Armenians
in the Caucasus and, of all the heterogeneous populations we must rule,
they are the most difcult. Personally, Sazonov observed, he would have
preferred to retain Armenia under Turkish sovereignity.28 Sazonov
declared that Russia opposed French encroachment, but that Russia itself
did not wish to annex Armenia. British Ambassador Buchanan reported
that Sazonov expressed 1.) That he would prefer to keep Turkey as suzerain
of Armenia [that is, the Ottoman empire would exercise dominion over
Armenia, while granting limited self-rulePH]. 2.) That he did not wish
Armenia to be annexed to Russia for political reasons. 3.) That Erzurum
however could not be evacuated but that Russian Government desired to
take as little territory West of Erzurum as possible.29
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 157

French Ambassador Palologue reported that Emperor Nicholas II

expressed a similar sentiment: he declared that he had no dreams for any
conquests in Armenia, other then Trebizond and Erzurum, the possession
of which is a strategic necessity for the [Russian-controlled] Caucasus.30 As
a result of a compromise brokered by the British, Russia ceded control over
Little Armeniathe historic cradle of the medieval Armenian kingdom.
In return Russia would retain control over northern Mesopotamia
Erzurum, Bitlis, and Van, a strategically important area but one with fewer
Armenians and a large number of Kurds, Nestorians, and Lazes.31 As a
result of these negotiations, Russia now committed itself to annexing the
regions of Erzurum, Trebizond, Van, and Bitlis, up to a point on the Black
Sea littoral to the west of Trebizond.32 Sir Mark Sykes explained the Russian
governments concerns in these negotiations: Russians desire as few
Armenians as possible in Russian territory and consider that an Armenian
state under French protection will relieve them of Armenian nationalist
responsibilities, as Russians can say to Armenians, if you wish to be inde-
pendent, migrate to Armenian State where there is ample room.33
Until 1917, Russian ofcials regarded the annexation of Armenian terri-
tory as an unwelcome requirement forced on them by the British and the
French. It was the cost extracted from Russia for gaining control of the
Straits, and the acquisition of the new territories, Russian diplomats felt,
would cause Russia more than a few problems.34 It must be emphasized,
however, that attempting to absorb as little Armenian-inhabited territory as
possible was not the same as plotting to expel Armenians from that territory,
as is sometimes charged.
While Armenia was slated for annexation after the war, during the war it
continued to be administeredin accordance with the laws of waras an
occupied territory.35 In the summer of 1916 Foreign Minister Sazonov and
the viceroy for the Caucasus, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, corresponded
regarding the aims and policies of the Russian occupation of Armenia.
Sazonov noted that the occupation of Great Armenia and the decision to
incorporate it had raised the question of the areas future organization.
While it was still premature to establish precise foundations for the con-
quered region, it was essential to determine guiding principles. The great-
est difculty in our forthcoming task, wrote Sazonov, consists in posing
and solving the Armenian question. He continued:

Taken together, it somewhat extends beyond the boundaries of Russian state

life.... As is well known, the two extremes between which we have posed the
solution of the Armenian question are two currents. One is the desire of
Armenian nationalists for full autonomy under the aegis of Russia, in the
spirit of the reforms proposed by us in 1913, and the otherentirely contra-
dictory to itreduces the political signicance of Armenians to nothing and
158 Genocide in International Context

seeks to put Muslims in their place. It seems to me that the solution of this
question entirely in one or the other direction does not correspond to Russias
state interests, neither from the point of view of domestic nor of foreign
policy.... It seems to me that the best outcome for us in ordering the recon-
quered areas of Turkey would be to be especially rm in following the princi-
ples of legality, justice, and an entirely non-partisan relation to all the diverse
elements of the region, not setting one against the other and nor providing
exclusive protection to any one particular nationality [narodnost] at the expense
of another.36

The grand duke had had previous experience governing an occupied ter-
ritory: he and his chief of staff, General N. N. Ianushkevich, had directed the
disastrous rst Russian occupation of Austrian Galicia, which ended with
the Russian Armys Great Retreat in the summer of 1915.37 Demoted from
supreme commander in chief to viceroy for the Caucasus, he now replied to
Sazonov that, overall, he concurred with Sazonovs guidelines. However, he
indicated that it was his profound belief that the Armenian question did
not exist within the boundaries of the Russian empire. In an offhand criti-
cism of his predecessor, Vorontsov-Dashkov, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaev-
ich wrote that he did not favor any group in the Caucasus over any other.
The Armenian question as such, he insisted, exists only outside the bor-
ders of Russia.38 (On another occasion, he proclaimed that there is no
more an Armenian question than there is a Yakut question.)39 Insofar as
the Armenian question did exist outside the borders of Russia, he shared
Sazonovs point of view: Armenians should be granted broad autonomy, but
no special privileges vis--vis the Muslim population. The Russian military
had formally articulated these policies one month earlier, in the Temporary
Statute on the administration of the territories of Turkey, seized by right of
war, issued in June 1916.40 The statute established a governor-general for
the occupied regions, spelled out his authority, and laid down general guide-
lines. Formally, up until the October Revolution and the conclusion of a
ceasere on the Caucasus Front, the Russian Government continued to treat
the regions of Turkey as occupied territory rather than as regions annexed
to the Russian Empire.41

Before addressing the dilemmas of administering occupied territory, the

Russian military in the Caucasus rst had to confront irredentist appeals
and attempts to incite Russias Muslim population during the initial Otto-
man incursion into the Russian empire.42 Prior to unleashing outright
military operations against Russia, the CUP dispatched agents to provoke
the Muslim population within the Russian Caucasus against the Russian
government and had encouraged marauding by Kurdish tribes in Russian-
controlled Persia.43 Then, during the initial Ottoman occupation of Ajaria in
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 159

December 1914, Ottoman detachments attempted to incite the local popula-

tion against the Russians and slaughtered Russian-subject Armenians in
the regions that they had occupied.44 Thus Russian authorities in January
April 1915 faced a situation not unlike the one which the Ottoman state
claimed as a justication for its reprisals against Ottoman-subject Arme-
nians. What the Russian case demonstrates, however, is that a similar struc-
tural situation did not produce identical results. In reoccupying the territory,
Russian forces looted and marauded.45 The British correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian reported that General Liakov in particular accused the
Moslem natives of treachery, and sent his Cossacks from Batum with orders
to kill every native at sight, and burn every village and every mosque. And
very efciently had they performed their task, for as we passed up the
Chorokh valley to Artvin not a single habitable dwelling or a single living
creature did we see.46 Yet in terms of further policy, the Russian govern-
ment considered, then rejected, the mass expulsion of the Muslim popula-
tion. Again, this measure is striking not only in its contrast to the actions of
the CUP toward Greeks and Armenians, but also to Russian policy in Aus-
trian Galicia, which saw the mass expulsion and detention of Jews.47
Upon reoccupation of the region in January 1915, commanders of indi-
vidual Russian units began dispatching parties of Russian-subject Muslims
suspected of aiding Turkish forces to the regional administrative centers of
Kars and Batum for detention. In late January, authorities in Kars were
holding 159 Muslims from 15 villages under arrest for suspicion of aiding
the enemy.48 In doing so, they invoked articles of the armys eld manual
granting military authorities the power to expel by administrative decree
any individual determined to be harmful, the same justication Russian
commanders used to expel Jews in occupied Galicia.49
Soon, however, Russian authorities in the Caucasus developed a more
far-reaching and comprehensive plan. The military dispatched harmful in-
dividuals to the cities of Kars and Batum. At the time, military guidelines
dictated that all suspects must be tried at the place where the crimes had
been committed. The governor of the Kars region, fearing the arrival of a
steady stream of suspects and the possibility of lynchings, all in light of the
fact that the prisons in Kars were already full, requested that the military
cease dispatching suspects to Kars. General Iudenich, chief of staff for the
Caucasus Army, replied that the governor should retain only those suspects
who were to be tried by court martial. Those whom the military had arrested
as harmful individuals, but against whom there was insufcient judicial
evidence for a court martial, he could expel wherever you wish.50 Russian
ofcials continued to compile lists of suspects to be handed over to courts-
martial in Kars and Batum. They also requested instructions regarding to
which provinces they should expel those suspects against whom they lacked
160 Genocide in International Context

sufcient information for a court martial. Authorities in the Caucasus antic-

ipated displacing up to ve thousand individuals. The Ministry of the Inte-
rior directed Russian authorities in the Caucasus to deport these individuals
to Kharkov, Kursk, Orel, Tula, and Nizhnii Novgorod provinces.51
Soon afterward, Russian authorities in the Caucasus redened this ad
hoc measure as a comprehensive policy and requested authority to carry it
out. Peterson, the head of the viceroys ofce of civil administration in Tiis,
in a report to the Council of Ministers in Petrograd, noted that many Mus-
lims had joined with Ottoman forces. While Russian forces had managed to
reoccupy the region, Peterson worried that to refrain from visiting a harsh
retribution [surovaia kara] on the traitors would be a major mistake for
reasons of state. If Russian authorities failed to punish those whom they
suspected of treason, but against whom they lacked sufcient evidence to
hold a court martial, Muslims in other regions might be tempted to follow
their lead. He requested permission to deport these types of suspects to ve
northern provinces both as a means in the short term of removing [literally,
cleansing] an unreliable element from the region of military operations, an
element that is clearly very dangerous to us, and also as a means of restrain-
ing the remaining Muslim population from treachery. It also raises the
question, no less important for the interests of the future of our border-
lands, of the possibility of undertaking the colonization of these regions
bordering Turkey with a Russian population. More than thirty years of Rus-
sian administration (Kars and Batum had been annexed in 1878) had failed,
Peterson wrote, to transform the moral physiognomy of the Muslim popu-
lation. While they were nominally Russian subjects, in their hearts they
remained Turkish subjects. It was essential, he argued, to establish a rm
bastion along the border, by means of a program of Russian colonization.
Peterson acknowledged that it would only be possible to pursue this coloni-
zation program in the future. In the meantime, it was essential to deport
these suspects (those against whom there was insufcient evidence) to the
northern provinces, to conscate their property, and to revoke their Russian
citizenship, thereby returning them to their original statethat is, they
would revert to what Peterson charged was their de facto status as Turkish
subjects. Then, upon the wars end, Russian authorities could simply expel
them all to Turkey.52 Ironically, Russian ofcials developed this proposal to
deport Russian-subject Muslims to the Ottoman empire at roughly the same
time that one Ottoman general broached an abortive project to expel Otto-
man-subject Armenians across the border to Russia.53 Unbeknownst to each
other, both states discussed simultaneous measures for what would have
been a compulsory population exchange.
More important, however, is the fate that befell this proposal. Over the
course of several months, the procedural mechanisms of the Russian
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 161

governmentin an almost comically pedantic wayscaled back all of the

major proposed measures in Petersons report. First, the governors of the
northern provinces protested that they could not absorb and house the de-
portees. Other governors wrote that they would accept only those who were
self-supporting and capable of work.54 Next, Prince Alexander Oldenburg,
director of the armys evacuation and sanitation service, barred the transfer
of any of the detainees because of fears that this transfer would spread con-
tagious diseases.55 Meanwhile, from February through April 1915, the Coun-
cil of Ministers in Petrograd discussed whether to sanction the proposal
from the viceroy in the Caucasus. Each individual ministry studied the pro-
ject and submitted its views. When the Council of Ministers met to discuss
the matter, all ministers supported the measure, except for the Minister of
Justice and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Both cited legal and practical
obstacles to implementing the expulsion plan. In particular, both raised the
objection that the revocation of Russian citizenship from these individuals
would not revert them by default to Turkish citizenship. Contemporary inter-
national law, they noted, did not permit a condition of a lack of citizenship.
The two ministers also objected to the conscation of private property as a
form of collective punishment.56 The delegate for the viceroy in the Caucasus
in Petrograd despaired that the resistance of these two ministers would
scuttle the plan.57 In the end, the Council of Ministers sanctioned a scaled-
back version of the plan, permitting deportation of suspects from the Cauca-
sus to Russia, but without revoking their Russian citizenship. The Council of
Ministers determined that landholding in the region was founded on collec-
tive ownership of state property, so Russian authorities could conscate the
land of suspects without violating existing laws on private property.
In the meantime, however, there was another intervention. In mid-May,
Emperor Nicholas II received a petition from his uncle, Grand Duke Geor-
gii Mikhailovich. The grand duke had toured the Caucasus front in February
and met with representatives of the Muslim population there, including
local deputies to the State Duma. They told him that it was untrue that Mus-
lims had sided en masse with Turkish forces; only a few bandits and crimi-
nals had joined them. Yet, they claimed, Russian authorities now declared
them all beyond the law. The grand duke wrote that he believed it unwise to
create any unnecessary internal enemies for our fatherland. He noted that
the Council of Ministers had only recently conrmed the viceroys proposal
for punitive measures against the Muslim population. In his view, this
measure was excessively harsh and unjust, as it would deprive all those
identied as traitors of their rights, but not by means of any court, but solely
in an administrative manner. His report then repeated, word-for-word, the
arguments against the proposal found in the dissenting memoranda of the
Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Given the verbatim
162 Genocide in International Context

agrumentation, there can be no doubt that the grand duke coordinated his
intervention with those members of the Council of Ministers also critical of
the decision. He concluded by appealing to Emperor Nicholas II to appoint
an individual to conduct a special investigation of the entire affair.58 The
appeal had its effectEmperor Nicholas II suspended the Council of Min-
isters April 28 decision and dispatched his own delegate to the region to
determine the guilt or innocence of the population.59 Simultaneously, Mus-
lim and non-Muslim delegates from the Caucasus in the State Duma peti-
tioned on behalf of the population of Kars and Batum provinces.60
The general assigned to conduct the investigation determined that, while
there had been individual cases of treason, the local Muslim population had
not in fact engaged in any organized hostile actions toward Russian forces.
Less than one percent of the population had been guilty of treason against the
Russian state. Thus, the report found, the reckless charge that the Muslim
population engaged in rebellion and state treachery should be dropped.
More than 200 cases were opened against Christians for looting and pillaging
of Muslim inhabitants.61 Nevertheless, in the interim, up to several thousand
Russian-subject Muslims had been deported from the Caucasus.62
Within a year ofcials reversed their decision to seize the property of in-
dividuals who had ed in the aftermath of the Ottoman incursion, and
instead permitted the return of this property either to relatives or to the
individuals community.63 In the years that followed, Russian authorities
continued to pursue suspects, but now as individual accusations through
the military court system. The numbers were not large, however. Russian
investigative commissions identied 489 individuals who had ed with the
Turks in Kars district.64 And a mid-1917 report of one case dealing with
some inhabitants of Kars district who sided with the Turks revealed that 64
people had been convicted (56 for state treason and 8 for general criminal
acts)but 166 had been acquitted.65 Military courts appear to have taken
their duties seriously, and the les contain frequent cases of acquittal of
suspects for lack of evidence.66
Thus, just when the CUP decided to embark on its systematic massacre
of its Armenian population for alleged treachery, the Russian government
proposedbut then tfully scaled backa mass expulsion of the Muslim
population of the Kars and Batum districts, which was accused of having
sided en masse with the enemy. This was also the time when the Russian
command on the Austro-German front pursued its most expansive plans for
deporting the Jewish population of the occupied territories and in the zone
of Russian military operations.67
Unlike the case in the Caucasus, the Russian high command did not ask
for permission from the civilian government to pursue its measures against
the Jews of occupied Austrian Galicia. The viceroys proposal to expel the
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 163

Muslims of Russias Kars and Batum districts received its rst check at this
stage. Despite the horrors of both policiesthe program for expulsion of
the Muslims of Kars and Batum and the armys policy against the Jews on
the eastern frontthey both were scaled back by mid-1915.68 The Russian
government continued to operate in functional terms, to deliberate and
weigh policy, andas a statedid not embrace an overarching ideological
program. There was certainly a current of ideological anti-Semitism under-
lying plans for occupied Galicia, as well as programs for ethnic consolida-
tion in the Caucasus. Advocates for these programs remained embedded,
however, within a broader state and political structure that continued to
function along bureaucratic and functional, rather than ideological, lines.
These checks were both of the old regime variety (the personal intervention
of Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich) and of a modern sort (rational-bureau-
cratic, as with the objections to the expulsion plan by the Ministries of Jus-
tice and Foreign Affairs, and representative-political, as with the
investigations by State Duma deputies into state policy toward the Muslim
population). At this stage, the Russian empire lacked structures that could
institutionally coordinate and ideologically inspire such expansive programs
as the CUP and the Special Organization (Teskilat- Mahsusa), the Bolshevik
Party and NKVD, or the Nazi Party and SS/Gestapo. This explains why such
wide-ranging programs were broached in early 1915but were then aban-
doned or drastically trimmed down in the period from 1915 to 1917.

Both Turkish accounts and accounts sympathetic to the Armenians detail

the violence of the Russian military. The former accuse the Russian military
of a systematic anti-Muslim bias; the latter of a concerted agenda to clear
Armenia of Armenians. It is a mistake, however, to view the violence of the
Russian military as the result of a coherent policy or, still less, a specic
ideology, be it a supposed overarching anti-Muslim bias or a programmatic
attempt to depopulate the region in order to pursue a policy of Russian col-
onization. The conduct of the Russian military in fact comprised overlap-
ping forms and types of violence. The dynamic between these forms of
violence changed over time. Moreover, they were frequently at odds with
one another.
In my view, at least as important as the tful embrace of ethnic mobiliza-
tion (as regards both Armenians and Kurds) was a military culture that
instrumentalized the civilian population. The Russian military, rather than
pursuing an overarching policy for the region, sought to come up with
short-term solutions to immediate problems, solutions that privileged the
military at the expense of the civilian population. At some level they had
come to accept civilian losses as a military necessity. As one example, in
early 1917 General Ianushkevich, the grand dukes chief of staff for the
164 Genocide in International Context

Caucasus front, declared bluntly that a 10 percent mortality rate due to food
shortages among the civilian population in Russian-controlled regions of the
Caucasus was normal and acceptable.69 Ianushkevich was not motivated
by any specic colonial, anti-Muslim, or anti-Armenian bias. He had oper-
ated from similar guidelines both in occupied Galicia (a Slavic region slated
for incorporation into Russia proper) and in Russia proper.
Two recent studies have argued (referring to the German military in
World War I) that military practices may have structuring patterns yet still
be the result of improvisation. The historians John Horne and Alan Kramer,
in their coauthored book analyzing German atrocities in occupied Belgium
and northern France, point to the cultural and political disposition that
carried not just ordinary soldiers but the entire military command rapidly
beyond its own legal code and even contemporary moral norms of accept-
able violence against civilians. In their view, brutality and inhumanity
characterized the response to the franc-tireur war because these reected
the prevailing doctrines of the German military on civilian involvement in
warfare.70 The historian Isabel Hull has extended this argument by showing
that military conduct in the German case was determined not simply by
conscious decisions, but by an even more diffuse institutional culture em-
bedded both in doctrine and in unarticulated presuppositions. When facing
specic dilemmas in a wide variety of cases, the German military responded
in near identical fashion, without guidance or central coordination. Indeed,
Hull notes that the German military behaved in strikingly similar ways in
colonial wars as it did during World War I in both Eastern and Western
Europe. It did so, she argues, not because colonial methods were brought
home, but because the institional culture of the German militaryan un-
usually strong institutiontranscended the particular arenas of its imple-
mentation. When the military set about solving these problems, it came up
with broadly the same techniques wherever it was.71
One distinction in the Russian case is that the Russian military was not
an institution as strong as its German counterpart.72 An additional con-
sideration in regard to occupied eastern Anatolia was the nature of the the-
ater. The Caucasus front had a much lower concentration of forces, more
difcult terrain, and a much poorer supply network than most other the-
aters of the First World War, conditions that complicated even the most
routine operations for militaries.73 Military censors, reviewing letters from
the front, reported that the horrible thirst, the shortage of bread and water
cause the soldier to dream about [serving on] a different front, one that
might be more dangerous, but that would be better supplied. In their let-
ters home, Russian soldiers complained that they were ragged and shoe-
less ... wed prefer three more years of war, if only we could serve on the
[Austro-German] front.74
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 165

Nevertheless, much of the Russian militarys conduct in the occupied

territories of Turkey derived from standard operating procedureone
that was famously utilitarian and callous. The Russian military entirely sub-
ordinated the regions and their populations to its own operations. Yet mili-
tary operations in occupied Turkey did not become supercharged with an
ideological program, such as the liberationist and overtly anti-Semitic occu-
pation regime Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Ianushkevich had pur-
sued in occupied Austrian Galicia in 19141915.
The Foreign Ministry determined ofcial Russian government policy
toward occupied territory. But the institution that actually administered the
occupied territories was the Russian military. The higher military command
in charge of this policy encompassed three primary posts: the supreme
commander in chief (Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich until August 1915,
then Emperor Nicholas II); the chief of staff for the commander in chief
(General Nikolai Ianushkevich for Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, then
General Mikhail Alekseev for Emperor Nicholas II); and the viceroy for the
Caucasus, who in time of war simultaneously served as the commander in
chief of the Caucasus Army (Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov from October 1914
until September 1915, when he was replaced by Grand Duke Nikolai Niko-
laevich, when the latter was removed from his post as commander in chief).
The effective commander of the Caucaus Army was the very capable Gen-
eral Nikolai N. Iudenich, who formally served as chief-of-staff to both
Vorontsov-Dashkov and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.75
As commander in chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevichalong with
much of the Council of Ministersfavored a strategy concentrating on the
eastern front against Austria and Germany: he concurred in the popular
view of the Russian staff that the road to Constantinople led through Ber-
lin.76 The Russian army occupied a defensive posture until the Ottoman
Empire entered the war, and thereafter continued to view the Caucasus front
as secondary. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and General Ianushkevich,
however, did not disdain politics or questions of military occupation. They
lavished attention on the occupation and planned annexation of Austrian
Galicia and Bukovina, which theyand many other conservativesimag-
ined as a Russian land from time immemorial. In order to aid the regions
anticipated incorporation, the grand duke and Ianushkevich engaged in a
policy of favoring certain ethnic groups and persecuting others. In partic-
ular, they sanctioned the widespread expulsion of the regions Jewish popu-
lation, which set in motion the Russian armys policy of deportation of Jews
for much of the next year.77
While the grand duke occupied the post of supreme commander in chief,
he gave little thought to Armenia. As noted above, many in the Russian
government suspected that the viceroy of the Caucasus, Vorontsov-Dashkov,
166 Genocide in International Context

was pursuing his own pro-Armenian policy. In fact, Vorontsov-Dashkov

scrupulously kept the Council of Ministers informed of his general policy,
like the plan to arm Armenians in anticipation of the outbreak of war with
the Ottoman Empire.78 His program was one of Russian imperial greatness
through management of ethnic differencean old story. Moreover, from
1912 Vorontsov-Dashkov equally sought to enlist Kurdish leaders for the
Russian cause.79 Nevertheless, due in large part to court politics and bureau-
cratic inghting, he was tarred as pro-Armenian. His successorGrand
Duke Nikolai Nikolaevichcame to believe these rumors, and sought to
remedy Vorontsov-Dashkovs pro-Armenian orientation.
From September 1915 on, Emperor Nicholas II was nominally com-
mander in chief. Yet it was his chief of staff, General Alekseev, who man-
aged all military affairs. Alekseev believed even more rmly than the grand
duke had that the Caucasus front was a secondary theater. He favored no
territorial acquisitions there and even advocated seeking a separate peace
with Turkey. Russias victories on the Caucasus front in the spring of 1916,
he believed, should be leveraged to press Turkey for peace. Alekseev in fact
argued that the Sykes-Picot agreement forced on Russia too much of Turkey
in Asia, fearing an aggravation of the Armenian question within our own
borders. He opposed in particular the Russian naval ministrys desire to
extend Russias borders on the Black Sea littoral from Trebizond all the way
to Sinope.80 The Foreign Ministry and Emperor Nicholas II were also op-
posed to such expansive acquisitions.
After Vorontsov-Dashkovs dismissal in autumn 1915, the administra-
tion of the occupied Ottoman territories passed into the hands of Grand
Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.81 The grand duke retained as his chief of staff
General Ianushkevich, a noted reactionary and anti-Semite. Ianushkevichs
dislikes extended to Armenians, whom he claimed were the same as
Jewsan ominous statement coming from a man who had orchestrated
the Russian Armys expulsion of Jews from Galicia.82 Other important mili-
tary ofcials shared his anti-Armenian prejudice.83 Many soldiers shared
these views. One wrote home that you know the Yids [zhidov]? Well, you
would need 25 Yids to trick one Armenian.84
Both Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Ianushkevich, however, were
aware that their interventionist, liberationist, and anti-Semitic programs for
occupied Austrian Galicia in 191415 had failed. Their criticsincluding
many in the Russian militarycharged that in occupied Galicia they had
pursued politics for the sake of politics, to the detriment of the military
operations. It was out of this experience that the Grand Duke and Ianush-
kevich stepped into their new duties. From mid-1916 on the occupied terri-
tories were overseen by a military governor-general for the regions of
Turkey occupied by right of war, who was directly subordinate to the grand
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 167

duke. As his appointee the grand duke selected General Peshkov, who faith-
fully carried out the grand dukes policy.85
The new viceroy believed it was his task to reverse Vorontsovs allegedly
pro-Armenian policies.86 His attempt to do so coincided with the Russian
Armys advance into territories depopulated by the Ottoman massacre of
Armenians. The grand dukes turn from what he believed were the previous
policies was most evident in his efforts to win over Kurdish tribal leaders
and in his order to reform Armenian volunteer formations into regular rie
regiments. Armenian organizations portrayed these measures as heartless
and unjust. Vorontsov-Dashkov had also courted Kurdish leaders in the
Ottoman territories. But his primary agent for this endeavor, Prince B. N.
Shakhovskoi (a former consul in Damascus), believed that Vorontsov-Dash-
kovs pro-Armenian orientation created an impossible environment for win-
ning over the Kurds.87 Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich granted Shakhovskoi
broad authority to seek an accommodation with the Kurdish tribes. The
grand duke attempted to appeal to the latter by releasing the Kurdish leader
Simko, who had committed himself to the Russians before 1914, but who
had afterward sided with the Ottomans and been captured by Russian
forces. (Despite his release, Simko would continue to operate against Rus-
sian forces in Northern Persia from 1916 onward.) Shakhovskoi could report
few successes. He blamed his lack of success on the actions of Armenian
units afliated with the Russian army, which made any accommodation
with the Kurds impossible.88
By early 1917 Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, who was never terribly
well disposed toward the Armenians to begin with, had been swayed by
Prince Shakhovskois arguments in favor of siding with the Kurds against
the Armenians.89 In fact, several of the grand dukes secret agents for con-
ducting negotiations with the Kurdish tribesPrince Shakhovskoi and Col-
lege Assessor Gadzhemukovwere appointed, for purposes of conspiratorial
cover, as district captains for regions of occupied Turkey.90 Once the 1917
February Revolution occurred, Prince Gadzhemukov lobbied General
Iudenich to pursue a more aggressive pro-Kurdish policy and to abandon any
support for the Armenian cause. He concluded: if one is to view [the Otto-
man slaughter of the Armenians] not from a humanitarian, but from a polit-
ical point of view, and as an already accomplished factone for which the
Armenians bear the blameone must say that there is this positive side:
Turkey has left us an Armenia without Armenians.91 Several studies point to
Gadzhemukovs statement as laying bare the Russian governments true in-
tentions for occupied Armenia.92 In fact, rather than a statement of policy, his
letter was a plea for the army to abandon what he portrayed as its pro-Arme-
nian policies. Armenia without Armenians was Gadzhemukovs desire
and his criticism of the Russian government for failing to carry it out.
168 Genocide in International Context

Several accounts charge that Russian military authorities, and the grand
duke in particular, banned Armenian refugees from returning to the occu-
pied territories as part of a general plan to depopulate occupied Turkey in
preparation for settlement by Russian settlers and Cossacks.93 These charges
are long-standing, and reect Armenian suspicions of Russian state policy
toward the Armenians.94 While it is true that he was not well-disposed
toward the Armenians, the grand dukes concerns were much more prosaic.
They reect at least as much the overall institutional culture of the military
and the constraints within which it operated in this theater as any overt
ideological bias. The conict with the grand dukes conduct against Jews in
occupied Galicia is the most striking demonstration of this contrast.
The Armenian genocide and the ight of Muslims before the advance of
the Russian army left a barren and depopulated land, making operations in
this already difcult military theater even harder. The need to supply the
army, rather than to prepare the land for Russian colonization, lay behind
the armys management of Armenian refugeesand other refugees, for
that matter. The Russian government and public organizations, such as the
All-Russian Union of Towns, set up a network of canteens throughout the
occupied territories. Indeed, Russian authorities established in early 1915
an agency charged specically with the care of refugees, both within the
Caucasus and in the occupied territories of Turkey and neutral Persia. The
man appointed to this post was General Mikhail Tamamshev.95 From early
1915, the Russian government provided humanitarian aid to Ottoman refu-
gees who were Christian subjects; with the armys advance deeper into Ana-
tolia in the spring of 1916, the Russians found themselves having to confront
the problem of Turkish Muslim refugees. As a result of appeals by General
Tamamshev and Muslim deputies in the Duma, the Russian government
extended humanitarian aidessentially food suppliesto the Turkish Mus-
lim population as well. The government opened a line of credit of 500,000
rubles for aid to the Muslim population of the occupied territories in early
1916. Russian agencies were to withhold aid only from those segments of
the population that engaged in hostile activities against Russian forces, this
mostly referred to the Kurdish tribes operating against Russian forces.96 Po-
litical factors played a role, but the military agreed to offer this aid largely
because failing to do so would increase the risk of epidemic diseases in the
areas behind the front.
The directive determining Russian policy on landholding in the occupied
territories, Order no. 121, issued on March 19, 1916, had as its goal to the
recultivation of abandoned lands. Local inhabitants could use any unused
plots, so long as they set aside a portion of the harvest for the actual owners.
The fundamental aim, wrote the grand duke, was to put these lands under
immediate usethrough rental arrangementsin order to decrease our
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 169

food supply aid to the local population to a minimum, and to provide for our
forces by local resources.97
In his letter to Sazonov laying out the principles for Russian occupation,
the grand duke reiterated these concerns. Questions about landholding
should be resolved in a totally legal and impartial manner. Concerned about
the armys food supply situation, the grand duke raised the issue of the
return of the Armenian refugees to the lands in the occupied areas of Tur-
key, in the hope that they will ourish in their homes and return the fertile
lands of Turkish Armenia to use, which will aid the army in a major way.98
In August 1916, however, General Iudenich, commander of the Caucasus
Army, banned the return of refugees to the occupied regions of Turkey. He
considered the return of inhabitants to the areas we occupy in Turkey to be
premature, since it would complicate the already difcult food supply issue
for these regions.99
Later that year, in an interview with the conservative St. Petersburg news-
paper Novoe vremia, the governor-general for the occupied regions of Turkey
explained why he was barring the return of refugees to certain occupied
regions:

The question of the return of the Armenian population which had ed to

Russia due to the Turkish atrocities depends, in the Governor-Generals opin-
ion, not only on completing the administrative reorganization of the region,
or guaranteeing the food supply, but also on the strategic situation at the front.
The premature return of refugees often brings in its wake undesirable panics
and needless victimsboth human and materialof which the populationss
rapid departure from Van recently can serve as an example. For this reason the
state must treat this question very cautiously.100

General Peshkov was referring to the fact that the Russian army, in the
face of an August 1916 Ottoman offensive, organized the evacuation of
50,000 refugees who had returned to Van, Bitlis, and Mush, and had distrib-
uted them further, to Basen and Igdyr. This relocation caused a new crisis,
as the refugees now required food and medical supplies.101 Individual gen-
erals used this argument as a pretext to remove what they viewed as unnec-
essary mouths to feed.102 Where the local population had remained, Iudenich
directed it to cultivate the areas closest to the armys front, in order to help
provide for the armys needs.103
By and large, the Russian army on the Caucasus front was driven by the
institutional concerns of the military, rather than an ideological agenda.104 It
is true that in spring 1915 General Iudenich developed a proposal to settle
Cossacks in the Alashkert, Diadin, and Bayazet valleysa plan that would
seem to contradict the stated reasons for banning the return of Armenian
refugees. He planned to settle the Cossacks on lands abandoned by Kurds
170 Genocide in International Context

and alongside the remaining native Armenian population. The purpose, at

least in part, was to bring the land into immediate cultivation in order to
support units of the Fourth Cossack Corps, operating in that region. Viceroy
Vorontsov-Dashkov approved this proposal in principle, but no concrete
measures resulted.105 Iudenich repeated his proposal in April 1916, this time
also to increase cultivation and to prevent the seizure of these abandoned
lands by speculators.106 The grand duke, like Vorontsov-Dashkov before
him, approved the program in principle, but found that it was as yet prema-
ture to act on it. He explicitly stated that the report was compiled for infor-
mation purposes only, and the Viceroy does not expect any directives to
follow from it.107 Again, there was a discussion of expansive plansplans
which several secondary works claim were implementedbut which in fact
were put on hold.
The army high command, then, viewed the occupied areas of Turkey in a
manner that was undoubtedly utilitarian. The Russian military did not see it
as its task to care for civilians, particularly when the army believed that civil-
ians interfered with the conduct of military operationsmeaning, not least
of all, the armys ability to feed itself. Thus, the Russian military regularly
dispatched refugees from one region to another and sought to control their
access to regions where the army was active. Its goals were frequently
limited and operational. Furthermore, military authorities did not seek to
pursue a far-reaching political program to incorporate the regions of Turkey,
such as that Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Ianushkevich had
attempted in Galicia in 191415. Certainly, there was no coordinated policy
to prevent the return of Armenian refugees or to expel them from their
lands for the purpose of settling Cossacks or Russian settlers.
In addition to directing the ow of refugees, the Russian military also
engaged in widespread expulsions of civilian populations. It is becoming
increasingly clear that mass population expulsions were an intrinsic feature
not just of the Second World War, but of the First World War as well. Mass
deportations occurred during the First World War not only on the Caucasus
front, but also on a widespread scale on the western and eastern fronts.108
These expulsions were a military practice, one that grew out of a myopic
focus on the conduct of military operations and a disregard for civilian pop-
ulations. The same causes spurred the development of concentration camps
as a tool of military operations during the Spanish American and Boer
Wars.109 Deportations grew into something more than military practice
when ideology began to inform the goals, and thus the means, of deporta-
tion. What distinguished Ottoman policy in its expulsion of Armenians was
not simply military necessity, but an ideological agenda. Similarly, the Rus-
sian treatment of the Jewish population in 1915 in occupied Galiciaand
within Russia itselfculminating in the mass expulsion of almost one
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 171

million people, occurred within an ideological envelope of anti-Semitism.

Russian conduct during the second occupation of Galicia, in 191617, was
strikingly different, in large part because the army command repudiated the
explicitly anti-Semitic agenda of the 191415 occupation.110
The Russian armys ofcial policy toward the occupied regions of the
Ottoman Empire was not to expel the Armenian population, or ban the
return of Armenian refugees, in order to colonize the region with Russians.
Certain individuals and even ministries had such plans, to be sure. General
Peshkov, governor-general for the occupied regions of Anatolia, believed
that separating the local population into ethnic enclaves was the only way to
ensure peace. He proposed to deal with this difculty by regrouping as far
as possible the population, and getting the Armenians to settle east and the
Kurds south of [Lake Van]. He continued:
The regions of Trebizond and Erzurum are going to form two administrative
areas separate from that of Van and Bitlis, which will form the third. Each of
these three areas will be divided into four districts, and in the Van and Bitlis
area as far as possible, the Moslems will be divided from the Christians and
settled in particular districts. Already some 29,000 Armenians have resettled
in their former homes in the Van region, and some 30,000 more, including
some Caucasian Armenian traders and artisans are on their way.... As far as
the Trebizond and Erzurum regions are concerned, only those Armenians
who resided there before the war will be allowed to settle there. Those regions
will be regarded as especially Moslem.111

While these far-reaching plans were not realized, army and corps com-
manders instructed their troops to expel populations from regions of the
front line. The Russian army practiced mass population expulsion, clearing
large swaths of the front of their native inhabitants, Armenian and Kurd
alike. This was not, however, a policy specic to the Caucasus front, but
rather a generic feature of Russian military operations.112 In the Erzurum
region, for instance, the military commander resettled all inhabitants from
a ten-verst strip of the front line10,000 peopleand moved them closer to
the city of Erzurum, in the process exacerbating the already dire food supply
situation.113 On a smaller scale, the military issued orders forcing the inhab-
itants of both Kurdish and Armenian villages to relocate from one half of
the village into another in order to disinfect their dwellings. It was con-
cerned not with the health of the civilians themselves, but wished to prevent
the spread of infectious diseases to the troops quartered in these regions.114
The subordination and instrumentalization of the civilation population
to military needs also extended to enlisting civilians for compulsory labor.
This aspect of Russias war conduct has largely gone unstudied.115 In occu-
pied Galicia, for instance, the Russian military employed nearly 200,000
civilians to work on its trenches. The German Army did the same on both
172 Genocide in International Context

the eastern and western fronts. As early as November 1914, one month into
the war on the Caucasus front, the Russian military drafted all male Kurds
of the Bayazet valley for compulsory labor on clearing the roads.116 During
its occupation of Erzurum, the Russian military drafted the entire popula-
tion to dispose of unburied corpses (the concern again was the possibility of
epidemic disease and the danger it posed to the military), then assigned
almost the entire male population t for work, from the age of 17 to 45, to
complusory labor of a military nature.117 Both Armenians and Kurds were
subject to this labor. The head of the rst district of the Erzurum region,
Staff Captain Alekseev, arrested 47 working-age Armenians in order to
assign them to work details. (They were releasedbut only because the
commissar of the Erzurum region determined that the men were farmers
and their work in agriculture was more valuable.)118
In many cases, then, the Russian military engaged in expulsion and de-
tention for reasons of military necessity, which took absolute precedence
over the well-being of the regions civilian population. This was an inherent
feature of Russian military culture, and as the Russian army retreated, it
would resort to such measures within Russia itself. Both White and Red
would employ such practices in the civil war that followed.119
If the rst type of expulsion focused on entire civilian populations for
reasons of military necessity, the second type focused on specic groups.
The Russian Army took this approach toward populations it regarded as
unreliable. In Galicia and Russian Poland, this primarily meant the Jew-
ish population. On the Caucasus front, this referred rst and foremost to
the Kurdish population. One must distinguish here between ofcial expul-
sions, and the pillaging and marauding that stemmed from anti-Kurd senti-
ment among lower-level commanders and the troops. On this front, both
the Ottoman and Russian armies confronted foesArmenian volunteer de-
tachments against the Ottomans, Kurdish irregulars against the Russians
who operated with guerrilla methods, much as the Spaniards had against
Napoleon one hundred years before. Russian soldiers found this type of
warfare unsettling and unfair. One Cossack wrote to his brother:

It is worse in our rear than at the frontline. We receive less re at the frontline
than in the rear. All Kurds, if a regiment is passing by, are all peaceful inhabi-
tants. As soon as the regiment passes by, they assemble and take to raiding the
supply units. They dont allow the supply units to pass and allow nothing
through. But its interestingthey ee as soon as you go to attack them.120

Commanders at the corps level and below had the authority to expel indi-
viduals and entire groups of people they determined were unreliable. Due
to the irregular warfare practiced by the Kurds, as well as anti-Kurd senti-
ments among the Russians, the military frequently resorted to expelling
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia. . . 173

Kurdish communities en masse. Throughout the period 191517, the Rus-

sian army removed Kurds from entire districts.121 This type of expulsion was
distinct from, but overlapped with, the violence unleashed by Russian units
and Armenian volunteer formations against Kurdish communities.
Even here, however, there was a lack of overall coordination. The high
military commands policies were ltered through the conduct of individual
army commanders. Several of them gained reputations for their disregard
of, or even hostility to, the plight of the Armenians. Armenian spokesmen
charged that this was the inevitable result of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaev-
ichs supposedly pro-Kurdish and anti-Armenian orientation.122 For Arme-
nian activists, the cause clbre was the conduct of Major-General Nikolaev,
commander of the Bayazet Detachment, which relieved the city of Van in
June 1915. Nikolaev permitted Kurds to resettle in the Van region, leading to
outraged Armenian protests.123 Yet most Russian commandersentering a
land that had just witnessed the systematic massacre of Armenians and
themselves under intermittent attack from Kurdish irregularsinclined
toward the other extreme. Konstantin Kozakov served in the Bayazet detach-
ment that relieved Van in June 1915. In a letter to a friend he wrote: I wont
describe in detail here the scenes of those horric atrocities and violence
which the Kurds and [Turkish regulars] committed at the instigation of the
Turkish government on the defenseless Armenian population... . It was a
nightmarish scene.124 Russian commanders practiced frequent punitive
expeditions against local Muslim villages and expelled entire Kurdish com-
munities.125 Cossack units in particular visited merciless retribution on the
local Muslim population.126 Armenian volunteer detachments, later
reformed as rie corps, similarly showed little mercy to Kurdish and Turk-
ish communities.127 Ultimately, the Russian occupation administration
under the grand duke alienated Armenians because of its allegedly pro-
Kurdish bias, while the conduct of individual army and corps commanders
made hostile to Russian rule the very Kurdish population whom the grand
duke was seeking to win over.

This chapter is not intended as an apology for the Russian occupation, but
rather to complicate our understanding of Russian intentions and Russian
policy. At the time, the CUP was convinced that the Russian state was
seeking to dismember the Ottoman Empire and annex vast swaths of terri-
tory. Historical studies have tended to reect this fear, seeing in disparate
Russian measures a coordinated and predatory Russian policyeither anti-
Muslim or anti-Armenian, depending on the literature. This study, rather,
supports Michael Reynoldss observation that we need to treat the Russian
and Ottoman empires as state actors, and not simply as vessels for
emerging national movements.128 And as a state actor, it is imperative to
174 Genocide in International Context

treat the Russian state as a complexmultifaceted and compoundinstitu-

tion. Specically, I wish to underscore the complex and multilayered nature
of Russian decision making. The policies in Russian Armenia were not the
expression of some unied program by the Russian government. Rather,
policy changed over time. Moreover, to grasp the dynamics of Russian policy
in Armenia, it is essential to place them in the larger context of Russian
domestic and foreign policy. I hope to suggest a method of evaluating both
Russian foreign policy and military conduct. The foreign policy of the Rus-
sian government was doubtless cynical in certain respects, but it is a gross
simplication to leave the story at thatas it would be for any of the other
powers. We must view foreign policy both as the interplay of state actorsas
Reynolds insistsand as existing within an arc of institutional and political
agendas.129 The military, for its part, was certainly callous, but it did not
always pursue a nationalizing or ethnicizing goal. The presence of multiple,
at times conicting, programs within the Russian governments overall
policy explains, in part, why scholars have been able to read Russian occupa-
tion policy is such remarkably divergent ways.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This chapter is part of a larger project examining how the Russians applied
the laws of war to territories that they occupied by right of war. I grate-
fully acknowledge the support of the National Council for Eurasian and East
European Research for its support of this project. I wish to thank Michael
Reynolds, Eric Lohr, and David Rich for their helpful and constructive com-
ments of an earlier version of this paper.
8

Germany and the Young Turks

Revolutionaries into Statesmen

Eric D. Weitz

Die Trkei wird autokratisch sein, oder sie wird nicht sein.
Turkey will be autocratic, or it will not be.
Ambassador Marschall to Chancellor
Hohenlohe-Schillingsfrst, December 26, 18991

The Armenian Genocide was committed by the Committee of Union and

Progress (CUP) government of the late Ottoman Empire. But unlike other
genocides, where the locus of responsibility is generally quite clear, ques-
tions arise persistently about the role of another country as a possible orga-
nizer or co-perpetrator of the Armenian tragedy. The Nazis used Latvians,
Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and others, but no one doubts that it was the Nazi
state that organized and implemented the Holocaust. No serious scholar
questions the role of the Khmer Rouge government in carrying out the
genocide and other atrocities committed against the Cambodian popula-
tion, or of Hutu Power and the state it came to dominate in the genocide of
Tutsi and killings of moderate Hutus in Rwanda.
In the case of the Armenian Genocide, that other country is, of course,
Germany. In the late nineteenth century and especially after the accession
to the throne in 1888 of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany dened the Ottoman
Empire as a key area of interest, a site where Germany could become the
dominant imperial power and contest the inuence of the British, French,
and Russians in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Asia. Germany
poured military aid into the empire, especially after the Young Turk Revolu-
tion of 1908. German diplomats had great access to Sultan Abdlhamid II
and his successors, and German businesses and banks arrived with great
expectations. Increasingly, Germany displaced France as the main source of
political counsel, intellectual inuence, and military aid, although this

175
176 Genocide in International Context

development was highly contested among the Ottoman elite. Ultimately,

the relations between the two countries were sealed by the CUP decision in
1914 to enter World War I on the side of the Central Powers.
The Ottoman Empire was now a German (and Austro-Hungarian) ally.
German military advisors fought alongside and sometimes commanded
Ottoman divisions, and even received commissions as ofcers in the Otto-
man army. CUP and German ofcials consulted on a regular basis and the
Germans had access to privileged information. German consular ofcials,
businessmen, and missionaries were stationed all around Anatolia and had
intimate knowledge of events as they unfolded. The powerful presence of
Germans in many of the major institutions of the Ottoman Empire and
their geographic dispersion through Anatolia means that aside from Otto-
man sources themselves, the next best archival records on the Armenian
Genocide are the German ones.
But just what role did Germans play in the genocide? Could the CUP have
launched such a major and drastic policy decisionthe removal and slaugh-
ter of the Armenianson its own? Did the Young Turks need the prior
approval of their German allies before launching such a policy? The ques-
tions reach back in time to 191415, when Entente propaganda, Young Turk
assertions, and general rumors among the Ottoman population explicitly
blamed Germany for the Armenian massacres, a view that also persisted in
the Armenian diaspora.2 Scholars, though, have been divided on the issue.
Major diplomatic histories most often completely ignored the Armenian
Genocide.3 In contrast, some relatively recent works place a great deal, per-
haps the decisive level, of responsibility on German ofcials and drive a
straight line of continuity from the Armenian Genocide to the Holocaust.4
They view the Young Turks as largely dependent on their wealthier, more
powerful, supposedly more clever German allies. But the most sophisticated
analyses of Ottoman-German relations, both older and recent, present a
more modest view of the German role. They portray German army ofcers
and diplomats largely as bystanders who were ineffective or indifferent to the
tragedy that befell the Armenians, whether because of the limitations in-
herent in their role as advisors, the perceived logic of the military alliance, or
the character of German military culture with its cavalier approach to civilian
casualties.5 Research into the role of other Germans, such as missionaries
and businessmen, shows that many of them were appalled by the atrocities
perpetrated against the Armenians, as were some German consular ofcials.
Although religious and business gures were very well connected to govern-
ment circles and the various elites of imperial Germany, they too found their
entreaties largely ignored by the embassy and rejected by Berlin.6
The more recent publications that depict a limited German role are cer-
tainly closer to the mark. The view that places the Germans at the center of
Germany and the Young Turks 177

the Armenian Genocide inadvertently diminishes the role of the CUP,

reducing its leaders to pawns of German policy makers. The CUP triumvirs,
Enver, Tlt, and Cemal, whatever their nefarious faults, were fully capable
of exercising leadership and making decisions, and little evidence exists to
suggest that the Germans actively pursued a policy designed to eliminate
the Armenians. However, even the more sophisticated historiography is
very much concentrated on the events during World War I and neglects the
larger course of German-Ottoman relations. It fails to explore fully the ideo-
logical and strategic elements that underpinned the wartime alliance and
that enabled so many ofcial Germans to accept with equanimity the violent
population politics directed against the Armenians and other Christians like
the Assyrians.
In this chapter I hope to present a much more nuanced picture of Otto-
man-German relations. No monolithic position existed among Germans in
regard to the Ottoman Empire. But ofcial Germans as well as busi-
nessmen, academics, and missionaries active in the area agreed on three
points: 1) the Ottoman Empire was a prime area of German interests; (2) to
achieve those interests, Germany required, above all else, stability; and(3)
stability meant a strong state. Many German diplomats, army ofcers, and
intellectuals recognized a kinship with the authoritarianism of Ottoman
rule, both of the sultanate and of the CUP. The semiauthoritarian struc-
tures of imperial Germany, with their strong military characteristics, found
a mirror image in the forms of Ottoman governanceor at least so many
Germans thought and hoped. Moreover, the Young Turks evolution, how-
ever inchoate, toward a vision of the empire as not just Muslim but Turkic
accorded with the way these Germans viewed the world, as a place where
aggressive nationalisms competed for domination and national or racial
purity was understood as both an essential criterion of success and a goal in
itself. And the elites in both countries underwent a parallel radicalization
process that made them prone to adopt reckless and aggressive policies,
domestically and internationally.7
Decades before the nation-state existed, some German intellectuals had
begun to envision the Ottoman Empire as a primary site of German inu-
ence. Their ranks included the economist Friedrich List and a retinue of
archaeologists. They were animated by German neoclassicism, which imag-
ined a profound link between the ancient Greek world and contemporary
Germany, a link that by the turn of the twentieth century was often articu-
lated in racial terms. They also believed that the Greek Orient, the term
they often used, could be a place of German settlement and German-inspired
economic development. Especially from around the mid-nineteenth century
onward, reforming intellectuals and enterprising cranks believed that Ger-
man colonial settlement in western Anatolia could serve as the wellspring of
178 Genocide in International Context

a healthy national revival against the degenerate inuences of industrial so-

ciety and its congested cities, or, in a modernist version, as the pioneering
focal point of German imperial penetration of the Middle East.8
Nothing much came of these plans. The few German settlements that
were established failed or limped along painfully. But the notion of a Ger-
man East much farther aeld than Poland and the Baltics had achieved a
certain popular and ideological resonance, far more so than the actual col-
onies Germany gathered beginning in the 1880s in Africa and the Pacic.9
German missionaries went to the Ottoman Empire in serious fashion, and
German companies became increasingly active there in tobacco, textiles,
and, especially important, railroads, the latter an investment vehicle for
Deutsche Bank and other nancial institutions. Since the unication of
Germany in 1871, a cadre of diplomats had emerged who viewed the Otto-
man Empire as critical site of German inuence despite Otto von Bismarcks
well-known, oft-expressed reservations against imperial adventures,
including entanglements in the complicated ethnic, national, and Great
Power conicts in Southeastern Europe.
German diplomats and businessmen possessed the sober characteristics
typical of their tradesthey had little patience for experimental settlement
colonies, and used all their inuence to work against them. But they were
interested in German power, political, military, and economic. Even Bis-
marck in his pursuit of German interests had allowed himself to be drawn
into Ottoman affairs by challenging Russian expansion following its victory
in the Russo-Turkish War of 187778. Bismarck played a key role in con-
vening the Berlin Congress in 1878, whose nal treaty rolled back Russian
gains but also resulted in the loss of substantial Ottoman territory in Europe.
In addition, the Berlin Treaty marked the formal and fateful internationali-
zation of the Armenian issue, because paragraph 61 provided for western
supervision of the Ottomans treatment of the Armenians.
So when in 1897 Kaiser Wilhelm II launched Germanys Weltpolitik
(world policy), it followed nearly a century of preoccupation with the Otto-
man Empire among the interlocking German elite comprising intellectuals,
religious leaders, businessmen, government ofcials, nobles, and ofcers.
Weltpolitik signied that Germany was no longer a satiated power, as Bis-
marck had declared upon the creation of the German Reich in 1871. Now
Germany would seek to extend its inuence around the globe, a policy that
managed to antagonize rst the British and then the Russians, while the
French were generally threatened.10 If not a place for actual colonies, the
Ottoman Empire was at least an area where Germany could exercise pre-
dominant political and economic inuence, and in the process, contest Brit-
ish and French primacy in the Middle East. Some German intellectuals and
ofcials began to see Turks as the Prussians of the Near East, a group that
Germany and the Young Turks 179

embodied the militaristic virtues of valor, discipline, and order. The neo-
absolutism of Sultan Abdlhamid II accorded with Kaiser Wilhelms pre-
tensions, however misplaced and ultimately disastrous those views were
given the modern and dynamic nature of Germanys economy and society.11
The kaisers famed 1898 visit to Istanbul included a number of private gath-
erings with Abdlhamid. Although in private the kaiser had earlier con-
demned the sultan as a scoundrel [Schurke], suddenly he felt great admiration
for the absolutist trappings of the Ottoman regime and the evidence all
around of monotheistic religiosity. The visit marked something of a con-
summation of the relations between the two powers, and was probably more
important than Wilhelms outlandish declaration in Damascus that the
German kaiser was the friend forever of the worlds 300,000,000 Muslims.12
The Baghdad Railway project soon followed the visit to Anatolia and the
Middle East. Financed primarily by the Deutsche Bank, it became the major
vehicle for German political and economic penetration of the Ottoman
Empire. Meanwhile, German military advisors increasingly supplanted
their French counterparts, who had exercised much inuence throughout
the nineteenth century. For some Ottoman ofcials, the newness of Ger-
manys entrance onto the world stage constituted the precise basis of its
appeal. Germany had no record of carving off Ottoman territory; indeed, it
had helped force the partial reversal of Russian gains in 1878. It provided a
hopeful counterweight to the other Great Powers, and its military prowess
was much admired.
The emergence of the Young Turk movement in the 1890s threatened at
rst to disrupt the relations between the two governments. To German of-
cials, supporters of their own semiauthoritarian state, the Young Turks were
dangerous revolutionaries. German diplomats willingly complied with Otto-
man requests to keep track of Young Turk exiles with their malevolent
intentions.13 Germany sometimes served as a surrogate for the Ottomans
and pressured other European countries to close down Young Turk publica-
tions and conspiracies, often nding a model in the repressive actions of
other states, like Belgium, which banned the Young Turk newspaper edited
by Ahmed Rza.14 In 1899, Ottoman ofcials approached the German ambas-
sador in Turkey, Baron Marschall von Biberstein, and asked the German
government to intervene with the Swiss government. Geneva had become a
Young Turks exile center from which the Young Turks printed and smug-
gled leaets and brochures into the Ottoman Empire, and perhaps also orga-
nized assassination plots against the sultan. Marschall told Tewk Pasha,
the Portes ambassador to Berlin, that he would immediately pass on the
request to his government and he was convinced that something would be
done in this question to suit the wishes of His Majesty [Sultan Abdlhamid
II].15 The German consuls in the Netherlands, Egypt, Bulgaria, and other
180 Genocide in International Context

places also reported on oppositional activity, all of which they tended to

lump together with the Young Turks though this was not always the case.16
Germanys representatives in the Ottoman Empire were always well
informed about various events, including palace intrigue. In 1898, the sul-
tans brother-in-law, Mahmud Pasha, apparently promised the English a
part of the Baghdad railroad concession. His infelicitous action caused great
concern in the palace and among German diplomats. When Mahmud Pasha
could not deliver on his promises, he ed to Europe. Marschall wrote that
Mahmud Pasha was unbalanced and was seeking to raise agitation against
Germany.17 Blow, state secretary at the Foreign Ofce, wrote to the kaiser
conrming Marschalls observations, and recommended that the sultan let
the matter lie until it faded from view.18 German ofcials were bound and
determined to forestall any English involvement in the railroad, and Ambas-
sador Marschall said he would make clear to the sultan that any such con-
cession to English interests was politically impossible. Recklessly, the
kaiser, in a marginal notation, indicated that a concession on this matter
would be for me a casus belli.19
The kaisers belligerent notation on such an apparently mundane
matterthe nature of the investors in a railroadis evidence of the brash-
ness that would eventually lead Germany, with its Ottoman ally in tow, into
World War I. Determined to assert its power on the world stage, Germany
under the kaiser continually challenged the predominance of the other
powers, notably Britain, and promoted the massive use of force in its impe-
rial domain. In the decade before the outbreak of World War I, the German
military had demonstrated extreme brutality against the Boxer Rebellion in
China and the Maji-Maji uprising in East Africa, and had committed in
Southwest Africa what we now term a genocide. Notably, the radicalization
of German politics, the willingness to risk war and use massive force, ema-
nated from the very center of the system, that is, the kaiser, the military, and
some Foreign Ofce personnel, including the foreign minister Blow (who
would soon become chancellor). The Ottomans, and especially the Young
Turks after they assumed power in 1908, knew well the policies of the coun-
try they chose as their main ally.
In the context of the minicrisis involving Mahmud Pasha, Ambassador
Marschall penned one of his long, elegantly written reports to the Foreign
Ofce. His recommendations were not always followed in Berlin, but
Marschall was almost always well informed, and he was a rm proponent
of strong relations between Germany and the Ottoman Empire. His
reports provide many insights into the thinking of German ofcials, and
reect a typical mix of acute political strategy and sheer prejudice and con-
descension concerning the Turk and the Orient. Marschall, although a
Badanese liberal, strongly advocated authoritarian rule and always
Germany and the Young Turks 181

expressed impatience with demands for popular sovereignty in the Otto-

man Empire. His reports provide one indication of why Germany would
so easily ally with the CUP: its shift toward authoritarian politics and op-
position to nationalist demands, especially after 1913, had great afnities
with German perspectives, and German ofcials also saw in the CUP con-
tinuities with the regime of Abdlhamid.
Marschall began by noting that Germanys good standing in Turkey (the
term Germans almost always used, rather than Ottoman Empire) had to
do with the fact that their ofcials and journalists, unlike their French and
English counterparts, recognized that other views and morals prevail in the
Orient and the governmental system has to be judged on a basis different
from Europe.20 Marschall went on to praise Abdlhamid as a ruler who

has a ne understanding for the great political questions that are bound to the
existence of His Empire. With great skill He knows how to position His g-
ures on the chessboard of Oriental politics and masterfully understands how
to play the greed of certain powers against one another. But also in the realm
of domestic politics He has great merits. Certainly He is no reformer in the
modern sense.... To reform Turkey means to let loose on the Empire all the
biting dogs, which today are restrained by their chains and now and then by
well deserved blows.21

Marschall went on to describe improvements in transportation and commu-

nication, public schooling, and public nances. The big problems had to do
with disorderly administration and the corruption of ofcials, a theme he
would maintain during the nearly fteen years of his tenure as Germanys
representative to the Porte. (Marschall died in 1912 just as he was taking up
a new ambassadorial post in London.). But the present Turkish governmen-
tal system could not be held exclusively responsible for the situation. All of
the wrongs are rmly rooted in Oriental morals and particularities.22
One critical fact remained, Marschall wrote:

Abdl Hamid has understood [that He has to] establish His authority in the
Empire ... rmly and unwaveringly. To develop and maintain ... this country
is only possible with an autocratic regimen. All the Turkish statesmen ... who
want to push Turkey down liberalizing paths and want to limit the govern-
mental power of the Sultan through the cultivation of that intangible thing
that we call public opinionall those, to the extent that they are not ele-
ments consciously hostile to the state, are living in a fantasy.... To follow this
course in Turkey would be the beginning of the end. The conglomerate of
nationalities, tribes, religions, and confessions, with their diverging interests
and centrifugal tendencies, often nourished from abroad ... can only be held
together with an iron hand. Every loosening of the reins, every concession to
modern liberalism in the sense of participation of the people in governance
would threaten the entire state with atomization.23
182 Genocide in International Context

Here we have the key elements of the German strategy. The Ottoman
Empire was critical to German interests. Any form of liberalization, whether
through democratic practices or concessions to ethnic and national demands
for autonomy, would be dangerous because it would encourage the dis-
solution of the Empire. A strong, centralizing, authoritarian regime was
required. When Abdlhamid provided that, he was supported by Germany.
When the CUP provided that, in still more radical fashion, it was supported
by Germany. With his imperial German background, Marschall welcomed
the autocratic rule of the sultan, though he would later criticize its excesses.
Somewhat reluctantly at rst and with a great deal of complaining after-
ward, he would come to terms with the Young Turks. Authoritarianism at
home in Germany and a willingness to use immense force, rst in the
colonies and then, in World War I, in Europe itself, had a recognizable coun-
terpart in Ottoman governance.
The sultan feared the Young Turk movement, but Marschall believed in
the 1890s and the rst years of the twentieth century that it was completely
harmless [vllig ungef hrlich]. However great the unrest in Turkey, the ele-
mentary preconditions for revolution did not exist, namely, the possibility of
bringing together large numbers of people in common action.24 Marschall
was of course wrong in his political predictions. In 1908, the combination of
the Young Turk Revolution and the Bosnian crisis forced German ofcials to
adapt quickly to events outside their control, but the lines of strategy laid out
in Marschalls 1899 report remained constant. As Germany began dealing
with the Young Turks without abandoning Abdlhamid, it tried to support
those who seemed to be more in line with perceived German interests and
German thinking. They watched guardedly Young Turks who were suscep-
tible to what German diplomats always called French or western Euro-
pean political notions, meaning, of course, the ideas of 1789.
The rst news of the Young Turk Revolution did nothing to jar German of-
cials from their dismissive attitudes. As one embassy ofcial wrote to Berlin:

The broad term Young Turks covers those people who are consumed by and
infatuated with western European concepts without having a real under-
standing of them. They dream of a reformation of their fatherlands so-
called parliamentary institutions along any kind of European model. I hardly
believe that these enthusiasts are very numerous, even less that they are di-
rectly dangerous.25

The ofcial complained that every utterance of discontent was attributed to

Young Turks, although this was hardly the case. The Austrian ambassador
complained that the Young Turk leaders in Paris, well educated and com-
pletely familiar with European politicsnot quite a compliment in Jano
Pallavicinis penheld the movement tightly in hand.26
Germany and the Young Turks 183

For their part, the Young Turks, while inuenced by intellectual cur-
rents emanating from Germany, were also wary because of Germanys
strong support for Abdlhamid. Nonetheless, the Young Turks made
overtures to Germany. They knew that Germany could be a helpful ally
and it at least did not have a track record of dismembering the Ottoman
Empire. The full sense of afnity would develop after the 1913 coup and
in the war, when Germanophiles like Enver Pasha were at the helm of the
CUP and exclusive nationalist ideologies, sometimes imbued with racial
currents, had advanced among many Young Turks. But even the Franco-
phone and Francophile Ahmed Rza, who had long resisted attempts by
other Young Turks to nd a foreign patron for the movement and its
efforts to overthrow Abdlhamid,27 sought out German contacts from his
Parisian exile. Almost at the moment the 1908 Revolution was unfolding,
he sought an audience with Kaiser Wilhelm II and with Reich Chancellor
Blow. In a rather obsequious note, Ahmed Rza thanked the kaiser for
his interest in the progress of the Ottoman Empire and support of the
Ottoman army.28
The kaiser took a middle road, backing both the sultan and the reform
efforts of the CUP. But Rza began to push a little too far. He requested that
the kaiser not only communicate his views personally to the sultan, but
make a public statement regarding his feelings of friendship for the Turkish
people and their struggle for freedom. The German diplomats were wary of
such a public move.29 As always, they were also keen to size up their inter-
locutors. From Paris the German ambassador Lancken wrote that Rza is
clear and direct thinking, warm-hearted, and a patriotic man of honorable
character. Lancken, like other German ofcials, was always pleased to note
that Rzas mother was German (she had married a Turkish diplomat),
although Rza did not speak the language.30 They hoped that with men like
Rza, the Young Turks would lose their revolutionary characteristics and
govern with the sultan.31
Ofcial Germans were on the road to thinking about the Young Turks as
statesmen rather than as revolutionaries. But Austria-Hungarys annexa-
tion of Bosnia-Herzegovina just a few weeks after the Young Turk Revolu-
tion created grave problems for the Germans. Many Ottomans indeed
believed that the German government was behind or at least supportive of
the annexation. However, Marschall, always a proponent of good relations
with Istanbul whoever governed, bitterly condemned the Austrian move,
arguing that it was a blatant violation of the Berlin Treaty of 1878 and
thereby undermined European order. But he was overruled by Berlin. The
alliance with Austria-Hungary was too important, and after all sorts of dip-
lomatic dances, Germany ultimately decided not to pursue any measures
against its ally.32
184 Genocide in International Context

In April 1909, various garrisons in Constantinople and elsewhere

revolted, calling for the revocation of the constitution and the implementa-
tion of Sharia, the Islamic law code. Such events were especially worrisome
to the Germans. With a man like Ahmed Rza, whose mother was German,
who was uent in French, they could easily negotiate. In other Young Turks,
who perhaps had read the French and German classics and Darwin and
Nietzsche, they could also place their hopes. Abdlhamid was a known
quantity. But an Islamist movement was utterly foreign to them and threat-
ened German interests and ambitions in the East far more than the old
sultan or the Young Turks.33According to Marschall, the rebels charge was
that the Young Turks had acted in opposition to holy law. Their calls for
womens emancipation had greatly riled religious groups. Marschall sus-
pected that the sultan had had a hand in the events, especially since he knew
his land and his people better than the Young Turks, who have spent the
greatest part of their lives abroad.34
The revolt was suppressed and Ambassador Marschall lauded Young
Turk military successes against the opposition forces. He sought to calm
worries in Berlin about unrest in various Ottoman cities and the fate of the
sultan.35 Even the kaiser, for once, took a restrained attitude and opposed an
intervention in a private, domestic Turkish affair, though he lamented the
fact that Germany had no major battleships in the Mediterranean to make a
major show of force.36
Later that fall, in October 1909, Ambassador Marschall reviewed the
internal situation of Turkey in another one of his long reports. Still com-
mitted to friendly relations with the Ottoman Empire, he was growing dis-
dainful of the political situation, and more worried about the liberal
tendencies of the CUP. Germanys predominant interest in the stability of
the empire were threatened by the CUPs commitment to liberalism (how-
ever temporary and unstable) and, even more so, by various forms of ethnic
and national politics.
It is one of the signatures of modern developments that the domestic politics
of states produce an ever greater array of questions. Turkey has an overpro-
duction of such questions, and the new era is creating even more. The slogans
of equality and brotherhood are answered on the side of Christians with
calls for the retention of the old privileges. ... Every nationality of this col-
orfully marked empire has its own question, which in every instance is di-
vided into a political and religious part, each of which is then further
subdivided. As a result of the territorial mixing of the population, in particular
provinces the threads of various national oppositions have become drawn to-
gether in a completely confused tangle.37

Marschall noted that Turkeys constitutional monarchy allowed a huge

range of freedoms.
Germany and the Young Turks 185

As children are wont to do, the Turks have subjected this new toy [the consti-
tution] to so many powerful blows that it was soon destroyed. After the joyful
giddiness came the agitation of the religious leaders, strikes, armed actions,
general insecurity, in a word, anarchy.38

Reality in Turkey, he continued, had little to do with what Germans would

consider constitutional principles.
The system by which Turkey is today governed is no model of constitutional
legality [staatsrechtlichen]. It is a caricature, an unusual mix of monarchy
and oligarchy, of authoritarianism and democracy, of parliamentarism and
military dictatorship, of a legal, constitutional state and an arbitrary state.
Over everything exists the state of emergency with martial law and sum-
mary justice.39

The ambassador was astute enough to recognize that because of his

absolutist strivings and the annihilation struggle he initiated against the
best element of his Army, Abdlhamid bore major responsibility for the
emergence of the CUP. Marschall, who normally had very good contacts
within the Ottoman administration, was somewhat nonplussed by the
secretive nature of the CUP. With a note of exasperation, he wrote that all
we knew was that there existed a 12-person committee, with periodically
shifting personnel, that directed the CUP.40 This secretly functioning oli-
garchy was in effect a revocation of the constitution.

Undoubtedly the Committee represents only a small minority of the Turkish

people. The Young Turks do not dispute the point, but in contrast, use it to
their advantage. The Turkish people, so they argue ... are indifferent and even
opposed to the constitution. Under the old regime the people lost the capacity
to think politically and are incapable of recognizing that the constitution is the
only means of saving the country.... An extraordinary organization is needed
[so the Young Turks argue]. For that reason the Committee is for the time
being necessary. With this argument one can ultimately prove the necessity of
any kind of rule. The common understanding, on the other hand, will come
to the conclusion that the Turkish people is not ripe for the constitution and it
would not be clever to force upon it a state form that it does not understand
and that can be maintained only through irregular institutions.41

The ambassador noted that despite a variety of political currents, there

existed no organized opposition to the CUP. The low cultural level of many
of the deputies in the Parliament only enhanced the CUPs ability to domi-
nate the political system. Indeed, Marschall was prescient in describing the
dictatorial tendencies immanent in the CUP. The more the democracy
claims to distance itself from absolutism, the more it comes to resemble
it.42 He recognized the good intentions and energetic work, but also the
inexperience, of many of the Young Turk leaders. He complained especially
186 Genocide in International Context

about their determined rush to change everything before the proper prepa-
ration and infrastructure had been put in place, and their similarly deter-
mined claim to Great Power stature.
With his tirades against absolutism and dictatorship, Marschall sounded
like a good liberal. But what he really advocated was a legal, constitutional
state, a Rechtsstaat in German, infused with authoritarianism. In other
words, he advocated for the Ottoman Empire something like the forms of
rule prevalent in imperial Germany. Among the specic measures Marschall
applauded were the limits on democracy that the CUP had implemented:
curbs on the freedom of the press, a new law that forbade unions and strikes
in public services, and a ban on associations that represented the particu-
larist demands of individual nationalities.43 Moreover, Marschall often
repeated his assessment that amid all of the difculties in Turkey, all of its
centrifugal tendencies, only the army could guarantee the development of
the new order and the integrity of the empire.

So many serious differences exist, even among Muslim Turks themselves,

that only one tie encircles all of them, from the turban-wearing old Turks, who
look still with one eye to the old regime, to the most radical Young Turks, who
swarm with enthusiasm for Rousseau and the Encyclopedistsnamely, the
conviction that the Empire can be saved only through the earnest, conscious
strengthening of the military.44

German diplomats, suspicious of both extreme dictatorial power and

democracy, in the end welcomed every strengthening of centralist ten-
dencies. The new German ambassador, Baron Hans von Wangenheim,
who assumed the position after Marschalls posting to London in 1912,
wrote in 1913:

The present political program of the Committee signies in essence the rever-
sion from a true parliamentary system to a monarchical-constitutional system
of governance. It is in Turkeys own interests to welcome the fact that the stron-
gest political party [the CUP] ... has come to recognize that ... Turkish condi-
tions are ripe only for a substantially moderated form of constitutionalism.45

Using an analogy of ready-to-wear versus tailored clothing, Wangenheim

noted with satisfaction that the Young Turks had discovered that the most
liberal constitutional forms from Europe do not match their size.

The jacket bought off the rack in the clothing store usually does not t well,
and the owner decides to have the suit made to his size. As is the case for the
buyer with the more discerning eye, so one hopes for Turkey that it patronizes
a skilled tailor.46

Here we see the background to the German commitment to the Ottoman

military and the logic of military necessity, the argument that would so
Germany and the Young Turks 187

often be called on to justify the deportation and killing of Armenians in

191516. German diplomats were acutely aware of the divisive political and
social conditions of the empire. With the sultan effectively deposed, only the
CUP and the army could ensure political coherence in the empire, and the
Germans supported every effort at greater centralization of power.47
Marschall and Wangenheim, though the latter perhaps to a lesser degree,
had mixed feelings about the CUP, but both placed great hopes on the army.
Popular participation and concessions to nationalist strivings would only
worsen the situation. Force and reasonable dictatorship were the answer.
Even if the CUP did not always seem the best partner in this venture, ulti-
mately the Germans would accept it because of the hope that the party
would provide the stability in the Ottoman Empire so desperately desired by
Germans. Moreover, the more the CUP abandoned French ideas, the
more its authoritarianism and forceful nationalism became pleasantly
familiar to German governing circles. Underlying it all was a commitment
to German imperial penetration of Anatolia and the Middle East. Marschall
elucidated this position in one of his reports:

The enormous industrial rise in the United States, English imperialism, and
the development of things in the Far East threaten our old and best markets
[abroad]. A substitute for that we can only nd in the Orient. If political fric-
tions arise from that, so be it: that is the price we will have to pay, though we
should also be ready to come to understandings in particular instances.48

Even reasonable diplomats like Marschall and Wangenheim were prepared

for great risks in their pursuit of German interests. They would negotiate
with the other Great Powers, but they would not shy away from the assertion
of German power abroad, notably in the Ottoman Empire. If the ultimate
result was war, so be it.
Indeed, the ambassadors and other German diplomats greeted every dif-
culty between the Ottoman Empire and Britain or France with a good dose
of Schadenfreude [malicious pleasure] and hope in the diminution of their
ideological inuence on the Young Turks. As Marschall wrote to Chancellor
Bethmann-Hollweg:

During their stays abroad, these people [the Young Turks] acquired a certain
measure of education and cultivation [Bildung], and one cannot deny that they
in part are denitely intelligent and have good intentions. Unfortunately, they
studied politics in western Europe, primarily in France, and thereby learned
nothing clever and have forgotten the traditions and perspectives of their
people. As an offering they brought to their land the teaching of the sover-
eignty of the people. I have never been able to nd any kind of reasoned
sense [vernnftigen Sinn] in this theory ... [and] in view of the many and varied
centrifugal nationalities [in the Ottoman Empire], it is complete nonsense....
188 Genocide in International Context

[The Turkish state] oscillates . . . from the most extreme absolutism to the
opposite pole of boundless radicalism. That stands in complete opposition ...
to Turkish particularities.49

Presciently, Marschall observed in 1911 that the main impact of the revi-
sions of the constitution was to open the door for a coup dtat.50
Perhaps a few thousand other Germans were active in the Ottoman
Empire. They were academics, businessmen, and missionaries, and the
more elite and entrepreneurial among them had close ties to ofcial circles.
Together they promoted an early form of cultural politics as a way of deep-
ening the Ottoman-German relationship. They arranged study tours of Ger-
mans in Anatolia and of Turks in Germany, organized friendship societies,
promoted German language instruction in the Ottoman Empire, and sought
to establish a German Cultural House in Istanbul. At home they issued
pamphlets, wrote newspaper articles, and preached from pulpits.51
Like their countrys ofcials, private Germans were overwhelmingly con-
cerned with stability in the Ottoman Empire, in their case, so they could run
their factories, trade at the ports, dig at archaeological sites, and conduct
missionary work among Armenians (having given up on converting Mus-
lims to Christianity, they had settled on the next best goal: making Protes-
tants out of Gregorian Armenians). Many of the academics were pro-Turkish,
but others, especially the missionaries, were deeply worried about the fate of
Armenians even before the onset of the genocide. Some had ministered to
Armenians during the earlier massacres of 189596 and 1909 and had devel-
oped ongoing relations with them through various Christian institutions.
While it is impossible to determine which faction, pro-Armenian or pro-
Turkish, prevailed, certainly many inuential Germans who straddled the
worlds of business, academia, and government, like Friedrich Naumann and
Ernst Jckh, energetically promoted close ties between Turks and Germans.
Retinues of Ottoman ofcials and businessmen were provided with grand
treatment on study trips to Germany, which German ofcials afterward
touted as great successes. After one such visit in 1911, one German ofcial
quoted an unnamed Ottoman source who gushed over the ne hospitality
the Turks were accorded, not just at ofcial meetings, but also on the street
and in the shops. At a banquet, the owers on the tables matched the colors
of the Turkish ag, leaving a glowing impression on the guests, going right
to their hearts. Turks who had only thought of Germany as a military state
discovered hospitality and blooming culture and science. Wherever one sets
foot in Germany, everywhere one nds the most progressive civilization.52
Some trips were nanced by the German government, others by the
German-Turkish Friendship Society, headed by Ernst Jckh, a mercurial
academic and an inveterate organizer, self-promoter, and Turkish-enthusi-
ast. Alongside get acquainted trips, Jckh put great efforts into obtaining
Germany and the Young Turks 189

support for the foundation of a German school in Istanbul that would be

another major vehicle of winning friendship for Germany.
Over the course of these events, it became evident that German ofcials
had decidedly mixed attitudes toward the Armenians. For some Germans,
Armenians were brotherly Christians who suffered under Muslim Turkish
oppression. But for many others committed to the relationship with Turkey,
the Armenians were a troublesome group and worse. Their nationalist striv-
ings threatened the integrity of the empire, and their commercial occupa-
tions made them the Jews of the Orient, not exactly a positive attribute in
German eyes. The archives are full of negative references to Greeks and
Armenians, who are often characterized as even more adept merchants and
moneylenders than Jews.53 Ambassador Marschall commented that all Ori-
entals are involved in intrigues. The Armenians and Greeks are masters of
the trade.54 As a result, there was little place for anti-Semitism in Turkey.
The economic activity, which elsewhere the Jews perform, namely the exploi-
tation of the poorer, popular classes through usury and similar manipula-
tions, is here performed exclusively by Armenians and Greeks. The Spanish
Jews who settled here cannot make any headway against them. Therefore, it
has been found necessary to strengthen antisemitic sentiments by the word
Zionism, which allegedly follows the goal of delivering to the Jews not only
Palestine, but also Syria.55

Armenians, meanwhile, often displayed an intense hostility toward

Germans based both on Germanys close relationship to the hated Abdlha-
mid and on economic competition between German and Armenian busi-
nesses, particularly in provincial centers outside Istanbul. According to one
German businessman involved in the building of the Mersina-Tarsus-Adana
railway, the hostile mood toward Germany in Mersina and, in connection,
the movement against our railroad, has won the upper hand.... The leader-
ship of the movement lies in the hands of the Armenians, whose committee
more than ever raises particularistic demands and does not wish to see that
Mersina, the Armenian port, falls under any kind of German control.56

The German consul in Mersina recognized that German textile manufac-

turers and efforts to control transport represented serious competition to
some Armenians and Greeks, who put into motion all manner of intrigue
against German interests. At the same time, the various CUP committees
established in every signicant town adopted an unfriendly attitude
toward Germany that could jeopardize the Baghdad Railway.57
Sometimes, however, pro-Armenian views overrode ofcial support for
the relationship with the Ottoman Empire. During the 1909 massacres in
Adana, the marine command of the S.M.S. Hamburg sought to deliver aid to
besieged Armenians. In revenge for Armenian self-defense, Ottoman troops
190 Genocide in International Context

had destroyed the Armenian quarter. Refugees found shelter in a German

factory; the troops had plundered the ofces and had murdered Armenians,
making the evacuation of refugees now impossible. Armenian trust in
Turkish ofcials is totally lost, the commander wrote, and requested the
quick dispatch of tents, food, drugs, and physicians. Turkish ofcials do
nothing, he added.58
The kaiser did, apparently, mention the massacre to the Turkish ambas-
sador in Vienna, Ferid Pasha, during a visit there. The kaiser sharply con-
demned the Adana events and said that the repetition of such outrages
would lead to serious dangers for Turkey.59 But such sentiments did not at
all call into question Germanys fundamental commitment to the Ottoman
Empire, whether it was ruled by Abdlhamid or the CUP.
On the eve of World War I, German ofcials were watching the situation
in the Ottoman Empire with ever heightened concerns. They remained
worried about the fragility of the empire, by the demands of disparate
groups for reform, and by the capabilities of the Young Turks themselves.
The Balkan Wars of 191213 only heightened these worries at the same
time that they were a dening experience for the CUP. The loss of so much
Ottoman territory and population, among the last footholds of a once-great
European, as well as Asian and Middle Eastern, empire was a huge blow.
The poor performance of Ottoman troops unnerved both the Young Turks
and German ofcials. Some elements in the CUP moved toward a more
exclusive, Turkic conception of the empire that entailed a sharp reduction
or elimination of other ethnicities and religions.60 In 1914, just months
before the outbreak of World War I, the Great Powers imposed on the CUP
government heightened international surveillance of the treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Coming right after the defeat in the
Balkan Wars, such actions only intensied the CUPs hostility toward for-
eign interference and fears for the very existence of the Ottoman realm.
Germans meanwhile began thinking about a possible federal structure or at
least greater autonomy for Armenians, Greeks, and others, and some even
went so far as to contemplate the dismemberment of the empire. But they
knew that in such a case, England and France would come out far more
protably than Germany.
Wangenheim was a strong promoter of central power coupled with some
cultural autonomy. From Corfu in 1912, he reported matter of factly on a
conversation with the liberal Albanian smail Kemal Bey, who advocated a
federal solution along German lines for the Ottoman Empire. Turkishness
[Trkentum] should play a role similar to Prussia, he proclaimed, meaning
that the Turkish areas and population should be dominant within the
empire, but a fair level of autonomy should be allowed the various regions
and peoples. Wangenheim did not comment on Kemal Beys proposal,
Germany and the Young Turks 191

which ran against the centralizing tendencies of the CUP. But what could
sound more melodic to a German ofcial than a German model for the
Ottoman Empire, however farfetched that now appears?61
Some sixteen months later, Wangenheim lauded two developments: the
CUPs willingness to grant greater autonomy in the cultural sphere, notably
in regard to education in languages other than Turkish, and, at the same
time, the centralization of power. The ambassador wrote approvingly of the
CUPs recent efforts to assert the right of the sovereign to delay or dismiss
parliament; limit the powers of deputies to engage in no condence votes
that could topple a minister or government; abolish the notion that deputies
had to be resident in their districts, which would ensure a more technically
oriented, experienced parliament; and reduce the time period that parlia-
ment could remain in session.62 Wangenheim concluded that the present
political program signied a transformation from a purely parliamentary
to a monarchical-constitutional system. We can joyfully recognize that it is
in Turkeys own interests that the strongest party ... has come to see that
even in the best of circumstances, Turkish conditions are ripe only for a very
mild form of constitutionalism.63 Wangenheim did not need to write that
such developments in Young Turk politics were also in Germanys interests
because they held out the promise of greater stability. Nor did he note that
the limitations on democracy instituted by the CUP echoed the semiauthor-
itarian structures of imperial Germany. German forms of governance had a
recognizable counterpart in the late Ottoman Empire.
As war approached in the summer of 1914, the Ottoman elite remained
divided whether to enter the conict and, if so, on which side. We know
from recent research that ultimately, broad segments of the Ottoman elite
had come to support war and the alliance with Germany.64 Germany prom-
ised the CUP the recovery of the territory and population it had lost in the
Balkan Wars, and more. Moreover, Germany had never taken Ottoman ter-
ritory, the one mark of distinction it possessed as all the Great Powers scur-
ried around looking for support in the impending conagration. In turn, the
Young Turks imagination soared as they contemplated the fruits of victory.
Like their German ally, they believed that through war, all internal social and
political conicts could be erased and an even grander empire would take
shape.
It did not quite work out that way. Defeat and disaster were the conse-
quences for Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. But
along the way, the Young Turks adopted one particularly brutal form of
erasing social difference: the genocide of Armenians as a means of creating
a far more homogeneous population structure.
The Armenian deportations had begun in February 1915 in Cilicia, and
key decisions for further population removals were probably made at the
192 Genocide in International Context

end of March and were perhaps discussed with the Germans in Berlin.65
Through the spring deportations accelerated, leading to the Armenian up-
rising at Van in April and May. Even before Van, news of the brutal treat-
ment of Armenians had disseminated rapidly through Europe and the
Middle East. On May 24,1915, Britain, France, and Russia issued the now-
famous note in which they promised to hold members of the Ottoman
government and their agents responsible for crimes against humanity.
On May 27, 1915, the Ottoman government issued a law that legitimized
deportations for security and military interests. The timing is notable.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians had already been removed and
killed. The Van revolt had been suppressed and the Ottomans had received
the Allies note. Clearly, the CUP government was trying to forestall fur-
ther criticism and pressure by presenting its actions against the Armenians
as purely within the realm of legitimate warfare. In fact, it was attempting
a massive demographic restructuring of the empire by the exercise of
extreme violence.
German ofcials were very well informed about all these events.66 Con-
suls were reporting back to Wangenheim with explicit descriptions about
the fate of the Armenians, pleading for the ambassador to intervene with
the Ottoman authorities and with the German government in Berlin. Wan-
genheim had issued a few, weak protests, but by mid-spring, as the deporta-
tions accelerated, he refrained even from these limited actions. The
Armenian uprising at Van in AprilMay 1915 pushed himor gave him the
cover he wanted in any caseto lend his full support to Ottoman policies.
Always suspicious of Armenian political demands, Wangenheim defended
his position on the basis of military necessity, the phrase raised continu-
ally by German ofcials and ofcers. Germany was at war, its Ottoman ally
had to be supported, and Armenians were a troublesome lotso went the
standard explanation.
But German consular ofcials continued to raise fervent protests with
their superior in Istanbul. Bowing to pressure, Wangenheim, on July 4,
1915, protested the Armenian deportations to the Ottoman government, but
allowed that such actions were acceptable if they were done for military rea-
sons.67 In essence, Wangenheim just fell in line behind the cover of the
Ottoman deportation law of May 27. He communicated his objections to
Berlin as well, but Bethmann-Hollweg rejected even that meek attempt.
Bethmann-Hollweg responded with the favored slogan, military necessity.
Wangenheim issued a few more protests with the Ottoman government.
But it was clear that from the highest reaches of the state, German ofcials,
with a few notable exceptions, displayed a massive indifference to the fate of
the Armenians, which, in fact, signied a degree of complicity with Otto-
man policies. Through the spring, summer, and fall of 1915, only consular
Germany and the Young Turks 193

ofcials raised serious protests. Never did the top German leaders, from
Wangenheim to the Foreign Ofce, the civilian government, the military
command, and the kaiser, try in earnest to restrain their CUP allies in their
exercise of the most brutal form of population politics. Within two weeks of
his appeals to the Ottoman authorities, Wangenheim was writing to Beth-
mann-Hollweg that the Porte would not take into account German appeals
and Germany should simply try to shield itself from charges of complicity.68
Through the autumn of 1915, while Armenians were still moving across
the killing elds of the Syrian desert, while survivors reached Aleppo and
Damascus famished and disease-stricken, a high volume of cable and per-
sonnel trafc, ofcial and private, shuttled back and forth between Istanbul
and Berlin in regard to the Armenian issue. The energetic missionary
Johannes Lepsius, long engaged in the Ottoman Empire and closely tied by
family and profession to high state ofcials in Berlin, clamored for action
against the Ottoman government and support measures for Armenian sur-
vivors.69 An adept organizer, Lepsius rallied other highly placed Germans to
pressure the government.
But Lepsiuss nemesis, Ernst Jckh, was no less active, and he too was a
skilled organizer. Jckh took a long trip in Anatolia and the Balkans in Sep-
tember and October 1915, clearly with ofcial support. In his extensive
report, he emphasized the preparations for a German House in Istanbul,
the organization of a Turkish-German Association as a parallel to the Ger-
man-Turkish Association, the conditions of German schools in various
parts of the empire, and other matters of that sort.70 Always one for self-pro-
motion, Jckh made sure his interlocutors knew about his eight-year
acquaintance and friendly relations with Enver Pasha and Tlt Bey.71 As
ever, Jckh played up the close connections and mutual interests of Ger-
many and the Ottoman Empire, which leading Ottoman ofcials recognized
as the cornerstone of Turkeys future. According to Jckh, one leading Otto-
man ofcial lauded in parliament the close collaboration of the two coun-
tries from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf. At the same time, all the
leading Ottoman statesmen made clear that the capitulationsthe special
privileges accorded Europeanshad to be abandoned.72 The triumvirate
expected trust and more trust from Germany and German collaboration
in all Ottoman governmental ofces. The will to hold on with Germany is
rm with these statesmen, and they really are power holders who have
power in the hand.73 To Jckh, true Turks were loyally behind the alliance
and supportive of Germany. He claimed to hear many times, even from
even traditional Turks, Maschallah aleman! (God bless the Germans!).74
Jckh dismissed other ethnic groups as disloyal, in the case of Armenians,
or degenerate, in the case of Levantines (meaning Maronites) and Arabs,
especially Arab Christians because of their ties to France and their receipt of
194 Genocide in International Context

French or English pensions. Jckh offered, then, an ethnic-national political

map of the Ottoman Empire that lauded its core Turkish element and
rejected all the other population groups.
The Armenian deportations and murders were not in the forefront of
Jckhs concerns, nor could he ignore them. Like leading German states-
men, Jckh approvingly quoted Enver that the Turkish Empire (Jckhs
words) had to secure itself against an Armenian revolution that had broken
out in the rear of its troops. Tlt made clear that he greeted the annihila-
tion of the Armenians as a political relief, though there existed some voices
of opposition within the CUP. According to Jckh, Lepsius and all the other
opponents of CUP policies, German and Ottoman, had to be reminded that
Turkish participation in the war had resulted in great achievements against
Russia and England and that Turkey was always the key to the Balkans.75
At the embassy in Istanbul it was business as usual through the remain-
der of Wangenheims tenure. In one of his last dispatches, Wangenheim
jauntily reported on a meeting with Halil (Mentee) Bey, who related the
deliberations of a joint meeting of the Ottoman government and ten mem-
bers of the CUP central committee. After the victory in warwhich they all
apparently expectedthe extended period of peace must be used to carry out
full-scale reforms of governmental administration. These should be mod-
eled on Germany and should be carried out with the support of Germany.
But for this to happen, Germany will have to follow through on its promise
to abandon the capitulations. A treaty along these lines must be concluded
and trade negotiations begun.76 Not a word from Wangenheim or, appar-
ently, from his Ottoman interlocutor about the Armenian deportations.
Already ill, Wangenheim left for Berlin in July, shortly after raising his
protest against the treatment of the Armenians. He returned to Istanbul,
and then died on October 25, 1915. His two successors, Prince Ernst zu
Hohenlohe-Langenburg (on a temporary basis) and Paul Wolff-Metternich,
reversed Wangenheims course. They raised loud and persistent complaints
about the Ottoman governments treatment of the Armenians. Wolff-Met-
ternich took up his post in Istanbul on November 19, 1915. Shortly after-
ward, on a trip to the Dardanelles and Eastern Thrace, he described a
territory devastated by the Balkan Wars and World War I. Even once-fertile
areas were like a desert and cleared of men.

Whether after the war Turkish culture can succeed to conjure up again a
fertile region out of the desolation remains to be seen. Personally and based
on what I have seen so far, I do not believe in the regeneration of Turkey. All
the conditions are lacking: honesty, an active middle class, secure legal condi-
tions, and a sound education of the population. From a clique that proclaims
libert, droit civil pour tous, constitution and slaughters hundreds of thousands
of innocent people I do not expect much.77
Germany and the Young Turks 195

Wolff-Metternich scathingly dismissed the more or less youthful enthusi-

asts among us who were of a different opinion concerning the Turks; they
had allowed themselves to be taken in by the current leadership.78 His views
were echoed by the most prominent members of a Reichstag delegation,
who traveled to the Ottoman Empire in February 1916. The Center Party
leader Matthias Erzberger reported that Germans with long experience in
Anatolia had no condence in the empires future and the CUP govern-
ment. According to Erzberger, they dismissed Jckh and his various enter-
prises and pleaded for a more reasonable policy from Berlin. Erzberger
admitted that the Ottoman Empire had done Germany a signicant military
service. But if by ghting the war to victorious conclusion Germany makes
Turkish territory secure, it will have repaid its debt. In view of the extermi-
nation of the Armenians and the persecution of Christians, the abolition of
the capitulations was fully impossible, Erzberger concluded.79
But these pro-Armenian voices, as prominent as they were, could not
penetrate Berlins resolve to support its Ottoman ally all down the line.
Despite Wolff-Metternichs continual efforts, most striking is the silence that
descended on the Armenian issue in the German documents from around
1916 to the end of the war. At most, German ofcials made veiled references
to the exaggerated nationalism of the Young Turks, which the Germans
hoped would be curbed after the war. Ofcial German government press
guidelines in 1917 stated explicitly that it is best to keep silent about the
Armenian question.80
Within the military commands, the Armenian issue also receded from
importance. Tensions certainly ran through the Ottoman-German alliance,
but these had more to do with issues of personnel and authority of com-
mand than they did with the commission of atrocities. Many Ottoman
ofcers resented the German presence and blocked or undermined German
orders. Within the German camp, civilian and military ofcials were con-
stantly at loggerheads, especially given the difcult character of General
Otto Liman von Sanders, who was in charge of the military mission. Wan-
genheim complained bitterly about him, to the point where the ambassador
noted to a friend that in my long diplomatic career I have worked well with
superiors, subordinates, and colleagues. But I have not yet achieved the
qualications of a doctor for the mentally ill [Irrenartzt].81 Liman and Enver
Pasha worked in the same building but would only communicate in writing.
General Friedrich Bronsart von Schellendorf found himself in the unten-
able position of serving as both Envers chief of staff and a member of the
military mission under Limans command.82 Schellendorfs ties to Enver
were no doubt part of the reason why Liman wanted to re him.
Wolff-Metternichs protestations on behalf of the Armenians aroused the
ire of both the Ottoman and the German authorities, and the German
196 Genocide in International Context

government acceded to the CUP request for his recall, which occurred on
October 3, 1916. His tenure had lasted less than eleven months.
His successor as Germanys ambassador, Richard von Khlmann, arrived
in Istanbul in mid-November 1916. Khlmann was far more supportive of
CUP policies and simply entered into standard ambassadorial mode by
reporting on the internal politics of the CUP. His evaluations were not
always accurate. Sometimes he (and his successors) mischaracterized dif-
ferent factions or predicted wrongly which individuals were prevailing
within the party. But overall, the Germans were very well informed and they
continued to advocate the policies set out by Marschall and Wangenheim:
centralization of power coupled with some cultural autonomy. At the same
time, they ignored the most powerful example of the exercise of central state
power: the genocide of the Armenians. Like his predecessors, Khlmann
joyfully relayed any positive comments about Germany issued by his Otto-
man interlocutors. He lauded Hussein Dschahid (Hseyin Cahid) as a
leader of the modern faction in the CUP who had come to recognize that
a wise and clever grafting of German methods onto Turkish schools and
administration was the single possible way of domestic development.
Moreover, Dschahid stated that Turkey needed an ally, and if it did not main-
tain the relationship with Germany, it would fall victim to a brutal relation-
ship of dependency with regard to all the Great Powers.83
Khlmann hoped that if this tendency prevailed, the exaggerated nation-
alism that was also present in the CUP would recedea veiled reference
perhaps to the Armenian massacres. Yet he lauded the main architect of the
genocide, Tlt Pasha, as Germanys man. Sprinkling Romantic-type descrip-
tions of the broad shouldered, heavily bearded man, with black penetrating
eyes and an outward calm and bonhommie amid an analysis of the power
hierarchy within the Ottoman Empire, Khlmann projected Tlt as a wise,
decisive statesman, but one willing also to exercise brutality when it was
necessary.84 Apparently, Khlmann saw nothing wrong with this last trait.

Despite the varied positions among Germans in regard to Turks and Arme-
nians, whatever the tensions between Turkish and German military men
and governmental leaders, the Ottoman-German alliance held until the
bitter end, with dire consequences for the Armenians. At the uppermost
reaches of the state and with a slew of academics, publicists, and others in
tow, German military and civilian ofcials supported the Young Turk gov-
ernment and, thereby, became complicit in the Armenian Genocide
although they were hardly the initiators or organizers of the event. Their
complicity stemmed from inaction, willful self-deception, and the percep-
tion of military necessity in the age of total war, when the status of civilian
populations had become ever more critical to the logic of warfare.
Germany and the Young Turks 197

Yet military necessity hardly sufces as an explanation for ofcial Ger-

man toleration and support of the Armenian Genocide. Military thinking
does not exist in pristine isolation from other ideological formations, nor
without reference to larger historical factors. In the particular case of the
Armenian Genocide, German actions were informed by a century of intel-
lectual interest in the Ottoman Empire and a generation of direct, active
pursuit of German imperial interests in the region. To achieve those inter-
ests, Germany sought a powerful state, a general perspective that they lled
out with ideas and concepts drawn from their own imperial German back-
ground. They defended authoritarian structures in the Ottoman Empire as
the most reliable guarantors of stability. Ottoman authoritarianism, whether
the Ssultans or the Young Turks, would best enable Germans to develop
their political, economic, and religious enterprises in Anatolia and the
Middle East. Strong central power, rather than popular sovereignty, was
familiar and comfortable to ofcial Germans, who identied kindred ele-
ments in Ottoman governance. The central role German diplomats accorded
the Ottoman army also directly echoed the Prusso-German experience with
its powerful military, which stood at the center of governance in the political
structure of imperial Germany.
Two other factors were critical in the German accommodation of Otto-
man atrocities. Germans, like the Ottoman rulers, had had plenty of experi-
ence with troublesome populations in the rst years of the twentieth
century. Against the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Maji-Maji Uprising in
East Africa, the Germany army had unleashed extensive brutality. In South-
west Africa the army had carried out a genocide of the Herero and Nama. In
World War I it committed severe violence against Belgian and French civil-
ians. All of these actions were directly encouraged by those at the very center
of power: the kaiser, the military command, and, of secondary importance,
the civilian government. German strategists and politicians thought about
these groups in extreme national or racial terms, such that every member of
the group was deemed a potential enemy. The Armenian Genocide was
more extensive and deadly than these other events. But the strategy of
deportations and killings that the Young Turks initiated constituted a policy
that was all too familiar to German ofcials.
Finally, the pursuit of these kinds of policies marked a serious radicaliza-
tion of governmental policy. In both the Ottoman and German cases, it was
those in power, the insiders, the elites, not those on the social or political
margins, who underwent a process of radicalization. Precisely because they
held power, their inclination for extreme measures, domestically and inter-
nationally, proved so deadly for certain populations (and not just rival armies
and states). Both regimes advocated and put into practice the Flucht nach
vorne (colloquially, the preemptive strike). The engagement of war was a
198 Genocide in International Context

risky business, but also provided their leaders with great opportunities. In
the context of war imaginations soared ever higher. German military and
civilian ofcials envisaged a German imperium from France to Ukraine and
into Anatolia and the Middle East. The Young Turks thought of war as the
means of resolving all of the perceived problems of the empireencroach-
ments of foreign powers on Turkish sovereignty, the loss of territory through
the Bosnian annexation and the Balkan Wars, and nationalist movements
from within, in particular among the Armenians. It all ended in political
disaster for both imperial Germany and the Ottoman Empire, but not before
atrocities had been enacted upon a number of populations.
In late 1916, Ambassador Khlmann wrote to Chancellor Bethmannn-
Hollweg. He mentioned nothing about the Armenian deportations and mas-
sacres, except for a veiled reference to the exaggerated nationalism of the
Young Turk government. About Tlt, who as Minister of the Interior was one
of the main organizers of the Armenian Genocide and was about to become
Grand Vizier, Khlmann wrote that from [Tlt] one can reliably expect a
decisive and clear direction of the entire scope of Turkish politics. He was
the strong man that Germans always felt the empire needed. Moreover,
he has staked his own political existence and that of his country on the alliance
with Germany. So long as we or the conditions in general do not place before
him the alternative of sacricing the existence of Turkey on the altar of the
alliance, we can rmly and denitely count on him.85

From dangerous revolutionaries in the 1890s the Young Turks had become, in
German eyes, responsible statesmen with whom they could workeven when
work meant complicity in the destruction of the Armenian population.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like thank the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Arsham
and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in the College of Liberal Arts, University
of Minnesota, whose support made possible the research for this chapter.
9

Who Still Talked about the Extermination

of the Armenians?
German Talk and German Silences

Margaret Lavinia Anderson

Who still talks nowadays about the extermination of the Armenians? Hit-
lers challenge, ung out to his commanders on the eve of their attack on
Poland, has become so familiar that it is the target of genocide deniers, deter-
mined to discredit its authenticity.1 Although we have no reason to doubt the
remark is genuine, both attack and defense obscure an obvious reality. Sup-
pose detractors could prove that the emissary from the German resistance
who handed the Fhrers speech to the APs Berlin Bureau Chief had indeed
inserted the reference to the Armenians in order to make Hitler appear more
bloodthirsty? Such an insertion would only underscore the iconic status of
the Armenian genocide as the apex of horrors conceivable in 1939.
This chapter supplies the empirical basis for what is implicit in the Nazi
leaders rhetorical question: that the Armenians and their extermination
had once excited considerable talk. Secondarily, it raises the question,
without resolving it, of whether talk has consequences. (Hitler thought so;
otherwise why try to assure his generals, about to embark upon extermina-
tions of their own, of talks transience?)2 Finally, in demonstrating the ubiq-
uity of talk about the extermination, it offers a fortiori proof that the
extermination occurred.
Talk about the extermination of the Armenians began in the mid-1890s,
when Abdlhamid IIs massacres, with well over 100,000 victims, provoked
an outcry of indignation and sympathy from church and peace groups to the
Socialist International. In England, the House of Commons demanded that
the royal navy force the Dardanelles and remove the sultan. In Russia, intel-
lectuals from Chekhov to Solovev garnered nearly 30,000 rubles from dona-
tions and sales of an anthology put together for Armenian relief. In France,

199
200 Genocide in International Context

Dreyfusards founded the journal Pro Armnia, its editorial board graced by
luminaries from the Leftalthough agitation for the Armenians ranged
across Frances entire political spectrum.3
The uproar was not conned to countries with designs on the Near East.
Switzerlands interest in the region was so slender that until 1927 it did
not even maintain formal diplomatic relations with Turkey. Yet the Swiss
soon collected a million francs (more than ten million in todays purchasing
power) for Armenian relief and more signatures than on any petition in
their long history.4 In the United States, suffering in Anatolia spurred
nationwide Armenian Sundays, precursors of the Golden Rule Sundays
of the 1920s when participants consumed (often in banquet rooms provided
gratis) the same meager fare dished up by Near East Relief, to raise money
for starving Armenians. By 1925, forty-nine countries were sharing these
rituals of symbolic sacrice.5
Not least among those who kept the talk about Armenians humming
were the Young Turks, who before 1908 planted articles and letters in the
European press on their mistreatment. Referring to the service that the
Armenians are rendering to the Turks, many hoped, as did Armenians
themselves, to spur the Great Powers to topple the sultan. Meanwhile Abdl-
hamid bribed Western journalists to inuence opinion in the opposite direc-
tion. On the Bosporus, at least, people believed talk had consequences.6
And in Germany? By late 1896, talk about the destruction of the Arme-
nians was so loud that Johannes Lepsius, the young pastor who spearheaded
the agitation, had become the most famous man in Germany.7 Lepsius, to
whom I will return later, appealed especially to Lutherans of an evangelical
persuasion, but secular Germans were also appalled by Armenian suffering.
No other aspect of the Eastern Question, averred a prominent German
liberal, is now discussed so vigorously as the Armenian Question.8
We must distinguish, of course, between noise in the public square and
the intense but discreet exchanges in the corridors of power. To merge
these two conversations was vital for the Armenians; to keep them apart,
the goal of diplomats and statesmen. For sooner or later talk meant
pressure, and the last thing policy makers wanted was the kind of moral-
izing speech that might limit their own freedom of action. The use of
force on behalf of the Armenians, they feared, would compromise Otto-
man survival and risk unleashing a war of all against all. Thus, in the
poker game of Great Power politics, as the historian Marian Kent has
noted, The Ottoman Empire held one trump card. This was the general
desire of the European Powers for it to survive as a political entity.9 That
card could be played as easily against Great Power humanitarianism as
against Great Power imperialism. Consequently, the louder the outcry
over the Armenians plight, a buzz that by its nature sparked networks
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 201

that jumped national boundaries, the more Europes foreign ofces coop-
erated in their studied efforts at silence.
Yet behind closed doors, the talk continued, as stacks of foreign ofce
documents make clear. Discussions grew more intense whenbeginning
with the Albanian rebellion in 1910 and spiraling into the Balkan inferno of
191213the empires nal liquidation, as diplomats delicately put it,
hove into sight. The collapse of Ottoman authority in the Balkans was
expected to spread to Asia Minor, where new crops of separatists were
emerging, from Beirut to the Persian frontier. Some observers feared Arme-
nian rebellions; others, massacres when the Ottoman army demobilized.10
In September 1912, Patriarch Hovannes Arsharuni resigned over the
Portes passivity in the face of 280 documented murders of Armenians
setting off demonstrations in London, Paris, Soa, and Cairo.11 Amid a
urry of disquieting rumors, Germany deployed, with British approval, four
cruisers to Turkish waters. For violence in Asia Minor, if it triggered Russian
intervention, would surely be met by Austrian counteraction in the Bal-
kanswith the risk of a general war.12 Preventing the extermination of the
Armenians thus became the task of every statesman committed to peace.
Yet at the prospect of ethnic conict spilling across the Caucasus, the
tsars governmentaware of the perils but pushed by the publicbegan
threatening to occupy Eastern Anatolia if credible protections for Arme-
nians were not implemented immediately. The Russian dmarche added
urgency to cries of the Armenians themselves. As Russians pressed and
Ottomans dithered, Armenians and their supporters petitioned the presi-
dent in France; sent appeals to the Hague Court from Japan and Burma;
importuned Britain from outposts in India, Ceylon, and the Straits Settle-
ment; and entreated Germany from Constantinople, Cairo, Soa, Yoko-
hama, Manchester, Frankfurt, and Potsdam.13 Talk got louder.
At least one German diplomat recognized a crisis when he saw one.
Ambassador Hans von Wangenheim urged Berlin to instruct its representa-
tives in Turkey to intervene to stop the abuses of Armenians and even, in
emergencies, to act as their really effective protectors. It was time also to
grasp the nettle of Armenian Reforms. The proposal required scuttling
the sacred diplomatic convention of ignoring a friendly states domestic
arrangementsa convention that during the massacres of the 1890s had
kept the kaisers government on a noninterventionist path. The ambassa-
dors proposal would have meant a radical shift in Germanys stance in the
Near East.14
Wangenheims bosses demurred. With the outcome of the Balkan wars
still so uncertain, rolling out the Armenian question was the last thing
that Germanys new foreign secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, wanted.15 But talk
about imperiled Armenians could no longer be hushed. The London Times
202 Genocide in International Context

ran eighty-eight items on Armenian troubles over the course of 1913. In

Paris, Pro Armnia, defunct since 1908, resumed publication. Twelve
speeches in the British parliament, an interpellation in the Italian chamber
of deputies, and queries in the Reichstag reected and contributed to the
disquiet. Whether he liked it or not, Jagow had to talk about the Armenians.
The work load of Europes exhausted diplomats, already crushing thanks
to the Balkan crisis, increased dramatically as a consequence. In June alone,
well over seventy-ve missives on the Armenian matter crossed the tran-
soms of the Wilhelmstrasse. In Therapia, Baron Wangenheim was chained
to his desk, his longed-for family holiday postponed, then postponed again.
Even with Balkan armies still raining down atrocities on each others vil-
lages, the kaleidoscopic situation in the Orient, Jagow declared, had
become the most pressing of all political questions.16
Uncertain whether the future lay with the Armenians or the Turks, Ger-
man ofcials began to work both sides of the street. As the atmosphere in
Constantinople became increasingly electric, Jagow labored, with Lon-
dons cooperation, to secure protections for the Armenian minority that
would be least subversive of Ottoman sovereignty.17 At the same time,
through Johannes Lepsius, the Armenians champion in the nineties, he
opened relations with Armenian leaders, both to win them for a compro-
mise and to ensure their goodwill should compromise fail.18 Although not
the dramatic course correction Ambassador Wangenheim had wanted, Jag-
ows expenditure of diplomatic capital on behalf of an accord demonstrated
how acute the danger in Eastern Anatolia was felt to beto its populations,
to Ottoman survival, to European peace. The Armenian question, declared a
scholar returning from the Turkish capital, was the key to all.19

On February 8, 1914, Russia and the Ottomans signed an agreement, bro-

kered by Germany, on the seven historically Armenian provinces. The Porte
ceded some of its sovereignty in Eastern Anatolia. Russia stopped threat-
ening to occupy it.
Would these reforms stabilize Ottoman rule? Or would they, as many
feared and some hoped, deliver its coup de grce?20 Far from quieting talk
about Armenians, the reforms of February 1914 now broadcast it through
the megaphone of Great Power politics.
Nowhere was that talk louder than in the German Empire, where a newly
founded German-Armenian Society, aimed at fostering warmer relations
between the two peoples, held an inaugural gala in Berlin, complete with a
lecture on The Signicance of the Armenians for World Culture. The very
existence of the society betrayed the Wilhelmstrasses tilt. Only the sun of
ofcial favor could explain how this new outtled by Lepsius with a steer-
ing committee composed of a journalist, a pastor, and six Armenians whose
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 203

fame surely did not extend beyond the Armenian colony in Berlinhad
managed to collect the dazzling names, ninety-seven in all, that graced its
appeal: four generals, the leaders of the Reichstags two liberal parties as
well as the Conservative president of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies,
and important representatives of business, government, academia, and the
Protestant church.21 Yet the desire to be in the governments good graces
cannot explain the support of such glitterati as Germanys celebrated painter
Max Liebermann; the social theorist Georg Simmel; the winner of the 1908
Nobel Prize for literature, Rudolf Eucken; and the young novelist Thomas
Mann, who would capture the same honor in 1929. They must already have
been talking about the Armenians.
In urging a course correction on his superiors in February 1913, Wan-
genheim had warned that such a shift would require a change in the way the
press treated matters Armenian. And indeed, tea-leaf readers abroad
detected signs that Germany was taking steps to wean its public from hos-
tile stereotypes.22 The names of the editors of Germanys three most inu-
ential dailies on the list of the German-Armenian Societys sponsors seemed
to conrm that a page had been turned; that talk about Armenians would
grow warmer, more friendly.
It was not to be. Within weeks, Europe was at war. On August 2, a (secret)
alliance with the Ottoman Empire, rejected as militarily worthless by Jagow
only three months earlier, was signed by Germany.23 The German-Armenian
Society suddenly became a political embarrassment. The German-Turkish
Union, which had been launched with the Foreign Ofces countenance in
February, three days after the signing of the Armenian Reforms (probably to
reassure the Porte of Germanys continued benevolence), now had a mis-
sion. Its animating ventriloquist, Ernst Jckh, a diminutive journalist with a
supersized gift for self-promotion, was put on government payroll and
immediately began devising instruments for piping Turkeys praises.
On October 31, 1914, the Turks entered the war. The German public,
reeling after three months of the deadliest combat of the entire conict,
embraced these unlikely brothers-in-arms as saviors. The alliance proved a
Full Employment Act for orientalists. Almost overnight, enrollments in
courses on Turkey and instruction in the language soared (Everyone, Pro-
fessor C. H. Becker marveled, wants to learn Turkish now!).24 Anyone
with a colorable claim to expertise on the Ottoman Empire could cash in.
Trumping all competitors, Ernst Jckh ran a one-man development ofce
for the new alliance. He set about convincing a foreign policy establish-
ment previously skeptical of turcophile effusions that a scholarly series
(his Orient Library) would boost the war effort.25 The Library ran to
twenty-ve volumes and promised twenty more. Along with predictable
puff pieces (mostly pamphlets), readers were offered a chorus of Ottoman
204 Genocide in International Context

voices, among them the journalist Munis Tekin Alp, whose expansionist
demands for the Caucasus, Crimea, Persia, and Central Asia left even a
man as committed to the alliance as Professor Becker gasping: Heaven
grant that the Turkish government does not proceed according to this
recipe.26 Everything possible is appearing about the Orient and Islam,
his bemused colleague, Enno Littmann, agreed. Among the possible was
an article in 1915 trumpeting The Evolution of Turkey into a State gov-
erned by the Rule of Law.27

Even as Jckh and his allies were marketing the Ottoman Empire as the
land of tolerance, Turkeys ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)
was driving Armenians to their deaths.28 By April 1915, Germans stationed
in Turkey began witnessing pogroms, expulsions, and massacres. Ensconced
at the Colonial Ofce as director of propaganda abroad, Jckh was kept ap-
prised of the CUPs policies by his crony, Hans Humann, Enver Pashas
boyhood friend, now a naval ofcer posted to his old Orient-homeland. In
July, as Italys consul in Trabzon collapsed under the weight of the horrors
he was forced to witness, Jckh-the-Turk, as he was dubbed, began making
space in his series for yet another riff on the Tolerance of Islam.29
Those who wanted the world to know what was going down in Anatolia
faced formidable obstacles. As of May, missionaries as well as Armenians
were barred from using the mails. Soon their telephones and telegraphs
were conscated.30 Emissaries of neutral states, now forbidden by the Porte
to encrypt their telegrams, were limited in what they might say. Only Ger-
man and Austrian partners remained secure conduits for candid informa-
tion about the gruesome events now unfolding. Would these embassies
forward such explosive information about their allies? When a German con-
sul included Karl Blanks account of the Mara pogrom of April 14 in his
bag, Wangenheim refused to receive it until he had extracted a promise that
the material would be released neither through the press nor any other
way. It took two months, and repeated requests, before Blanks superiors in
Frankfurt, at the German Aid Federation for Christian Charity in the Orient,
received his report, and then in an oral, sanitized redaction.31
The CUP usually denied its purpose, if not its policies. Thus it was that
Wangenheim, who had protested brutalities against Armenians in winter
191415, at rst accepted its argument that the deportations that spring
were a military expedient, to remove actual and potential fth columns from
the path of Russian invaders. And the massacres that befell the deportees as
they trudged away? Regrettable failures of military discipline that could
happen in any wartime situation. But the deception could not last. As much
as he wanted to believe the CUPs story, the German ambassador never sac-
riced his critical judgment on the altar of the alliance. In this respect, the
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 205

volcanic baron compares favorably to his British counterpart at St. Peters-

burg, Sir George Buchanan. Responding those same months to anxious
queries from London about the tsarist armys mass expulsions of Jews,
Ambassador Buchanan expressed not the slightest doubt that Jewish trea-
son necessitated such harsh measures, assurances echoed uncritically by
other Brits on the spotsoldiers, scholars, journalists.32
Wangenheim, however, although visibly suffering the colossal physical
decline that pregured his death only months later, could still summon the
energy to catch the Porte in ctions.33 As early as June 17, he had concluded
that the banishment of the Armenians is not motivated by military consid-
erations alone is clear as day. Indeed, he reported, the Minister of Interior,
Tlt Bey, recently expressed himself freely that the Porte wanted to use the
war in order to thoroughly clean out its domestic enemiesthe native
Christianswithout being disturbed by diplomatic intervention from
abroad. Armenians argued that any Armenian offenses had been provoked
by Ottoman authorities. The baron apparently concurred.34 On July 7, he
informed Germanys chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, that the
fact that the deportations had been extended to provinces not threatened
with invasion, and the manner in which they were being carried out, con-
vinced him that their ally was in fact pursuing the aim of destroying the
Armenian race in the Turkish empire.35
Wangenheim based this conclusion not only on Tlts comment, but on
an array of German sources: teachers, medical personnel, church people,
engineers and managers, soldiers, and his own consular staff. Especially
compelling were indignant dispatches from three of his men. Walter
Rssler, consul in Aleppo, would eventually earn a mild reprimand for his
passionate protests on behalf of the Armenians.36 Walter Holstein, running
the vice-consulate of Mosul-Van, was so moved by the famished creatures
straggling by that he fed them himself. If the Foreign Ofce was unwilling
to reimburse him the 300, well then, he declared, hed take it out of his
own pocket. The inclusion of Chaldean and Assyrian Christians, small de-
nominations with no considerable body of coreligionists across the border,
proved that the CUPs removals were population policy, not security
policy.37
Then there was Reserve Lt. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, sent to the
Caucasus to organize Muslim guerrillas behind Russian lines. Arriving in
Erzurum, the heart of historic Armenia, Scheubner was pressed into service
as acting vice-consul and almost immediately witnessed the same grisly
sights. CUP hardliners bluntly informed him that their nal goal was
the complete extermination of the Armenians. After the war, we will
have no more Armenians in Turkey, is the verbatim pronouncement of an
authoritative personage, the young soldier reported. In August he informed
206 Genocide in International Context

Wangenheims stand-in that massacres throughout the region had left his
consulate without Armenians. He did not deny there had been insurgents
here and there; what could be more natural for a people so badly treated?
But of a general, intentional, and premeditated uprising by the Armenians,
any proof whatsoever, in my view, is lacking. The success of the extermina-
tion itself proved the absurdity of Turkish claims: that tens of thousands of
Armenians let themselves be butchered, without resisting, by a handful of
Kurds and irregulars as happened here is surely proof of how very little taste
this people has for ghting and revolution.38

As refugees, neutral diplomats, social workers, and medical personnel

returning from Anatolia told the world of the catastrophe, were people
inside Germany also talking about the extermination of the Armenians?
War means censorshipand in Germanys censorship handbook
(Zensurbuch) only ve items took up more space than Turkey. Strictures
on what might be written about the Ottoman Empire exceeded in length
even such awkward topics as Belgium and U-Boat Warfare. The prin-
ciple was simple: All remarks that could in any way diminish the reputa-
tion of our Turkish allies or be wounding to them must be avoided. Care
must be taken with travelers reports, and anything on the Armenians had
to be submitted to precensorship.39 In fact, the Zensurbuch made plain, on
the Armenian question the Wilhelmstrasse wanted no articles at all.
The press got the message. Although the Frankfurter Zeitung, Germanys
most prestigious daily, had a veteran correspondent, Paul Weitz, in Constan-
tinople, Weitz valued his insider status much too much to waste it on a story
that might never see the light of day. That status was used instead to secure
fawning interviews with Turkish leaders and to broadcast the CUPs tale of
Armenian treachery.40 Nor did other papers rock the boat. During the geno-
cide year of 1915, the Armenians were mentioned in the Berliner Tageblatt
just ve times: in two reprints of rebuttals of Entente propaganda by the
Ottoman press agency, and in asides by Enver Pasha, Interior Minister Tlt
Bey, and Grand Vizier Halil Pasha during interviews conducted by a toadying
Emil Ludwig.41 Other papers fell into line.42
In September, Friedrich Naumann, member of parliament and darling of
the nonsocialist Left, let at least some cats peep out of the bag. Yesterday,
he reported in his popular weekly, I heard from a reliably well-informed
party of the violent transplant to Mesopotamia of Armenian women, chil-
dren, and elderly, because, or on the occasion of, unrest in Van. Readers
could nd a comprehensive account, which has until now hardly been
noticed in Germany, in Christliche Welt. Naumann heard yesterday? The ac-
count had appeared in July, and Christliche Welts editor was Naumanns
brother-in-law. Not noticing took an act of willbut war encourages such
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 207

acts. With nearly 3.4 million of their young men mobilized in 1914; with
almost 9,000 casualties, on average, every day during the rst months of the
war; with pundits like Naumann himself insisting that everything turns on
the Dardanelles, defended by the Turkscan we wonder that ordinary Ger-
mans let their allys story go unchallenged?43
And yet, statisticson censorship, news items, casualtiesdo not close
the question of what Germans knew and said about the extermination of the
Armenians. Unlike the Third Reich, where the disclosure of genocide was a
capital crime, penalties in imperial Germany for circumventing censorship
were light.44 Dutch, French, English, and even Russian newspapers
remained on sale. Among the effects of Matthias Erzberger, the Center Par-
tys Reichstag leader, were translations of French articles on the massacres,
conrmation that talk was crossing borders. Those without foreign lan-
guages could learn the same from the Swiss press.45
An information barrier so omnipresent, yet so porous, meant that Tur-
keys boosters faced the task of rebutting atrocity reports that they could
never be sure anyone had read. The result was a mass of contradictions.
Germans were told that Armenians were being subjected to a just and
necessary response to their treasonous aid to the tsars army.46 But they
could also read that relations between the Armenian elite and German-
Turkish circles were very close; that even Russia was discovering that
Armenians wanted Eastern Anatolia to remain Ottoman; that the Armenian
Reforms had proven themselves absolutely, with the friendly relation-
ship between Armenians and their government now based on rm, con-
stitutional granite. Contradictions multiplied when on the same page
another author blamed the terrible Armenian massacres (assumed to be
common knowledge) on unruly Kurds, whose depredations the Porte, bur-
dened by a bureaucracy from the previous regime (i.e., still unreformed),
could not control.47 Competing apologias reected and fueled suspicions of
murder and mayhem.
But still we must ask: Who knew? If we look not at the hard-pressed
German-in-the-street but at the elites, the close-knit world of movers,
shakers, and public opinion-makers, then the answer is clear: everyone. And
if we ask, what did they know? The answer, with equal certitude, is: enough.
Orientalists learned early, from students serving as interpreters and from
colleagues abroad. Gttingens Enno Littmann initially dismissed a report
from America on the Armenian plight. The future translator of Arabian
Nights knew a good tale when he saw one, and anyway Londons mobs and
Russias expulsions of Poles and Lithuanians and persecutions of Jews were
worse. Becker demurred: That terrible things are happening is without a
doubt. A letter from a former student contains so very many details that he
has seen with his own eyes that the madness of the deportation is not to be
208 Genocide in International Context

doubted.48 Scholarly eyewitnesses tried to evade Germanys military cen-

sors by using Arabic or Turkish to relate their most ghastly particulars, such
as the nails through the arm and hand of an Armenian woman.49 Though
the ploy rarely succeeded, enough details got through to convince even the
hard-nosed Littmann.50 By October 1915 reports of the massacres, Becker
saw, ll the entire world.51
One source was Armin T. Wegner. Returning to Berlin after serving as a
medic in Turkey, the aspiring writer used readings of his new work to notify
dovish intellectuals, like the journalist Hellmut von Gerlach and the art col-
lector Count Harry Kessler. Gerlach took the news to a meeting of the Fed-
eration for a New Fatherland (Bundes Neues Vaterland), whose eclectic
clientele stretched from Albert Einstein and the novelist Stefan Zweig,
through the usual liberal, socialist, and feminist suspects (e.g., the revi-
sionist socialist Eduard Bernstein; the radicals Clara Zetkin and Ernst
Reuter), all the way up to ofcials within the establishment. Gerlach got the
German Peace Society to pass a resolution in Leipzig expressing sympathy
for all oppressed and abused people, especially the Armenians, demanding
remedies from their government.52 But in his more inuential capacity as
political editor of Die Welt am Montag (circulation 150,000) Gerlach kept
faith with his governments precept: what happens in Anatolia stays in Ana-
tolia. Nor was Maximilian Harden, publisher of the fashionable Die Zukunft,
any prole in courage. Inform the Empress! he advised Wegner. Emphasize
the religious angle, since the Armenians are a Christian people!53 He him-
self, he was sorry to say, could do nothing. The censor closed our mouths,
Gerlach later explained. But who could assess the censors power, with self-
censors so obliging?54
Talk about the Armenians extended beyond academics and peaceniks.
Arthur von Gwinner, director of the mighty Deutsche Bank, which owned
controlling shares of the Anatolian Railway, learned of the slaughter through
the hair-raising accounts his deputy director-general sent the home ofce.
The Jewish pogroms in Russia, which I know, are comparative childs play,
the latter exclaimed.55 The Railway protested to the Turks and reported in
detail to the Foreign Ofce. It saved as many Armenians as it could by hiring
even the unqualied for construction and ofce work. Its life boat bears
comparison to Oscar Schindlers, on a much larger scale.56 Gwinner himself
designated 1,000 for immediate (secret) Armenian relief. But he did not
resign as chairman of Jckhs German-Turkish Union, whose goals he con-
tinued to legitimate with his name.
Walther Rathenau, raw materials supremo and chairman of German
General Electric, and the steel magnates Hugo Stinnes and August Thyssen
also knew. Wartime Constantinople was never off limits to inuential
people (every train from the Balkans brings Germans who want to monkey
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 209

around with the Turks, complained a later German ambassador.)57 Stinnes

and Thyssen arrived in winter 1916 and met other Germans talking about
the extermination of the Armenians. Also among the ood of curious
compatriots was Gustav Stresemann, rising star of the Liberals, who met
with newspapermen, soldiers, expats, and diplomats (including the U.S.
ambassador, Henry Morgenthau)and Enver Pasha. Stresemanns diary
leaves no doubt that he learned exactly what was happening. Armenians
were mentioned ve times. On day 4 he wrote: Armenian reduction 11
1/2 million.58
Back in Germany, the future chancellor of the Weimar Republic made his
inuence felt. To the public, Stresemann conveyed the sunny face of the al-
liance, treating audiences to encomia on the valiant Turks.59 To insiders,
his picture was grim. A long report that, though labeled condential, was
clearly intended for circulation, did not mince words: on the Ottoman
economy, on hostility between German and Turkish ofcers, on growing
xenophobia. But on the Armenian question, Stresemann reversed targets,
aiming his guns not at Germanys allies but at Wangenheims replacement,
Count Paul von Wolff-Metternich, for antagonizing the Turks by his prefer-
ence for Armenian-Greek elements and his partisanship on the so-
called Armenian question. Talking with Turks, Wolff-Metternich almost
regularly touches on it, taking the part of the Armenians completely.
Citing Envers sarcastic query whether Herr von Metternich was the am-
bassador of the German Empire or the ambassador of the Armenians? the
future Nobel peace laureate endorsed Turkeys demand that Germany recall
its outspoken ambassador.60
Stresemanns traveling companion, Matthias Erzberger, leader of the
Catholic Left and by 1916 the most powerful man in the Reichstag, was
already well informed. As director of war propaganda for neutral countries,
Erzberger was kept supplied by the Foreign Ofce with the extenuations it
sent to its diplomatic personnel to use in rebutting Entente charges. But
Erzberger also had independent sources on this newest burning ques-
tion, most credibly, an army of Catholic clerics. The Armenian nation,
one conded, is supposed to be pretty much exterminated.61 From two
absolutely reliable sources Erzberger heard that murdered Christians
numbered one and a half millionthe same gure Stresemann had heard
in Constantinople.62
Erzberger had several sh to fry when he arrived in the Ottoman capital
in early 1916; not least he wanted to persuade the Porte to turn over the
sacred sites in Jerusalem vacated by the Armenian Apostolic Church to
the religious orders of his own church.63 Nevertheless, in interviews with
Enver and Tlt, Erzberger spoke up for the Armenians. When he returned
to Berlin he wrote to the Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne about their plight.64
210 Genocide in International Context

He also sought out the Turkish ambassador and later his own Foreign
Ofce, where he defended Wolff-Metternich against the German ambassa-
dors detractors.65 Alarmed by all this talk, Jckh was driven to protest, at
a board meeting of his German-Turkish Union, the rumors spread by
Stresemann and Erzberger, which he denounced as completely baseless
testimony to their impact.66 In public, however, the normally voluble Erz-
berger did not break the silence.
And, as a member of parliament, he might have. The arm of the censor
stopped at the Reichstag door. Only the boos of his fellows or the presidents
call to order could silence a member. That was precisely what occurred,
however, in January 1916, when Karl Liebknecht, radical Social Democrat,
demanded that the government state whether it knew that its allies had
driven hundreds of thousands of the Armenian population from their
homes and annihilated them; that Professor [sic] Lepsius has spoken of
at-out extermination? A day later, the Foreign Ofce published an exculpa-
tory response. The following day Liebknecht was expelled from his party.67
But murder will out. By 1918, when a Center backbencher returned from
Turkey with news of fresh massacres, Germanys last ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire threw up his hands: So much has been spoken and
written about the Armenian atrocities that it seems idle to express oneself
on these questions.68 His exasperation is revealing. It seems that Germans
could not stop talking about the extermination of Armenians.69
The Protestant clergy, recipients of constant streams of information from
their own and international networks, talked the most. They forwarded eye-
witness testimony to their government, urging it to put a stop immediately
to the murders by our Turkish allies. Though some were tactful, others
badgered the Foreign Ofce, protested the presss falsications, waxed sar-
castic about CUP assurances that excesses were being controlled.70 In July
1915, Sonnenaufgang, the organ of the German Aid Federation for Christian
Charity in the Orient, with a circulation of 25,000, was among the rst, in
Germany or anywhere, to publish details (reprinted internationally) of the
genocide.71 Although such publications damaged Germanys relations with
its ally, an outright repression of Germanys pro-Armenian associations,
sighed the Reichs charg daffairs at Constantinople, was naturally out of
the question. Nevertheless, constant government pressure to cease their
negative publicity took its toll. Yes, the genocide remained on peoples lips;
otherwise the German Aid Federation for Christian Charity in the Orient
could not have collected some 400,000 marks annually for Armenian relief
for three years running.72 But in the public square where, arguably, it might
have mattered, the churchs talk remained wary, sheepish, mufed. Belief
requires not only hearing talk from a credible source. It requires subjecting
that talk to public debate. Precisely such a debate was forbidden.
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 211

In recent years, a number of historians have reiterated the Ententes charges

of German co-responsibility for the Armenian genocide.73 Others have
countered that in the deadly game of Ottoman minority policy, Germany
held few cards. As the once-skeptical Professor Littman demanded in 1915:
In any case, would Turkey let us have a voice in a domestic matter? He
knew the answer: not if it could help it.74
The Ententes demand that Germany ditch its Ottoman alliance was a
cheap shot: certainly during their Gallipoli invasion, which overlapped
almost precisely with the CUPs rst genocidal push; and even later, when
Turks were tying down more than million Entente troops. But there is some-
thing that all of us can demand of a society, even during a desperately fought
war: that it not lie to itself.
Living in Truth. Vclav Havels famous line identies truth itself as a
kind of power, available to men and women who have nothing else. Once
someone steps out of the lie, Havel found, he has shattered the world of
appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. . . . He has enabled
everyone to peer behind the curtain. Living within the lie can constitute the
system only if it is universal. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it
threatens the very existence of appearance. Truth becomes the power of
the powerless.75
That power was grasped by Johannes Lepsius. The veteran champion of
the Armenians stepped out of the lie when he invited the German Press
Association, as part of its regular briengs by the government, to hear what
Tlt Bey and Enver Pasha had revealed to him about their Armenian policy.
It was an offer journalists could hardly refuse. News of Lepsiuss chilling
conversations with Constantinoples strongmen in August 1915 had already
spread by word-of-mouth. Those who remembered his 1896 reports from
the Hamidian killing elds, soon translated into Dutch, French, and Eng-
lish, were aware that this was a man who knew how to get the worlds atten-
tion. Articles now circulating in the Swiss press on the extermination of
more than a million Armenians suggested that he had already begun.76
How had this gady managed to get an audience with Turkeys masters?
Calling in the chips he had earned working for the ill-starred Armenian
Reforms, in June 1915 Lepsius had pressured Under Secretary of State
Arthur Zimmermann into sponsoring a mission in which Lepsius would
enlist Anatolian Armenians behind the war effort and persuade Ottoman
leaders of the advantages of working with a nation with populations on both
sides of the bloody Caucasus border. By the time Lepsius arrived in late July
in Constantinople, however, his window of opportunity, such as it was, had
shut. While he was en route, the Russian army had withdrawn from Van,
leaving the citys Armenian population utterly exposedunable to defend
itself against the Ottomans, much less to subvert Russias Armenians on
212 Genocide in International Context

Turkeys behalf. The day after Russia pulled out, Zimmermann went so far
as to instruct Wangenheim to gather evidence of a wide-reaching Arme-
nian movement endangering the Turkish state.77 Germanys campaign of
disinformation had begun.
Looking reality in the face, Lepsius concluded that only the widest pub-
licity could save the Armenians now. Addressing the German Press Associ-
ation on October 5, he described the Armenian situation and recounted his
conversation with Enver. The audience, prompted by a representative of the
Foreign Ofce, expressed the obligatory skepticism, and the next day Zim-
mermann held his own press conference on the issue. But although he may
have persuaded listeners that the Armenians were not worth the loss of
their Ottoman ally, privately the chairman of the Press Association warned
Zimmermann that some of those present would probably leak Lepsiuss
material to their foreign affairs editors. His own editor, he sensed from a
phone conversation, was already going wobbly on the Armenians.78
Lepsius kept pushing. Military intelligence learned that he was winning
over prominent intellectuals.79 On October 9, he addressed an array of Prot-
estant leaders, mostly from missionary organizations with reliable sources
of their own. The journalist Paul Rohrbach summed up: These proceedings
make it impossible for us to accept responsibility any further for the Turkish alli-
ance. Military rule has bound our mouths before the public. But we can and
must say to the government that we can no longer recognize the alliance as
one concluded between two equally legitimate states.... We are facing the
end of Turkey, which must be taken into custody. Famous before the war as
a liberal-imperialist pundit, Rohrbach now headed a Foreign Ofce bureau
handling propaganda abroad. What might it mean for the policy of silence
that even this prophet of our whole German-Turkish relationship was
jumping ship?
A proposed mass petition to the chancellor promised reworks, not least
because it confronted the governments disinformation policy explicitly (as
explicitly as was prudent for men aware that supplicants do not insult those
whom they are supplicating): It oppresses our conscience that the German
press praises the nobility and tolerance of our Mohammedan allies, while
Mohammedans are shedding rivers of innocent Christian blood and tens of
thousands of Christians are forced to convert to Islam. Scarcely concealing
their indignation that the Porte thwarted their attempts to deliver aid to
women and children, the authors predicted a crippling impact on the
morale of German Christians when they have to look on while their allies
destroy an entire Christian people... . without our side doing whatever is
possible to save them.80
Those same visions of crippled morale, however, raised anxieties within
the petitioners own ranks. Frightened by their own courage, important
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 213

gures in the church intervened to get Lepsius to scrap plans for a mass
signature drive and to keep the petition condential and conned to men
in leadership roles. Still, within a few days forty-nine of the most distin-
guished gures in German Protestantism had been persuaded to sign: an
unprecedented step in a church known for its expansive interpretation of
Render unto Caesar. A fortnight later, at Lepsiuss urging, Erzberger got
the steering committee for missions at the Catholics congress of lay orga-
nizations to issue a similar, though more anodyne, statement. Nothing re-
motely like this efforta movement opposing the policies of a wartime
allyoccurred in any of the other belligerent powers.81
Bethmann took notice. Referring to mounting ... commotion in Ger-
many, he instructed his embassy in Constantinople to inform the Porte of
the two petitions at every opportunity, and emphatically.82
Yet just as the bureaucracy in the Third Reich would develop the habit of
working toward Hitler (Ian Kershaws famous characterization of the rela-
tionship between the initiatives taken at lower levels of the Nazi administra-
tion and the expressed desires of the leadership), so too did the Wilhelmine
media anticipate the wishes of their governmentfor silence. Even before
Lepsiuss press conference, the head of the Press Association, alarmed at
how atrocity stories were roiling the countrys Christian conscience, was
consulting with Zimmermann over how to burke Lepsiuss shocking testi-
mony and personally pressuring the board of one mission society to give up
its plans to involve wider circles in the Armenian question. Jckh was kept
informed and probably Captain Humann as well.83 By December the For-
eign Ofce had managed to convince church leaders that talk would be
counterproductivefor Armenians, and for Germans. Thus debate within
the establishment was aborted before wider circles could learn of it. Out-
side the columns of a few religious publications, usually employing Aeso-
pian language, public talk about the extermination of the Armenians ceased.
Germanys Daniel Ellsberg did not give up. The pandemonium that
broke out in the Reichstag in January 1916 upon Leibknechts mention of
the ndings of Professor Lepsius was a telling sign that Lepsiuss very
name had become a synecdoche for embarrassing information. Now he
worked feverishly, sifting hundreds of notes, weighing their reliability and
putting them in chronological order, determined to put a comprehensive
picture of the genocide into the hands of every Protestant pastor in Ger-
many.84 In March he got the board of the German Orient Mission to agree to
cover the mailing costs, estimated at 4,000 marks. But the Orient Mission
was unnerved by rumors that the book would nger the Ottoman govern-
ment as responsible for the horrors. Couldnt Lepsius leave that part out?
(He could not.) Other misgivings surfaced: were they not risking reprisals
against the Missions own schools, orphanages, and clinics? Within three
214 Genocide in International Context

weeks, the board had withdrawn its sponsorship; by June, its promise to
cover postage. Finally only Rohrbach was left supporting an unexpurgated
account.85
How would living in the truth in Germany halt an Ottoman killing
machine? Perhaps the lack of a convincing answer explains why Lepsius
found himself working alone, aided only by his family and Martin Niepage,
late of the Aleppo Realschule and soon to be sentenced to death in absentia
in Turkey for publishing his own eyewitness account. Lepsius nished his
Report on the Situation of the Armenians in July 1916. Eventually he found
two rms willing to risk printing it. In addition to 20,000 copies aimed at
every Protestant pastor, he printed an additional 500 to send to public g-
ures, the press, and members of parliament. The Lepsius children were
conscripted to haul baskets of the Report to the Potsdam post ofce, and
lest so many identical parcels deposited in one place attract attentionthey
also fanned out over town, dropping parcels in every corner mailbox.86
How successful were these efforts? In August the authorities impounded
191 copies meant for Germanys elected representatives. A month later, the
Turkish ambassador got wind of the Report, protested, and the military au-
thorities ordered the seizure of any remaining copies. By then, however, the
other 20,309 copies had surely already reached their destinationsas evi-
denced by the astonishing 24,000 marks for Armenian relief that, answering
the appeal inserted in each copy, owed into Lepsiuss coffers from mid-July
through September. And by the sharp criticism of Germanys Armenian
policy voiced in the Reichstags budget committee.87
The Report offers some puzzles worth pondering. Given exploding paper
costs, already driving small newspapers and presses out of business, where
did an unbeneced parson with eleven children get the sums to publish and
mail 20,500 copies of a 300-page book? Lepsius merely cites friends of the
good cause. Given rationing, where did he obtain the paper? The support
network built up for Armenian relief in peacetime must have managed, even
now, to maintain itself. Another mystery is Lepsiuss continued freedom of
movement. While Entente powers were quick to incarcerate their critics,
Lepsius was threatened only with three days prison and a 30 marks ne
and then only in 1917. Such forbearance suggests ambivalence. Even the
policeman charged with executing the seizure order in September 1916 pro-
ceeded with a minimum of force and fanfareand, it appears, commitment.
Finding no one in Lepsiuss ofce, he simply left a penciled slip, without of-
cial seal, on the desk, announcing the impoundment.88 Apparently German
conscations, like German censorship, were expected to be self-enforcing.

As the grapevine that informed wartime Germany of the Armenian geno-

cide attests, a secret is simply news told to one person at a time. With the
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 215

peace, ofcial secrets of all kinds burst into the open.89 Authors scrambled
to update their rosy accounts of wartime Turkey.90 Openness begat contro-
versy. Thus a slide lecture in Berlins largest auditorium, held by the former
medic Armin Wegner, and liberally spiced with his own obiter dicta on the
Turkish national character, had to be halted when Turks and Armenians in
the audience came to blows. Wegner was allowed to resume only after
agreeing to omit his most gruesome imageshardly a loss since (his own
photos having been destroyed, he now conceded blandly) the slides dated
from before the war.91
What had happened to the Armenians continued to be entwined with
politics, most obviously with the politics of peacemaking, as a defeated Ger-
many found itself in the dock, accused not only of starting the war, but of
atrocities in waging it: in Belgium; on the high seas; in Anatolia against the
Armenians. Yet even as hard-pressed diplomats struggled to make their case
in Paris, not everyone on the Wilhelmstrasse was alive to how deeply the
Ottoman alliance had compromised their country. Thus the German delega-
tion initially included not only the vice-consul of Mosul, Walter Holstein,
who had succored the Armenians, but also Hans Humann, who had worked
for the CUPs success. Word that Morgenthaus memoirs had ngered
Humann as Envers mouthpiece led to the captains hasty removal. An
embarrassed Foreign Ofce, with great misgivings, then commissioned
Lepsius, a man decried by Jagow barely two years earlier for his open oppo-
sition to the government, to publish the Wilhelmstrasses own documents
on the genocide, to send to Lord Bryce and other delegates. Widely reviewed,
Lepsiuss Germany and Armenia exposed the horrors to a large audience.
Whatever its shortcomings in portraying the entirety of Wilhelmine ofcial-
doms responses, the book proved to Germans that a genocide had taken
place, with the knowledge of their own leaders.92 In the meantime, Lepsius
also republished his 1916 Report. Now entitled The Death March of the Arme-
nian People, its fourth printing hit a whopping 28,000 copies.
Inevitably the genocide became entangled in German domestic politics.
Those convinced their leaders had lied to them throughout the war squared
off against those who believed that their undefeated army had been stabbed
in the back by November criminals, the democrats who had ousted the
kaisera legend that supplied natural supporters for the CUPs own alibi of
Armenian betrayal. And a chain of assassinations kept the genocide issue
alive. In March 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian shot Tlt Pasha on a busy Berlin
street. The funeral and subsequent trial unleashed controversy. A graveside
eulogy for Tlt by Jckh praised this statesman of great stature, this
Turkish Bismarck.93Lepsius, on the other hand, testied successfully on
behalf of Tlts assassin. The jury agreed that a mass murderers victim
was not guilty if he rid the world of its perpetrator.94 Tehlirians acquittal
216 Genocide in International Context

met with international approval but heated condemnation by the Deutsche

Allgemeine Zeitung, where Hans Humann had found a safe landing. As
editor-in-chief, he continued the war against the Armenians by other means,
opening his pages to the apologias of a handful of German ofcers, veterans
of Anatolia.95 The following April, fteen more Armenians were arrested in
Berlin, for assassinating the former vali Cemal Azmi and Dr. Bahaeddin
akir, butcher of Trapezunt. Demands that, to prevent further bloodshed,
all Armenians be expelled from Germany, kept the issue at a boil.96 Attack-
ing and defending Armenians and Turks, Germans were attacking and
defending each other.
The Armenian catastrophe thus meant different things to different Ger-
mans. For some, it meant mourning, mixed with shame. In May 1919,
St. Hedwigs Catholic cathedral, in the heart of Berlin, hosted a standing-
room-only memorial for the Armenian people, attended by Germans, Arme-
nians, foreign delegations, and an ofcial representative of the German
government. The invitation itself, from the German-Armenian Society,
implied that the genocide had always been an open secret: As is well
known, during the World War more than a million Armenians, on orders of
the Turkish government, were massacred or deported to the desert. Con-
ceding that their countrymen did not feel directly responsible, the sponsors
stated atly that, because of its Turkish alliance, Germanys share in this
wrong was greater than that of any other people.97
Most Germans, weighed down by their own grief yet sensing in Arme-
nian suffering something not to be justied by anything, as even General
Ludendorff saw, assimilated the genocide into a developing master narrative
of German battles nobly fought, if nobly lost.98 Revealing was the 1938 biog-
raphy of Max von Scheubner-Richter, vice-consul of Erzurum in 1915, by his
adoring adjutant. In a work published ve years after the Hitlers seizure of
power, we might expect a testosterone-poisoned paean to the healthy ruth-
lessness of the Young Turks, especially as Scheubner had become prominent
after the war in the Nazi movement, dying at Hitlers side in 1923 during the
suppression of the Beer Hall putsch. Instead, the author lingered over his
heros efforts to save Armenians. His preface proudly recalled his young
commander presenting him in 1919 with a copy of Lepsiuss newly minted
Deutschland und Armenia, inscribed to the memory of common struggles
for the honor of Germanys escutcheon.99
But other Germans drew different lessons. To Hitler, the genocide served
as a warning, the handwriting on the wall that prophesied the doom that
awaited weaker peoples. In 1922 he cited the fate of the Armenians as what lay
in store for Germansif no rational solution were found to the Jewish prob-
lem.100 Eight years later Hitler was still complaining of a sentimental German
press, portraying over and over, far and wide, the Armenian atrocities.101
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? 217

Even as the war generation aged, the memory of the genocide remained
green. In December 1932, Franz Werfel traveled across Germany, giving
readings to capacity crowds from his epic novel of Armenian resistance, The
Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Professor Becker clipped a review of one of these
readings, the chapter depicting Lepsiuss verbal duel with Enver in Con-
stantinople in August 1915.102 Both antagonists were now dead; the empires
each had fought for, also gone. Within months, Jckh would depart for
greener American pastures. Yet before other victims claimed the worlds
attention, the events in Anatolia in 191516 set the international standard
for horror. Germans still talked about the extermination of the Armenians.
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Part IV
GENOCIDE IN LOCAL CONTEXT
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10

Zeytun and the Commencement of the

Armenian Genocide

Aram Arkun

Ahmet Cemal Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army in Syria, minister of

the marine, and one of the most powerful leaders of the Ottoman Empire,
declared in his memoirs that under his command: The most important
military event up to the end of the year 1915 was the attempted rising of the
Armenians in Zeitun and Urfa, which was put down by the regulars we
sent there.1 Cemal considered what took place in Zeytun to be a clear up-
rising against the Ottoman government. Yet, writing in the same period
after World War I, a correspondent lamented in an Armenian newspaper
that Zeytun did not show the same courage in 1915 as it had in the past. It
was necessary to mercilessly punish those several traitors who, unfortu-
nately now in sheeps skins, have begun to enter important establishments.
For example, Hovhannes Aharonian, one of the greatest betrayers of Zey-
tun....2 Armenians blamed Aharonian, the Zeytun school district director
and a noted public gure, for actively preventing the rebellion of Zeytun
together with other Armenian establishment xtures, including the head of
the Armenian Church in Cilicia, Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian of Sis.3
These two divergent interpretations, fairly standard narratives involving
Ottoman Armenians and Muslims, persist to this day. In this chapter I reex-
amine the sequence of events in Zeytun using a variety of primary sources
to see if indeed the Zeytun Armenians actions constituted a clear act of
rebellion. As the consequent Zeytun deportations constituted one of the
earliest instances of uprooting an entire Armenian community during the
Armenian Genocide, a study of these deportations will also inspire ques-
tions concerning the nature of the genocides organization.

By the beginning of World War I, tensions between Armenians and Mus-

lims ran high in Zeytun, a predominantly Armenian town in the mountains

221
222 Genocide in Local Context

of Cilicia or northwestern Syria, depending on how one draws the borders.

The perpetrators of two regional episodes of massacre and violence, in
189596 and 1909, remained largely unpunished, while the Ottoman defeats
in the Balkan Wars of 191213 led to the stipulation of Armenian reform
plans by Western powers and an abortive diasporan plan for an Armenian
rebellion in Cilicia that was opposed by most local Armenian leaders.4 The
loss of Ottoman territory in Europe brought new Muslim immigration into
Cilicia, which Armenians feared was an effort to alter the demographic bal-
ance to their disadvantage.5
Ottoman imperial instability encouraged both Muslim and Armenian
military desertion, with Armenian deserters in not easily controlled remote
areas (like Zeytun) suspected of political motivations. Weak government
and poverty drove many deserters to engage in banditry, while attempts by
government forces (including Armenians in Zeytun) to capture them cre-
ated tensions with the local population. Transportation and commerce suf-
fered.6 Success or failure in dealing with deserters contributed to the
Ottoman central governments decisions to change ofcials, and to pressure
the Armenian patriarchate to reassign prelates and priests. The banditry
became so widespread that even the mayor of Zeytun, Nazart Chavush
[avu] Norashkharhian (Yenidnyayan/Ynidiwnyayian/Ynidiwnian),
was allegedly cooperating with one bandit leader, and was related to another,
his nephew.7
Intervention in a 1914 incident involving Armenian deserters caused the
Ottoman Ministry of Justice to demand from Catholicos Sahag II Khabayan
the replacement of the local Armenian prelate, Very Rev. Fr. Hovhanns
Karanlian.8 The same incident led to the dismissal of one kaymakam (district
governor) of Zeytun and the appointment of a replacement, Hseyin Hsn
Bey, at the end of June 1914.9 At the same time, Ali Haydar Bey was appointed
governor of Mara, the sancak or subprovince to which Zeytun kaza (district)
belonged.10 Until March 1915, Mara itself was subject to Aleppo province
(vilayet), governed by Mehmet Celal Bey, a moderate ofcial who for many
years had enjoyed friendly personal relations with the Armenians.11
According to Catholicos Sahag, both Ali Haydar and Hseyin Hsn
were Albanians.12 Many of the government ofcials, gendarmes, and police
ofcers stationed in remote areas like Zeytun were immigrants from the
Balkans. Bitterness over experiences with Christians in the Balkans may
very well have colored the attitudes of these ofcials toward the Armenian
Christians in Zeytun. Meanwhile, a reactive resurgence in Ottoman nation-
alism with Muslim and Turkish undertones contributed to a boycott of
Christian merchants in parts of Cilicia in 1914.13
When World War I began, Armenians outside the Ottoman Empire, un-
happy about their Cilician compatriots constrained living conditions,
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 223

wanted to use the opportunity to end Ottoman rule over the Armenians.
Some presciently feared that the Armenians in Cilicia were apt to be subject
to violence during the war.14 Four Armenian organizations from outside the
Ottoman Empire, along with the prominent Armenian diplomat Boghos
Nubar Pasha, who was reappointed head of the Armenian National Delega-
tion by the Catholicos of the Armenian Church in April 1915, were among
the most active proponents of a landing by Armenian volunteer forces in
Cilicia. The latter were to join with local Armenians, including those of Zey-
tun, in an insurrection against the Ottoman state. Although these organiza-
tions cooperated at times with each other, more often they worked
independently. Realizing they did not have the ability to carry out their plans
unaided, they repeatedly requested Allied military support, primarily British
and French.15
The Allies periodically considered the advantages of opening up a new
front in Cilicia, but each time they decided against it due to the scarcity of
arms, ammunition, and troops, doubts over its utility, Allied rivalries, lack of
condence in Armenian irregular forces, and fear of erce reprisals against
the local Armenians.16 Despite these ultimately negative Allied decisions, the
Ottomans had good grounds for concern. The Cilician front was a potential
weak point for many strategists. German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg
observed that a relatively small Allied force landing on the Cilician coast
would have forced the Ottomans to surrender. It was in connection to this that
the Ottoman minister of war, smail Enver Pasha, conded to von Hinden-
burg: My only hope is that the enemy has not discovered our weakness.17
Taking advantage of this anxiety, the Allies engaged in relatively low-level
military activities to keep the Ottomans guessing as to their intentions, and
to divert troops from other areas. The British and French periodically sent
warships and airplanes to bombard and blockade the Cilician coast begin-
ning at the end of 1914 and continuing through at least 1917. These ships
landed spies on the Cilician and north Syrian coast, including some Arme-
nians (whose contact with Zeytun has not been conrmed).18
Without an Allied landing or assistance on a fairly large scale, the Arme-
nian organizations could do little for Cilicia until the end of World War I,
when the Allies fought their way north through Palestine and Syria to oc-
cupy the region. Armenian volunteers then played a role in the advance as
members of the French Lgion dOrient, created in November 1916.
If the possibility of outside intervention by early 1915 was limited, the
question remains, what were the Armenians in Zeytun and Cilicia planning
or doing themselves?

Relations between Armenians and Muslims in the Zeytun area grew worse
as a result of the war. In August 1914, shortly after the Ottoman Empire
224 Genocide in Local Context

began mobilization, Zeytun became a conscription center for the sur-

rounding areaAndrn, Gksn, and Elbistanand thousands of Mus-
lims owed into the town. As there were no hotels, they either had to stay in
local inhabitants homes or in the open. This was soon to spark many minor
local clashes. The government also requisitioned salt, sugar, and animals
from the natives. On one occasion, Zeytun wives invaded the government
headquarters and reclaimed their families animals, meeting no resistance
from the soldiers present. Despite such difculties, the Zeytun women
raised money for mobile kitchens at the major bridges to cook soup and
bread for the conscripts, using provisions usually set aside for the severe
winter.19
General mer Fahri [Fahrettin Trkkan] Pasha,20 serving as deputy to
Cemal Pasha, replaced the soldiers garrisoned in Zeytun with Muslim gen-
darmes from Mara. Presumably this was intended to free up soldiers for
the war effort, but it contradicted the advice of the Aleppo governor-general
Celal Bey. These gendarmes, according to the German consul in Aleppo,
were hostile to the Zeytun Armenians, and they engaged in minor incidents
of harassment and molestation of women.21
Around this time a Turkish bandit called Tek Byk (Single Mustache)
robbed and beat two Hajin (Hain) Armenian travelers, and some young
Zeytun Armenian military deserters unsuccessfully sought revenge. Seeing
some sixty Muslims from Andrn heading home in August after being
released from military registration in Zeytun, the Armenian gang stopped
the group, suspecting that the bandit might be hiding among them. Frus-
trated by not nding Tek Byk, they partially shaved the beards of several
men to dishonor them, and then robbed them. The recruits led a com-
plaint with Mara governor Ali Haydar.22
In response, Mara Muslim notables, according to Armenian sources,
protested to Constantinople that they would not send recruits as long as the
Zeytun Armenians were at large, allegedly declaring: Our Moscow is right
here.23 A telegram from the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior conrms that
ofcials feared Muslim retaliation, with thirty enlisted men from the region
having already deserted to their villages. The government decided at the end
of August 1914, to reinforce the number of troops at Zeytun, restoring units
that had been removed because of the war. Orders were requested from the
defense ministry for a mobile brigade of 250 recruits and the 1,160 strong
depot battalion reserves in the Mara region to be sent to Zeytun.24
Ali Haydar came in September to Zeytun with at least one battalion of
troops to capture Armenian military deserters and bandits. He offered them
an imperial pardon, but also pressured the local populace to help him by
forcing them to pay for the maintenance of the new troops until the rebels
were caught. Two Armenians of Mara, Melkon Agha Hazarabedian and
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 225

Garabed Nalchajian, were brought along to help persuade the Zeytun

Armenians. According to one Armenian eyewitness, the Mara Armenians
declared that the Zeytun Armenian youth would henceforth be free from
military conscription unless the state urgently needed them, in which case
a special regiment with Zeytun Armenian ofcers would be formed. Otto-
man sources report, however, that it was the Zeytun Armenians who in
August 1914 offered to form such a volunteer regiment to defend the Zey-
tun region in place of regular military service, but that the government
turned the proposal down.25
Meanwhile, outside Armenian church and political leaders urged the
Zeytun Armenians to avoid rebellion for the sake of Armenians elsewhere.26
Soon Mayor Nazart Chavush Norashkharhian set an example for the local
notables by bringing his nephew Awedis to the government, and other fam-
ilies emulated him by convincing their relatives to surrender voluntarily.27
Nazart Chavush had not yet given up on the idea of a rebellion, but before
he could act, his plans were betrayed to the government by another Arme-
nian. Ali Haydar arrested him, and summoned and beat the Zeytun nota-
bles, attempting to force them to surrender all their weapons.28 Several
Martini ries and ten Mausers were relinquished. The ofcials conducted
similar searches for weapons and army deserters in villages around Zeytun,
such as Frnuz29 and Awak-gal.30 Eventually, according to one Armenian
source, they conscated some 250 state and 1,150 locally made weapons of
various sorts.31 In the process, they also carried out acts of violence and mis-
behavior, including attempted rape.32
Ali Haydar returned to Mara at the end of September with Nazart
Chavush and at least sixty-four other captives in chains.33 Former prelate Fr.
Karanlian, who had also been imprisoned, was among them.34 The Mara
governor did not keep his promise to obtain pardons for the surrendered
bandits, nor did he provide immunity to informers, arresting them too. In
early October, Nazart Chavush died in prison from beatings and ill-treat-
ment.35 The Norashkharhian family, as well as some other Armenians,
believed that he had been poisoned by the Committee of Union and Pro-
gress member Lt, a pharmacist, who visited him in prison together with
Ali Haydar.36 According to a German nun in Mara, Ali Haydar tortured
people so severely during investigation that some of them had to have their
toes amputated.37
After Nazart Chavushs imprisonment, his brothers son-in-law Hayg
Asmnian was elected mayor. This marked a shift of power away from those
in Zeytun who favored armed action against the central government.38 A
new police chief, Captain Sleyman, arrived.39 Sleyman, like Zeytun gov-
ernor Hseyin Hsn, had to abandon all he had and ee during the Bal-
kan wars.40
226 Genocide in Local Context

The Armenian youth in Zeytun continued to avoid conscription and de-

sert army service, and were constantly pursued by the police. The police
chief and governor accepted bribes to look the other way, but those without
any money ended up threatening these ofcials at night, destabilizing the
peace. The town notables sent telegrams complaining about the corruption
of the Zeytun police chief and governor to the governor-general of Aleppo
and to the governor of Mara, as well as to the Armenian Patriarchate of
Constantinople and the Catholicos of Sis.41 The Catholicos of Cilicia in turn
protested to the Ministry of Religious Affairs in October 1914 that police
and gendarme groups were beating village men and even women while
searching for thieves. The groups stole food, clothing, and property, and
took prisoners to Zeytun. Weaponslegal and illegalwere conscated
from the Armenians, while the Muslims were left armed. The Catholicos
reported that when Armenians complained to the governors of Zeytun or
Mara about their treatment, they were told: This is the governments af-
fair. The goal is your destruction and extinction. Furthermore, the governor
of Zeytun, Hseyin Hsn, had personally slapped or beaten various priests
who had come to speak with him.42
Armenian banditry continued too. Sometime in mid-October, in the envi-
rons of Andrn, the village gendarme Ahmet was killed by two Armenians
who had been sent out in his custody from Gksun.43 When the news of an
imperial pardon for the arrested Zeytun Armenians who had not been ac-
cused of any crime or had been condemned in absentia reached the gover-
nor of Mara (who already had lobbied the central government against this
possibility),44 Ali Haydar proceeded, according to Armenian sources, to stir
up the local Muslims.45 Fourteen Andrn notables (all Muslims except for
two Armenians) signed a telegram to the War Ministry in which, citing the
misdeeds of Armenian bandits going back to 1895, including the recent
incidents of the robbery of the Andrn recruits and the killing of village
gendarme Ahmet, they argued that the pardon would have a bad effect on
military conscription of Muslims. The notables asked that if the Armenians
were not to be punished, local Muslims either be left free to act as they
wished on the issue, or be shown a place where they could emigrate.46
In November 1914, upon the advice of governor-general Celal of Aleppo,
Ali Haydar Bey was replaced as governor of Mara by Mustafa Ahmet Mm-
taz Bey, who was said to be more impartial concerning the Armenian situa-
tion.47 The public prosecutor of Mara was also retired. These changes may
have taken place in part due to the forceful complaints of Catholicos Sahag,
the Zeytun notables, and other prominent Armenians.48 Catholicos Sahag
had shown his resolve in a letter he had written to Patriarch Zawn Dr
Eghiayan in October: If we do not succeed in removing this monster, and
his assistant, from ofceif you do not do all that is possibleit is best that
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 227

we resign from the Patriarchate and Catholicate, rather than allow Zeytun,
which is simply forced to be patient in order to assure the lives of its brothers,
to be subjugated step by step, and basely.49 However, the effect of these
changes may not have been that great. According to an Armenian source,
Mmtaz considered Ali Haydar to have been rewarded for his behavior, for
the latter was soon sent to Urfa as governor.50
During the same period, the Porte ordered the release of those prisoners
who had willingly surrendered, while the others were to be sent to Osmaniye
for trial. Some 75 to 80 people were let go51 due to lack of evidence,52 the
goodwill of Aleppo governor-general Celal Bey,53 and the abovementioned
Armenian mediation, while 22 prisoners were sent to Osmaniye. Fr. Karan-
lian and three others were released by the Aleppo court-martial.54 How-
ever, the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople reported that 70 to 80
Zeytun Armenians were still in prison at the end of March 1915 (some per-
haps in Mara),55 while according to Rssler, in April 1915, thirty Zeytun
prisoners were in Osmaniye awaiting trial.56
Furthermore, the Zeytun Armenians, repeating their prior requests,
asked the new governor Mmtaz to remove Zeytuns governor and the cap-
tain of the gendarmerie from ofce, citing their abuses. When Mmtaz
asked for testimony the Armenians remained silent, presumably out of fear,
so he took no action.57
In January 1915, the Zeytun notables, still upset over the prevailing anar-
chy and oppression, and no doubt wondering about the possibilities of Al-
lied wartime intervention, sent Awedis Aharonian (nephew of Hovhanns)
as their representative to discuss the Zeytun situation with Catholicos
Sahag. Aharonian, carrying a letter asking permission from the catholicos
for a rebellion, rst went to Sis. Catholicos Sahag had gone to Hajin, so
Aharonian spoke with Sahags secretary, the chancellor Bishop Kiwd
Mkhitarian. Mkhitarian advised Aharonian to return to Zeytun instead of
continuing to Hajin, and relay to the local leaders that there was no need for
permission. As in the past, the Zeytun Armenians were free to act as their
consciences dictated and as their interests demanded. Aharonian ignored
Mkhitarians advice and continued on to Hajin, delivering the letter to its
intended recipient. Catholicos Sahag advised the Zeytun mountaineers that
a rebellion would be imprudent, as they lacked the necessary supplies: guns,
ammunition, and food. Considering the precariousness of the situation of
the Ottoman Armenians in general during the world war, he argued, they
should remain quiet.58
The notables also sent messengers to Drtyol and Hajin to see if these
towns would join Zeytun in a rebellion. Before the answers arrived, an
Armenian Revolutionary Federation member in Mara, Mardiros Trzian,
offered to send four to ve hundred youth to Zeytun if needed. The Zeytun
228 Genocide in Local Context

Armenians had little faith in this promise, however, given past disappoint-
ments with the Mara Armenians. Soon afterward they received word that
the Armenian youth of the towns were mostly away serving in the army,
weapons were few, and much of the Hajin population, as was their winter
custom, had scattered throughout the Adana province. At this point, the
majority of Zeytun notables denitively abandoned the idea of rebellion.
There may have been other attempts to establish contact between the var-
ious regions of Cilicia at this time.59
Meanwhile the turmoil continued in Zeytun. Armenians took to throwing
stones at police and gendarmes from their rooftops. On February 10, they
beat and wounded a gendarme named Abdullah, seizing his weapons and
ammunition. This news upset the governor-general of Aleppo, who sorrow-
fully reproached the Catholicos of Sis. A few weeks later, the catholicos wrote
to the local priest to ask the Zeytun Armenians to maintain calm and not
give the government a pretext to impose further severities.60
The news toward the end of February 1915 that the government was
planning on transporting weapons out of Zeytun offered the minority fac-
tion in favor of rebellion a prime opportunity for action. On the night of
February 28, Panos Chakrian, a notable who had been released from prison
in Mara several months ago, and several other veteran ghters from the
189596 battles, offered their leadership to the general populace for a rebel-
lion. Some present at the large meeting were rmly opposed, citing the lack
of support from other parts of Cilician Armenia, as well as the shortage of
food, guns, and ammunition. They pointed out that none of the Armenian
political parties had been involved in such a plan nor were ready to assist
them, while the possibility of European intervention (as in 1862 and 1896)
on behalf of Zeytun appeared slim. Meanwhile, the Ottomans had recon-
structed the Zeytun barracks so that it was difcult to seize, and had brought
Krupp artillery which could reduce the city and monastery to rubble. The
proclamation of jihad had excited Muslim villagers against the Armenians,
and the local Armenian villagers feared that Zeytuns actions would lead to
their own destruction.61 Though some suggested that an attack on the
weapons transport could be carried out by army deserters outside the city so
that the Zeytunites could avoid blame, no one could agree on what should
be done, and this meeting ended in discord.
A second meeting took place that same night with the participation of
only the more radical element at the Surenian (Middle) Quarter home of
Nshan Ezgilian Efendi. Ezgilian was an energetic young teacher from a
noted clan who, like Panos Chakrian, had been recently released from
prison. Those present feared that the conservative or loyalist Armenian no-
tables would accede to an isolated attack outside the city only as a cunning
way of getting rid of the younger radical element in the city. The radicals
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 229

would then be suspect and be investigated by the government. Thus, they

had to take action in the city that very night not only to rally the youth to the
ag of rebellion, but to force the other notables to join in. The government
would then consider the entire city population as complicitous. They de-
cided to attack the fty gendarmes in the city with seventy to eighty men and
seize the weapons in the government building.62
As planned at the second meeting, some Armenians went to hold posi-
tions at key street corners, but it was already late in the night, and the signal
to attack was delayed. Meanwhile, the conservative notables learned of the
plan, and persuaded the families of those involved to halt it. The conspira-
tors gradually dispersed and returned to their homes without having taken
any action.63
The next day the conservative notables decided to ofcially inform the
government and the prelate of the plot via Mayor Hayg Asmnian. Presum-
ably they intended to prevent further incidents by the radicals which they
thought could harm the broader Armenian population and threaten their
own leadership, while proving once more their own loyalty to the Ottoman
government. It turned out, however, that the government had already gotten
wind of the events through its own spies, and had opened new investiga-
tions and made some arrests.64 The government also requested from the
Ottoman Fourth Army command the dispatch of one or two companies of
250 soldiers each to Zeytun as a show of force. It feared that seizing the de-
serters might provoke a general uprising, which the existing number of gen-
darmes would be insufcient to prevent. A week later, no troops had been
sent, and the governor of Mara requested 600 troops to pacify the town.
Two companies from Mara were available.65
Many Armenians took to the mountains to avoid interrogation and im-
prisonment.66 When the government disarmed Christian troops in the
Mara area in the beginning of March, Armenian soldiers feared this was
only the prelude to further steps against them. Some deserted and ed to
Zeytun, joining the fugitives in the mountains.67 The rebels and army de-
serters split into three principal groups, led by the Norashkharhians, Panos
Chakrian, and Mesrob Cholakian, respectively.
In early March, the Chakrian and Cholakian groups learned of a group
of 15 to 25 gendarmes and soldiers traveling to keep watch over the villages
around Zeytun and track down deserters. The gendarmes may also have
been there to ensure the safe delivery of weapons dispatched on March 7
from Mara. On March 9, twenty to thirty Armenians from the abovemen-
tioned groups attacked the government forces at a site located several hours
to the south of Zeytun and variously called Pambagi Tzor (Cotton Valley),
eltik, Karacalt/Karaalt, and a valley at Alikayas. The Armenians took
the soldiers weapons and money, after killing six to fteen men (the lower
230 Genocide in Local Context

estimates are probably more accurate). The deserters probably attacked pre-
emptively, as well as to obtain the personal weapons of the soldiers. While
they initially may have hoped to obtain the weapons from Mara, these had
been sent via a different route, and the Armenians probably learned of this
before the attack. According to several of the Armenian sources, the reason
for the Armenian attack was actually to avenge the licentious behavior of
the gendarmes and soldiers in area villages like Alabozan (Antrasenk or
Antrasian). The soldiers had spent the previous night there and harassed
the populace, even attempting to violate family honor.68 In response to the
attack and the general situation in Zeytun, ve hundred troops from Mara
were nally ordered to leave to Zeytun that evening together with a gendar-
merie commander.69
Nshan and Eghia Norashkharhian and their followers took refuge in St.
Asduadzadzin monastery to the northeast of Zeytun, at the base of Mt. Ber-
znga and south of Mt. Pisir, which was under Eghias control. Cousins and
members of the inuential princely Norashkharhian clan, Eghia and
Nshan were seasoned leaders from the 189596 period, who had been
released from prison with Chakrian. St. Asduadzadzin Monastery had its
own spring, protective walls, and a small chapel, and there were some hun-
dred homes around it that formed the Vank or Monastery Quarter. Several
hundred men, including the members of the other two groups, joined the
rebels there, and they raised Armenian political party ags on the roof.70 The
monastery soon became the base for all rebel operations. They cut the
nearby telegraph wires connecting Zeytun to the outside world, probably the
same evening.71
The rebels and deserters had taken four Turkish village chiefs and some
villagers as hostages to the monastery. They issued the local Ottoman govern-
ment a 24-hour ultimatum for the release of some sixty imprisoned Arme-
nian youths, and for the evacuation and surrender of the barracks and
government building to their new Armenian government. If not, they threat-
ened to arrest more Turks and torture them. Furthermore, they would arrest
those ofcials and policemen who, during wartime, had oppressed the
Armenian population. The governor of Zeytun initially ordered the Zeytun
Armenians to either suppress the deserters or surrender them, but the nota-
bles declared that they were unable to do so, since their weapons had been
taken away by the government months earlier. The governor, temporarily cut
off from the outside world, had no choice but to place his hopes, at least tem-
porarily, on the conservative faction of Zeytun Armenian notables. After dis-
cussion with them, he agreed to release the Armenian youths. In exchange,
the rebels released the village chiefs and their other Turkish prisoners.72
The rebels pleaded their cause before an assembly of Zeytun notables,
but the inuence of the loyalist members of the diocesan council was strong.
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 231

The loyalists decided to help the governor to x the telegraph wires cut by the
rebels, but after each repair the rebels would cut them again. Eventually, the
loyalist notables sent out two Armenians as couriers or guards to help
ensure the safe delivery of messages to Mara (though one Armenian source
claims that a group of gendarmes were able to achieve this task indepen-
dently). They sent four priests and some additional men with mules to bring
back the corpses of the dead gendarmes that the local government was un-
able to retrieve. The military forces requested from Mara arrived sometime
during this period. Nonetheless, as the troops under his command were not
yet sufcient to counter the rebels, the Zeytun governor continued negotia-
tions, condent now that his message asking for additional soldiers had
made it out successfully.73It was also around this time that the rebels made
an abortive attempt to assassinate Mayor Hayg Asmnian in revenge for his
efforts to repress them.74
Upon getting word of the troubling events taking place in a district under
his jurisdiction, on March 12, Ottoman Fourth Army Commander Cemal
Pasha ordered Hicaz gendarmerie regiment commander Major Hurit Bey
to take two mountain cannons, one infantry battalion, and one infantry de-
tachment, together with a court-martial committee and the governor of
Mara to Zeytun. Hurit was to punish the rebels without getting the popu-
lace (presumably meaning vengeful local Muslims) involved.75
That same day, Mara governor Mmtaz Bey arrived at noon and went to
the Zeytun barracks, the telegraphic communications of which were cut off
from the city. By then there were still not more than a thousand soldiers at
Zeytunan insufcient number to deal with the Zeytun Armenians, espe-
cially if the insurrection spread. Despite Cemal Pashas orders, an Arme-
nian source claimed that Mmtaz had written letters before his arrival to the
Muslim villages of the area, urging them to ght Zeytun. This is conrmed
by a March 13 telegram from Mmtaz, explaining that because local Otto-
man forces were insufcient in number to capture and punish the trouble-
makers, it was necessary to ask Muslims in surrounding areas for support.
When the Zeytun governor and the conservative Armenian notables came
to greet him at the barracks, Mmtaz commanded that the telegraph wires
be xed since communications essential not only for him but for other prov-
inces relied on this route. He ordered the revolutionaries to return all the
weapons that they had taken from the murdered police soldiers, or at least
ve or eight of them; in exchange he promised to obtain from the Fourth
Army command and the central government a pardon for all revolutionary
acts until that point.76
According to an account by one of the leaders of the conservative Zeytun
faction, the Mara governor was pleased with the initial reception he was
given by the Zeytun Armenians. Though he had been extremely upset on
232 Genocide in Local Context

his way to the town, Mmtaz Bey saw the Armenians efforts to repair the
telegraph lines, and was persuaded by the singing schoolchildren and
friendly notables that in fact the majority of the Zeytun Armenians opposed
rebellion.77
The rebels were disappointed that there was no word from the rest of
Cilician Armenia about supporting their actions. Mara, with its promise of
ve hundred men, was silent, but the rebels still hoped that Hajin would
join Zeytun and their joint forces would descend to Gars, not far from
Adana. Some feared the Allied states would not help at this stage, but others
believed it was inevitable.78
In any case, following the same plan that they had unsuccessfully tried to
put into motion at the end of February, the rebels decided to attack the city
at night and force the remaining Armenians to join them in revolt. As
before, the loyalist Armenian notables got wind of this plan, and informed
the government. According to one version, the Ottoman commander asked
the notables what should be done, and the latter suggested that he provide
four hundred troops to join with three hundred of the Zeytun Armenians in
defense of the city borders against the rebels. A different version suggests
that it was the governor of Zeytun who proposed joint patrols by govern-
ment troops and police and the Armenian populace. The notables also tried
to dissuade the deserters from their attack plan in other ways.79
On the night of March 12, the deserters set out from the monastery and
rst clashed with the town guards by the rock called Anpani Kardag or
Khach Kar. The guards ed after some light resistance, but soldiers in the
army barracks, which was at a high elevation, saw the rebels and began
ring on them. As the rebels reached the homes at the northeastern out-
skirts of the town, the rst and second lines of the guard posts joined to-
gether to ght them. The revolutionaries lost any hope of the populace
joining them. They could also hear the cries of residents in the Upper or St.
Lusaworchats quarter of the Norashkharhian clan whose homes were
being struck by their bullets. The revolutionaries realized that more Arme-
nians than soldiers were being harmed during the attack, and without pop-
ular support it was not possible to take over the government. They gradually
stopped shooting and began to retreat back to the monastery. The shooting
had lasted at least one hour. One soldier, one civilian Armenian, and two
attackers were killed, and two soldiers and one civilian were wounded,
according to Mmtaz. Local Armenian leaders gave higher casualty gures,
with eight soldiers and two civilians killed (but no mention of attackers). It
was largely thanks to the resistance of the Zeytun citizens that the deserters
failed in their attempt, since the government forces alone were insufcient
to withstand a general insurrection of the town. The number of attackers
must not have been very large, as one of their sympathizers wrote that a few
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 233

days earlier many of the volunteer ghters had been sent home on a break
and the presence of government forces on the roads prevented their rejoin-
ing the men at the monastery. Some ghters also had to defend the monas-
tery and could not join the attack.80
Soon after the Mara governors arrival, the notables got the telegraph
lines working again. Mmtaz requested the Fourth Army command to dis-
patch one battalion of soldiers with a battery of mountain artillery.81 Tele-
grams from the Catholicos of Sis urging loyalty and repeating government
promises that the innocent population would not be harmed helped win
over much of the population to the side of the conservatives.82
On March 14, Mmtaz and several other Mara ofcials again demanded
from the Zeytun Armenian notables and priests the ries that the deserters
had seized from the gendarmes. The next day, the notables promised the
rebels that if they surrendered the weapons and the government failed to
keep its promise of a pardon, they, too, would join in rebellion. Municipal
physician Dr. Eruant lmajian and the Catholic Armenian prelate went to
the monastery to deliver this message in person. Though the rebels did not
trust the government to keep its word, after initially refusing, they decided to
hand over six Martini ries on the condition that the notables secretly replace
them. The government, meanwhile, beefed up its operations. It set up a
second independent telegraph house in the barracks, increased the numbers
of soldiers, and occupied strategic positions occupied in the city. Over the
next week, troops continued to arrive from Mara, and began preparations
for combat, such as the digging of trenches. The Mara and Zeytun gover-
nors, growing more condent in their own forces, now became dissatised
over the remaining captured weapons, and forgot their talk of pardon.83
By March 23, Catholicos Sahag, recognizing no doubt the seriousness of
the situation, proposed going to Zeytun himself, to personally handle the
crisis. He repeated his proposal on March 27, but Cemal Pasha thought it
unnecessary, and turned it down.84
Count Wolffskeel, the German military advisor to Fahri Pasha, suggested
sending additional troops to Zeytun quickly and in large numbers, and
Fahri agreed. They feared that the nearby military route Osmaniye-Islahiye-
Rajo, a strategically important path that stretched from Adana to Aleppo
province, would be affected if an Armenian rebellion spread. Consequently,
they assembled at least ve battalions, two squadrons, and mountain artil-
lery, with troops to come from Aintab, Aleppo, and Geben.85
On the night of March 23, the Ottoman ofcials who had been staying in
the government building in Zeytun proper moved to the army barracks.
This left the Zeytun Armenians very anxious, and they asked the Mara
governor to move the ofcials back. The prosecutor general of Mara
informed the Armenians that the governor of Zeytun had been red, and
234 Genocide in Local Context

shortly thereafter the ofcials returned to their original lodgings.86 The Zey-
tun judge Muhammed Zeki, originally of Elbistan, became acting governor
of Zeytun.87
That same night, three Armenian spiritual leaders from Mara, an Arme-
nian notable, and a German missionary, Karl Blank, arrived from Mara in
a mediation attempt. The next day they were able to obtain information
about the rebels from the city Armenians, but as they had no luck negoti-
ating directly with the rebels themselves, they departed not long after.
According to the account of a Zeytun Protestant Armenian pastor who was
present, the local Armenians promised to remain neutral in any operations
against the rebels.88
Major Hurit Bey, not caring to wait for the considerable number of Otto-
man troops that were instructed to assemble, began the attack on the mon-
astery on March 25 with a bombardment and rie re. The rst shell landed
in the courtyard of the monastery. By now there were some 100150 men in
the monastery,89 of whom 3540 were the primary ghters.90 The rest were
neighborhood villagers, who evidently supported the ghters. Some fteen
of the armed ghters took positions to the northwest of the monastery at
Kartshkr (Lizards Rock, also called Ghat), while two of Eghia Norash-
kharhians sons went to defend the village.91
Approximately three hundred Ottoman troops slowly approached the
walls of the monastery, and exchanged gunre with the rebels. The Martini
eld artillery did not have much effect on the walls of the monastery, but
when the troops realized that the Zeytun populace was neutral, they brought
the Krupp cannon from the barracks. Cannon re had begun to weaken the
walls, when Mara gendarmerie battalion commander Major Sleyman Bey
approached the monastery door and was shot.92
At this point, the loyalist Armenian notables of Zeytun went to the gov-
ernment ofcials and requested that the siege continue through the night,
lest the rebels would escape and cause even more trouble. The ofcials gave
their word, yet that evening the troops left their positions to return to the
nearby barracks. Two hours later, thirty-ve rebels ed the monastery to the
mountains, while the Armenian villagers went to Zeytun town. Catholicos
Sahag wondered whether this loosening of the siege was a deliberate at-
tempt to create a pretext for subsequent mistreatment.
The next morning, March 26, troops red again at the monastery, and,
seeing no resistance, approached, entered, and burned it, along with the
nearby Armenian homes despite Armenian pleas to spare both.93 In addi-
tion to being motivated by sheer anger, this was intended perhaps to prevent
the monastery from ever being used again.
During these incidents two Armenian rebels were supercially wounded,
according to Armenian sources, who also claimed that one to three hundred
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 235

troops and a major were killed.94 Though the latter matches initial Ottoman
gures reported secondhand,95 Cemal Pashas telegram to Enver only cited
as dead one major and eight soldiers, and 37 rebels.96 According to one Ger-
man diplomat, as well as an American missionary, the two rebels were not
just hurt but killed, and their friends cut off their heads to prevent their iden-
tication.97 Presumably, this would protect their families from retribution.

After the monastery was destroyed, troops placed the entire town under
siege, and the government began to turn out Armenian villagers who had
taken refuge there. They began to systematically search the rebels homes,
and, at least according to Armenian sources, two wounded ghters who had
taken refuge there were seized and taken to the barracks. Over sixty suspects
were quickly imprisoned, and weapons, gunpowder, forbidden publications,
and even the seal of the Hnchak Party were uncovered.98 Hundreds of
Armenian deserters surrendered in Zeytun and other parts of Mara prov-
ince.99 Soldiers rounded up not just deserters but all Armenians of military
age. Some ed and joined the rebels in the mountains, and thus their
number reached forty-ve.100
On April 2, as these rebels were assembling at Alikayas and Sultanda,
to the southwest of Zeytun, a detachment of soldiers with one mountain
cannon headed to Zeytun.101 Irregular local Turkish forces joined the troops
in pursuit of the rebels.102 Meanwhile, those suspected of having any con-
nection to the revolt were sent to the court-martial in Mara. A German mil-
itary ofcer attached to the Ottoman army wrote that the government
probably did not nd valid evidence of guilt, but used the opportunity to
clean things up somewhat in Zeytun.103 Some thirty-two Zeytun notables
who surrendered were imprisoned in Mara,104 and many more soon fol-
lowed.105 These Zeytun prisoners would be hanged over a period of almost a
year after the ghting ended.106 Meanwhile the forty-ve rebels wandered
the mountains around Zeytun, periodically clashing with troops and gen-
darmes, until July 1915.
After a two-week period during which people suspected of having any
connection to the rebels, as well as all army deserters, were arrested and
removed, the government began deporting groups of families to Konya.
Major Hurit organized the rst caravans. He only told the Armenians
that they would be sent as far as Mara. Between twenty-two and fty no-
tables and their families were deported in early April, sometime between
April 7 and 10. Over the next few weeks in April and May, the Armenians
in all of Zeytuns quarters and its villages were gradually deported, until
only four hundred families remained.107 After telegraphic inquiries as to
how many Armenians were left in Zeytun and how many had been
deported, Interior Minister Tlt Pasha relayed the decision that all of
236 Genocide in Local Context

Zeytun must be emptied to the Mara governor on May 6, and repeated it

on May 9.108
Though in Zeytun the major declared that everything was nished, and
had a town crier announce the end of the deportations, in the second half of
May the same town crier declared that all Armenians would have to leave
Zeytun within two days. According to an Armenian eyewitness, the govern-
ment feared that Armenians who remained would supply the surviving re-
bels with provisions. By mid-June the deportation of Armenians from
Zeytun and its environs was nearly complete.109 A small number of Zeytun
Armenians, including Mayor Hayg Asmnian, were allowed to stay in Mara
as a reward for their loyalty to the government, but after a few months, they
too were deported.110
The rst groups of Zeytun deportees were sent to Konya via Mara,
Bae, Osmaniye, Tarsus, and Bozanti (Pozant).111 American missionaries
reported that the government did not feed the rst group of deportees in
Mara, and that an ofcer told the soldiers leading them that they were free
to do as they pleased with the women and girls, who were sent in a separate
group.112 According to William S. Dodd, an American Protestant missionary
doctor who helped establish a hospital in Konya prior to the war, and now
wanted to help the refugees, the Armenians were only allowed to take their
animalsdonkeys, horses, cows, and oxenas far as Bozanti in the Taurus
Mountains, where some of the animals were conscated and sold. The few
animals that successfully made it to Konya could neither be sold nor used
because the government required that they be available for requisitioning.113
At Bozanti, too, the Armenians went hungry.114
As much as a month later, the Zeytun Armenians were moved some sixty
miles to the Sultaniye district. Celal Bey, then governor-general of Aleppo,
but afterward governor-general of Konya, later wrote that Sultaniye (later
renamed Karapnar) was infamous for its severe climate,115 while a Swiss
teacher from Tarsus College who traveled to Konya in May 1915 described it
as one of the unhealthiest places in Konya.116
In theory, the Ottoman government intended to provide the deportees
with assistance. Since their possessions had been conscated and assessed,
Count Wolffskeel reasoned, in exchange the Armenians should receive pos-
sessions or money of equal value, as well as new homes.117 In a telegram
dated May 5, 1915, the Interior Ministry wrote to the Konya provincial gov-
ernment that the Ministry of the Treasury had been instructed to pay for the
settlement and provisioning of the Armenians sent to Konya from funds for
unexpected arrangements, but on May 29 it wrote instead that already exist-
ing funds in the province for emigrants must be used.118 According to what
Dodd told the abovementioned Swiss teacher, although the government ini-
tially gave the deportees bread in Konya, it was bad bread, only distributed
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 237

once every two or three days. The teacher commented: How cruelly ironic
to think that the Government pretends to be sending them there to found a
colony; and they have no plough, no seeds to sow, no bread, no abode, in fact
they are sent with empty hands.119 Dodd wrote on July 17, 1915, that it had
been one month since any food had been given to the deportees: The man-
ifest purpose to destroy these people by starvation cannot be denied.120
The Ottoman government obstructed local aid efforts by Armenians and
American missionaries, while in Constantinople Ministers Talt and Enver
deected American ambassador Morgenthaus interventions. When the
Armenians were moved to more remote Sultaniye, they were lodged in all
manner of broken down buildingseven camel stablesand reduced to
digging for roots to supplement the scanty bread they were able to purchase.
Only some of the poor were given our by the government initially. Some of
the men were drafted into labor regiments.121
By July there were some seven thousand Armenians from Zeytun and its
environs in Konya provnce.122 Many perished from starvation and disease.
Some fteen hundred died from an epidemic that summer in Sultaniye.123
Finally on August 16, 1915, the deportees were told to prepare for their
return to Zeytun, but were sent instead toward Syria.124 On the way back, the
Zeytun deportees were robbed at many stopsUlu Kla, Mamure, and
arar (between Islahiye and Bae)until they reached Katma, outside of
Aleppo. They remained there for months, many dying of starvation and de-
hydration, before moving on to Der Zor.125
By this time, there were already many Zeytun Armenians who had been
deported to Syria. On April 24, Minister of the Interior Tlt had instructed
Cemal to stop deporting Armenians to Konya. Tlt argued that they were
creating too great a concentration of Armenians in one place, and that the
newcomers might eventually unite in movements with local Armenians. He
deemed areas in southeastern Aleppo province, Zor, and Urfa more suit-
able.126 This reasoning appears to have been generalized in a May 26, 1915,
telegram from the supreme military command to the Ministry of the Inte-
rior proclaiming that deported Armenians nowhere should exceed ten per-
cent of the local Muslim population in their areas of settlement; the villages
that the deportees would establish should not exceed more than fty homes
each; and the Armenian deportee families should not be allowed to change
residences.127
The precise timing of the redeportation of the Zeytun Armenians to the
south, as well as the initial deportation of some Konya Armenians, was a
result of local circumstances. The new governor-general of Konya, the same
moderate Celal Bey who had recently been removed from Aleppo, was not
then at his new post, so the Committee of Union and Progress responsible
secretary in Konya, along with other proponents of anti-Armenian action,
238 Genocide in Local Context

took advantage of his absence, and of the availability of the railway line to
the south, to act quickly.128
With the change in destination to the south, one of the new routes used
by the May caravans from Zeytun passed near Mara, then Perta (Birecik),
Urfa, and Rakka,129 or Ras ul-Ayn. In the latter place large numbers were
massacred.130 Many of the survivors were forced on to Der Zor (Deyr ez-
Zor), where they were reunited with the Zeytun Armenians who had come
via Konya. By the end of July 1915, 15,328 Armenians from Zeytun, Yarpuz,
Alaba, and Elbistan were in Der Zor and its surroundings (with 10,000 in
the city proper), most living in the open air. Three hundred died from the
stress of the journey, ninety drowned in the Euphrates, and the remaining
deportees were forced to sell over thirty children, leaving them to precarious
fate, in order to live. The food supply was completely inadequate, according
to the German consul in Aleppo.131 Beatings, robberies, and outrages to
women were commonplace.132 Two thousand people, or 350 families, by
mid-May had traveled via Mara and Aintab toward Aleppo, from where they
were to be sent to Meskene, while another 250 families were expected in
Aleppo by May 20.133
The Armenians assembled at Der Zor were massacred on a large scale.
The few survivors from Zeytun were assembled by gendarmes and driven to
the deserted expanses of Sheddadiye and Abdl Aziz, where they were mas-
sacred without regard for age or sex. According to one Armenian report,
Circassians and Chechens from the Zeytun area, whose families had emi-
grated from the Caucasus over fty years ago, came all the way to these de-
serts to participate in the killing of their Zeytun neighbors. They took revenge
for defeats and deaths in frequent conicts against the Armenians.134
A particularly high percentage of the Zeytun Armenians as compared to
Armenians from other parts of Cilicia, or even many other parts of the Otto-
man Empire, died as a result of the violence, sickness, and famine of depor-
tation, with only some two thousand returning to the Zeytun district after
the end of World War I.135
Muslim immigrants from Macedonia moved almost immediately into
the Zeytun Armenians homes, even while the deportation was still going
on. According to an Armenian report from 1919, the Muslim refugees has-
tened the departure of the remaining Armenians through violence and even
murder.136 On April 20, 1915, Tlts deputy Ali Mnf wrote in the name of
the Interior Ministry and its Directorate of the Settlement of Tribes and
Immigrants to Cemals Fourth Army Command that the transferral of Mus-
lim refugees from Aintab (Antep later named Gaziantep) to Zeytun had
begun. Despite his initial misgivings that the refugees would eventually ee
because the area was not suitable for agriculture,137 by mid-June, Zeytun
was full of Macedonian Muslims.138 This settlement of Muslim refugees
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 239

into the homes of Armenian deportees became a common phenomenon

throughout the empire, and was part of a broader effort to change the demo-
graphic face of the country.139
The government changed Zeytuns name to Yeni ehir, or New City,140
and then on June 8, 1915141 to Sleymanl, in memory of Major Sleyman.
Fahri Pasha or Major Hurit ordered the destruction of the Armenian in-
scriptions and symbolic carvings that adorned the rocks of Bagh-Aghpiwr.142
This change of toponyms was part of a broader movement. According to the
Turkish scholar Fuad Dndar, shortly after non-Muslims were removed
from their homes, in the summer of 1915, places began to be renamed,
though initially there were no formal state guidelines. On January 5, 1916,
Enver Pasha announced the decision that place names in languages of non-
Muslim millets (religious communities) would be Turkied as quickly as
possible in this favorable time for us. Among the new toponyms sug-
gested were names connected with great military events, or deceased indi-
viduals famous for their services to the nation, as well as local climatic,
geographic, economic, or other noteworthy conditions. To make the new
names easier to learn, they should sound somewhat like the old ones.143
In August 1915, re broke out in two separate quarters of Zeytun. It may
have been arson, but the cause remains unclear. The Balkan refugees left,
and in their place arrived other Muslims from the Zeytun region.144 The
district capital moved from Zeytun to the Circassian town of ardak.145 Zey-
tun became a shell of its former self.
The already tense Armeno-Turkish relationship in Zeytun at the start of
the war was exacerbated by the demands placed on both parties through
military mobilization and conscription. Any clashes that occurred were
interpreted by both sides in light of their fears: for the Muslims, that the
Armenians were ready to rebel and collaborate with Allied states potentially
interested in occupying Ottoman territory; and for the Armenians, that the
Muslims were planning another massacre. Small incidents of banditry were
granted exaggerated signicance, and the seemingly disproportionate re-
sponses in turn fueled the fears of the other side. Repressive government
actions led some Armenians like Nazart Chavush who had been involved
in banditry or prior cycles of communal violence to plan rebellion. The
Armenian community, however, was divided concerning such actions.
Most of the Zeytun establishment, wealthy landowners and merchants
who had large clan-based and patronage followings, were upset with the
army deserters and bandits for making the area unsafe for travelers and
bringing the unwanted attention of the government on the city. They
resented Nazart Chavush for promoting and beneting from the rebels.
Furthermore, at that point they were not willing to make the necessary
sacrices for a rebellion, and feared a negative outcome, especially since
240 Genocide in Local Context

the Ottoman army was equipped with modern German weaponry, which
the Zeytun Armenians could not hope to possess. Bab Agha Surnian
expressed their fatigue from the anarchy and violence: This is already the
36th war. Is there no one else who will ght? We are the fools of the [Arme-
nian] nation. This time let others go and ghtwe will stay. Bab Agha,
like some of the other prominent members of the establishment, had not
been averse to using force in the past: he had been active in the 189596
defense/rebellion of Zeytun.146
Krikoris Balakian, a well-informed Armenian cleric and intellectual, con-
rmed in his memoirs Zeytuns disinclination to ght. If indeed some
twenty thousand Zeytun Armenians had intended to revolt, he wrote, they
would not have let themselves be disarmed so easily, by a mere few thou-
sand soldiers. (They had been able to resist regular Ottoman troops for
months in 1896.) Furthermore, the Zeytun Armenians had been cautioned
repeatedly by the Catholicos and Mara notables not to endanger the very
existence of the Cilician Armenians by their actions. As mentioned above,
the Zeytun Armenians returning to their homes in 1919 were very upset
that the Catholicos of Cilicia had worked to halt any efforts at self-defense
and resistance.
The main proponents of rebellion were the bandits and army deserters.
Already in trouble with the law, they had little to lose. They had become used
to a life of banditry. They had as patrons notables of Zeytun, who aided them
as long as they did not cause too much trouble for the latter, and perhaps
provided them with a share of the loot. The idea of achieving glory as a
ghter was a signicant draw in a society where exhibiting such courage
was virtue. Even Nazart Chavush may have been swayed by this logic.
Some young people were attracted by the ideology of patriotism. Although
the Armenian political parties may have contributed to this ideology, it does
not seem that they played a leading role in Zeytun during this period. As
one Zeytun woman declared: The political parties were at that time going
through a period of speeches.147 Their function was mostly symbolic,
serving as a rallying point for disparate groups.
When the deserters surrendered through the intervention of their patrons
in the fall of 1914, the two factions of the Zeytun Armenians were tempo-
rarily united. The unkept promises of Ali Haydar, governor of Mara, made
it difcult for the Armenians to trust any new offers from the government,
however, and despite the persistent efforts of the Armenian Church, no
internal force was powerful enough to keep the two Armenian factions from
dividing again.
An external force perhaps could have done it. Somemaybe even a good
manyof the Zeytun Armenians harbored sympathy for the Allies, and
were looking for a signal of support at the end of 1914 and in early 1915,
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 241

when it appeared that the empire was heading for complete defeat and
occupation. A young Armenian woman being deported from Zeytun at the
end of April 1915 told an American reporter at Bozanti that the young Arme-
nians had been told that the English and French had taken Constantinople
and that the Turkish government was a thing of the past. Thereupon they
had decided to do away with the Turkish garrison of Zeitoun. The barracks
of the Ottoman battalion stationed in the town was attacked, and in the
ghting a good many Turks had been killed.148 According to an Armenian
eyewitness, the rebels in the monastery wanted at one point to raise the ags
of Allied states along with an Armenian one.149 Yet whatever rallying power
the name of the Allied powers carried was limited due to the absence of
direct Allied contact and intervention.
In the end, the Armenians remained split. Twice, the rebels tried to at-
tack the government center in the city of Zeytun, and each time a signicant
portion of the local populace remained neutral or sided with the govern-
ment. Several Armenians were killed by the deserters as a result. The de-
serters even tried to assassinate one of the leaders of the loyalist notables
during this period. When the nal showdown ensued, the Armenian leader-
ship decided to remain neutral and allowed the government to attack the
deserters without hindrance. In the latter instance, one Armenian eyewit-
ness account portrays the conservative element as having prevented some
youth in the city from joining the rebels.150
It is also important to note that during this period there were Armenians
who still served in the gendarmerie on the government side, and even
fought against their fellow Armenians, according to at least one Armenian
account. Thus, despite the great tensions, national-religious polarization
was not complete.
In short, only a minority of Zeytun Armenians attempted to oppose the
Ottoman government with force, against the wishes of the majority. Only a
few Ottoman ofcials, however, openly accepted this explanation. Aleppo
governor-general Celal Bey was one of them. He wrote at the end of World
War I that there was no need for the deportation of the Zeytun people to
Konya, as there were only a small number of military deserters, and minor
incidents. It was the governor of Mara subprovince, Ali Haydar, who gave
the situation a political coloration.151
Most Ottoman ofcials, like Cemal Pasha, averred that the Zeytun Arme-
nians were in revolt, and were collaborating with the enemy. According to
an American missionary of Aintab, who himself believed the contrary, Gov-
ernor Mmtaz of Mara had come to the conclusion after his experiences
in Zeytun that the entire population was more or less involved in support-
ing the rebels.152 The German consul of Aleppo, who had visited Mara to
investigate what was taking place, was told in April by the chief judge of the
242 Genocide in Local Context

Ottoman court-martial in Mara that there was foreign inuence, meaning

the instigation of Germanys opponents in the war. The consul complained
that the judge did not provide any evidence, and believed that the causes
were all domestic.153
Though Minister of the Interior Tlt Pasha expressed his satisfaction to
the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople sometime in March 1915 that the
Zeytun population had joined Ottoman state forces against the army de-
serters,154 he declared on March 29 to the German ambassador in Constan-
tinople that he believed that foreign agitators had had a hand in the recent
Zeytun events.155 Tlt in his telegrams, public statements, and later mem-
oirs portrayed the Zeytun Armenians as a community participating in a gen-
eral Armenian uprising in collaboration with foreign powers, and this is
how mainstream Ottoman and Turkish historiography continues to portray
them, despite the complexity of the situation as described above.156

The timing and nature of the Zeytun deportations raise important ques-
tions about the organization of the Armenian Genocide. First, why were
inhospitable parts of Konya chosen as a deportation destination, far from
Syria or Iraq, where the majority of later Armenian deportees were sent.
Cemal Pasha claimed that he never was consulted in the planning of the
empirewide deportations, and that personally he found it more expedient
to settle Armenians in Konya, Ankara, and Kastamonu than to send them to
Mesopotamia. He explained that deportations from Anatolia might delay or
cause other problems with the delivery of weaponry and other items
necessary for his Suez Canal expedition. Presumably either taking care of or
annihilating hundreds of thousands or more of Armenians would also be a
big burden.157
Despite Tlts abovementioned April 24 and 26 orders to stop sending
Armenians to Konya province in order to avoid creating too high a concen-
tration of Armenians, and general instructions in May specifying locations
in Syria and Iraq as suitable destinations for Armenian deportees, ofcials
in Adana province under Cemals jurisdiction later at least twice tried to
deport more Armenians to Konya, from Adana and Tarsus, and Hajin
(Kozan subprovince).158
Furthermore, Armenians outside of Cemal Pashas jurisdiction from
places like Konya city proper, Adapazar and Knclar (both all the way in the
west of Asia Minor), or Kk ncesu of Kayseri subprovince were being
deported to various parts of Konya province.159
Aside from the question of why Armenians were still being sent to Konya
province after April, the broader issue is how government ofcials in disparate
and distant parts of Asia Minor knew to send Armenian deportees to Konya,
and what this implies about any possible planning and organizational process.
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide 243

Second, some sort of decision seems to have been reached regarding

Zeytun by February 1915, as evidenced by several warnings of the Aleppo
governor-general Celal to Catholicos Sahag.160 Furthermore, a knowledgable
Armenian priest related after the war that a Cilician merchant had been
warned in mid-February of a deportation decision which concerned Zeytun,
Drtyol, Hajin, and Adana, and probably other parts of Cilicia. According to
this priest, the then V. Rev. Fr. Krikoris Balakian, when the merchant
informed Catholicos Sahag, the latter, understandably concerned, went to
Cemal Pasha for an explanation. Cemal revealed that a decision for a general
deportation of Armenians had been made in the Ottoman capital.161 Bala-
kians account is only partially veried by others,162 but two sets of Ottoman
documents appear to conrm an early decision to deport the Armenians of
Zeytun and Drtyol.163
The governor-general of the province of Adana, of which Drtyol district
was a part, telephoned either on February 25 or 26 to Gendarmerie Regi-
ment Commander Avni Bey, who was then in Osmaniye as both vice-gover-
nor and commander of the local zone, to order the relocation of all Armenians
in Drtyol to Osmaniye, Ceyhan, and Adana. The Adana governor-general
informed the Ministry of the Interior of these actions, which in turn
informed Enver Pasha, as commander of the Ottoman army.164 On March 2,
1915, the Ottoman Minister of the Interior wrote to the Adana provincial
government approving of the destinations for the Drtyol Armenians.165
On February 28, 1915, Cemal Pasha wrote to Enver from Jerusalem that,
among other things, troops were ordered to remove Armenians from the areas
in which they lived in Aleppo provincemeaning, though not specifying, Zey-
tun rst of allin order to prevent an imminent Armenian rebellion.166
The Armenians of Zeytun were not deported until April, and those of
Drtyol, after the males were placed into forced labor battalions, in May.167
Why was there this time lag, and what was the connection of these decisions
to a series of other decisions taken in February and March about the Otto-
man Armenians? Were these deportations part of a broader plan, or reactive
measures?
A third set of related questions are raised by ambiguous telegrams,
behavior, and statements to Armenians and missionaries by Cemal Pasha
and Ottoman ofcials in Cilicia initially concerning whether the entire
Armenian population of Zeytun or only a select group would be deported,
and, once this issue was settled, whether all or only some Armenians of
Cilicia would be deported.168 Why the ambiguity, and what was Cemals role
in decision-making concerning the deportations? The actions of Ottoman
middle-level ofcials seemingly opposed to the Cilician deportations, such
as Celal in Aleppo, smail Hakk in Adana, and kr in Aintab, must be
explored in this context.
11

The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians

David Gaunt

At the Paris Peace Conference a delegation representing the Assyrians laid

forth reasons for granting the Assyrian people an independent state. On
maps they demarcated the borders of this statea territory that straddled
the borders of present-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The delegation
maintained that massacres and attacks sanctioned by the Ottoman govern-
ment had caused 250,000 deaths, or 50 percent of the original population.1
In addition they presented evidence that Russian and British diplomats and
military ofcers had promised them their independence if they participated
in the war on the Allied side.2 Starting in spring 1915 a signicant segment
of the Assyrians, the erce highland tribes of the Hakkari Mountains, had
indeed joined Allied campaigns against the Ottoman forces. Despite a wide-
spread feeling of moral responsibility, the Great Powers did not grant the
Assyrians their own state (nor even compromise on a joint Assyrian and
Kurdish state). In the 1920s the survivors languished in refugee camps in
Iraq, Syria, and the Soviet Union, and nding a home for them became a
major international issue.3
Assyrian is a designation of a Christian ethnic group living in central
Kurdistan. They speak dialects descended from the Aramaic language: with
differing eastern and western dialects. The dialect boundary corresponds
with the ancient frontier between the Byzantine and Persian empires, which
lay considerably west of the present-day Iranian-Turkish border. Assyrians
converted to Christianity during its earliest stage and developed theological
positions that came to be declared heretical, resulting in isolation. In the
theocratic Ottoman Empire, the Assyrians were not usually identied as an
ethnic group but were rather categorized by religion, which was compli-
cated by several rival church organizations. The eastern Assyrians had two
major churches: the Nestorians, ruled by a hereditary religious and secular
leader entitled the Mar Shimun (meaning Lord Simon), resided in a ham-
let in the Hakkari Mountains. The majority of Nestorians lived on both sides

244
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 245

of the Turkish-Iranian frontier. The Chaldean Church broke away from the
Nestorians and joined Catholicism in the early modern period. A uniate
church, it kept its original liturgical language and rites. The main concentra-
tion of Chaldeans was located in present-day Iraq, but there were important
settlements in Iran and in the Bohtan district of Turkey. The main west
Assyrian church was the Syrian Orthodox (often termed the Jacobites). This
church was widespread in provinces west and south of Lake Van, and there
was a nearly continuous settlement in Tur Abdin, an agricultural region
centered on the town of Midyat. A small Syrian Catholic Church split off in
the early modern period. During the modern period Protestantism also
made some gains.4
The genocide committed against the Assyrians did not come out of the
blue. On the contrary, relations between Christians and Muslims had deteri-
orated rapidly since the accession to the throne of Sultan Abdlhamid II.
Assyrians were among the victims of the 189596 massacres throughout
eastern Anatolia and the 1909 massacres in Adana. In addition to these
major catastrophes, attacks by local Kurdish tribes and forced conversions of
entire villages were frequent. Already at the outbreak of World War I, the
Assyrians increasingly expected to be targeted for extermination, not because
of national politics, but because of rising local anti-Christian animosity.5
Violence against the Assyrians occurred sporadically in the period before
the Ottomans joined the War in November 1914, but after mobilization was
declared in August. These attacks gradually increased in intensity and
frequency, culminating in a full-scale genocide during the summer of 1915.
Several features characterize the campaign against the Assyrians. The most
prime feature was the total targeting of the Assyrian peoples. The attacks
were not limited to the Nestorian mountain tribes who mounted a resistance,
but spread to peaceful Assyrian farmers in Anatolia and even to Iran during
the Turkish occupation. In rural villages and hamlets the killing was particu-
larly comprehensive, while a few Assyrians in some major towns might be
spared. This indicates that an important material objective was to seize land.6
Second, regular troops were deployed for the killing and expulsion in
Hakkari, occupied parts of Iran, and against the few farm villages elsewhere
that resisted. Third, the destruction of villages and hamlets in rural areas
was nearly total. Destruction of churches, wells, houses. Complete plun-
dering of animals, furniture, doors, and windows in order to hinder the
return of eventual survivors. Fourth, organized massacres resulted in the
mass murder of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants. Estimates of
250,000 were made at the time, but that gure might be too low. In the san-
cak of Mardin, percentage population loss for Assyrian peoples exceeded
two-thirds.7 The systematic attacks on peaceful villages terried many wit-
nesses into abandoning their homes. Fifth, there was a bureaucratic design
246 Genocide in Local Context

to the extermination, with several layers of Special Organization (a paramil-

itary section of the Committee of Union and Progress), locally recruited
death squads and militia, coordinated mobilization of willing local tribes,
active recruitment of outlaws and criminals to participate in the raids, and
removal (sometimes assassination) and replacement of oppositional gov-
ernment ofcials.
In some respects the treatment of the Assyrians differed from that of the
Armenians. There was much less central government propaganda identi-
fying the Assyrians as traitors, but provincial and local politicians spread
such accusations in their jurisdictions. On occasion the central government
issued decrees that only Armenians should be deported, but this was ignored
in the provinces, particularly in rural areas. The Assyrians had a low level of
national feeling, had no political parties and few intellectual leaders. The
only large group that attempted resistance were the tribes of the Hakkari
Mountains with their antiquated hereditary leadership and clanlike social
structure. The Assyrians were seldom placed into deportation columns, but
rather were killed in their villages by large assemblies of local Kurdish tribes
coordinated by local militia. The Ottoman authorities used the divide-and-
rule approach. In large towns and cities with a mixed Christian population,
the Armenians were arrested, killed, and deported in the rst phase. There-
after, the attention was turned on the Assyrians and they were given the
same treatment. But this temporary respite gave many Armenians the false
impression that Assyrians were spared.
This chapter will attempt to show that the Assyrians and Armenians suf-
fered similar fates at the hands of the Ottomans during World War I. The
region where these two Christian groups were most integrated, the Iranian-
Turkish border strip, was also the place where the rst full-scale massacres
took place and where Turkish armies had their rst taste of taking revenge
for military setbacks on defenseless noncombatants.

Before the world war, the political situation in Iran was very complex, and it
was particularly unstable in the extreme northwest corner, Azerbaijan,
which was partially occupied by the Ottomans. In 1905 the latter seized
much of the border, penetrating tens of kilometers into Iranian soil, ad-
vancing beyond the areas they had historically claimed. Only the coveted
plain of Salmas (with the towns of Dilman and Khosrowa) near the north-
ern tip of Lake Urmia, lay outside their grasp. This district contained a large
population of Armenians and Assyrians. During 1915 it would become the
scene of brutal atrocities against Christian noncombatants.
The Ottomans established a civil and military administration in 1905 that
remained in place until the outbreak of the Balkan Wars. The unexpected
Ottoman withdrawal in 1912 was portrayed as a temporary measure, and
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 247

local Turkish representatives assured their supporters that they would

return as soon as possible. Rumors circulated that the Ottomans were on
their way back, and local Muslims warmed to the idea of Turkish annexa-
tion. Panic-stricken Christians looked to Russia as their only realistic savior
and were only partially calmed when a handful of Russian troops arrived,
ostensibly to guard its consulates.
Thus, in August 1914, when war between Russia and Turkey seemed
increasingly unavoidable, the Russian government conceived the idea of
establishing a local Iranian Christian militia for border defense, and ear-
marked money and supplies for this purpose. The militia was concentrated
in the Urmia district, which neighbored the Ottoman province of Van. On
both sides of the border there were many Christian villages. In the northern-
most sector lived mainly Armenians and in the south, mainly Assyrians (Nes-
torians or Chaldeans). The Assyrians actually outnumbered the Armenians.8
In the year preceding the war, the border district was in a precarious po-
litical situation, marked by high-pitched interreligious conict. Hostile for-
eign powers competed for local support and pitted religious and ethnic
groups against each other. The Russians made concerted efforts to gain the
loyalty of the Christians, threatening them with renewed Turkish occupa-
tion. Russian inuence grew so great that a Nestorian bishop converted to
Russian Orthodoxy and the patriarch Mar Shimun seriously considered
doing the same. The Russians also tried to woo the Muslim population, but
with discouraging results. The Ottomans on their side made great gains
among the Sunni Kurdish tribes and Turkish-speaking Muslims. Thus there
was a polarization of confessional groups in the wake of Russo-Turkish ri-
valry, and this expressed itself in Christian fear and panic, while Muslim
hate-speech calling for jihad ourished.
The autonomous Assyrian tribes9 became a prime target for pan-Islamists
and Turkish nationalists. The Young Turk government spoke of them with
the same degree of animosity as they did the Armenians. The violent ethnic
cleansing of Assyrians in the Hakkari Mountains was a consequence of a
series of government decrees, some of which predated the war, thus indi-
cating a long-standing intention to remove them. The eradication of the
Assyrian tribes was the objective of Tlt Pasha, the minister of the interior,
because they made up a solid non-Muslim enclave near a strategic border.
As war grew imminent, small-scale incidents spiraled rapidly into full-scale
ethnic cleansing. Tlt made the ofcial decision to move forward in June
1915 with his intention, once it became clear that the Assyrian tribes could
be crushed. He accused them of collaboration with the Armenians and Rus-
sians concluding: we should not let them return to their homelands.10
After the Ottoman mobilization of August 2, 1914, news spread that
Assyrians were being forced out of the Ottoman side of the border. One
248 Genocide in Local Context

close observer of these events was Basil Nikitin, a Russian diplomat. He

wrote that Turkish Assyrians refused to be mobilized in the Turkish army,
and this was followed by repression and conscation of their property. As
a result, Assyrians ed to Persia.11 Immediately, the families of the youths
who ed were punished, causing a new wave of refugees into Iran. The
government applied pressure on the Assyrian leadership. Turkish author-
ities have imposed severe control over the territory of the Turkish Assyr-
ians and take reprisals against their leaders. Mar Shimun was called to Van
and the bishop of Shamdinan Mar Khnanisho was arrested, Nikitin
reported. Assyrians from nine villages had been deported to Persia and
their houses burned.12
The Assyrians were considered a grave risk because the Ottomans were
planning a surprise invasion of neutral Iran in order to attack the unsus-
pecting Russians, and the loyalty of the Assyrians was doubtful. For years
representatives of Russia had regularly paid visits to the patriarch Mar Shi-
mun. The Russian vice-consul in Van met with the patriarch in October
1906, and was led to believe that the Assyrians would eld forty thousand
men on the Russian side. This statement should be considered as part of the
negotiation rather than as a denite commitment.13
In late October 1914, Tlt Pasha issued a decree deporting the Assyri-
ans. Like other deported minorities they were to be split among many vil-
lages so that they would be submerged in a world of Turkish-speaking
Muslims. The decree read

the Nestorians have always remained suspect to the government due to their
predisposition to be inuenced by foreigners and become a channel and an
instrument. Because of the operations and activities in Iran, the concern of
the government over Nestorians has increased, particularly about those who
are found along our border with Iran. The governments lack of trust of them
results in their chastisementtheir deportation and expulsion from their
locations to suitable provinces such as Ankara and Konya.14

This project was not simply a resettlement, since the dispersal of the Assyr-
ians in the manner described was designed to destroy their culture,
language, and traditional way of life. Tlt ordered the mass arrest of Assyr-
ians in Julemark town, close to the residence of the patriarch.15
Unaware of government deportation plans, surprised Assyrians noted
that the Turkish authorities arrested and shot fty Assyrian males in the
borderland.16 Throughout the Hakkari district, Ottoman irregular cavalry
sacked Assyrian villages and abducted women. This terror must be seen as
retaliation for the Assyrians refusal to abandon their homes. But the Assyr-
ians did not realize the Turkish determination to drive them out. At rst
they saw the violence as simply continuation of prewar local anti-Christian
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 249

animosity, and they protested to the governor. The atrocities of which we

have given instances did not take place without the knowledge of high of-
cials. On every occasion, the fullest details were sent in writing by Mar Shi-
mun, to the Vali [provincial governor] of Van.17 It took until December 1914
for the Assyrians to discover the involvement of the authorities in the reign
of terror.
When the rst waves of Nestorian deportees arrived in Iran, the Rus-
sians discussed the need for a village self-defense, because the Russian gar-
risons were very small. Foreign Minister Sazonov proposed forming a
militia composed of Assyrian and Armenian volunteers. Twenty-ve thou-
sand surplus ries and twelve million cartridges were earmarked for this
purpose. The Russian military presented a proposal to train small bands of
Armenians and Assyrians in camps under Russian command.18 Minorsky,
Russias expert on Iran, however, tried to halt any plans to militarize the
border strip. He warned that arming villagers would backre: the measures
we are currently planning will bring us no military advantage whatsoever
and will serve only to unleash just reprisals upon the Christians and their
supporters.19
Before the declaration of war in November 1914, Ottoman troops started
to attack and plundered border villages.20 A major thrust began September
29, when a surprise offensive drove the Russian Cossacks back, but it
stopped October 12 after almost taking the town of Urmia.21 The newly
formed Assyrian and Armenian militia fought side by side with the Rus-
sians. An American missionary wrote a determined attack was made on
Urmia, ostensibly by Kurds. It was afterwards clear, from statements made
by Persians and Turks who were engaged in the attack, that the nucleus of
the ghting force was made up of Turkish soldiers and that the attack was
under the command of Turkish ofcers. It was also clear ... that the result
of success in this attack would have been the looting of the Christian popu-
lation, with probable loss of life.22 Another witness, a Catholic missionary,
was more specic: The Russians retreated to Urmia and left all of the
Christian villages of the plain ... at the mercy of the Turks and Kurds... .
After having descended in the plain of Urmia the Turco-Kurds burned all
the Christian villages which they encountered on their way, such as Anhar,
Alwatshe and massacred the columns of refugees. The invaders came to
within eyesight of Urmia and perpetrated all manner of atrocities, leading a
Russian diplomat to employ the term jihad.23 Iranian authorities found the
dead bodies of uniformed Ottoman soldiers.24 Inspection revealed the iden-
tity of a sergeant and a private of the Fourth Army. Their dead ofcer carried
the Ottoman military law codex and plans of operations.25 Enraged, the Ira-
nian government protested over the Turkish border violations and its agents
provocateurs.
250 Genocide in Local Context

On November 12, 1914, the Sultan proclaimed holy war and appealed to
all Muslims to join in a common struggle. At the outbreak of war the Otto-
man agents intensied already boiling jihad sentiments in the border strip.
This proved effective in mobilizing the Kurdish tribesmen, who might oth-
erwise have been unwilling to ally with Constantinople.
There was great Iranian resentment against Russia and Britain because
of their heavy-handed intervention in domestic politics, and the Ottomans
hoped to exploit this frustration to their advantage. Since the sultan only had
religious legitimacy among the Sunni Muslims, his proclamations pulled
little weight in overwhelmingly Shiite Iran. To overcome this obstacle,
Shiite mujtaheds (mcahid in Turkish) in the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala
also issued calls for jihad.26 The Russians realized that they were sitting on
a powder keg in Iran, which would prove volatile if a jihad ignited the pent-
up anti-Russian feelings.
With the outbreak of open hostilities in early November, the Russians
penetrated the Turkish border to the nearest administrative centers: Saray in
the kaza of Mahmudi and Bashkale in the sancak of Hakkari. The Russians
held these towns for only a short while, but when the Ottomans recaptured
them, they took revenge on local Christians, accusing them of collaboration.
A local observer wrote, twelve villages in the [Gawar] district on the Persian
frontier, Bashkale and Saray with the Nestorian and Armenian villages
round, were ruthlessly wiped out after the Russian retreat.27 Some eyewit-
ness accounts were collected by a Russian investigation and an Assyrian
survivor gave the following testimony:

In 1914 I lived in the village of Houzi close to the town of Bashkale. In the
winter of that year ... at about six oclock in the evening, I saw that the Turks
were approaching. I went out into the plain to nd my brother Aywaz who was
tending the cattle to tell him. I had not gone far before I saw my brother, run-
ning towards me. He was totally covered in blood, his mouth was sliced open,
and his half cut off tongue hung from his mouth. Since he could not speak, he
began to explain with his hands. From this explanation I understood that the
Turks had done it. But who exactly and why, and under whose orders, my
brother could not tell.... On the next morning, after the Turkish troops had
left Houzi and gone on, I came down from the hill and went to my house. I
found my brothers corpse in the road beside my house. He had a piercing
wound passing all the way through the neck and another through the stom-
ach. I cannot say what had caused these wounds. The village was completely
empty ... Later my neighbor Benjamin Lovkoev said that Taher Pasha and
Hurshid Bey were the commanders over the Turkish troops.28

Houzi was a village with seventy-eight Assyrian households, and Hurshid

was the local commander of a local Hamidiye cavalry regiment.
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 251

Reprisals and terror plagued the border strip. The violence from the Otto-
man side was out of all proportion to the degree of local collaboration that had
occurred. As soon as the Russians retreated from a village or town, Ottoman
soldiers moved in and ruthlessly punished the population for disloyalty. As a
rule, the Russians would appoint some local Christians to administrative
posts. The Ottomans saw acceptance of a post inside the Russian occupation
as treason. A German observer learned that all the Christian villages in the
Albak valley were destroyed in punitive raids on the order of the kaymakam
(district governor).29 According to the widow of a village headman, Hurshids
regiment was responsible for the attacks on Assyrian villages. The widow was
saved to deliver a warning to Mar Shimun. She testied:

The Turks attacked in November 1914 the village of Ardshi. These Turks were
not regular askeri (soldiers) but the Sultans special volunteers, called the
Hamidiye. The head of the group was ofcer Hurshid Bey. As soon as they
invaded Ardshi village they set the house of Yuhannan Abdarov on re and
arrested my husband and sons. They were tortured to death. They were beaten
from all sides and ordered to become Muslims, but they refused. Before my
eyes Hurshid Bey shot my sons with a pistol. As I saw what happened, I tried
to protect my husband, but Hurshid Bey kicked me in the face knocking out
two teeth. Then he shot my husband with six bullets. The corpses of the dead,
even that of my husband, were left lying in the road. We were not allowed to
bury the dead. Hurshid Bey ordered that the corpses be smeared in excre-
ment. In the following four days the dogs ate the corpses. Then Hurshid Bey
ordered that the corpses be thrown in the latrine, where even the cross of the
village church got thrown. Then Hurshid had the whole village burned and
twelve people killed ... 150 women and girls were forced to become the wives
of Hurshid Beys relatives.30

Inside Iran, after the October provocations, there was a period relatively
free of further violence. The Ottomans were trying to entice Irans govern-
ment to join their side for an attack on Baku.31 The Russians were aware of
the rising Muslim hostility and wanted to avoid a conict that would sweep
through Azerbaijan, its prime economic interest.32 However, the two enemy
powers were quietly gathering strength behind the scenes. A few thousand
Russian reinforcements arrived and they included a contingent of Arme-
nian volunteers.33 Minister of War Enver ordered the formation of the Fifth
Expeditionary Corps to be commanded by Halil (his uncle) and to be rushed
to Iran. As this division had to be recruited and trained, it did not arrive until
April 1915.34
Most military buildup took place in the town of Sawuj-Bulak just south of
Lake Urmia. Iranian ofcials watched helplessly as Ottoman ofcials estab-
lished a base with hundreds of Turkish soldiers and a constantly growing
number of Kurdish tribesmen.35 Iranian forces headed by the pro-Russian
252 Genocide in Local Context

provincial governor nally confronted the Ottomans in December 1914, but

battle ended with complete Turkish victory. A Russian diplomat was killed in
the rout, and secret documents concerning deployment of the Assyrian vol-
unteers fell into Ottoman hands.
On New Years Day 1915 the Russians began a total retreat from Iran.
The evacuation of Russian troops was a carefully calculated risk. With luck,
it would force Iran to mount its own defense using its own army against the
invaders. An armed conict between Iran and Turkey would swiftly defuse
the impact of the pan-Islamic appeal, and the Ottomans would replace the
Russians as the focus of Iranian xenophobia.36 But Irans weak army was in
no condition to halt the advancing Ottoman invaders.
The Russian vice-consul Nikitin reported: Among local Christians a
panic immediately occurred. Christian Assyrians tried to organize resis-
tance in a few places.37 But the Christian population was basically unde-
fended. Some ed, walking barefoot through the snow, slush, and mud. It
took a seven-day march to cross the Russian imperial border, and many
perished on the way. By the end of January 1915, Russian authorities calcu-
lated that they had received 49,838 Armenian and 8,061 Assyrian refugees.38
Local Armenians and Assyrians serving with the Russians in volunteer bri-
gades found themselves safe behind Russian lines, but gravely worried over
the fate of their families trapped inside the occupation zone.
The combined Turkish-Kurdish force advanced from the south. There-
fore destruction and loss of life was greatest in the southernmost, predomi-
nantly Assyrian sectors, and least in the northern, Armenian sectors, as the
population had more time to ee. News immediately spread that the victors
had begun to pillage, burn villages, destroy churches, and slaughter Chris-
tians. Between the retreat of the Russians and the arrival of the Turkish
army there was a short interval of sheer anarchy, during which local Mus-
lims staged pogroms on their Christian neighbors. Among the Assyrian vil-
lages that were attacked and plundered were Charbash, Dilgusha, and
Gogtapa near Urmia, as well as the following in the Barandus valley, south
of Urmia: Dizateka, Satuli, Alyabad, Shimshajean, Babarud, Darbarud,
Sardarud, Teka, and Ardishai. The following villages of north of Urmia in
the Nazlu River valley were attacked a few days later: Ada, Karajalu, Mush-
awa, Sherabad, Superghan.39 Of the major rural villages only Gulpashan
was intact, thanks to the intervention of German missionaries, and even
that security was only temporary. Details of certain incidents were horri-
fying: At Ardichay 75 women and girls ran into the sea to escape the Turks.
They refused to trust promises of safety if they came out, and all were shot
as they stood in the water.40
As the Ottoman control solidied, news spread of a reign of terror. The
Iranians did what they could to prevent panic. In Istanbul the German
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 253

ambassador and the Young Turk leaders admitted that the situation in Iran
had gotten out of hand. On February 11, 1915, the German ambassador
hosted a meeting between Minister of War Enver and the Persian ambas-
sador to assess the situation. The Persian ambassador argued that the Turk-
ish ofcers were doing a disservice to the Ottoman cause by alienating
public opinion and recommended that the high command punish them.41
The Turkish troops inside Iran reacted to the growing opposition by
plundering and pillaging Christian villages. When the Russians returned
they found evidence of recent atrocities. News spread to international media
and created shock waves. A telegram referred to in the New York Times
stated: the Turks and Kurds, who were retreating before the Russian
advance pillaged and burned villages and put to death some of the inhabi-
tants.42 On March 10, 1915, a Russian consul surveyed a chilling scene in
Haftevan, a village situated between Khosrowa, a Chaldean center, and Dil-
man, an Armenian town. This was the site of the rst planned mass execu-
tion of noncombatants committed by the Ottoman army. On the ground
were literally hundreds of corpses of the adult Christian male population of
an entire district. Nearly all had been mutilated and as far as he could see
most had been decapitated.43 A high ofcer counted 707 corpses: all of them
Armenians and Assyrians. He saw hundreds of mangled corpses in pits,
stinking from infections, lying in the open, I saw headless corpses, chopped
off by axes, hands, legs, piles of heads, corpses crushed under rocks from
fallen walls.44
Bystanders identied the Ottoman commander Jevdet (Cevdet) Bey, the
vali of Van, as the instigator of the massacre. He had ordered all adult Chris-
tian males to assemble in Haftevan under the pretense of registering them
for food distribution. All of the Armenian and Assyrian men who turned up
were arrested. Mass executions were conducted for two days under
hair-raising circumstances. The army was running low on ammunition so
the soldiers did not use bullets. In one farmyard there was a covered well
and hanging upside down from its roof was a headless body, the well itself
full of decapitated corpses. Victims had been hung upside down, their heads
chopped off before being dropped into the well. In groups of twelve men had
been made to face a wall while they were killed one by one with pick-axes
smashing the backs of their skulls. A Russian consul counted fteen wells
stuffed with bodies as well as several corpse-lled barns.45 Even the Ottoman
high command was stunned by the news of these excesses calling it an
unfortunate incident caused by undisciplined troops and wild volunteers.46
Irans Minister of Foreign Affairs registered a formal protest to the Turk-
ish government over the atrocities committed by the Ottoman troops
occupying his country. He complained that Iranian ofcials had witnessed
repeated acts of violence committed by your soldiers and who in the course
254 Genocide in Local Context

of battle, have pillaged many villages, torched many others and reduced all
of the inhabitants to a state of misery. This violence is most noted in the areas
where there are many villages inhabited by Christians, where the population has
been violated and mercilessly massacred. Such extreme form of violence
against unarmed noncombatants was unprecedented within neutral coun-
tries. The Turkish ambassador was lectured on the absolute necessity to
dampen the hatred sown by the Turks among the tribes of Azerbaijan. The
Iranians insisted on Turkeys withdrawal and in a manner with less ferocity,
particularly the Kurdish irregulars.47
An American missionary lamented: In Urmia the biggest and wealth-
iest Syrian village, Gulpashan, which had been spared by payments of large
sums of money was given over to plunder by the returning Kurds. The men
of the village were all taken out to the cemetery and killed; the women and
girls treated barbarously.48 Equally dismayed, Russian consul Vvedenskii
informed his government:

I have begun to investigate the Christian villages. I have investigated twenty

villages. Everywhere there is complete ruin and devastation. Churches,
schools and libraries have only walls [standing]. Icons and sacred items are
lying in the mud, torn and riddled with bullets. Some churches were trans-
formed into stables or supply rooms for food or plunder. The villages are full
of corpses of the poor victims of massacres, which were carried out by Turks
and Kurds everywhere ... The corpses bear the marks of cruel killing with
axes, daggers and blunt objects.49

On the next day he sent a new telegram: There is threat of a new massacre.
During the last week one hundred persons were massacred.50
By mid-March newspapers throughout the world overowed with stories
of atrocities in the Ottoman occupation zone. The situation worsened when
the Turkish army prepared to return home. A Russian diplomat warned of
the immediate danger in a secret telegram sent to the Russian government
on March 14, 1915. Kurds and soldiers slaughtered and killed Christians in
the surroundings of Urmia. There is a risk that they will breach the sanc-
tuary of the American mission and before they leave Urmia, they will mas-
sacre the Christians who are protected by the Americans.51 He repeated
this message with more urgency on March 22. The Turks are preparing to
massacre the Christians in Urmia. There is an evident threat to American
and French missionaries, and also for the 1,500 Christians who are hidden
in the missions. The Assyrian Orthodox priest and Nestorian Assyrian
priests were taken from the missions and were tortured. I request to send
troops immediately.52
Aware that their makeshift forces in Iran were inadequate, the Turks
were rushing reinforcements. As already noted, general Halil Bey was sent
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 255

with some elite units to command the occupation. He was military governor
of Istanbul when ordered to form the Fifth Expeditionary Force and invade
the Caucasus through Iran.53 His divisions amounted to 248 ofcers and an
additional 10,920 well-equipped soldiers. The force also included gendarmes
and 12,000 irregular Kurdish cavalry. His troops arrived in Azerbaijan in
mid-April after a grueling forced march. He expected to confront the Rus-
sian forces commanded by General Nazarbekov54 together with the Assyrian
and Armenian volunteers.55
In size, Halils was denitely the superior force, but his army was badly
mauled in a decisive battle near Dilman that left thousands of casualties on
the battleeld. Ofcial Turkish sources gave the losses for the rst day of
battle, listing 15 ofcers and 453 soldiers dead, 28 ofcers and 1,200 soldiers
wounded, and 370 missing in action. Many of the badly injured were aban-
doned in the eld so the casualties may have been much greater, and non-
Turkish sources speak of 3,500 Ottoman dead.56 The Armenian and Assyrian
volunteers played an important role in repulsing the Turks.57
General Halil (Kut) blamed his defeat on the Christians and he even
ordered the execution of his Armenian and Assyrian soldiers. German mil-
itary advisors estimated that several hundred unarmed soldiers and ofcers
were murdered. An ofcer who knew Halil well stated that his campaign in
Northern Persia included the massacre of his Armenian and Assyrian bat-
talions and the expulsion of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Persian popula-
tion out of Northern Persia.58 An Assyrian doctor at a mission hospital
recorded a conversation with a district governor who refused orders to kill
all of the Ottoman Christian soldiers in his jurisdiction.59
On May 13 Halil abandoned Iran, his army reduced to half its original
size.60 The defeat at Dilman and the subsequent Ottoman retreat coincided
with ongoing attacks against Assyrians and Armenians throughout Turkeys
Van province. Halil and his fellow occupation functionaries took indiscrim-
inate retribution on Ottoman subjects of Christian faith. A Venezuelan mer-
cenary in Ottoman service observed that Halil did as he pleased in wreaking
his own vengeance on the Christians for the moral and material aid they had
lent the Russians during the Battle of Dilman.61
For many months small-scale Turkish and Kurdish assaults on tribal
Assyrians were frequent in Hakkari, and more or less forced the Assyrians
to prepare for full war and see Russia as their only realistic ally. Already
established Assyrian-Russian contacts intensied throughout early 1915
with promises of cooperation. When the Russians followed up their victory
in Iran, the Ottoman forces gradually retreated back into home territory.
One of the rst contingents to reach in home territory was Jevdets force,
which was in disgrace because of the atrocities it perpetrated inside Iran.
While his forces regrouped, Jevdet went to Van to solicit support for a
256 Genocide in Local Context

general massacre of all Christians in his province. His approach was affected
by his recent insight that troops could be taught to exterminate noncombat-
ants. Rumor spread that Jevdet had nicknamed his guard the butcher bat-
talion and that he had bragged: We made a clean sweep with the Armenians
and Assyrians in Azerbaijan. We must do the same with the Armenians of
Van.62 A Chaldean bishop heard Jevdet utter: I have cleansed the Chris-
tians from the country of Bashkale and Saray. I would like to cleanse them
from Van and its surroundings.63
On April 20, 1915, Jevdets artillery began bombarding the Armenian sec-
tions of the Van, announcing that they were combating an Armenian
revolt. On April 23, other units of the Ottoman army reported that a Nesto-
rian revolt had also started.64 Information about the destruction of Chris-
tian communities spread quickly. Vvedenskii reported: In Gawar and
Bashkale almost all of the male Christian population was massacred. The
Christian villages are being burnt and destroyed.65 Based on testimony
from refugees streaming over the border, the Russians learned the entire
male Christian population of Gawar and Bashkale had been massacred.66A
missionary also heard of methodical massacres: The many hundreds (and
perhaps some thousands) of Armenians and Syrians in the region of Bash-
kale have been massacred ... In the mountains Mar Shimun is said to have
gathered the independent tribes about him, and they are battling for their
lives against great odds.67
The German consul in Mosul broke the news that the Christian popula-
tion of Van province since several days nds itself in uproar ... Nestorian
tribes of Tiyyari in the district of Bashkale rose at the same time. 2,000 well-
armed Tiyyari attacked Moslem villages and fortied themselves north of
Julamerk.68 Halil directed his army to Gawar and Bashkale where he per-
ceived the situation seems to have worsened.69 Units of the Russian army
followed hot on their heels and called on the Assyrians to halt Halils retreat.
They mobilized against Halils retreating troops, but the promised Russian
military aid never arrived. Instead the Kurdish tribes were given free hands
to deal with the Nestorians as they saw t.
On May 18, the German consul in Mosul, relayed to the German em-
bassy Assyrians fears that the Muslims intended to perpetrate a general
massacre of all Christians. Mar Shimun in Kochanes informs me that the
anti-Christian movement in Amadia district [in southernmost Hakkari] is
growing daily. Moslems there plan a general massacre of Christians and
have partially already begun. Today the Chaldean Patriarch here delivered a
similar message. Mosuls vali also admitted that a general massacre was
under preparation.70
On May 25 Halils last units departed from Urmia. Soldiers retreating
from Iran and Van intended to regroup near Hakkari after defeat in Iran and
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 257

at Van. The remainder of Halils expeditionary force tried to follow the road
along the Zab River valley, and Jevdet met up with Halil near the Iranian
frontier. Here Kazm Bey had already set up headquarters with a gendarme
division and some Kurdish volunteers. As the Turks pulled out of Bashkale
a new massacre of noncombatants took place. A group of three hundred to
four hundred Armenian women and children, and some fteen artisans,
likewise Armenians, were slaughtered in nearby caves with the collusion of
the civil authorities.71 In early June, in the face of massive hostile presence,
the Turkish troops once again retreated westward. General Halils deci-
mated expeditionary force struggled on to reach the town of Sairt.72 There
he orchestrated a bloody massacre of Armenians and Assyrians.
The central government set a plan in motion for the complete ethnic
cleansing of the Assyrian enclave in Hakkari. Enver and Tlt coordinated
their preparations in this joint effort. Responsibility for leading the opera-
tion fell on the vali of Mosul. In order to make the expedition fully legal, the
districts of Julamerk, Gawar, and Shemdinan were temporarily transferred
to the jurisdiction of Mosul province.73 Fresh troops marched up from
Mosul and local Kurdish tribes planned an invasion from three sides. The
Ottomans had engaged the services of local Kurdish tribes and gave them
specic targets. From the west, the emir of Upper Berwar marched against
Ashita, the Lizan valley, and Lower Tiyyari. Said Agha from the village of
Chal marched against another valley in Lower Tiyyari. Ismael Agha marched
against Chamba in Upper Tiyyari. From the east, Suto Agha of Oramar
attacked the Jilu, Dez, and Baz tribes.
The encirclement operation started on June 11. The large villages in the
lower valleys were lost immediately, and most of the Assyrians ed to higher
ground. Although the Assyrian defense was strong and the Kurds suffered
great losses, many houses were burned and sacked. Even when the Assyri-
ans won, it proved often a costly victory, weakening their already limited
capabilities and draining their resources. After a few weeks the Assyrians
were almost completely surrounded in the mountain peaks.
The Jilu tribe was badly beaten in the rst stage of the campaign and
retreated to Iran. Suto Agha of Oramar together with other Kurdish tribes
attacked their main settlement of Zirne. The Assyrians lost seventy warriors
in a single battle. Suto continued to attack and destroy the other villages, and
the losses were enormous. Many Assyrians had only their traditional int-
lock weapons, while the aggressors had modern ries, machine guns, and
artillery.74 Jilus main church, Mar Zaya, from the fourth century, was
destroyed together with priceless contents including antique Chinese vases
dating from the time of the great Nestorian missions.
Around June 20, the Turkish government played a trump card. It had
captured Mar Shimuns brother Hormuz, a student in Istanbul, and Tlt
258 Genocide in Local Context

ordered the use of this hostage as a pawn.75 Mar Shimun soon received a
letter from the commander of the Ottoman forces: May I inform you, that
your brother, Hormuz nds himself in captivity in Mosul. If you and all
your tribes do not capitulate, your brother will be murdered. Mar Shimun
is said to have replied My people are my sons, and they are many, Hormidz
my brother is but one. Let him therefore give his life for the nation.76 News
of his death came toward the end of July.
By late June the Assyrians plight was truly distressing, as they were com-
pletely cut off by Ottoman troops. On July 12 a Russian diplomat received a
message from Mar Shimun that There are many wounded and killed, am-
munition is running out and the situation is critical. He asks for 3,000 sol-
diers with artillery in order to prevent the combination of Turkish troops
with Persian Kurds. If not, they will [all] be murdered.77 The Russians were
never able to send supplies, and the Assyrians retreated higher and higher
up into their mountains, where there was neither shelter nor food. In the
end they had no other alternative than to leave Hakkari and seek refuge in
Russian-held territory.
The Chaldean bishop of Van inventoried the casualties of the Catholic
Assyrians:

sixty Assyro-Chaldean villages in the vicinity of Van that had been subjected to
atrocities. The village of Kharachique, composed of 37 families, lost 103 per-
sons. Khinno, 32 families, lost 51 persons. Ermans, 22 families, of which half
were massacred. Sele, 50 families, Kharafsorique, 20 families were completely
annihilated. Akhadja and Rachan, 30 families, there are no more than 2 males
and the females escaped, etc., etc. In the district of Gawar, likewise in the
province of Van, the Assyro-Chaldeans made up some twenty villages where
nearly everyone has been massacred, except the women and the small chil-
dren.78

Paul Shimmon, a spokesman for the Nestorian patriarchy, summed up

the Nestorian experience in an article published in the Armenian journal
Ararat. He retold the story of the ethnic cleansing of Hakkari:

For forty days the people defended themselves against superior forces, and
that only with intlocks and antiquated ries. At last, unable to withstand the
onslaught of modern artillery, with which the Turks also bombarded the
Church of Mar Sawa, the people withdrew to the interior of the mountains
with the Patriarchs family in their center; and here they subsisted on herbs
and some sheep they had taken with them, while many were daily dying of
starvation. Mar Shimun came to SalmasI had an interview with him there,
and he has sent me to speak for him and histo effect the escape of his
people, or at least of as many of them as could be saved. All this happened in
the latter part of September, when ... some 25,000 had already arrived, and
with them Mar Shimun, himself as destitute as the rest, while 10,000 more
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians 259

were to follow. The condition of the remnant, for in all there are over 100,000,
is very precarious, but let us hope not hopeless.79

If there were 35,000 survivors then we can estimate the loss of population to
be about two-thirds.

This chapter compares the similar fates of the Assyrian and Armenian
Christians at the hands of the Ottomans during World War I. They were
targeted for eradication and ethnic cleansing for some of the same reasons
suspected disloyalty and collaboration with the enemy. Even the weakest
sign of self-defense met with disproportionate violence. Both groups were
pushed out of their home territories at the same time in 1914 and 1915. They
were subjected to indiscriminate mass violence orchestrated by high
Ottoman ofcials, backed up by neighboring tribesmen.
In Iranian Azerbaijan, years of pro-Turkish and pro-Russian propaganda
had played on latent religious animosity causing interfaith relations to
degenerate into a climate of fear and hostility. Given the lack of protection
granted them by the government in Istanbul, the Armenians and Assyrians
sided, almost by default, with the Russians. Whether the pull of Russian
support or the push of Ottoman suspicion was the greater factor is impos-
sible to discern. At the same time Muslims were attracted to the Ottoman
cause and some Muslim Persian subjects welcomed occupation and prob-
able annexation.
The expulsion of the Assyrians from Hakkari took the form of genocide
under the guise of counterinsurgency. Mass killing of women, children, and
noncombatants proceeded, while the army and volunteers destroyed rural
villages. It was not a deportation, but rather a forced expulsion against an
unwilling population. The Ottoman army was not content with merely
defeating the Assyrian warriors. The order from central government was to
drive them out and make sure that they would never return.
12

The First World War and the Development

of the Armenian Genocide

Donald Bloxham

This chapter examines the proximate causes of the Armenian genocide. It

contends that there was no a priori blueprint for genocide, but rather that it
emerged from a series of more limited regional measures in a process of
cumulative policy radicalization.1 Until late May 1915, anti-Armenian ac-
tions were often enacted reactively and, in the eyes of the Committee of
Union and Progress (CUP), preemptively, as well as pro-actively. This does
not mean that Ottoman actions were objectively rational in their intent or
extentthe Ottoman-Armenian dynamic was a hugely unequal one, the
disparity of power vast, and CUP perception was heavily colored by chau-
vinism. Nor does it mean that Ottoman actions were any less vicious. The
extreme nature of CUP policies can be traced to perpetrators acting on ideo-
logical precepts and pushing for ever-more indiscriminate measures. Never-
theless, it is only in the early summer of 1915 that we can speak of a
crystallized policy of empirewide killing and death-by-attrition. Among
other things, this chapter is a plea for the normalization of the study of state-
sponsored mass murder, for a recognition that it emerges, like many other
governmental policies across a spectrum of regimes, often piecemeal,
informed by ideology but according to shifts of circumstance.
Many of the themes involved in the deterioration of Ottoman-Armenian
relations converged in the eastern crisis of 18751878, which in turn
sheds light on the wider context of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The
massive territorial losses of this period, combined with the inux into Ana-
tolia of millions of Muslim refugees (muhacirs) from the Balkans and the
Caucasus, whose numbers added to the massed ranks of Circassians eeing
tsarist brutality over previous decades, greatly shifted the demographic of
the empire toward a Muslim majority. It also introduced elements with
often strongly anti-Christian feelings that would compete with indigenous

260
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 261

Christians for land resources. Their presence and actions increased the
Armenians insecurity of life and property, and stimulated Armenian pro-
tests to Istanbul for reforms and Armenian appeals to external powers for
support. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which settled the eastern crisis, saw
the internationalization of the Armenian question.
The battle between Britain and Russia for inuence over the reform issue
during and after 1878 fueled increasingly strident Armenian nationalist
demands and Ottoman suspicions of Armenian disloyalty at a time when
the interreligious inclusiveness of the earlier Tanzimat reforms was being
reversed. The Armenian nationalist political partiesforemost the Arme-
nian Revolutionary Federation (ARF; Dashnaktsutiun) and the Hnchaks
were formed in the 1880s, and, in light of the failure to secure enforceable
reforms, they led the movement to recapture the attention of the powers,
sometimes by ostentatious, terrorist methods.2 The massacres of 80,000
100,000 Armenians in the mid-1890s can be seen as a blow against a non-
Muslim minority with perceived separatist aspirations in the context of an
attempt by the sultan, Abdlhamid II, to mold the Muslims of the empire
into a more coherent political unit within the hostile international system
the aim of pan-Islamism.
In the following CUP era, the Balkan Wars of 19121913 were as signif-
icant in their own way as the eastern crisis had been. The wars and their
associated ethnic violence, with Muslims again the primary victims, accel-
erated the inux of refugees into Anatolia as Macedonia was torn away, and
killed any vestige of interest in interreligious pluralism for the CUP
leaders. As the conicts cast Muslim-Christian relations into sharp relief,
with widespread Christian draft evasion and Ottoman Bulgarian and Greek
soldiers swapping sides to ght alongside their ethnic brethren, deporta-
tions of small groups of Christians from the vicinity of military communi-
cations routes were sanctioned. The end of the wars also saw the
introduction of a new Armenian reform plan under Russian pressure,
infuriating Istanbul.
The internationalization of the Armenian question is the central reason
that the state-Armenian dynamic deteriorated as it did within the larger
matrix of demographic change and territorial diminution of the late Otto-
man Empire. Other things remaining equal, Ottoman policy from the time
of the reform plan, taken to its logical conclusion, would at some point prob-
ably have required the marginalization of the Armenian national commu-
nity of eastern Anatolia at least, to tackle the increasingly anomalous
Christian population itself, to remove the excuse for European encroach-
ments, and secure the land for Muslims. This did not necessarily mean
killing, but it would likely have entailed policies of cultural and linguistic
Turkication such as those initiated from 1910, and probably furtherance
262 Genocide in Local Context

of the sort of dilution-by-muhacir-settlement that had already occurred.3 But

war changed circumstances and possibilities.
The Armenian fate was unusual even among the Ottoman peoples
during World War I, though it cannot be properly comprehended outside of
that broader framework. Albanian, Bosnian and Georgian Muslims, Kurds,
Gypsies,4 and some Arab and Jewish groups5 were also moved around the
empire in and around the war period for purposes of assimilation and in
some cases, punishment, though none were so comprehensively dislocated
as the Armenians, and none subject to the same near-total murder. Insofar
as we can tell from the available documentation, the Armenian genocide
was also somewhat more systematic and thorough than the CUPs attacks
on the Assyrians/Syriacs (Sryani and Asuri), extensive and genocidal
though these certainly were.6 In collective terms state intent was more ex-
plicitly murderous in the Armenian case, than in either the postwar purge
of people of the Greek Orthodox religion from Anatolia and the reciprocal
purge of Muslims from Greek territory, or the prolonged Kemalist assault
on the Kurds. Though these episodes are testament to the gathering strength
of ethnic nationalism in the region, and were marked by terrible violence,
in the Greek case, intermigration was the ultimate end; in the Kurdish case,
assimilation. Explaining the scale and singularly murderous nature of the
Armenian deportations is therefore as important as explaining the deportations
themselves.
Without subscribing to any determinism about the development of the
genocide, it is clear that, as a result of its own recent experiences, the Otto-
man empire entered the world war with an ethos of population politics that
was already more radical than those of the other major warring parties. Even
the apparatus that would conduct the Armenian genocide was in place
before the war, though it had not yet been assigned to that particular task.
The titles of the two governmental bodies most closely involved in the or-
dering and administration of the major Armenian deportations during
World War I reect the Ottoman obsession by 1914 with ethnicity and eth-
nic security. Both were in the Interior Ministry. One was the Directorate for
the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants, established in 1913 to marshal
the settlement of Balkan muhacirs. The other was the Directorate for Gen-
eral Security.
For the Ottoman Empire, more obviously than for all the other warring
great powers, entry into a continental war was an existential matter. Fighting
Russia, the hereditary enemy, was one thing; ghting France and Britain,
successively the most important supporters of the empire prior to the advent
of imperial Germany, was quite another. The Ottoman entry into war
bespeaks a do-or-die effort on one hand to eradicate external inuences in the
empire, including the 19131914 Armenian reform plan, the European-run
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 263

Ottoman Public Debt Administration, and extraterritorial privileges (the ca-

pitulations), and on the other hand to reinvigorate the empire by reexpan-
sion to the pre-1878 boundaries. Defeat would certainly bring division of the
remaining empire, the end of the Ottoman polity. Thus the scope for further
radicalization of population policy was great, especially as this concerned
populations who, it was suspected, desired Entente victory.
Nevertheless, whatever ideas of ethnic homogenization were present
in 1914 did not translate smoothly into action. Despite threats, increasing
violence against the Armenians in eastern Anatolia, including sporadic boy-
cotts, and the deterioration of CUP-Armenian relations from 1909, there is
no evidence that a policy to physically destroy the community was forged
prior to World War I, not least because the deportations only began after
seven months of war.7 International factors, the interaction between Russia
and Armenian nationalists particularly, continued to play a role until well
into World War I in radicalizing CUP policy. Continuities in this interaction
were evident from the prewar period, but there were also factors specic to
the war, and to the new long- and short-term strategic goals of the com-
batant forces in and around Ottoman territory.
Extant notions of reordering society crystallized as the CUP saw their
wartime plans fall apart and felt their territory to be under threat both from
outside and within, as the stereotype of Armenians as proxies of the great
powers in peacetime was extended into a stereotype of military collaboration
during warfare. The sheer brutality of the method used to combat this puta-
tive threat was conditioned by generations of discrimination against the
Armenians.
August 1914, the month of the secret CUP military pact with Germany,
was marked by the beginning of ruthless war requisitioning, in which the
Ottoman Christian communities were disproportionately targeted, in an
indirect continuation of practices of expropriation developed over recent
years.8 Killing on a large scale by Ottoman forces only developed sporadi-
cally in the provinces bordering Russia and Persia from November 1914,
however, with men initially the prime target. In general terms, genocide
developed out of an Ottoman policy of ethnic reprisalmeaning deliber-
ately collective punitive measures in the tradition of much counterinsur-
gency warfareinformed by experience and knowledge of links between
Armenian nationalists and Entente sponsors, but more generally by ethnic
stereotypes of Armenian disloyalty and support of Allied war aims. Anti-
Armenian policy intensied with every Entente military advance or success.
This was the pattern following initial small-scale Russian incursions into
Ottoman territory in November, the famous Ottoman defeat at the turn of
19141915 at the battle of Sarkam in the Caucasus, the initial Anglo-
French assaults on the outer forts of the Dardanelles in March 1915, the
264 Genocide in Local Context

near simultaneous Russian successes in Persia, the Gallipoli landings im-

mediately prior to Apr. 24, 1915 (the day commemorated as the beginning of
the genocide),9 Ottoman setbacks in Persia throughout this period, and, -
nally, the Russian advance into the eastern Anatolian interior throughout
May and June.
The broader immediate context was a war in the region that was cast
partly along ethnic lines, with each major combatant trying to stimulate
anti-imperial insurgency on ethnic-nationalist grounds in their opponents
territory. Jihad, holy war, was announced by the Ottoman government with
German encouragement to arouse the Muslim subjects of Britain and Rus-
sia, yet this was conceptually comparable, for instance, to British sponsor-
ship of the Arab revolt or German appeals to Ukrainian or Georgian
nationalists. Russia, too, instrumentalized some Armenians (as well as
some Kurds and Assyrian Christians) in Ottoman territory and the adjacent
border areas. In September 1914 Armenian volunteer battalions were
formed to ght alongside the Russian army.10 These were composed of men
from the territories taken by Russia in 1878, or who had ed to the Caucasus
more recently from Turkish rule. Similar forces were set up on the Persian
border. They could provide intelligence and advice on the terrain and, as has
been ignored in the literature, provoke their Ottoman Armenian brethren to
take up arms.11
The Russian sponsoring of Armenian insurgency bore only limited
results, and certainly did not stimulate the civil war often invoked in
Turkish nationalist literature. Such eruptions as did occur in the interior
were mostly comparatively minor.12 The most discernible phenomenon
would have been the desertions. Nevertheless, the Ottoman leadership was
aware of the Russian-Armenian links from the beginning.13 As to deser-
tion, the difference in CUP eyes between Armenian desertion and that of
Muslims, which was also widespread, was its perceived purpose. Interior
Minister Tlt later claimed the plan was as follows: if war is declared
Armenian soldiers will take shelter on the enemy side with their arms. If
the Ottoman army advances [they will] remain inactive, if the Ottoman
army retreats, [they will] form armed bands and hinder transport and com-
munications.14
The jihad was largely unsuccessful too. Ottoman and German agitation
did bear a little fruit in parts of Azerbaijan15 and other locations in the Cau-
casus around the turn of 19141915, where advancing Ottoman forces were
joined by several thousand Muslims.16 The Russian response included ex-
pelling suspect Muslim communities over the Ottoman border and doubt-
less also massacre.17 This further exacerbated the ethnic situation inside the
Ottoman Empire. From at least early April, for example, the Muslim refu-
gees from Russian reprisals were settled in Armenian dwellings in the Mu
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 265

district of Bitlis,18 mirroring a pattern of tit-for-tat expulsions that had oc-

curred in November 1914 on the Persian-Ottoman border.19
For their part, the weight and viciousness of Ottoman responses to inci-
dents sparked internally or by the approach of Russian forces with Arme-
nian volunteer units can be inferred from ofcial references to the dispatch
of irregular paramilitary militia and tribal forces or punishment units.20
Ottoman forces had no compunction about rationalizing the severest
methods to completely crush any incidents lest they assume more than
merely regional proportions,21 including taking rigorous measures
against the families of deserters and traitors and punishing severely peas-
ants who support these outlaws.22 By one estimate, some twenty-seven
thousand Armenians in and beyond Ottoman territory were murdered in
this phase of the war between November 1914 and April 1915.23 Assyrians
were murdered on a similar scale in the Ottoman-Persian border areas.24
(There is also evidence of atrocities committed in some Russian-occupied
parts of eastern Anatolia.25 These were on a smaller scale than Ottoman
anti-Christian murders, but it is safe to say that Russian use of irregulars
invited fracture of the laws of war. Armenians, however, formed only a por-
tion of the irregulars operating in Russian service. Cossacks are also identi-
ed in some of the evidence as perpetrators, as are regular Russian soldiers.26
This ethnic reprisal policy formed the background of the most contested
episode in the development of the Armenian genocide, the large-scale
Armenian uprising from mid-April in a quarter of the eastern Anatolian city
of Van, an episode concluded successfully in mid-May with the retreat of the
Ottoman besiegers in the face of a Russian advance, but at the price of many
Muslim as well as Armenian lives.
At the end of March the governor of Van province, Cevdet, accompanied
by several thousand soldiers and Kurdish and Circassian irregulars, returned
from unsuccessful campaigning over the border in Persia. On April 17, he
responded to a minor occurrence in the Shatakh district of the province by
dispatching his forces to annihilate the Armenians there, but the ill-disci-
plined irregular soldiers opted instead to attack closer Armenian settle-
ments,27 and the ensuing chain of massacres drove the Van Armenians to
resist.28 Cevdet was attempting to isolate the city from the outlying districts
of the province,29 and crush any sign of trouble with extreme and indiscrim-
inate violence. Thus to ascribe the hatching of a bigger plan to either side is
wrong. This was neither the intended beginning of a general Armenian
genocide, as some Armenian diaspora historians would have it, nor evi-
dence of premeditated Armenian revolt in the interior, as Turkish national-
ists would have it: in a terrible circularity, the Van Armenians, trying to
maintain an escape route toward Persia, were driven to action by the same
ethnic reprisal measures Cevdet used to crush the putative Armenian
266 Genocide in Local Context

threat at a local level. The simultaneous development of the Van rising and
of the wider war would have even more extreme ramications, as we shall
see shortly.
Between Sarkam and the Van rising, Russian forces were insufcient
to sustain a major thrust into Anatolia. In the interim the major threat to
Anatolia affected the regions northwestern coast: it was the beginning of
the Anglo-French assault on the Dardanelles, designed to relieve pressure
on the Russian Caucasus ank. The rst major stage of the attack on the
outer forts was from March 517. In Istanbul, preparations were made for a
previously planned movement of the capital and its population to the inte-
rior of western Anatolia, by force if necessary.30 Parliament was suspended
as part of the process, removing an important check on CUP actions.31 Con-
sistent with the established fear that Armenians would join with advancing
Entente forces, the intention was to deport all of the Armenians from the
area between Istanbul and the projected provisional government base,
Eskiehir.32 A similar plan may well have been entertained simultaneously
for Smyrna/Izmir should the Allies land there, after a recent naval bom-
bardment of the city.33
Mid-March also saw a series of meetings of the CUPs central com-
mittee.34 Bahaeddin akir, a civilian director of the irregular forces collec-
tively and perhaps imprecisely known as the Special Organization, and
member of the central committee of the CUP, was recalled from Special
Organization operational HQ at Erzurum to attend, and presented evidence
of the activities of the Armenian bands in eastern Anatolia. He argued that
the CUP should fear the inner enemy as much as the outer enemy, and
was delegated extended authority and independence to combat the former.35
The end of March and the beginning of April saw an ominous buildup of
the irregular units for border activities,36 the departure for eastern Anato-
lia of others in the Special Organization hierarchy who attempted to orga-
nize a general massacre in Erzurum,37 and the dispatch to other provinces
of radical CUP emissaries. One such emissary was the notorious Mehmed
Reid, who was sent to bring his iron rule to Diyarbakr, where he conducted
a particularly vicious round of searches for arms and deserters, and went on
to become one of the most enthusiastic murderers.38
The historian Taner Akam argues that the March meetings led ulti-
mately to the passing of the deportation law.39 The unleashing of the CUP
emissaries and an increased number of irregulars, and their impact, cer-
tainly suggests that among some CUP leaders, a reservoir of ruthless anti-
Armenianism had been waiting to be tapped. Cevdet in Van, for instance,
clearly beneted from a more-or-less free hand in dealing with the situation.
Yet the fact that the projected deportations from Istanbul and its hinterlands
did not occur, owing to the Entente failure to break through to the capital,
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 267

indicates that Armenian policy was still contingent on the course of the war,
not fully pro-active or general across the empire. From the end of March,
deportations of Armenians began from parts of Cilicia to the west, but they
too were regionalized measures, attributable to a combination of the turbu-
lent history of Ottoman-Armenian relations in the area and to the course of
the war in the adjacent Mediterranean.40
Unlike the deportations from April 24 onward, which were all directed
toward the desert regions in the south, the rst Cilician deporteesfrom
Zeytunwere sent to a variety of destinations, including the barren salt lake
area in heavily Turkish Konya, in western Anatolia.41 Their treatment on the
way to and at their destinations varied, as in some places they were fed, in
others not.42 The move to a general deportation, and alongside it the express
murder of the deportees, required a further trigger. This was duly supplied
in the further unfolding of events in eastern Anatolia relating to the Van
episode and the Russian military advance.
On May 2 the military leadership requested of the Interior Ministry that
Armenians in rebellious areas in Van be either forced over the Russian
border or dispersed in Anatolia. In addition to addressing the problem of
insurgency, it was argued, this would provide a form of revenge for the Rus-
sian treatment of Muslims during the war while vacating homes for those
very refugees.43 Presumably fearing that expelling Armenians into Russian
territory would simply swell enemy ranks, a week later the Interior Ministry
issued internal deportation orders for Van and parts of Erzurum and Bitlis
provinces in the face of the Russian advance.44
Meanwhile, on May 4, two hundred Erzurum Armenians were arrested45
as the Russian left ank crossed the border in a two-pronged assault, one
side directed through the east of Erzurum province to the northwest of Lake
Van, the other heading for Van city itself on the eastward side of the lake,
both accompanied by Armenian volunteers.46 As the force approached Van,
and Cevdets forces retreated with many of the Muslim women and children
of the city,47 Armenians were evicted from the rural border regionthe
Pasin district and the wider plane of Erzurumwhereupon their villages
were resettled with Muslims.48 The Armenians were initially moved west-
ward, with many gathering around the city itself.49 Thereafter events pro-
ceeded at bewildering pace.
The Russian forces arrival at Van on May 18 (with Armenian volunteers
as the advance guard) seemed to conrm every Ottoman suspicion. Cer-
tainly the Van Armenians looked to Russia for aid at this dire moment, and
contacted the Persian Choi district and the Caucasus to try to secure it, as
the Central Powers were well aware.50 The Russian army did come, slowly,
while thousands of Armenians were dying in Van, but as an ad hoc measure,
not because of a preconceived plan.51 Nevertheless, by disrupting the rear
268 Genocide in Local Context

and occupying Ottoman troops, the uprising was instrumental in the failure
of the Persian part of War Minister Envers military campaign, as were the
delaying actions of the Armenian volunteers ghting alongside Russian
forces in Persia at the battle of Dilman at the end of April.52 Equally impor-
tant, an indeterminate number of Muslims were massacred both before and
after liberation.53 This added fuel to the ethnic re, though the death-toll
was nowhere near the scale of 150,000 claimed as one justication for the
subsequent deportation program.54 And at the Russian arrival, an estimated
80,000 Muslim refugees ed to Bitlis on the other side of Lake Van.55 For his
part, Cevdet moved southward and westward into Bitlis in the face of the
Russian advance, massacring as he went.56 He was joined at the beginning
of June by Envers uncle Halil (Kut), the vanquished commander at Dilman.
Between them they succeeded in repelling the Russians, and notwith-
standing the deportation orders for the provinces Armenians, continued
with massive, indiscriminate murder on the spot among the Armenian and
Assyrian population, though they were temporarily held up by knock-on
Armenian resistance at Mu and Sasun.57
During the conclusive days of the Van conictMay 1618and as the
inhabitants of Khnyss (Hns) on the Van-Erzurum border were massacred
in the retreat from the other prong of the Russian invasion, the Interior
Ministry instructed the governor of Erzurum to deport those Armenians
thus far evicted southward from their homes to southern Mosul, Der Zor,
and Urfa provinces.58 On May 23, as the Russians and some of the
Armenian volunteers pushed on from Van toward Bitlis, this decision was
extended throughout the provinces in closest proximity to Russian forces
Erzurum, Van, and Bitlisas well as much of Cilicia and the coastal district
of Aleppo.59
On May 26, the Supreme Military Command contacted the Interior Min-
istry referring to an oral decision for the deportation of Armenians from all
the eastern provinces, Zeytun, and other areas of high Armenian concentra-
tion, to the region south of the Diyarbakr vilayet, the Euphrates valley, Urfa,
and Sleymaniye.60 In contrast to those Muslims encouraged into the
empire in previous years, the deportees were not supposed to settle within
25 miles of railway lines. On the same day, Tlt sought the enactment of
legislation legitimating deportations. Pursuant to these two communiqus
a provisional law was promulgated on 27 May, permitting the military au-
thorities to order deportations in the interests of security and military
necessity.61
The very nature of the deportations that followed is sufcient evidence of
genocidal intent. Where the earlier anti-Armenian measures did not distin-
guish innocent individuals from guilty ones, the new measures did not
differentiate between communities with revolutionary traditions or the
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 269

great majority without, nor, increasingly, between border regions and the
interior. In light of the Russian advance and the events at Van, the distinc-
tion between innocent and guilty Armenians was rendered meaningless
both ideologically and practically in CUP eyes. Now, even if only a minority
of Armenians were active enemies, in the CUP calculus all stood to benet
from the situation that some of their number had brought about. That, and
the feared prospect of Armenians joining with Entente forces, could be fore-
stalled if the Armenian population was physically removed once and for all.
This would leave Muslims in sole occupation of the land and would render
redundant any Russian claim to a protectorate. And even if (as some of-
cials could discern) the Van Armenians had only risen in self-defense, they
still represented an obstacle to the prosecution of the war in the short term,
and an ethnically dened challenge to Turkish authority in Anatolia in the
long term.
Unlike the rst Cilician deportees, the Armenians were now not to be
sent to places were settlement was possible, if difcult; they were sent, de-
fenseless and without provision or means of subsistence, to desert regions
where natural attrition could take its deadly toll. That was not all. Murder,
rape, mutilation, kidnapping, and theft accompanied the deportations from
the beginning of June as irregulars, Kurds and other Muslim tribesmen,
alongside some units of the army, descended on the deportees at strategic
points.62 Thus the pattern of ethnic reprisal massacre as practiced for
months in the eastern border regions was fused with the practice of ethnic
cleansing by deportation, providing the constituent elements of genocide.
Barely 20 percent of the deportees from this phase of the deportation pro-
gram would reach their desert destinations. The twin track of measures
deportation and accompanying massive killingwas repeated throughout
the expulsions from eastern Anatolia, though not in the western provinces,
where the deportees passed relatively unmolested to the deserts, where
most would later die or be killed.63
By late May, after a series of stages of radicalizations in Ottoman policy,
the move to a decision for general deportation was probably not a question
of shedding any vestige of moral restraint. On top of all the prewar Otto-
man-Armenian tensions, the established view of Russian-Armenian mili-
tary collaboration, elements of vengeance for the events of the war since late
1914, the fall of Van, and attacks on Muslims by Russian forces, the May
developments in CUP policy were probably more a matter of logistics, of
concern for the states image, and even perhaps of imagination, in terms of
nally seizing the moment to solve the Armenian question. At the same
time we should not, conversely, imagine that as soon as the CUP leaders
opted for general measures they decided that each and every Armenian
should die. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the death of every single
270 Genocide in Local Context

Armenian was not crucial for the aim of destroying the Armenian national
presence in Anatolia and Cilicia. Given the small pockets of Armenians
remaining across the empire after the war, and given the practice of allow-
ing some converted Armenians to remain in situ, there was clearly space in
the policy to allow for a few isolated and therefore irrelevant survivors.
Second, it is unlikely that the CUP leaders instantly developed a precise
template of how their inherently murderous scheme would unfold across
the empire. A discrete decision for total murder is the product of the ex post
facto ruminations of genocide scholars. Logistical decisions still remained
to be made in the following months concerning the pattern and schedule of
subsequent deportations, as perhaps did lesser decisions in principle about
the precise scope of the measures in the west. The provisional nature of the
establishment of the desert concentration camps in the south for those
Armenians that survived the deportations suggests the ongoing, rather
improvised nature of the whole destruction process, as do the differences in
the immediate treatment of deportation caravans from different places.64
If we are, nevertheless, to seek a turning point at which it becomes pos-
sible to speak of an accepted practice of general destruction of the major
Armenian communities of Anatoliaof which outright, mass murder was
an integral partthat was maintained and extended until over a million
Armenians were dead, we might consider the prisoners incarcerated in
Constantinople on April 2426, and deported to Ankara. With very few ex-
ceptions they were murdered, but only in mid-June.65 By that time, Cevdet
was turning Bitlis into a charnel house and the slaughter of the Erzurum
Armenians was fully underway.66 The latter was given euphemistic sanction
on June 14 by Talts authorization of the killing of resistors and escapees in
the deportation columns, and was pursuant to the logic he outlined three
days later to a member of the German embassy staff. 67 On June 17 Talt
averred the Portes intention to use the cover of war to nish for good with
its inner enemies, thereby avoiding the problems of external diplomatic
interference.68 Shortly before, on June 9, the Ministry of the Interior had
directed the governor of Erzurum to auction off the property of the deported
Armenians of the province: they were clearly not expected to return.69
The scope of deportations was continually expanded within Anatolia
until the end of the summer. After a brief hiatus following the specic de-
portation orders of late May, the expulsions spread westward and south-
ward in quick succession in June and July, through the Sivas province and
the adjacent district of Shabin-Karahissar (ebinkarahisar) (where ve
thousand Armenians, men, women, and children rose up and took to the
hills in mid-June after local massacres of Armenians), the provinces of
Harput (Kharbert, Kharput) and Trebizond (Trabzon), and into Thrace in
the autumn. At the beginning of July, as the deportations expanded in
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 271

scope, so did the reception areas for the deportees. They now incorporated
the provinces of modern-day Syria, with the stipulation that the Armenians
should not exceed 10 percent of the overall local population. This measure
was designed to prevent the establishment of any critical mass of Arme-
nians, facilitating assimilation and/or simple marginalization, and reects
the CUPs ongoing paranoia about concentrated Armenian populations.70
It has been suggested that the further rounds of massacres of deportees
barely surviving in the desert concentration centers over the rst half of
1916 was due to Armenian numbers exceeding this 10 percent gure.71
Though much more work needs to be done in the area, the theory has some
substantiation since the greatest massacres occurred in the camps in the
vicinity of Der Zor, which was precisely the area that caused the most con-
cern over its concentration of Armenians.72 Additionally, the self-inicted
problem (indeed threat) of epidemic disease rife in these camps probably
furnished both an excuse and an incentive to murder the Armenians out-
right, as it would at times in the genocide of both Jews and Romanies
during the Second World War.73
Estimates of the number murdered in these camps by Circassians,
Chechens, and Arabs run as high as 150,000. This constitutes the majority
of the 200,000 Raymond Kvorkian suggests were murdered outright at this
stage of the genocide. The remainder of that total were killed at the other
two points of the Der ZorRas ul-AinMosul triangle, well into the inte-
rior, with the projected fteen thousand victims at Mosul killed under none
other than Halil.74 Given that these camps could never be self-sustaining
entities, and that the government was utterly uninterested in adequate pro-
vision for the largely elderly, juvenile and female inhabitants, massacre was
a logical method of expediting the inevitable process of death-by-attrition. In
the larger number of concentration centers nearer the Mediterranean coast,
the huge death-tolls were for the most part the result of starvation and
disease alone.75 The CUP rationalized its policy of obstructing German and
American missionary assistance to the destitute remnant by arguing that
the inner resistance of the Armenians against the Ottoman government
could only be broken when they realized that they could not expect any help
from foreign states.76
The somewhat improvised and sometimes reactive nature of the destruc-
tion process as it developed in no way detracts from the overall intent man-
ifest in the conduct of the measures when they were underway. Though the
breadth of participation in the destruction and the function it served for the
empire means that the Armenian genocide was ultimately a state project, its
implementation was closely policed by the CUP. When general deportation
had become policy it was rigidly enforced from the power centre, with pro-
vincial governors shadowed by watchful responsible secretaries of the
272 Genocide in Local Context

CUP to ensure appropriate execution of their instructions.77 Reluctant of-

cials were replaced by more enthusiastic ones, and sometimes even killed.78
The deportation orders themselves contain no explicit sanction of mass
murder. Doubtless the CUP leaders did not want to leave incriminating doc-
umentary evidence, nor did they wish to risk potential opposition from any-
one in the larger governing structure, including some cabinet ministers
who were kept in the dark.79 Yet testimony from various executors of the
genocide at the postwar trials conducted under the auspices of the new
Turkish government exposes the deliberate use of euphemism and camou-
age in the instructions for care of the deportees. It reveals that the onus
was on outright killing, and there existed oral and secret telegraph orders
from Istanbul and local CUP functionaries to this effect,80 though regional
differences in the death-tolls exacted from the deportation convoys suggests
that there was not complete uniformity in this second track of orders.
The fact that much of the killing was done by irregulars may have meant
that the power center lost a certain amount of control over the process, but
that does not reduce its responsibility. The deployment of irregulars for
dirty work was an established Ottoman tradition. While elements of the
regular army clearly played a role in the Armenian genocide, it had rarely
been used to exterminate entire communities. Irregular specialists were an
integral part of the states arsenal and their actions had traditionally had the
acceptance and tacit compliance of the Ottoman authorities and provided
plausible deniability.81 Furthermore, there was a structure to the process at
the macro-level that does not necessarily come through if we look only at the
bedlam of the experience of the attacks on the deportation convoys or the
massacres in situ in Bitlis, Van, and Diyarbakr.82 As the scholar of Yugosla-
via Cornelia Sorabji has written of the murderous breakup of that polity,
whatever arbitrary horrors individuals could invent in the process, they were
only enabled to do so within an ordered context.83

As has been made clear, at certain stages in the development of CUP policy,
the actions of Armenian nationalists provided catalysts. Yet whatever may
be said of the behavior of the volunteers and other activists, nowhere else
during World War I was nationalist activism answered with total murder.
That is the crux of the issue and must serve as a preface to any assessment
of the issues at stake for Armenian leaders.
The distinction between acts of self-defense and acts of revolt was and
remains blurred: who was to decide when and why to take up arms against
the state, and how was the state to perceive the intentions of unlicensed
arms-bearers in its midst? While to many Armenian nationalists and histo-
rians, the Van uprising was of the same desperate, heroic part as the famous
forty days of Musa Dagh84 in autumn 1915where a community ed
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 273

impending deportation to the hills on the Mediterranean coast south of

Alexandretta and held off their assailants until their rescue by a French war-
shipand to the CUP they were simply two similar examples of treachery,
the external observer might view them as different points on a continuum
with pure voluntarism at one end and a desperate lack of choices at the
other. The pure self-defense of Musa Dagh would be at the latter extreme,
the Van uprising only slightly further down. The planned Zeytun rising
would be still further down, perhaps at the midpoint, while still further
down might be the behavior of the relatively small number of Ottoman
Armenians who joined Russian ranks at the outset of the war.
If not all forms of resistance at the time were responses to genocide, all
were based on experience, including experience of discrimination and mas-
sacre, and on aspirations for the future. That at the outset of World War I
some Ottoman Armenians were prepared to throw their lot in with Russia
is not surprising, given the dashing of their hopes for a more secure, egali-
tarian society with the false dawn of the 1908 CUP revolution. The great
majority of Ottoman Armenians, however, remained terried of what any
provocation might bring. Ottoman documents on eastern Anatolia show
that some Armenians were coerced into action, and also that Armenian
communities condemned the reckless behavior of some of their number,85
and particularly that of their coreligionists in the Caucasus and Persia,86
who provided the driving force for action as they had traditionally done.87
Assuredly this was the established attitude of most ordinary eastern Anato-
lian peasants who feared reprisals out of long experience,88 and who went
on, fully uninvolved, to form the bulk of the genocides victims. Elements in
the leadership of every Armenian political party were partly culpable for not
heeding voices of caution from within their communities, subordinating
the interests of the Ottoman Armenian masses, ignoring their fears, and by
default inveigling them in a nationalist scheme with which many did not
identify.89 This was hardly a movement of national consensus, let alone par-
ticipation. Ironically, the level of Armenian nationalist action in 19141915
was lower than it had been on the eve of the 18941896 massacres. Unfor-
tunately for the passive Armenian majority, the actions of the few contrib-
uted to radicalizations of CUP policy.
The Armenian political leaderships were not simply dupes, acting on
unrealistic hopes about Allied support for future autonomy. The rst pre-
mier of the short-lived Caucasian Republic of Armenia, Hovhannes
Katchaznuni, discerned that some nationalist leaders implanted our
desires into the minds of others ... by overestimating our modest worth we
were naturally exaggerating our hopes and expectations,90 but not all Arme-
nians were ready to believe Entente assurances. Appreciating at least some
of the powers interests, both Boghos Nubar, who had been appointed by
274 Genocide in Local Context

the Catholicos of All Armenians to negotiate the prewar reform plan, and
the Russian ARF spokesman Hagop Zavriev were aware in their own ways
that Armenian claims had to be diplomatically defended against their
potential sponsors.91 Yet Armenian representatives had precious few cards
to play, and the biographer of the volunteer leader Andranik identies the
resulting dilemma: could the Armenians expect territorial favors in a peace
settlement if they did not make some sacrices?92 Nubar had also reected
in April 1915 that every oppressed people needs to comply with certain
duties in order to be worthy of liberation.93 The promise of internal assis-
tance to the Entente derived from the perceived need for Armenian leaders
to contribute to overthrowing Turkey, to maximize the weight of their claims
to territory. In a word, they tried to prove to the Entente by the provision of
force that they were worthy nationalists in the Darwinian international
system that the Great Powers had done so much to create.94
The Armenian genocide was successful in its own terms, for the Arme-
nians who remained could not hope to form a signicant coherent national
group and many were forcibly assimilated into Muslim society. Had CUP
policy not developed into one of general murder and dislocation, it would
still have boded ill for the Armenians given the trajectory of CUP ideology
by the close of the Balkan Wars. This is why the element of state security
should not be singled out above all others in the CUP move toward killing
Armenians. Security only assumed its signicance because of the CUP
drive for ethnic homogeneity and national territorial integrity in the heart-
lands of the Ottoman empire, and political and economic independence
for Muslims, and increasingly specically Turkish Muslims, as a group.
Armenians in Cilicia and eastern Anatolia were already seen as obstacles to
each of these ends. And with Entente military advances and the very real
Ottoman fears of their implications for the empire, the presence of an inter-
nal alien element was no longer just an obstacle, but an immediate threat.
Talts shameless propagandizing about the Armenian threat thus made
perfect sense in his terms, as did his claim that the deportations were deter-
mined by national and historical necessity.95 The First World War brought
everything to a head.
This interpretation in itself is not partisan; the question is to what use it
is put. It does not excuse Hitler to say that his delusions about the Jewish
world conspiracy were real enough to him, or that the association of Jewry
with Bolshevik Russia was taken as self-evident. For the CUP the Van rising
was a realization of a prophecy of Armenian treachery, but because of the
repressive and often murderous nature of CUP policy up to that point, the
prophecy became self-fullling. And any claim that the murder of the
Armenians when it unfolded was not a genocide, simply because there is
not unequivocal evidence of genocidal intent prior to the events of mass
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide 275

deportation and massacre (events from which such intent can be legiti-
mately inferred), is as absurd as the suggestion that the Nazi nal solu-
tion was not a genocide because it was not inscribed before the invasion of
Poland or the USSR that every Jew was to be murdered.96 Since the histori-
ography of the Shoah today is more mature and less politicized than that of
the Armenian genocide, the question does not have such political signi-
cance, but it would be equally controversial for a scholar of the former as
one of the latter to pinpoint exactly when that genocide began.
Part of the interpretative problem is that genocide is more a legal term
than a historical one, designed for the ex post facto judgements of the court-
room rather than the historians attempt to understand events as they de-
velop, that is, out of nongenocidal or latently murderous situations. In this
sense, genocide is a classic example of the past examined teleologicallya
retrospective projection. As the epithet genocide perpetrator has become
the major stigma under international law, the politico-legal battle between,
crudely speaking, representatives of Turks and Armenians, has raged
around the applicability of the term, and specically the key notion of intent.
It may be said categorically that the killing did constitute a genocideevery
aspect of the United Nations denition of the crime is applicablebut rec-
ognizing that fact should be a by-product of the historians work, not its
ultimate aim or underpinning.
In the historiography of the Armenian genocide the writing of recon-
structive history has too often been subordinated to ahistorical ends. Inter-
pretations have been articially dichotomized into pre- and post-decision
periods. The confrontation at Van is a prime example of the confusion to
which such an approach can lead. Representatives of the ofcial Turkish
nationalist viewpoint have tried to use those events to illustrate Armenian
treachery and thus legitimate subsequent CUP policy. On the other side,
while proving that Van was a result of Ottoman aggression, scholars have
argued that the Armenian rising must, therefore, have been a response to a
preconceived policy of genocide, or at least that it gave the perpetrators the
excuse they were looking for.97 The former interpretation cynically disre-
gards the whole history of CUP policy up to April 1915; the latter ignores the
complexities and contingencies of state policy-making in a period of pro-
longed wartime crisis. In reality, the Van episode contributed to the exacer-
bation of existing CUP policy and the unleashing of its most extreme
tendencies. This is probably insufcient for scholars who have been involved
in a long quasi-political battle to prove outright prior genocidal intent. Yet
Van is precisely illustrative of a process of cumulative radicalization toward
a policy of genocide.
13

Pouring a People into the Desert

The Denitive Solution of the Unionists to the
Armenian Question

Fuat Dndar

The massacre of the Armenians, which was at the core of the Committee of
Union and Progresss denitive solution to the Armenian question, has
been extensively, even exhaustively, studied in numerous works. The
scholars Vahakn N. Dadrian, Taner Akam, and Raymond Kvorkian in par-
ticular have analyzed in depth the details of the causes, organization, and
execution of the massacres.1 The actual deportation of the Armenians, how-
ever, remains relatively under-studied. So far, the subject has been
approached from nearly opposite perspectives. According to most ofcial
researchers in Turkey, the deportations did not involve massacres but rather
consisted of the mere removal and relocation of the Armenians to different
sites in the empire.2 However, a second group of researchers almost exclu-
sively from outside of Turkey argue that the displacement of the Armenians
was a pretext for mass murder and a tool with which the Unionist govern-
ment carried out the genocide. In Dadrians words, it constituted an
economy in violence.
Given these divergent interpretations, the deportation of the Armenians
to the desert region of the south requires reexamination. As it stands, the
Armenian deportation amounts to a death sentence for the deported and,
therefore, the denitive solution to the Armenian question. There are three
important factors that make the deportation into the desert region a deadly
action. These are: (1) the fatal difference in climate, ecology, and topography
between the regions of origin of the Armenians and the region of destina-
tion of the deportation; (2) the actualization of the deportations under condi-
tions of war, accompanied by both spontaneous and organized attacks; and,
most signicantly, (3) the execution of the deportations by an empire that
had spent the previous century experimenting with all kinds of population
displacements, thereby accumulating vast knowledge and experience in the

276
Pouring a People into the Desert 277

process. This includes a comprehensive understanding of the devastating

impact of deportation on the deported and especially of the ensuing epi-
demics in their midst. Specically, members of the Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP), who were mostly Balkan immigrants, not only knew about,
but in some cases had also personally experienced, the severe effects of
deportation.3 In addition, Tlt Pasha, the leader of the CUP and the Interior
Minister at the time who made the fateful decision to deport the Armenians,
was certainly aware of the extremely harsh character of the region to which
the Armenians were sent.
In the two sections that make up this article, I show, rst that the decision
to deport the Armenians was expressly lethal, after which I retrace the steps
that the government took to organize the deportations. In many regions
local conditions led to the emergence of practices during both the deporta-
tion as well as the resettlement that differed from the initial orders given
from the center.4
Once referred to as the Province of Desert/Desert Province (l vilayeti)
by Bab- Ali,5 Deir-ez-Zor (Der Zor; henceforth Zor), with its surface area of
78,000 square kilometers6 was the region to which most Armenians were
relocated. Its population in 1907 was 66,294, meaning it was one of least
densely populated regions in the empire.7 Zor lies at the center of a zone
where precipitation levels do not exceed an annual average of 200 millime-
ters. In addition to extreme dryness, the wide variation of temperature in
the region contributes to its terrible harshness. Winters in the area are ex-
ceptionally cold with temperatures frequently dropping below zero degrees
centigrade. The scorching heat and the absence of water in the region cause
animals to perish at very high rates and leave the land completely arid, with
the exception of a few kilometers of rivers. Moreover, the absence of
geographical variation and natural defenses renders the region particularly
unstable.8
The population of the region was (and still is) largely nomadic. Full and
partly nomadic lifestyles helped the people survive harsh physical and cli-
matic conditions. This is why the region counted only 139 villages, the
smallest concentration of communes in the Ottoman Empire in 1917. In
the subprefecture of Zor and Ashara, demographic growth between the
1910 and 1915 censuses was only 2 percent. As the governor of Zor pointed
out, this meant an increase of only 398 people (from 18,265 to 18,663) over
a ve-year span9.
Climatic conditions and nomadic tribalism (al achariyy) constituted the
main obstacles for the establishment of Ottoman authority over the region.
From the middle of the nineteenth century to the Balkan Wars, the primary
concerns of the Ottoman state in Zor were to increase agricultural produc-
tion and thereby its tax revenues, and to stop the aggression of the nomadic
278 Genocide in Local Context

Bedouin tribes on the settled areas. After the Balkan Wars, the question of
where to settle the Balkan muhacirs (refugees) gave further impetus to the
Ottomans efforts to establish authority in the region.
The Ottoman state regarded the nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouins as
undesirable for three reasons. First, their mobility made them difcult to
control, even during peaceful times. Second, the nomads repeatedly attacked
sedentary communities, not only in the Zor region, but also in places as far
as Urfa and the southern borders of Diyarbakr. Third, these attacks impeded
the development of agriculture and therefore the ow of revenue into the
Ottoman treasury. The Ottomans kept trying to nd solutions to these
related problems. In 18511852, even though Zor was chosen to be the
pivotal point in the Bedouin conict,10 the results were not satisfactory. The
other solution was a demographic one: muhacirs from the Caucasus were
settled in regions north of Zor in order to block Bedouin aggression. The
cities of Reslayn and Nusaybin functioned as frontier posts dividing Ana-
tolia and the Zor region, so that there was no urban development beyond
this frontier. During the ensuing years, the government undertook con-
struction of two new communes, Ebu-kemel and Tedmir, as a barrier to
prevent further Bedouin attacks. At the time, the Ottoman administration
noted that The Zor slahat [reform] can only be realized with the establish-
ment of two new outposts of defense in Ebu-Kemal and Tedmir.11 The word
slahat was employed in two different contexts here, to mean agricultural
reform and reforming the people.
After 1870, the settlement of Tcherkess (Circassian/erkes) colonies in
strategic zones allowed for agricultural improvements, extending such ac-
tivity in an eastwardly direction.12 In 1891, the sultan ordered the settlement
of the Kiki and Halican tribes in two towns, Reslayn and Harbo, which had
previously been attacked by Bedouins.13 Throughout this period, the process
of Ottomanization, otherwise called reform, was carried out without much
success. After the 1908 revolution, however, the reform efforts in this region
intensied. The extensive expulsions of the Muslims from the Balkans ele-
vated the signicance of the unoccupied area of Zor. Between 19081913,
many reports, studies, and investigations were produced at irregular inter-
vals about the Zor region on such topics as: were the lands capable of being
farmed? How should the nomadic population be settled? Which agricultural
techniques would help make barren lands cultivatable?
One of these reports, dated April 19, 1910, stated that the problems of the
region stemmed from the nature of the population. Both the Bedouins no-
madic way of life and what the Ottomans called their savagery were
constant sources of annoyance to the authorities. According to this report,
two methods were adopted in order to prevent the Bedouin attacks coming
from the desert: rst, increasing the number of army soldiers in the region
Pouring a People into the Desert 279

and second, providing the cavalry with a sufcient number of mules to

improve mobility. With these military measures on the part of the govern-
ment, the savage tribes would hopefully settle down and adapt to an agri-
cultural lifestyle. Consequently, the Ottomans anticipated that the wealth of
the region would increase, business would grow, and the revenues of the
treasury would multiply.14
A proposal by the Ministry Council dated April 25, 1910, focused on the
agricultural development and population growth of the region. The pro-
posal suggested two measures for accomplishing these goals: rst, the con-
struction of a road from Aleppo to Zor with a barrier of 800 meters along the
Euphrates to prevent it from ooding, and, second, the construction of
seven bridges in the region.15 Additionally, due to the high cost of these
construction projects, the local government was enjoined to prompt local
entrepreneurs to open arid lands for agricultural purposes. In return for
cultivating the land, the government offered to assume the costs of main-
taining publicly registered land.16
The ow of Muslim refugees into Anatolia during the Balkan Wars
increased the interest of Bab- Ali (the Sublime Porte) in the underutilized
region of Zor. The need to create new spaces to live within the borders of
the empire was directly linked to this rapid explosion in the number of im-
migrants. Their numbers grew and steadily lled the vast Anatolian lands;
at the same time, Christian Ottomans refused to accept them in their terri-
tories. As a result, the only possible region of relocation left in the empire
for this Muslim immigrant population was Zor. Thus, the government
developed a project to resettle large numbers of muhacirs and other Anato-
lian populations in the region. However, Lt Efendi, one of the experts on
the region, refused to authorize the implementation of such a project,
stating that the region was not suitable for the installation of the muhacirs
of Anatolia.
In a report to Istanbul dated March 3, 1912, the former assistant of the
governor of Zor stated that only 20% of the administered territories can be
cultivated and these lands are to be found along the Euphrates River.17 He
then went on to point out that the rest of the lands was completely useless.18
The report recommended the settlement of the two largest Bedouin
tribes, the Anz and Chamar, in this large underpopulated territory by
assigning responsibility for these new mobile prefectures to their tribal
chiefs. As the authorities found such a project difcult to implement, they
instead chose to concentrate their troops in the region in order to protect the
settled communities from Bedouin attacks. Yet, this measure alone could
not have been expected to solve the problem. As was emphasized in the
report of the governors ex-assistant, Even if we covered the entire desert
with soldiers, the attempt to control the Bedouin populations would not be
280 Genocide in Local Context

a total success. Such an operation would certainly frighten the population

which has an extremely savage character and this, in turn, would certainly
provoke a rebellion. He therefore suggested increasing agricultural pro-
duction through a more conventional measure, by creating the necessary
infrastructure.
In undertaking such a project, he acknowledged that only the regions
around the Tigre and the Habur that were half an hour from the Euphrates
River were cultivatable; any place else beyond this distance was impossible.
He therefore proposed to construct irrigation canals along the deserts of
Samiya and Cezaire, and along the Euphrates, Tigre and Habur Rivers. In
this case, it would no longer be necessary to search for vacant lands in Ana-
tolia.... and being that you had requested the possible settlement of muhacirs
of Anatolia, even with the settlement of millions of them, there will still be
a lot of land left. The Ottoman ofcial nished his report by stating that if
the infrastructure was completed, the problem of underpopulation would
be resolved.19
On July 6, 1914, during a parliamentary session dedicated to the question
of the persecution of Ottoman Greeks, the deputy of Aydn, Emmanouil
Emmanouilidis Efendi asked the Minister of Interior Tlt Pasha the reason
for the settlement of the muhacirs in Greek villages since this action had
provoked the departure of many Greeks.20 He noted that It was not
necessary to choose the Greek villages to settle the muhacirs. If we need
empty lands, there are many stretching from skdar, all the way to the
Gulf of Bassorah. It is not fair to bring the muhacirs into the Greek villages
since it provokes unpleasant events. If the order to settle [the muhacirs in]
these areas is not deliberate, then what is the true reason?21 The response
of Tlt Pasha was very revealing. First, he explained that after having lled
all the Muslim villages, they had to settle the muhacirs in the Greek villages.
As for the regions stretching to Bassora:

Indeed, there are enormous parcels of land there, but in order to settle them
the way Emmanouilidis Efendi has said, we rst need 1520 million pounds,
something which we do not have. If we had sent them and dispersed the
muhacirs [who were a total of 270 thousand], they would all be dead of hunger
and Emmanouilidis Efendi would not be happy.22

Yet it was only ten months later, on April 24, 1915, that Tlt Pasha would
make the decision to deport the Armenians to exactly these regions where he
knew they would all be dead of hunger. Such a decision, unprecedented in
Ottoman history, signies a collective punishment for the Armenian popula-
tion: it was the transfer of an incorrigible people to a region that was
uncultivatable. Hence, hundreds of thousands of people would be trans-
ferred to an underpopulated region dominated by the desert landscape.
Pouring a People into the Desert 281

Even though the Armenian deportations have often been regarded as a

single event in terms of their organization and procedures, the Ottoman
archives reveal that there were actually ve different waves of deportations
with disparate targets, destinations, durations and levels of violence. The
rst wave did not commence in April 1915, as is often asserted, but two
months earlier: it was precisely the reaction of Armenian intellectuals in
Istanbul to these deportations that led to their own violent removal two
months later. Hence, the rst wave of Armenian deportations was ordered
in February 1915 and the direction of the deportation was to the heartland
of Anatolia, not away from it.
Even though the CUP claimed that it had rst experienced problems
with the loyalty of its Armenian subjects on the eastern front, the rst
Armenian deportations were carried out in Syria, then under the authority
and command of Cemal Pasha. After his rst military defeat in the Egyp-
tian Suez Canal operation, Cemal Pasha decided to change the ethnic com-
position of the region under his command in case of a future Allied
advance. Hence, upon returning to his headquarters in Syria in February
1915, he analyzed the potential threat of the Armenians of Zeytun and
Drtyol. It was therefore Cemal Pasha who rst proposed the deportation
of the Armenians. And with the order of the Interior Ministry dated Feb-
ruary 26, 1915, the deportation of the Armenians began into the Anato-
lian Desertas it was described by a foreign reporterin particular to
the Sultania district of Konya.23 As Tlt Pasha noted in his memoirs,
these deportations greatly disturbed the Armenian intellectuals of Istan-
bul,24 leading him to intervene and remove them as well, resulting in the
second and better-known wave of Armenian deportations two months
later.
On April 24, 1915, while Armenian intellectuals and politicians25 were
being arrested in stanbul, Tlt Pasha ordered a change in destination
for the Armenian convoys that had been expelled from Alexandretta, Drtyol,
Adana, Hain, Zeytun, and Sis in the February deportations.26 The new
objective of the Armenian deportees was not central Anatolia, but outside
of Anatolia to the desert, toward the south-east of Aleppo, to Zor and
Urfa.27 While the evacuation of the Cilicia region was taking place, some
Muslim populations from the Russian Empire took refuge in Ottoman
territories on the eastern front. On May 2, 1915, an Ottoman general pro-
posed to expel the Ottoman Armenians in eastern Anatolia to the Russian
lands and settle these new Muslim refugees in their place.28 However
stanbul did not accept this proposition because the Committee of Union
and Progress was pursuing a different demographic policy vis--vis
the Armenian population, which in turn led to a separate, third wave of
deportations.
282 Genocide in Local Context

Instead of sending the Armenians to the Russian territories, the govern-

ment commanded instead on May 9, 1915, that they be deported towards
the south. This was a consequence of the CUPs demographic policy toward
to the Armenians. If the Armenians were expelled to Russian territories, the
Young Turk leaders conjectured, there was a possibility that they would
return with the Russian army and resettle in this region, ending up consti-
tuting the majority in certain areas. This would establish permanent Arme-
nian hegemony over Ottoman land. Also, since the Armenians were locals
and therefore familiar with the topography, they might be conscripted and
used by the Russian army against the Ottomans. In short, they presented a
potential threat to the security of Anatolia. Due to these demographic, polit-
ical, military, and strategic reasons, the Armenians were deported not to the
Russian territories but instead to the south. The government then decided
to evacuate all the Armenians from those areas where the Armenian popu-
lation [had been] compact; namely, the south of Erzurum, the coast of the
Van lake, the city center of Van, Bitlis, Sassun, and Talori.29
Ultimately however this order was not executed. In those days all frontier
areas were in a state of chaos and it would have been difcult to carry out
such a command. It should also be noted that the Van resistance had begun
on April 19, 1915, on the initiative of Armen Garo (Karekin Pastrmacyan,
the ex-deputy of Erzurum, 19081912).30 Indeed, it was after the loss of Van
that the fourth wave of deportations commenced.
Four days after the loss of Van, Tlt Pasha ordered the complete evacua-
tion of the border areas as well as the region of Cilicia. There were to be two
main zones of evacuation: the southern zone (comprising Erzurum, Van,
and Bitlis) and the western zone (Adana, Antep, and Aleppo). Even though
this order included all the border regions, the regions of Sivas, Mamuretl-
aziz and Diyarbakr had not yet been designated evacuation zones. The des-
tinations of the deportees were assigned according to zone; deportees from
the southern zone would be sent to Urfa, Zor and the south-west of Musul,
and those from the western zone, the south of Syria and Aleppo.31
In resettling the Armenians, the Ottoman army followed three principles
very closely. The rst, known as the ten percent principle, stated that the
number of settled Armenians was never to exceed one-tenth of the Muslim
forces and tribes living in the region. Second, the number of houses in a
village constructed by the deportees could never exceed fty. And third, the
Armenian deportees were never allowed to change their places of settlement.32
From the beginning of the Armenian deportation, the CUP leaders
intended that Muslims and Turks would be resettled in the evacuated Arme-
nian villages. While the military and security forces were in charge of clean-
ing out these villages, the Directorate of the Settlement of Tribes and
Immigrants (IAMM) was in charge of lling them back up.33
Pouring a People into the Desert 283

On May 26, 1915, Tlt Pasha submitted the bill (tezkire) on resettlement
to the Prime Ministry (Sadaret).34 On May 30, 1915, Meclis-i Vkela accepted
the provisional law entitled Temporary Law concerning precautions to be
taken by the military side to counter those who oppose government actions
during military campaigns. Known as the Deportation Law (Tehcir
Kanunu), it did not explicitly mention the Armenians, but it was clear that
they were the implied target. The provisional law became effective on June
1, 1915, upon its publication in the ofcial journal (Takvim-i Vekyi), at
which point the Ottoman Army was legally empowered to act.35
The fth and nal stage of the deportations included all the remaining
Armenians. June 21, 1915, marked a turning point for the Armenian plight
as this was the date when Tlt Pasha commanded the deportation of all
Armenians without exception (istisnasz btn Ermeniler) who lived in the
ten provinces of the eastern region, including Trabzon, Diyarbakr, Canik,
Sivas, and Mamuretl-aziz. Henceforth, all Armeniansexcept the ones
considered useful to the statewere to be deported to Musul, Urfa, and
Zor.36 According to the new principles of settlement, the Armenian depor-
tees were forbidden to open their own schools and all Armenian children
had to attend state schools. They had to be dispersed in Muslim villages at a
proportion of ten percent. If they could, they had to build their villages in
places designated by the state; the villages could not comprise more than
fty houses and they had to be at least ve hours away from one another.
Hence, even though the state did not build a concentration camp, per se,
it constructed a region of concentration.37
The Armenians who were permitted to stay in Anatolia belonged to three
categories of families and to some privileged geographical regions. These
categories were the families of the artisans and soldiers; the Protestants and
Catholics; and single women and orphaned children. But the state decided
who was included in an Armenian family: according to its denition, for
instance, all children 15 years old and over were no longer considered family
members. Even girls under 15 years old, if married, were no longer consid-
ered members of the family.38
In the beginning of the deportation process, the Ottoman state had
excluded from the deportations those Armenians who had converted to
Islam. But the CUP changed its policy within a few weeks and ordered the
deportation of Armenians who had become Muslims as well. Some months
later, conversion would also be forbidden, except for those Armenian women
who had been married to Muslim men and therefore converted.
Despite the order to deport all Armenians without exception Arme-
nians in some regions as well as a few Armenian families were spared. Even
though the causes often varied, the provinces of Edirne, stanbul, and zmir
generally witnessed the expulsion of Armenian revolutionary committee
284 Genocide in Local Context

members, with the majority of the population not included in the deporta-
tion. The main reason for the expulsion of Edirne was geopolitical: as the city
was on the European border, any drastic movement could easily be observed
by foreigners. A large number of foreigners also resided in stanbul, the cap-
ital. For the case of zmir, the deciding factor was the governor Rahmi Bey
within the CUP and his belief that the removal of the Armenians would be
the death sentence for the commerce of the city.
On July 5, 1915, while the evacuation regions came to include the west-
ern provinces (the vilayets of Ankara, Eskiehir and the like), the boundaries
of the deportation region were revised once again so that the new zones
were composed of the sancak of Kerkk 80 kilometers from the Persian
border; the south and east of the Musul vilayet; south and west of Zor, in-
cluding the valley of Euphrates and Habour; the southeast of Aleppo vilayet
and southeast of Harran and Kerek sancaks.39 On July 13, 1915, several
weeks after the total evacuation order, Tlt Pasha declared to the director of
the abandoned property commission of Aleppo that the deportation had
been carried out as the denitive solution to the Armenian Question.40 He
had literally managed to eliminate the Armenian issue from the agenda of
the Ottoman Empire.
Part V
CONTINUITIES
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14

Turkey for the Turks

Demographic Engineering in Eastern Anatolia,
19141945

Uur mit ngr

The twentieth century, Anthony Giddens solemnly reminds us, is a

bloody and frightening one. While some scholars have dubbed the twenti-
eth century the century of genocide or have employed other superlatives
to describe its horrors, others have characterized the same century as that
of the camps, the age of barbarism, the century of fear, or the age of
hatred.1 Specically, the rst half of twentieth-century world history was
marked by a tremendous body count resulting from wars and genocidal vi-
olence.2 In 1954, le spectateur engag Raymond Aron noted the unique nature
of the violence in this period where the new wars were total due to their
unprecedented use of propaganda and bureaucracy.3 In a lucid article, Ian
Kershaw aptly paraphrases this interpretation:
This rst half of the centuryor, more precisely, the years 1914 to 1950 that
spanned the period from the beginning of the First World War to the end of
the Second World War ..., when high levels of violence against civilian popu-
lations with the resulting misery of millions continuedhas indeed claimed,
more surely than any other period in history, to be labeled the era of vio-
lence. That is to say: in these four decades of the twentieth century, violence
had epochal character; it determined the age.4

Micha Brumlik identies three fundamental aspects of this epochal

character: namely, the industrial killing of noncombatants, the establish-
ment of lawless enclaves embodied in concentration camps, and the politi-
cally motivated deportation and expulsion of indigenous peoples.5 Gtz Aly
concurs and adds, There was nothing taboo about the forcible resettlement
of population groups and entire peoples in the rst half of the twentieth
century.... Resettlement programs were routinely justied by reference to
economic and ideological arguments.6 Although the period 19001950

287
288 Continuities

indeed merits special attention for scholars interested in nationalist vio-

lence, nationalist population policies in general constitute more than out-
right violence and often include a broad range of possible political strategies.
For as Amir Weiner has noted: Whatever its ideological coloring, social
engineering possessed a tremendous capacity for violence.7
This chapter surveys the literature on Young Turk social engineering,
and synthesizes two hitherto separately studied phases of Young Turk nation
formation and social engineering: the rst phase of 19131918, and the sec-
ond phase of 19231950. It argues that there are solid arguments to suggest
that a relatively cohesive dictatorship existed from 1913 to 1950 that pro-
foundly transformed Ottoman society. Though the scholarship on Young
Turk social engineering is developing very rapidly, so far, the regime has
been studied in a fragmented way with focus on specic aspects rather than
its coherence. This chapter will challenge this convention by providing a
new interpretative context and developing the thesis that from 1913 to 1950
a clear continuity can be observed in the Young Turk dictatorships policies
of ethnic homogenization.
Demographic engineering encompasses the exercise of all possible state
policies aimed at changing the composition of a given society. Donald Blox-
ham offered a recent denition that is concise and pointed; for him, demo-
graphic engineering and population policies are interchangeable concepts,
a series of coercive state measures in pursuit of population homogeneity.8
It is a derivation of the term social engineering, which originated from late
nineteenth-century discussions by industrialists on personnel policies.9 In
the era of nationalism and nation-states, demographic engineering became
tantamount to the enforced maximization of ethnic, religious, economic,
cultural (in other words: identity) homogeneity. It is in fact partly synony-
mous with persecution, a concept which may be easy to invoke, but which
does not do justice to the organizational complexity and surgical precision
of modern persecutions. Although persecution is probably as old as human-
kind, only in the twentieth century did it acquire a decidedly calculated and
systematic character. Instead of sloppy pogroms periodically striking fear
into peoples hearts, the story of twentieth-century persecutions is that of a
permanent terror of rened plans and calculating bureaucracies.10
States can apply six strategies of demographic engineering.11 Ordered
from the least to the most violent, the rst involves the manipulation of
censuses. The twin principles of sovereignty and democracy, entrenched in
the paradigm of nationalism, guarantee that the ethnic majority holds polit-
ical power. Nation-states therefore closely follow the ethnic composition of
the population. The second strategy, closely connected to the rst, is natality
that augments absolute and relative numbers of the national group at the
expense of minorities. A third strategy is border alteration, which aims to
Turkey for the Turks 289

achieve total overlap between ethnic and political boundaries. Forced assim-
ilation is the fourth strategy of demographic engineering. Nationalist
regimes may pressure subject minorities to become like the majority in
order to produce greater homogeneity, leading many scholars to interpret
such policies as ethnocide or cultural genocide.12 Massive population
transfers such as population exchanges, deportations, or violent ethnic
cleansing aimed to create homogeneous societies are a fth strategy. Finally,
genocidal destruction is the most extreme and violent of all the possible
strategies of demographic engineering.
The concept of demographic engineering is a useful analytical tool to
discuss Young Turk population politics. The construction of the Turkish na-
tion-state and the homogenization of Ottoman society were pursued
through a range of strategies extending from the least coerced policies such
as gradual integration to massively violent ones, including genocide. Virtu-
ally all of the abovementioned techniques were utilized by the Young Turk
regime to homogenize Ottoman society and t it into their ideological tem-
plate of the Turkish nation-state.
The Ottoman Empire and its successors, including the Turkish Republic,
did not remain immune to the era of nationalism. An incomplete list of
nationalist violence in this era would include: the 1909 Adana massacres, the
violent expulsion of Balkan Muslims throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the
anti-Bulgarian and anti-Greek boycotts and persecutions of 1914, the 1915
deportations and genocide of Armenians and Syriacs, the 1916 crackdown on
Arab-nationalist and Zionist groups, the 1918 revenge killings of Muslims in
Eastern Anatolia, the 1921 Kogiri massacre, the 192021 Pontus massacres,
the 1925 massacres and deportations of Kurds, the 1934 anti-Jewish pogrom
in Thrace, the 1938 massacres and deportations of Dersim, the 194244 per-
secutions and deportations of non-Muslims, and one is even tempted to
include the 1955 pogrom against Greeks and Armenians in Istanbul.
Together, the violence and counterviolence cost millions of people from
all walks of life their lives and livelihood. Listed in this bookkeeping of
death, these campaigns may appear as incidental and isolated events,
sudden explosions encapsulated in time and space. Yet a closer look reveals
clear ideological, motivational, and organic links and interdependencies.
Were it not for the fact that almost all of these episodes of mass violence
originated and occurred under Young Turk rule, the breadth and difference
in each singular event would seem to preclude any interconnections. This
chapter calls this apparent isolation into question by analyzing the scattered
events and positing a larger picture. I argue that these concrete events are
constituents of the dark side of the process of Turkish nation-building,
launched after 1913, during which social engineering started to develop
piecemeal and was continuously in effect.
290 Continuities

Turkish-nationalist demographic engineering consisted of a broad scope

of policies ranging from marginalization, isolation, incarceration, border
alteration, deportation, forced assimilation, and population exchange to out-
right indiscriminate massacre, and in the most extreme case, fully edged
genocidal destruction. The fate of the victims depended both on their per-
ceived ethnic and political distance from the newly proclaimed and heavily
Islamized Turkish national identity and on the contingency of international
politics. Ethnicity was equated with loyalty, so that loyal Christian Armenian
government employees were doomed to be excluded whereas tax-evading
Turkish Alevi peasants were often folded into this new identity (whose
boundaries moreover uctuated at intervals). Some groups, such as Muslim
Kurds or Sephardic Jews, were considered slightly more Turkiable
(eintrkf hig) than others, albeit ambiguously.13 Much of this designation
was carried out with little regard for real and proclaimed loyalties. Once
these processes of persecution escalated, millions were cleansed from their
ancestral lands in mere years.
The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 was a watershed in
the modern history of the Middle East, marking the turn of a multiethnic
empire into nation-states set upon homogenizing their populations in their
everlasting nationalist search for identity. Scholars of Turkish-nationalist
social engineering have established that in Turkey too, encompassing cam-
paigns of thorough homogenization were carried out. In these years a gen-
eration of Turkish politicians, also known as the Young Turks, managed to
maintain power and persisted in implementing plans of demographic ho-
mogenization, carried out under the banner of nation-building. In what fol-
lows, I summarize the main debates on social engineering in Turkey,
utilizing key studies in this small but burgeoning eld.
On the historiographic level, Fatma Mge Gek detects three dis-
courses on CUP era social engineering policies: an Ottoman Investiga-
tive Narrative (the accounts of Ottoman citizens before 1923), a
Republican Defensive Narrative (the nationalist master narrative de-
nying all kinds of state-led wrongdoings), and a Postnationalist Critical
Narrative (comprising critical intellectuals challenges to the previous
narratives, opening up new avenues of research)(See chapter 2 in this vol-
ume).14 One could perhaps add to this portrait the Minority Memorial
Narrative: growing attempts (political and scholarly) of a plethora of com-
munity activists of various victimized peoples to document and vociferate
the violence perpetrated against their nation and popularize accounts
thereof, which were silenced and relegated to oblivion by ofcial Turkish
historiography. After all, had they not drawn attention to these historical
sufferings, fewer scholars would have picked up these signals and con-
ducted further research.
Turkey for the Turks 291

In an early article Mark Levene argued that once Ottoman politicians

were inuenced by Turkish nationalism, it was only a matter of time before
eastern Anatolia became a laboratory for Turkish nation-building. Levene
was unreserved in expressing that this extremely violent process engulfed a
mosaic of victims.15 Hilmar Kaiser deepened this notion and demonstrated
in purely historical yet extremely detailed research that the treatment of the
Armenians and Syriacs was nothing short of genocide, and the deportation
of Kurds and Greeks were integral parts of the CUP scheme of ethnic
restructuringon second thought, a euphemistic and potentially malig-
nant term.16 Deportation was the core theme in the work of Fuat Dndar,
according to whom the deportation was a total project aimed at what may
be considered separating the wheat from the chaff, that is, the cultural
assimilation of Muslims and exclusion of non-Muslims.17 These were the
rst instances in which the debate on Turkish social engineering was taken
seriously as an autonomous and legitimate eld of study.
Periodization remains far from a settled issue. In an account of the Turk-
ish nation-building process, Taner Akam traces its key aspects and links it
to the forced Turkication of Anatolia up to the establishment of the Repub-
lic. According to this interpretation, the Armenian Genocide was the apex of
this long and at times very violent process.18 Others have periodized social
engineering from 1923 on. In a massive volume describing anti-Jewish
measures and policies of the Kemalist regime through the use of a rich
array of sources in a multitude of languages, Rfat Bali has pointed out that
although the Ottoman Jews may have never been targeted genocidally, nei-
ther were they ever to be included in the Turkish nation. Bali explains that
during the Kemalist era, the Turkish Jews were beseiged for linguistic
assimilation and economic and administrative exclusion.19 An alternative
interpretation is offered by Ayhan Aktar, who writes that no Muslim ethnic
group was ever considered a minority. According to Aktar, the Kemalists
excluded Armenians, Greeks, and Jews from society through economic
Turkication, isolation, and expulsion, because these groups were perceived
as non-Turkiable minorities.20 A comprehensive and authoritative study
by Hans-Lukas Kieser described many aspects and detailed histories of
CUP social engineering rightly emphasizing Turkish nationalism as the
driving force behind the homogenizing efforts, which can be characterized
between 1913 and 1923 as nation-state policies on an imperial scale. His
periodization is broad but nevertheless also cuts through the mystifying
barrier of 1923.21
Some scholars have rightly pointed out the variegated nature of CUP
social engineering, involving not only a human cost, but the reorganization
of space as well. In a recent article Erol lker notes that Turkication was
a project of nation-building, aiming to keep the unity of the empire under
292 Continuities

the domination of a Turkish national core. Glossing over the genocidal

persecution of Ottoman Armenians and Ottoman Syriacs,22 as well as the
formative inuence of these events for the infrastructure of the envisioned
Turkied Ottoman state, lker notes how the CUP had Anatolia incorpo-
rate Kurdistan as a form of spatial nation formation.23 In an original
analysis of nationalist social engineering, Kerem ktem characterized its
Turkish manifestations as a double-edged sword, involving the exclusion of
non-Turkish people on the one hand, but the nationalist incorporation of
their space on the other.24 Soner aaptay traced the roots of nation-forma-
tion in the Turkish Republic to the millet system with its established cate-
gories of people. According to his matrix of Turkishness, potential Turks
could only become Turks after a process of ltration involving a full iden-
tity change.25
Were it not only for the fact that these works constitute a sophisticated
and impressive corpus of research literature on the subject, they should not
be easily dismissed as drops in the ocean, especially considering the reluc-
tance of other scholars to work dedicatedly on these themes. Although
research on this theme is developing rapidly, at present it still lacks many
elements, including the place of the Armenian Genocide within this larger
picture, the economic context of the genocide, longitudinal perspectives of
continuity between the CUP and Kemalism, and empirical historical studies
on the treatment and experiences of less well studied minorities.26 The latter
two issues are addressed below.
In a trailblazing analysis of modern Turkish history, Erik-Jan Zrcher
convincingly demonstrated the ideological and organic continuity of the
Turkish-nationalist political elite in the era 19081950.27 His longitudinal
study concentrates on one theme, namely, that of political leadership.
Although 1923 had been interpreted as a turning point in Ottoman-Turk-
ish history, Zrchers alternative interpretation stresses the continuity of
the political elite in the period 19101940. His contribution is limited to
the ebb and ow of Young Turk politics, and does not systematically ad-
dress longitudinal trends of Turkish political positions toward minorities.
Longitudinal research on social engineering in Turkey in this period has
yet to be conducted.
This brief recapitulation of existing research provokes further historio-
graphical questions. I explicitly problematize the construction in the litera-
ture of the concept of minorities in the rst place: the small but growing
literature on minorities (aznlklar) and their treatment in Turkey often
approaches the concept in political-legal terms. This is not surprising given
that the concept is indeed not only politically derived, but has also evolved
through various stages throughout the twentieth century, assuming many
political, legal, and sociological forms. This research tradition includes
Turkey for the Turks 293

Kemalist policies toward non-Muslims, with Balis and Aktars work as note-
worthy examples. Yet the literature often employs a legal denition of mi-
norities instead of taking into account the political viewpoint of the Kemalist
elitewhich also included many other minorities. Hence, rather than
departing from the Turkish-nationalist political mind, scholars instead
choose to part with the 1923 Lausanne Treaty denition of minorities,
which dened Armenians, Greeks, and Jews as minorities, and in the
process ignored the existence of small and large pockets of Yezidis, Pontic
Greeks, Alevis, Syriacs, and other ethnoreligious social groups. Another se-
rious and overlooked issue is the ethnic indeterminacy in many areas: it was
often difcult to pinpoint who was a Kurd, Syriac, Armenian, Greek, or
Turk. I argue here that this otherwise perfectly legitimate interpretation of
Turkication policies applies, somewhat differently but at least as forcefully,
to social engineering policies toward other groups as well.
It is not precisely clear if and when the CUP planned to engage in an all-
out campaign of nationalization, that is, Turkication of the Ottoman
Empire. Nonetheless, it is possible to reconstruct some of the key processes
and decisions that may very likely have led to the shaping of wartime pol-
icies. Three parallel developments were in effect during the years before the
war. An ethnoreligious polarization at the highest political level impelled
the CUP leadership to steer away from political pluralism. They were con-
vinced that only their vision of saving the country by forcefully transforming
it into an ethnically homogenous core state with an ethnically homogenous
core population was the only acceptable model for the Ottoman Empire.
Several key initiatives were implemented to actualize this vision. For ex-
ample, detailed ethnographic research on almost all the non-Turkish Otto-
man peoples was undertaken in order to facilitate these plans of ethnic
restructuring. Finally, the CUP put into effect several trial balloons that
aimed at Turkication of many domains of Ottoman society.
Huge losses of the Balkan wars, the ensuing establishment of na-
tion-states by formerly Ottoman subjects, and the persecution of Ottoman
Muslims in those regions, conrmed suspicions within the CUP that non-
Turkish Ottomans could not be trusted. The CUP analysis of the political
predicament of the Ottoman minorities quickly turned hostile; within the
tense environment of the Ottoman parliament, the various (Turkish, Greek,
Arab, Armenian, Kurdish) deputies ignored, accused, cursed, provoked,
and even threatened each other. Yet, especially after the Balkan wars, eth-
nic-minority deputies came together in solidarity during the plenary
debates against the CUP when the latter continuously issued Turkication
laws.28 During these debates, the CUP capitalized on the victimization of
the Ottoman Muslims in the Balkans and threatened the discordant minor-
ities with sanctions.
294 Continuities

Although the CUP did not have a detailed program, the leadership never-
theless gradually became more determined to homogenize the country by
forcefully altering its demographic makeup. Party ideologue Ziya Gkalp
wrote extensively about Turkifying the empire by concentrating the non-
Ottoman Muslims on Ottoman territory and by instilling Turkish nation-
alism into the Ottoman Muslims.29 According to Gkalp, this would
contribute to the nascence of a new Turkey. As he wrote in a poem titled
Motherland (Vatan):

A country that nobody plots against,

Each individual being united in ideal, language, tradition, religion,
Its parliament clean, without Boos30 speaking,
Its children happily sacricing their lives at its borders,
Hey Turks, that is what your motherland ought to be!31

The poem reveals Gkalps fantasies of a nation-state, as he indulges in

wishful dreams of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political homogeneity and
purity. In his famous poem Red Apple (Kzlelma) he fantasizes about cul-
tural and linguistic purity, as well as the demographic homogeneity of what
he calls a new Turkish World. The poem contains the following passage:

He said it was important to get to know the East /

said the people are a garden and we are gardeners (halk bahe biz bahvanz) /
trees are not rejuvenated by grafting only /
rst it is necessary to trim the tree.32

This excerpt quite literally reects Zygmunt Baumans metaphor of gar-

dening the human landscape. For Gkalp, the composition of society had to
change and the political elite was in charge of making that happen. Yet
Gkalps romanticizing of a Turkish nation-state was not limited to his po-
etry; the investigations he conducted for the CUP in his native Diyarbakr on
the Ottoman Kurds also laid out the foundation for the future Turkication
of the empire.33
It was not long before the CUP party dictatorship started to articulate the
concept of Turkication at party congresses in Salonica (1910, 1911) and
Istanbul (1912, 1913) as they adopted the ideology of Turkish nationalism
and emphasized the signicance of national education. Still, no explicit
comments were made on the fate of the Ottoman minorities.34 Due to the
secretive nature of the CUP and the sensitivity of this question, critical
decisions on this issue were made behind closed doors. According to Halil
Mentee (d. 1935), chairman of the Ottoman parliament, Tlt Bey informed
him during a meeting that he prepared to clean the country of treacherous
elements.35 The slogan of the new CUP policy, namely Turkey for the
Turks, is often attributed to Tlt.36
Turkey for the Turks 295

In May, June, and August 1914, Enver Paa organized a series of secret
meetings at the War Ministry, at which the elimination of the non-Turkish
masses was discussed with Special Organization operatives, most notably
one of its commanders, Kuuba Eref (d. 1922), Envers close trustee.37
During these meetings, the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire were juxta-
posed with the presence of clusters of non-Turkish people in strategic areas,
such as in the Aegean area, which harbored hundreds of thousands of Otto-
man Greeks. CUP loyalists decided that these internal tumors had to be
removed once and for all, in other words, Indel Smyrna had to become
Turkish zmir.38 This encompassing program was primarily directed
against non-Muslim Ottoman civilians like the Greeks, Syriacs, and Arme-
nians, and secondarily against non-Turkish Muslim populations like the
Arabs, Kurds, and Albanians. Small or scattered religious groups such as
the Alevis, Yezidis, Druzes, Jews, or Shiites were targeted as well.
Existing Ottoman bureaucratic tools sufced and needed only minor cre-
ative adjustments to carry out this CUP policy of nationalization. First of
all, the hierarchic fabric of Ottoman state organs allowed for the highest
echelons of any ministry (such as the Minister of the Interior) to telegraph-
ically communicate all the way down to the county level with even the most
insignicant civil servants and police ofcers. Discipline was reinforced not
only through the proverbial Ottoman political culture of obedience, but es-
pecially by the CUPs reputation for ruthlessness. Still, many written orders
were revoked and replaced by covert oral orders, a typical CUP practice.39
Another important bureaucratic apparatus was the establishment of the
Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants (skn- Air ve
Muhacirn Mdriyeti, henceforth AMM) in early 1914 for two purposes: to
advance the sedentarization of the many Turkoman, Kurdish, and Arab
tribes on the one hand, and to provide accommodation for the homeless
Muslim refugees, expelled from the Balkans and Russia on the other.40
AMM later branched out into four units, namely settlement, intelligence,
deportation, and tribes.41 The most prolic name in the establishment was
kr Kaya, the Director of Deportation (Sevkiyat Mdr) who person-
ally organized and oversaw most of the deportations.42
Since the army would play a secondary role in the program, the concen-
tration and purposeful canalization of a huge reservoir of violence was del-
egated to the Special Organization, which was reorganized in 1914 and split
into an external branch assigned to instigating rebellions in Iran and Cauca-
sia, and an internal branch charged with supervising the program of nation-
alization.43 The organizations rearrangement meant that it was now
detached from regular Ottoman military jurisdiction and brought under the
direct control of the CUP, specically under the auspices of Dr. Bahaeddin
akir (18771922) and Dr. Nzm (18721926).44 With a single order, the
296 Continuities

CUP could now deploy tens of thousands of ruthless and heavily armed
paramilitary troops to all corners of the vast empire to dispense violence.
Along with aligning bureaucratic organs, the CUP had also ordered the
conduct of detailed research on the demographic and ethnological charac-
teristics of the targeted ethnic and religious groups.45 These investigations
initiated on March 14, 1916, by the AMM, which had by then been renamed
the General Directorate for Tribes and Immigrants (Air ve Muhacirn
Mdriyet-i Ummiyesi, AMMU), were based on both eld work and careful
examination of previous research conducted by CUP specialists during and
after the World War. Thus, Baha Said was assigned to research the Kzlba
and Bektai communities, Mehmed Tahir and Hasan Fehmi the Ahi com-
munities, Esat Uras analyzed the Armenians, while Zekeriya Sertel concen-
trated mainly on the Kurdish-Alevi tribes. Habil dem was assigned to
mapping out the details of Kurdish and Turkoman tribes.46 Zekeriya Sertel,
who worked at the Tribes division of AMMU, later wrote in his memoirs
that the purpose of these research programs was to gather information in
order to act accordingly.47 Though most of this research was directly ordered
by kr Kaya, Ottoman documents reveal that in several instances it was
Tlt who personally requested detailed information like lists and maps
often covering information down to even the village level.48 In the end, the
CUP research program produced thousands of pages of detailed knowledge
on the targeted ethnic groups, most of whom were inhabitants of the east-
ern provinces of the empire.
It was during the summer of 1913 that the CUP gradually but resolutely
launched extensive campaigns of Turkication on practically all domains of
Ottoman society.49 They began with place names, Turkifying them and
wiping out in the process all traces of non-Turkish cultures: for instance, the
Kzlkilise (Red Church) county in the Dersim district was changed into
Nazmiye (after the Ottoman politician Nzm Paa).50 Although the practice
was suspended until the end of the war, this CUP practice continued well
into the 1960s and ended up in the alteration of tens of thousands of topo-
graphic names.51 As social Turkication constituted another signicant
component of the CUP campaign, all state organs (including all schools)
were ordered to correspond and communicate only in the Turkish language;
likewise, businesses owned or operated by non-Muslims were harassed into
using Turkish in all their corporate transactions. The Minister of Commerce
and Agriculture, Ahmed Nesimi, admitted that this linguistic enthusiasm
was in essence a method to get more Muslims employed in the Ottoman
economy. Ultimately, this forceful tactic would lead to the establishment of
the national economy that the CUP dreamed of.52
In 1914, most businesses in the Aegean area were owned by the Ottoman
Greeks. When persuasion for the Turkication of the economy did not
Turkey for the Turks 297

produce the desired effect, the CUP took recourse to more violent methods.
It sent emissaries like Special Organization agent Kara Kemal to assist the
CUP Responsible Secretary (and later president of the Turkish Republic)
Celal Bayar to forcibly Turkify the economy of Smyrna/zmir.53 In the
summer of 1914, this political and nationalist persecution gained mo-
mentum as boycotts and expropriations escalated into kidnappings and as-
sassinations of Greek businessmen and community leaders, and even the
wholesale deportations of villages.54 The fact that after this campaign of
terror many Ottoman Greeks opted to emigrate to Chios or Greece, aban-
doning their properties and lands to the Ottoman Muslims, was perceived
by the CUP as a great administrative success and led to the rapid advance-
ment of both Kara Kemal and Celal Bayar within the organization. The pro-
gram of Turkication was thus being translated into effective policy.
The deportations of Armenians and Kurds away from the eastern prov-
inces constituted two major pillars of Young Turk nationalist social engi-
neering. Comparing these two deportations is useful, as they serve as control
groups for each other. From a comparison of the deportations a converging
motive surfaces: the demographic dilution of these two ethnic minorities in
the eastern provinces.
The evolution of the persecution of the Ottoman Armenians is relatively
well known.55 In early 1915, some Armenians had already been deported
from their native regions, though this was not yet an empire-wide cam-
paign. The process of deporting practically the entire Armenian millet began
on May 23, 1915, when Tlt issued orders for the compulsory deportation
of all Armenians to Der Zor, starting with the northeastern provinces,56
urging that very same day the Fourth Army Commander to court-martial
any Muslims collaborating with the Christians.57 The Third Army was then
placed under the command of General Mahmud Kmil Paa, who had been
issued a similar order instructing him that any Muslim protecting an
Armenian was to be hanged in front of his house, his house burnt down;
and if [such a Muslim] held an ofce, that he should be immediately removed
from it and brought in front of a martial court.58 These massive arrests and
persecutions prompted the Entente Powers to announce a joint declaration
on May 24, 1915, denouncing the CUP policies against the Armenians. The
declaration vehemently criticized these new crimes of Turkey against hu-
manity and civilization and promised that they will hold personally re-
sponsible ... all members of the Ottoman government and those of their
agents who are implicated in such massacres.59 The CUP leaders, espe-
cially Tlt, panicked and attempted to disguise the deportations, requesting
permission from the grand vizier on May 26 to issue a temporary deporta-
tion law. Although the deportations had already commenced, the grand
vizier endorsed Tlts law on May 29, rushing the bill through the Ottoman
298 Continuities

parliament the next day. This legal cover marked the ofcial inception of the
deportation of Armenians to the Syrian desert as it authorized the army to
proceed with this fait accompli and delegated its daily implementation to
the AMM.60
The history of deportation in the Ottoman Empire can be traced back
centuries.61 However, the execution of the Armenian and Kurdish deporta-
tions displayed a fundamental breach with conventional Ottoman statecraft
in that the internal campaigns were to run parallel to the external war effort
with the Great Powers, especially on the eastern front against Russia. It was
no coincidence that most of the slaughter of the noncombatant Ottoman
Christians occurred in the eastern provinces, where the threat of a Russian
invasion backed by Armenian insiders was, in the paranoid minds of the
CUP dictators, most immediate. However, these deportations and persecu-
tions mostly occurred as autonomous processes and were only partly linked
to the ebb and ow of the war. The initiation and conduct of the persecu-
tions were generally in the hands of the Interior Ministry civil bureaucrats,
not the military personnel of the Ministry of War. By the autumn of 1915,
the Ottoman bureaucracy had depopulated most of the Armenian settle-
ments, isolated or eliminated the Armenian community leaders, and was
already micromanaging the expropriation and allocation of the remaining
Armenian property to the Muslims.62
Next, it ordered the mass deportation of Kurds from Eastern Anatolia.
Taken from their villages and nomadic routes, the Kurds were held at gun-
point and deported to Western Anatolia. From the ofcial correspondence,
it becomes clear that the CUP aimed at forcibly assimilating the Kurds in
that while it ordered the community leaders to settle separately from the
general public, it pushed for the Kurds rapid linguistic Turkication. De-
mographic dilution was another major aim: a general order proscribed that
wherever sent, the Kurdish population was not to exceed an upper limit of 5
percent, which was often the limit set for deported Armenians as well.
During the deportations many Kurds died from frost or hunger.63
In addition to deporting tens of thousands of Kurds out of Eastern Anato-
lia to the West and hundreds of thousands of Armenians to their death in
the desert to the East, the CUP also ordered non-Kurdish Muslims deported
to that region. This two-track policy would further expedite the Turkication
process. Most of these imported settlers were Bosnian Muslims, Bulgarian
Turks, and Albanian Muslims who had ed the war and persecutions in the
Balkans. Another group of settlers comprised the refugees from Bitlis and
Van, the Turks ltered out for immediate settlement in the vicinity. At rst,
the settler-deportees were temporarily lodged in the seminaries and mosques
along with other poor and miserable villagers. They were then eventually
housed in the empty Syriac and Armenian villages. Some were then moved
Turkey for the Turks 299

to the Adana region while others were settled on the Mardin plain. The set-
tlement policy was put into effect in the summer of 1915 and continued
until the end of the war.
The settlers sent to Eastern Anatolia had been the Muslim victims of
ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and had sought asylum in the Ottoman
Empire. Many had lived in Istanbul in shabby dwellings, impoverished,
traumatized, and vindictive. When the war broke out, the CUP activated its
plans for demographic engineering and incorporated these refugees. Alba-
nians, for instance, were but one such group to be deported and settled. In
June 1915, the AMM ordered their scattered settlement in order for their
mother-tongue and national traditions to be quickly extinguished.64 Alba-
nians were to be settled all over the empire, including Diyarbakr province.65
Bosnian refugees were to be settled in Diyarbakr as well; on June 30, 1915
the AMM ordered 181 Bosnian families temporarily residing in Konya to
be deported to Diyarbakr and settled in its empty villages.66 The next day,
AMM headquarters ordered the deportation and settlement of the ethnic
Turks from Bulgaria and Greece.67
In the meantime, genocidal destruction raged in full force. The Arme-
nians and Syriacs were being massacred while the Muslim settlers were en
route to replace them. However, some preparations were necessary for
their successful settlement. On June 17, 1915, the AMM headquarters
therefore reiterated its request for economic and geographic data on the
emptied Armenian villages of Diyarbakr; in order to send the settlers to
the province, it had to determine the local capacity to absorb the immi-
grants.68 A week later, it ordered the provision of educational commodities
for the settlers:

It is necessary to appropriate the schools of the towns and villages emptied of

Armenians in order to settle the Muslim immigrants there. However, the pre-
sent value of the buildings, the amount and value of its educational materials
need to be registered and sent to the department of general recordkeeping.69

This national order was a warrant for the seizure of all Ottoman-Arme-
nian schools and their subsequent conversion into Ottoman-Turkish edu-
cational facilities. School benches, blackboards, book cabinets, and even
paper and pens were allocated to the yet-to-arrive settlers. Local branches
of the Commission for Abandoned Properties were assigned to carry out
this operation.70
The information on the settlements of the Muslim immigrants in the
districts and towns of Eastern Anatolia is sparse. Little eldwork has been
conducted as to whether the settlers remained in the designated towns and
villages or migrated elsewhere. Armenian survivors recalled, however,
Muslims settling in the late summer of 1915 in villages that were formerly
300 Continuities

theirs. Local ofcials saw to it that these Muslim settlers were allocated the
best houses of the deported Armenians.71 One such example of settler co-
lonialism is the village of Tell Ermen in Diyarbakr province, the entire
Christian population of which had been massacred during July 1915. Tell
Ermen was then repopulated with Circassians and Chechens. Since the
settlers already had ploughs and oxen, all they needed for subsistence
farming was seed: the War Ministry ordered 1,000 cups of barley and 300
cups of wheat from the storage depots to provide the requisite seeds.72
When the Chechen population surpassed Tell Ermens capacity, the con-
struction of a new village was ordered for them in September 1918.73 Later
Tell Ermen, which means Armenian hill in Arabic, was renamed Kzltepe
(red hill). Nowadays, the town bears not a single physical trace of its
Armenian past.
CUP demographic engineering came to a halt only with the end of the
war. The Ottoman Empire suffered a catastrophic defeat as all its frontlines
disintegrated, triggering a sudden implosion of the army. On October 30,
1918, the Ottoman minister of the navy Hseyin Rauf Orbay and the British
admiral Calthorpe signed a truce that sanctioned unconditional surrender.74
The very next night the CUP inner circle burned suitcases full of docu-
ments, disbanded the CUP as a political party, and ed to Odessa in a Ger-
man submarine. The seven escapees comprised the triumvirate (Enver,
Tlt, Cemal), the doctors Bahaeddin akir and Nzm, and two others.75
The power vacuum was lled by the new sultan Mehmed the Sixth (Vahdet-
tin), Grand Vizier Damat Ferit Paa, and the Freedom and Coalition Party,
the CUPs sworn enemy. They ruled the Ottoman Empire during the inter-
regnum (19181923) in so far as the Istanbul government had sufcient
actual leverage in Anatolia.76 With the reorganization of the CUP in Anatolia
however, this political glitch was soon to come to an end.
The War of Liberation (19191923) was in essence a continuation of
the state formation process, which included a major exclusion of Ottoman
Christians from Anatolia. The Kemalists assumed control of the local elites
who had collaborated in CUP crimes, and the Armenian villagers who
returned to their farms and elds were chased out, terrorized, and bullied
away.77 Hence the subsequent proclamation of the Turkish nation-state on
October 29, 1923, was neither a starting point nor an end, but rather an in-
termezzo: there were compelling continuities not only in the power struc-
ture, ideology, and cadre, but also in practice, especially of population
policies.78 In 192324, Greece and Turkey both enjoyed international sup-
port to homogenize their countries through a massive population exchange,
which uprooted hundreds of thousands of people.79 No matter how thor-
ough the campaigns conducted in 1915 and 1923 were, however, they could
not achieve nationalist homogenization. Unbound by restraints of any kind,
Turkey for the Turks 301

behind the tightly knit curtains of national sovereignty and international

support for westernization and modernization, homogenization policy
continued in the post-1923 era in full force.80
The Kemalist abolition of the sultanate and caliphate and other revolu-
tions triggered varied reactions throughout Turkey.81 One of heavy resis-
tance was the Kurdish movement of Shaikh Said, which erupted in
mid-February 1925.82 The government quelled the insurrection with vio-
lence, scorching villages and summarily executing both combatants and
noncombatants. Shaikh Said himself was arrested and hanged on June 29,
1925, with several of his henchmen.83 The rebellion served to conrm estab-
lished Kemalist fears that Kurdish society was a centrifugal, tribalist, reac-
tionary, and potentially separatist threat that needed to be urgently dealt
with. On September 8, 1925, Mustafa Kemal authorized a special council to
devise a comprehensive report on reforming eastern Anatolia. The coun-
cil, formally named Reform Council for the East (ark Islahat Encmeni)
and chaired by smet [nn] with positions held by politicians and ofcials
such as Mustafa Abdlhalik Renda (deputy for ankr), Cemil [Uybadn]
(interior minister), Ali Cenani (minister for the economy), Mahmut Esat
[Bozkurt] (minister of justice), Lieutenant General Kzm [zalp], and Fevzi
[akmak] (chief of staff)84 was given fteen days to complete a report and
present it to the parliament for evaluation.
The report prepared and signed by these men on September 24, 1925,
was the quintessential example of early twentieth-century social engi-
neering, reecting a staunch belief in the feasibility of crafting a society
through large-scale, top-down authoritarian modernization, coupled with
an ethnonationalist vision of landscaping the human garden at a
distance.85 A multitrack policy would ensure the reformclearly a euphe-
mism for containmentof Eastern Turkey. In previous explorations,
Cemil Uybadn had characterized this approach as a colonial administra-
tive method, or a form of internal colonization. First of all, martial law
would be proclaimed in order to facilitate further policies whereby most
eastern provinces would be clustered together into ve general inspector-
ships (Umm Mfettilik).86 A total of seven million Turkish lira would be
allocated to the inspectors heading each region to supervise the many
aspects of nation and state formation such as the deportation of the Kurds
living in previously Armenian villages, the settlement of Turkish immi-
grants in their place, the expulsion of Kurdish families deemed dan-
gerous, the reinforcement of military presence in the region, the complete
disarmament of civilians, the prohibition of all non-Turkish languages, the
forced assimilation of Kurds and Arabs through boarding schools, the pro-
hibition of foreigners from access to the region, and the construction of
roads, railroads, and government buildings.87
302 Continuities

The 1925 Reform Plan envisioned deportation as a legitimate measure to

subdue (and assimilate) many Kurds as a solution to a problem. On July
4, 1927, the government passed a law empowering the Justice, Interior, and
Economy Ministries to coorganize the deportation of fourteen hundred
people and eighty families to various western provinces.88 Prior to its imple-
mentation, the government had prepared and published a detailed, top-secret
inventory of Kurdish tribes for internal circulation, identifying for every
province dozens of Kurdish tribes classied as loyal or disloyal including
details provided on the nature of their relationships with one another.89 These
plans, ambitious as they were, did not even approach either the major accel-
eration in Kemalist deportation campaigns after 1930 or the subsequent con-
solidation of the Kemalist one-party dictatorship in 1931.90 On June 14, 1934,
the government ratied the Settlement Law, an elaborate legal text sanc-
tioning the mass deportation of entire categories of peoples, from itinerant
Gypsies to anarchists to those not devoted to Turkish culture, sweeping
notions that would most of all target and strike the Kurds.91
These policies, formulated at the national level, produced local implemen-
tations that have hitherto been virtually unexplored. On January 1, 1928, the
government established the First General Inspectorate, centered in Diyarbakr,
and appointed brahim Tali [ngren] as its rst general inspector; Ahmet
Hilmi [Ergeneli] (19331935) and Abidin zmen (19351943) succeeded
him. The inspector implemented the general policies laid out in the Reform
Plan in the huge area under his jurisdiction. The many reports these men
sent to Ankara offer a unique insight into the local dynamics of social engi-
neering in the Diyarbakr province: the Reform Plan was put into practice
through militarization, disarmament, assimilation, infrastructural change,
and most signicantly: deportation.92 The aforementioned report included
ten pages on the tribes of the Diyarbakr province; one was the inuential
Azizolu dynasty, a branch of the Narek tribe residing in and around Silvan,
a town east of Diyarbakr.93 Although the report identied the Azizolu as a
loyal and obedient family that had never participated in any rebellion, in the
1920s, hundreds of Azizolu family members were rounded up and deported
to Thrace; a second wave of deportations in 1935 sent hundreds more to
Western Turkey.94 The Cemilpaazde were another wealthy and inuential
family deported in two phases: having proted from the Armenian Genocide
in 1915, they were now expropriated according to the Reform Plan, exiled to
the Aegean region, and their property was turned over to the state.95
The removal of the Kurds from Eastern Turkey was accompanied by
forced assimilation. In 1928, the Turkish-nationalist Tekin Alp (Moise
Cohen) published a nationalist manifesto entitled Turkication, in which
he argued that the rapid cultural homogenization of Turkey could only be
accomplished by Turkifying the minorities by force:
Turkey for the Turks 303

In order to preclude being dominated by the majority, minorities have no

other option than integration. Because new Turkey is truly a unitary nation
state, it absolutely cannot tolerate to execute old Ottoman population policies.
If the minorities do not wish to be alienated from national life, i.e. from being
Turks, they have no other choice than to nationalize ... Sooner or later, citi-
zens who wish to live in Turkey will have to become Turks, not only legally, but
also culturally and religiously.96

The message was clear: willingly or unwillingly all minorities had to be

assimilated into Turkish culture as soon as possible. Alp also provided con-
crete suggestions for integration: assuming Turkish names, speaking
only Turkish, extinguishing non-Turkish collective identities, and social-
izing with Turks.97 Even though Alps ideas were not very inuential among
the Kemalist elite, it did not take long for the government to translate them
into action. In 1928, the government initiated a campaign titled Citizen,
Speak Turkish! In January 1930, the Interior Ministry issued a top secret
order regarding the fate of the deportees in that they were to be made Turk-
ish in languages, traditions, and desires, and in 1934 the Surname Law
homogenized all family names into the Turkish melting pot.98 As in all of
Turkey, in the east too, these policies were put into practice through the
Peoples Houses (Halkevi) and Peoples Rooms (Halkodas), nationalist
institutions that brought Kemalist ideology to the populace.99 The negative
effects of these nation-building policies were not limited to Kurds, however;
communities speaking (dialects of) Arabic, Zaza, or Syrian-Aramaic encoun-
tered similar threats and pressures.100
In the period after 1931, the ofcial discourse acquired a racist and deni-
grating undertone toward the Kurds. The Cumhuriyet newspaper, the mouth-
piece of the Kemalist party-state, wrote that Kurds allow their emotions and
brains to be led by simple instincts like ordinary animals and therefore can
only think crudely and foolishly ... there is absolutely no difference between
the African barbarians and cannibals and these creatures who mix raw meat
with cracked wheat (bulgur) and eat it just like that.101 In a series of articles,
the nationalist journalist Yusuf Mazhar described the Kurds as follows:
Even though they may be more capable than the redskins in the United States,
they arehistory is my witnessendlessly bloodthirsty and cruel ... They are
completely bereft of positive feelings and civilized manners. For centuries,
they have been a plague for our race ... During Russian rule they were pro-
hibited to descend from the mountains, where they did not lead humane and
civilized lives, therefore these creatures are not really inclined to prot from
civilization ... In my opinion, the dark spirit, crude mental state, and ruthless
manners of this Kurdish mass are impossible to break.102

Hence social engineering during the Kemalist Republic was also a civi-
lizing mission, one comparable in discourse and practice to the European
304 Continuities

colonial enterprises.103 The campaigns were also accompanied by a thor-

ough erasure of the memory of the events. For every region in Eastern Ana-
tolia, for instance, local ofcial historians produced volume upon volume,
each one making sure to silence the genocide and recast all ethnic minor-
ities as Turks, thereby trivializing the historical and contemporary existence
of all local inhabitants.104 Only when the Republican Peoples Party lost
power in the elections of 1950 were these modernist projects of demo-
graphic engineering nally halted. By that time, however, the political, eth-
nic, and cultural map of Eastern Anatolia had dramatically altered for good.

In the turbulent period during 18781945, various ethnic and religious

groups in the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish Republic were expelled
and destroyed through the continuous processes of ethnic cleansing and
demographic engineering. The victims were mostly Muslims in the Balkans
and primarily Christians in Anatolia. Some regions continued to remain
unquiet. For Turkey its east, for Bulgaria the coastal region, for Greece the
north were heterogeneous and therefore acquired special status and as a
consequence the populations of these regions were subjected to extra na-
tionalist care. For Eastern Turkey, nationalist geopolitics remained very
topical in the long term. The Turkish internal Eastern Question still exists,
with the Kurds having replaced the position once occupied by the Arme-
nians. The attitude of the Turkish state toward a culturally distinct, territori-
ally compact and potentially separatist ethnic group suggests structural
continuity in the long term.
This chapter has argued that the continuation of the population policies
may necessitate the extension of the Young Turk era from 1908 to 1950, as
put forward by Erik-Jan Zrcher. However, a Young Turk continuity can also
be detected in the sphere of social engineering. Deportation, expulsion, and
assimilation indeed form the three key concepts in this reconceptualization
of Turkish history in the rst half of the twentieth century.105 After the rst
stage of the Armenian Genocide and the second stage of the expulsion of
the Greeks, the deportation and dissolution of the Kurds formulated the
third major stage of homogenization during this broadly dened Young
Turk era. The separate population policies of the CUP and the Turkish
Republic are too interconnected to be understood in total isolation; in addi-
tion, the Armenian Genocide nanced and enabled the execution of the
World War I settlement of the Muslims and the deportation of the Kurds.
Then again, only the deportation and expropriation of Kurdish elites in the
1920s and 1930s could have obviated the competing loyalties and facilitated
the eventual cultural assimilation of the Kurdish population.
Another factor that connected the two policies was the political elite
ordering and carrying them out: they were the one and the same. It can be
Turkey for the Turks 305

suggested that a generation of men, born roughly between 1870 and 1890
and educated under Sultan Abdlhamid II at the medical and military acad-
emies, as well as school for civil service, would ultimately constitute the
Young Turk generation. United in the Young Turk political movement, they
struggled for power around the n de sicle and ruled Turkey by dictator-
ship from 1913 to 1950. It is no accident that the names of Mustafa Abdl-
halik Renda, Celal Bayar, Kzm zalp, brahim Tali ngren, Ali Cenani,
and kr Kaya keep appearing and reappearing: these men were employed
in drawing up and executing the post-1923 policies of demographic engi-
neering, since they had acquired the requisite know-how and experience
during the CUP period. Even though some CUP members were tried and
hanged in 1926, many in middle management positions remained in of-
ce and many were even promoted all the way to become ministers and
presidents. Local elites too, remained largely intact and willfully assisted in
the continuing policies of state formation and nation formation.106 After the
ostensive caesura of 1923, these were the men who were employed since
they had proved their loyalty to the CUPs ideological projects and were in-
timately related to each other, generationally and by family. It was this gen-
eration of Young Turks that remained in ofce and profoundly shaped the
political and ethnic map of Turkey.
15

Renewal and Silence

Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the
Armenian Genocide

Erik Jan Zrcher

Twenty-ve years ago I published my rst book, The Unionist Factor.1 The
theme of the book was the continuity between the Young Turk period in
Ottoman history and the history of the early republic. It charted the way in
which leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress built the
national resistance movement after World War I and the way in which Mus-
tafa Kemal Pasha gradually managed to take over this movement and con-
centrate power in his own hands by eliminating his former Unionist
colleagues. It was a purely political history, focusing on the military and
bureaucratic elite.
Generally, the book was received quite favorably, but gradually I came to
realize that a discussion of the continuity between the CUP and the Repub-
lic was quite meaningless if one did not take into account the backdrop of
war, ethnic conict, and mass migration that characterized late Ottoman
history between 1877 and 1923. Study of the ideological changes that oc-
curred between 1908 and 1928 made me aware of the degree to which iden-
tity formation in this period was sharply dened by the opposition between
Muslims and non-Muslims, a process in which religious identity had
become an ethnic marker and which ultimately resulted in the emergence
of a erce Ottoman-Muslim nationalism.2 As Deringil and Yavuz have
shown, the foundations for this had been laid during the reign, and through
the policies, of Sultan Abdlhamid II, but it was the ten-year period of war
between 1912 and 1922 that gave rise to mass mobilization of the popula-
tion on this basis.3
This mass mobilization was effected by a Young Turk leadership, both
civilian and military, that overwhelmingly hailed from the Balkan provinces
and the Aegean littoral. Although they are never called muhacir (refugee),

306
Renewal and Silence 307

a term reserved for lower-class migrants, many of them were in effect refu-
gees after the loss of the Dodecanese to Italy in 19111912 and the Balkan
Wars of 19121913. The same was true for the rst generation of leaders of
the Republic of Turkey.4 In the years that followed they had to grapple with
this trauma of territorial loss and military defeat, and nd a new basis for
their identity. From 1913 onward, the reaction of the Young Turk leadership
to the Ottomans loss of their ancestral lands seems to have manifested
itself in four different ways, which were not mutually exclusive and in fact
often overlapped:
Irredentism: Irredentism as a political program was relatively subdued.
The hope of recovering at least some of the lost territory did play a
role in the decision to go to war in 1914, but certainly not a dominant
one.
Pan-Turkist escapism: the loss of a real empire in the West certainly
encouraged dreams of a virtual empire in the East, especially after
war with Russia had broken out, but to my mind the importance of
Pan-Turkism in the events that followed has been drastically
overstated by Armenian scholars from Zarevand to Dadrian.
Resentment: there is no doubt that the resentment against the Christian
minorities that had been growing since the 1860s and had become
very tangible after the constitutional revolution, was given a strong
impetus by the sometimes blatantly disloyal behavior of the Christian
communities in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan War. We can
certainly detect a discourse of revenge, violence, and hatred toward
the Christian minorities as well as against Europe in the Turkish
writings of this period.5
The appropriation of Anatolia as the true Turkish fatherland: there had
been a rise in interest in Anatolia since the constitutional revolution,
but after 1912 it was embraced as the true home of the Turks even, or
perhaps primarily, by those (like Mustafa Kemal) who had been born
and bred in southeastern Europe and discovered their new homeland
when in their thirties. The same can be said for the smaller but also
inuential group of immigrants from the Caucasus and the Black Sea
littoral.
The combination of resentment against the Ottoman Christian commu-
nities and the adoption of Anatolia as the new homeland made it crucial for
the Unionists to make sure that Anatolia was and would remain an Otto-
man-Muslim land. These sentiments served as the impetus for the policies
of ethnic cleansing that started in the summer of 1914 with the expulsion of
the Greeks from the coastal areas in the west. It is certainly no coincidence
that the man in charge of these expulsions, Mahmut Cell, was a son of
308 Continuities

refugees from Bulgaria, as was the main architect of the Armenian massa-
cres, Dr. Bahaeddin akir.
In the postwar environment, when the carving up of Anatolia by the
Entente and their Greek and Armenian clients seemed imminent, the
leaders of the resistance movement that emerged beginning in November
1918 onward once again had recourse to mobilization on the basis of an
ethnicized religious identity. The dominant discourse of the movement
between 1919 and 1922 is one of us and them, in which the other is
dened as the non-Muslim. In fact, it is precisely in the postwar era, under
Mustafa Kemals leadership, that Muslim nationalism reaches its climax,
something illustrated and symbolized by the text of Mehmet Akifs strongly
Islamic Independence March of 1921 (which paradoxically went on to
become the national anthem of the secular republic).6
In ideological terms there is thus a great deal of continuity between the
periods of 19121918 and 19181923. This should come as no surprise:
even though the top echelon of the Committee of Union and Progress had
been smuggled abroad by the Germans or was interned in Malta by the Brit-
ish, the cadres of the national resistance movement almost without excep-
tion consisted of former Unionists, who had been shaped by their shared
experience of the previous decade.
In other words, one can only fully understand the postwar policies of the
former Unionists who made up the national resistance movement by taking
into account the experiences that shaped them in the preceding period. Of
these, the persecution of the Armenians is no doubt one of the most impor-
tant. Leaving this out risks turning the nationalist leaders into gures in an
empty landscape.
What, then, was the impact of the Armenian massacres on the postwar
attitudes of the Unionists? In this chapter I examine their public statements
in order to establish to what extent an effort was made either to distance
themselves from, or conversely to justify, the ethnic policies of the war years.
After all, if this was the dening moment in their immediate past, they
would have to deal with it one way or another when trying to carve out a new
political role in the postwar environment.
Unionists in the postwar environment can be organized into three cate-
gories: (1) Unionist parliamentarians in new parties and parliamentary
groupings that can be seen as successors to the Party of Union and Progress
(the CUPs parliamentary party that was ostensibly merged with the com-
mittee in 1916); and (2) the embryonic national resistance movement that
was to a large extent based on the local branches and Unionist clubs in the
provincial centers. Of course, individual former Unionists quite often played
a role in both of these groups. The activities of the secret underground net-
works,7 such as Karakol (the Guard), founded in October 1918 at the behest
Renewal and Silence 309

of Enver and Tlt Pashas, no doubt would be a fascinating context for the
study of Unionists postwar sentiments and attitudes, but as these networks
did not produce public statements, they fall outside the purview of this
chapter.
Two political parties were clearly identied at the time as being heirs to
the old Party of Union and Progress, which had dissolved itself at its nal
congress on November 5, 1918. The Renewal Party (Teceddt Frkas) was
founded by the Unionists present at the nal CUP party congress on Novem-
ber 9, 1918. Although the party ofcially denied that it was a continuation of
the CUP, its takeover of CUP assets, such as organizational networks, real
estate (the clubs) and cash detracted from the credibility of this claim. It
rather sounds like the statement of the nationalist congress at Sivas in Sep-
tember 1919 rejecting all links with the CUP. This, too, was obviously a
stratagem made necessary by the political circumstances of the time.
The party published a detailed party program (prepared by a commission
during the CUPs nal congress), containing 175 articles on all aspects of its
internal and external policy.8 This is in some ways a very interesting docu-
ment. It is quite an elaborate and also a forward-looking document, which
announces a number of bold policy initiatives, but it seems to be totally
divorced from the reality of late 1918. There is no mention of the war, of the
dire economic circumstances of the country or, indeed, of the persecution of
Armenians. Security of life, honor, and property is emphasized as a common
right of all Ottoman citizens, and the rights of minorities are guaranteed
(Articles 36) but no mention is made of any past transgressions, let alone
of the need to deal with the past and punish the culprits. This is remarkable,
as everyone knew that the Entente powers had announced they would take
action on this issue once the war was over.
In part it reads like a constitution, not as a party program at all, sugges-
tive perhaps of the degree to which the Unionists had come to identify
themselves with the state. The rst section, consisting of thirty-three arti-
cles, describes the principles underpinning the Ottoman state order and its
main institutional elements. It deals with issues like sovereignty, the role of
the dynasty, state religion and language, and the fundamental rights of the
citizen. The party itself is not mentioned even once in this whole section.
Where it does announce future policies, the document is interesting in
the way it presages some of the later reforms of the Kemalist republic. Ar-
ticle 22 announces the abolition of all civilian honorary titles (Pasha, Bey,
Efendi, etc.). Article 54 calls for the introduction of a national anthem, an
ofcial name, and arms for the state (all of which the Ottoman Empire never
had). The next article, 55, states that the constitution will be modied to
comply with the principles of national sovereignty (hakimiyeti milliye) and
parliamentarism. This of course reminds one of the Law of Fundamental
310 Continuities

Organization, adopted by the assembly in Ankara in early 1921, with its

famous rst article Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation
(Hakimiyet bilakaydart milletindir). Article 70 calls for a reform of the
calendar, 96 for the introduction of family names, and 118 for a reform of
the Turkish language, all of them ultimately realized under Atatrk in the
1920s and 1930s. Improvement of conditions in the countryside is sought
through the reclamation of marshland (Article 130) and the abolition of the
tithe (159), precisely in the way the republic was to do.
The second offshoot of the CUP, the Ottoman Liberal Peoples Party
(Osmanl Hrriyetperver Avam Frkas), had come into being as the result of
a split within the CUP. It was founded in mid-October 1918, by some leading
Unionists who had not been particularly close to the wartime leadership.
Mustafa Kemals old friend Ali Fethi [Okyar] and Hseyin Kadri, the mem-
ber of parliament for Karesi, were the founders, together with a small group
of Unionist parliamentarians. Although all its members had a Unionist
background and were even invited to the last party congress of the CUP
after they had split off, the Liberal Peoples Party was not a direct successor
of the CUP in the sense that it took over CUP assets as the Renewal Party
did.
The Liberal Peoples Party, too, published a very detailed (94 articles)
party program immediately after its founding.9 Like that of the Renewal
Party, its rst sections are strongly reminiscent of a constitution and describe
the state order rather than formulating any party policies. In the rest of the
document we encounter many of the elements present in the program of
the Renewal Party, although it lacks the more radical reform proposals of
the lattersurprising, perhaps, if one bears in mind that Mustafa Kemal
was close to the party and even became co-owner of the party newspaper
Minber after his return from the Syrian front.10
Like the program of the Renewal Party, that of the Liberal Peoples Party
seems to have been drawn up with great care, but in complete isolation from
the realities of the day. Those realitiesrocketing ination, severe short-
ages, displaced persons, mass desertionsare not mentioned, and there is
no call for any kind of reckoning, redress, or persecution of the culprits of
the Armenian massacres. This is perhaps more surprising in the case of the
Liberal Peoples Party than in that of the Renewal Party, as Ali Fethis group
had not been close to the wartime leadership (indeed, Fethis enmity with
Enver Pasha had been well known since 1913) and its members had of-
cially and openly resigned from the CUP and thus could be expected to feel
more freedom in this respect.
Both parties were closed down on the orders of the government in May
1919 because they were considered direct successors to the CUP, but they
were quite active and vocal in parliament and outside it in the early months
Renewal and Silence 311

of 1919. By the time the parties were closed, the efforts to organize a resis-
tance movement in Anatolia, based partly on the network of Unionist clubs
and branches and partly on the infrastructure of the army, were well under-
way. The Congress of Sivas (September 411, 1919) was the rst attempt to
unite all the regional resistance initiatives in a common national front, and
it was there that the Society for the Defence of the National Rights [a refer-
ence to President Wilsons Fourteen Points] of Anatolia and Rumelia was
founded. The congress was completely dominated by people with a Unionist
background, but like the parties discussed earlier, those present made a
point of denying any continuity between the CUP and themselves, even
going so far as to swear a solemn oath that they would not revive the CUP.
The formal declaration of the congress formed the basis of the National
Pact, the nationalist program that was ofcially adopted by the nal Otto-
man parliament four months later. Unlike the documents produced by the
parties in Istanbul, this declaration acknowledged and focused on the actual
events and circumstances of the day. What did this text have to say about the
Armenian issue? The text refers to the Armenians and Greeks explicitly in
Article 3 and implicitly in Article 4. Article 3 states that ghting attempts to
found independent Greek and Armenian entities (Rumluk ve Ermenilik) on
Ottoman soil is legitimate, and Article 4 promises equality before the law to
non-Muslims, but rejects the reintroduction of the capitulations.11 Again,
there is no mention of the events of 19151916 or of the treatment of the
Armenians. Nor does the text have anything to say on the question how to
deal with the perpetrators of the genocide.
It could be argued that the document deals with the current situation
and with political goals and that it is therefore natural that it should not
refer to the events of the immediate past. One might expect, however, that
the issue of the persecution of the Armenians should come up in the dis-
cussions on the oath not to revive the CUP. This oath was debated quite
seriously, opinions being divided between those who merely wanted to
swear not to work for personal gain or party political interests and those
who expressly wanted to mention the CUP.12 Some of those who supported
the latter option, like Bekir Sami [Kunduh] or Rauf [Orbay] referred to the
Unionist nightmare and to the disasters to which the CUP had led the
country, while others like Mehmet kr argued that the CUP had had an
exalted idealist program, which still commanded respect in the greater Tur-
kic and Islamic world and that it would be unjust to reject its legacy simply
because of the misdeeds of a few individuals. Ultimately, the argument that
there was a great deal of suspicion in the country that the congress would
revive the CUP and that it was therefore necessary to publicly vow not to do
so, carried the day, with the understanding that the oath would be valid only
for the duration of the congress. Yet at no time during these discussions was
312 Continuities

the treatment of the Armenians mentioned, not even by those who were
most critical of the CUP. The same is true for Mustafa Kemals opening
speech at the congress, which set out the necessity of organizing national
resistance. He mentioned the Armenians, but only to say In the East the
Armenians have begun their preparations to expand their state up to the
banks of the Kzlrmak and even now their genocidal policy has started to
reach our borders.13 What had happened to the Armenians just four years
earlier again remained unsaid.
This rather suspicious defensiveness set the tone. In the rst public
speech Mustafa Kemal gave after establishing his headquarters in Ankara in
December 1919, he again warned the people about the dangers facing the
country both from the victorious Entente and from the non-Muslim minor-
ities, and especially from the combination of the two. He rmly rejected the
idea that the Turkish nation was an oppressor (zalim), praised the tolerance
shown by the Ottoman Muslims in the past and had only this to say about
the Armenian massacres during the war:

Whatever has befallen the non-Muslim elements living in our country, is the
result of the policies of separatism they pursued in a savage manner, when
they allowed themselves to be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused
their privileges. There are probably many reasons and excuses for the unde-
sired events that have taken place in Turkey. And I want denitely to say that
these events are on a level far removed from the many forms of oppression
which are committed in the states of Europe without any excuse.14

All the classic elements in the defense of violent aggression are here: they
asked for it, it was not really so bad and anyway, others have done the same
and worse.
In a sense the outcome of these ndings resembles Sherlock Holmess
famous curious incident of the dog in the night-time. In other words,
when we scan the policy documents of Unionist postwar organizations for
references to the persecution of the Ottoman Armenians barely two years
earlier or for attempts to either express regret, justify the events, or unequiv-
ocally distance the said organizations from them, we draw a complete blank.
As is well known, there were some in the postwar Ottoman environment
who called for the culprits of the genocide to be brought to justice. These
were not limited to the Liberal opposition (like Ali Kemal), but also included
the Young Turk minence grise, Ahmet Rza. The two parties that sprang
directly from the bosom of the CUP, however, did no such thing. Both the
Renewal Party and the Liberal Peoples Party came up with detailed, one
might even say remarkably mature policy documents, but one looks in vain
for a single reference to the treatment of the Armenians in the immediate
past. This is the more surprising for Fethi Okyars Liberal Peoples Party, as
Renewal and Silence 313

that group was a dissident grouping that had broken away from the CUP
before its last party congress. The same is true for the leadership of the na-
tional resistance movement in Anatolia. The language employed with regard
to the Armenians and Greeks where their political or territorial claims are
concerned, in Erzurum, Sivas, and Ankara is quite uncompromising, and
references to the events of 19151916 are completely lacking save for the
one very severe statement of Mustafa Kemal in Ankara, quoted in extenso
above.
In this respect, the argument, sometimes voiced even by concerned his-
torians, that Turks do not have to fear a reopening of the debate on the
Armenian issue because the republic is clearly distinct from the late empire
and that Mustafa Kemal has never spoken in support of the genocide,
sounds rather weak. When it mattered, in 19181920, Mustafa Kemal never
spoke out against the genocide, and he surrounded himself with people, his
own bodyguard Topal Osman among them, who were quite notorious for
having blood on their hands. His keynote address in Ankara in December
1919 put the blame squarely on the victims.
Taner Akam, a Turkish sociologist who has written extensively on the
Armenian Genocide, provides a somewhat dubious explanation for this dog
that didnt bark. In a recent article, Akam argues that the attitude of the
Turkish nationalists after the war can be explained by British actions.15 By
simultaneously implementing an aggressive imperialist policy aimed at the
destruction of the empire and taking the initiative in opening the case
against the perpetrators of the genocide, the two became so closely identi-
ed that supporting the legal persecution of the Unionists became an unpa-
triotic act by association. His argument is that a different policy on the part
of the British, which took seriously the national aspirations of the Turks,
might have allowed Mustafa Kemals nationalists to distance themselves
from the Unionists who were responsible for the genocide. This claim is
unconvincing, as the party programs of the Renewal Party and of the Liberal
Peoples Party (with which Mustafa Kemal was associated) date from before
the arrival of the British. Still, both parties denied themselves the opportu-
nity to distance themselves from the crimes committed during the war. The
Unionist underground organization Karakol was founded as early as Octo-
ber 1918 to smuggle arms and people to Anatolia with the twin aims of
strengthening any future resistance and to keep those who were at risk of
arrest out of the hands of the British. It thus linked the two elements of
national resistance and sabotaging the persecution of Unionist ofcials
right from the start.
Ultimately, it was simply impossible for Unionists in 19181919 to
distance themselves too visibly from the crimes of 19151916 and those who
had committed them. Those crimes occurred at the height of the period in
314 Continuities

which the population had been mobilized by the Unionists themselves on

the basis of a Muslim-Ottoman identity, an identity that had been formed in
continuous and conscious opposition to the Ottoman Christians. The
Unionists depended on this sentiment for their grassroots support and
could not afford a break with the past. This was as true for Mustafa Kemal
and his men in Anatolia as it was for the politicians in the capital. Therefore,
the silence of the postwar documents on the issue does not indicate a con-
spiracy of silence, an effort to cover up the past. Nor does it indicate that the
Armenian massacres had become taboo. Rather, given the surviving Union-
ists goal to generate political support among the Ottoman Muslims, whom
they clearly regarded as their constituency (witness Rauf Beys statement in
Sivas: the aim of the Defence of Rights Association is to unite the Muslim
population), any mention of the massacres would have been counterpro-
ductive and thus politically irrelevant.
In the rst few years of the Turkish republic, the Armenian issue does
not seem to have been discussed at a political level. When Mustafa Kemal
nally decided to deal with the remaining Unionist leaders and eliminate
them once and for all in the show trials conducted in the summer of 1926,
they were ercely castigated by the Independence Tribunal before which
they had to appear for the way they had dragged the Ottoman Empire into
World War I, for acts of corruption during the war and for their behavior in
the postwar years, but not for their ethnic policies. In other words: even
when an effort was made to publicly disgrace the former Unionist leaders,
the treatment of the Armenians was apparently not considered something
disgraceful in the eyes of the Turkish public.16 One could argue that Mustafa
Kemal publicly condemned them for the treatment of the Armenians in his
well-known interview with the Swiss reporter Emile Hilderbrand that was
published in the Los Angeles Examiner on August 1, 1926, in which he is
supposed to have said that they should have been made to account for the
lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en
masse, from their homes and massacred. There can be serious doubt, how-
ever, about the authenticity and reliability of this text, and even if it was
authentic, it was meant for foreign consumption. The fact remains that the
massacres did not gure in the actual trials or in Mustafa Kemals state-
ments to the Turkish public.17 On the contrary, in the same year when these
Unionist leaders were purged, the Turkish national assembly adopted a law
granting pensions to the widows and orphans of the Unionist leaders who
had been murdered by Armenian revenge killers in Operation Nemesis
and of those hanged by the military tribunal of Nemrut Mustafa Pasha in
Istanbul in 1919.18
That the Unionist elite felt no need to distance itself from the perpetrators
of the genocide in the early republic is also shown by another interesting
Renewal and Silence 315

example. In 1936 veteran journalist and editor Hseyin Cahit Yaln pub-
lished a series of biographical portraits of people he had known in the paper
Yedign. Among the people whom Yaln portrays is the man now generally
considered the architect of the genocide, Dr. Bahaeddin akir. Yaln rst
describes Bahaeddins character:
Bahaeddin akir had become a single hard unit through his exploits, like a
piece of steel that had been toughened in hardship, deprivation and pain. He
solved his whole life and all political problems with a sharp and decisive rea-
soning: What wasnt black was white; a man who wasnt good, was badfor-
ever. Subtle differences, vague colours did not exist in his eyes. One could say
he lived far removed from reality and from the world. In him there was an
ideal of freedom that formed lifes driving force and goal. For him this had
become a creed. He had buried himself in that ideal, that creed, had with-
drawn from the human world and had made himself a world in the abstract
and the absolute.
In the assemblies and central committee meetings of the Committee of
Union and Progress Bahaeddin akir was always the most ardent supporter of
the most radical measures. He could not envisage sacricing ideas or opin-
ions to reach a compromise. In his view, there was no world, there were no
opponents, no problems, just an ideal and a creed, and the process of moving
towards it with decisive steps without thinking of anything.

And then he goes on the openly address the question of Bahaeddins role in
the Armenian question:
What is Bahaeddin akirs role in the deportations? Even in our most intimate
meetings this issue was not made clear to us. I have no clear, denitive opin-
ion, but based on a word here that escaped from his lips when we discussed
other matters, a thought there that came out, involuntary gestures, subtle and
slight, even imperceptible, indications, which aroused suspicion in a person,
one idea imposed itself on me with great strength: that he was the prime
shaper and executor of the deportation business. I am strongly convinced that
he prepared the ground when he travelled the East by himself, took the basic
decisions and that, while he worked to put his own personal ideas into prac-
tice, his position meant that his orders were taken to be orders of the Central
Committee and of the government and that in the end he carried some of his
inuential friends in the government with him. That is why, if one day it would
be necessary to revive Bahaeddin akirs memory, the provinces in the east will be
more than ready to put up his statue.19

First of all, it is clear that this old Unionist has no hesitation in describing
Bahaeddins role quite openly (even if he refers to the deportations rather
than the killings). That the Armenian policy was not discussed openly in his
presence is entirely credible. After all, Hseyin Cahit was certainly trusted
by Tlts circle up to a point, but he was not one of the people who had been
actively involved in the planning of the constitutional revolution. Nor was he
316 Continuities

a member of the innermost circle. The important thing, however, is that he

concludes that Bahaeddin must have been primarily responsible and then
goes on, not to blame him or to distance himself from him, but instead to
suggest that his memory should be honored.
The most interesting aspect of the publication is of course that it was
published at all. In 1936 Kemalist Turkey had one of the most draconian
press laws in existence, which even prohibited any publication at odds with
the general policies of the state. Censorship was strictly enforced, so we can
assume that the above statement was published with the implicit agreement
of the government.
In short: in the early republic the political and intellectual elite felt as
little need to distance themselves from the genocide and its perpetrators as
they had immediately following the war. In the years 19181922 the contin-
ued need to mobilize the Muslim population of Anatolia made any serious
reckoning with this aspect of the recent past an impossibility. After the proc-
lamation of the republic the composition of the ruling elite precluded it.
Turkey was ruled by an elite that consisted of former Unionist bureaucrats
and military ofcers, who hailed overwhelmingly from the Balkans and had
adopted Anatolia as their new fatherland. Many of the people in central po-
sitions of power (kr Kaya, Kazm zalp, Abdlhalik Renda, Kl Ali)
had been personally involved in the massacres, but besides that, the ruling
elite as a whole depended on a coalition with provincial notables, landlords,
and tribal chiefs, who had proted immensely from the departure of the
Armenians and the Greeks. It was what Fatma Mge Gek has called an
unspoken devils bargain.20 A serious attempt to distance the republic
from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the
state depended for its stability.
Notes

INTRODUCTION
1. For a prehistory of the project to bring Armenian, Turkish, and other scholars
together to discuss their research on the Armenian Genocide and the nal years of
the Ottoman Empire, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Truth in Telling: Reconciling Real-
ities in the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, American Historical Review, 114,
no. 4 (Oct. 2009): 93046.
2. The principal exponent of the continuity thesis is Vahakn Dadrian. See, for
example, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conict from the Balkans to
Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995) and War-
rant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conict (New Brunswick, N.J., and
London: Transaction Publishers, 1999). Among those who have argued for contin-
gency and the distinctiveness of the Armenian genocide are Michael Mann, The
Dark-Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005); Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-
Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Ronald
Grigor Suny, Empire and Nation: Armenians, Turks, and the End of the Ottoman
Empire, The Armenian Forum 1, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 1751, critical responses by
Vahakn N. Dadrian, Engin Deniz Akarl, and Selim Deringil, with a reply by Suny,
13136. Similar arguments had been made earlier by Yves Ternon in a series of works:
Les Armniens: Histoire dun gnocide (Paris: ditions de Seuil, 1977); with Grard Chal-
iand, The Armenians: From Genocide to Resistance, trans. Tony Berrett (London: Zed
Press, 1983) and Le gnocide des Armniens (Paris: Complexe, 1984); and by the political
scientist Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide. On the Origins of the Armenian Geno-
cide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
3. For a review of these debates, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and
Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (London: Arnold, 1993), 80107; and Geoff Eleys
introductory essay to his edited volume, The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory,
NazismFacing the German Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 131.
4. The Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission was established in July
2001 with State Department support and ended its activity in April 2004. Made up of
civil society representatives, it attempted to nd common ground between Turks
and Armenians on the events of 1915. The International Center for Transition Jus-
tice eventually ruled on TARCs report and acknowledged that Ottoman government
actions constituted genocide. On TARC, with which WATS has sometimes been con-
fused or deliberately conated, see David L. Phillips, Unsilencing the Past: Track Two

317
318 Notes to Pages 716

Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation (New York and Oxford: Berghahn

Books, 2005).
5. Halil Berktay, ASpecial Organization Killed Armenians: An Interview with Halil
Berktay, by Nee Dzel, Radikal (Istanbul), June 30, 2000; translated by Marc David Baer.
6. The account of the Istanbul conference comes from a report authored by
Fatma Mge Gek and circulated through the WATS listserv.
7. See Paul Boghosians discussion The Concept of Genocide, Journal of Geno-
cide Research (2010, forthcoming).
8. A useful discussion of the distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide
can be found in Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-
Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25.

CHAPTER 1
1. The German Protestant pastor Johannes Lepsius, among others, issued reports
on the Armenian killings by the Ottomans while they were still occurring. His reports
were eventually published as Deutschland und Armenien, 19141918: Sammlung diploma-
tischer Aktenstcke (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919). One of the earliest sources available to
English-language readers was The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Docu-
ments Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (London,
New York, and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916). For contemporary newspaper
accounts, see Richard Kloian, The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from The American
Press: 19151922 (Richmond, Calif.: Heritage Publishing, 2005).
2. Roger W. Smith, Introduction, in Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgen-
thaus Story, xxv (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). The original publication
(New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1918) has been followed by successive reissues,
among them one published by the Gomidas Institute in Princeton, New Jersey (2000),
with an introduction by Ara Saraan. All references in this essay are to the 2003 Wayne
State University Press edition. The memoir was ghostwritten by Burton Jesse Hen-
drick (18701949), a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and biographer.
3. Ibid., xxi.
4. Heath Lowry, The Story behind Ambassador Morgenthaus Story (Istanbul: Isis
Press, 1990). Lowrys critique of Morgenthau was preceded much earlier by histo-
rians Sidney Bradshaw Fay and Harry Elmer Barnes, largely for an account of a
Potsdam Crown Council meeting of July 5, 1914, where Morgenthau incorrectly has
Ambassador Wangenheim meeting with the Kaiser. See also the anti-Armenian web-
site Tall Armenian Tale: http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/morgenthau.htm. On
Lowry, see William H. Honan, Princeton Is Accused of Fronting for the Turkish
Government, New York Times, May 22, 1996.
5. Copies of the original reports can be found at the Library of Congress and
have been published in an authoritative edition: Ara Saraan, comp., United States
Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 19131916
(Princeton, N.J., and London: Gomidas Institute, 2004).
6. Henry Morgenthau III, Epilogue: The Rest of the Story, in Morgenthau,
Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, 296.
7. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, xxxix.
8. For information on Morgenthaus early life and later career, see Henry Mor-
genthau, All in a Lifetime (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Page, 1922); I Was Sent to
Notes to Pages 1620 319

Athens (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929); and Henry Morgenthau III,
Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991).
9. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, xxxix.
10. Ibid., 14. In her reading of Turkish memoirs, Fatma Mge Gek has noted
that of the three leading Young Turk leaders, Tlt was the most religiously obser-
vant, was known to pray three times a day, and was sometimes ridiculed by others
for his piety. Personal communication to the author.
11. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, 16.
12. Ibid., 18.
13. Ibid., 164, 191.
14. Ibid., 191.
15. Ibid., 101, 170.
16. Ibid., 19293.
17. Ibid., 194.
18. Ibid., 196.
19. Ibid., 135.
20. Ibid., 100.
21. Ibid., 101.
22. Ibid., 11.
23. Ibid., 117. Most of these attacks were orchestrated by the CUP itself, accord-
ing to memoirs of members of the Special Organization. Fatma Mge Gek, pri-
vate communication to the author.
24. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, 118.
25. Ibid., 135.
26. Ibid., 138.
27. Ibid., 200.
28. Ibid., 201.
29. Ibid., 2034.
30. Ibid., 22122.
31. Ibid., 224. In his laconic diary entry, Morgenthau related that he had dinner
with Tlt that Saturday, April 24: We asked him about Armenians and he admitted
that they had arrested a great many of them. He said he wants them to leave the city.
They intend to put them among Turks in the interior where they can do no harm.
Saraan, United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus, 216.
32. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, 230. In his diary entry for
April 24, 1915, Morgenthau wrote that in a conversation about the Zionists, Tlt
saw them as mischievous and that it is their duty to get rid of them. The ambas-
sador concluded, he is evidently as much afraid of internal trouble as the war, and
they have made up their mind to crush all possible attempts at revolution. Saraan,
United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus, 21516.
33. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, 231.
34. Ibid., 232.
35. Ibid., 233.
36. Ibid., 229.
37. Ibid., 234.
38. Ibid., 254; diary entry, April 27, 1915. Saraan, United States Diplomacy on
the Bosphorus, 21718.
39. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story, 261.
320 Notes to Pages 2022

40. Ibid., 278.

41. The controversial and disputed Andonian documents rst appeared in
The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Ofcial Documents Relating to the Deportation and Massacres
of Armenians (1920) and were purported to include telegrams from Tlt. Turkish
scholars have disputed their authenticity, and the Dutch Turcologist Erik-Jan Zrcher
also questions their provenance, though he states that other documents corroborate
the documents claim of CUP initiation and involvement in the killings. Erik J.
Zrcher, Turkey, A Modern History (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 121.
For a Turkish critique, see Trkkaya Atav, The Andonian Documents Attributed to
Talat Pasha Are Forgeries! (Ankara: Sistem Ofset, 1984). For an Armenian defense of
the documents authenticity, see Vahakn Dadrian, The Naim-Andonian Documents
on the World War I Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a
Genocide, International Journal of Middle East Studies 18, (Aug. 1986), 31160.
42. On Lausanne and its effects, see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Geno-
cide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 166206.
43. Edward Minasian, The Forty Years of Musa Dagh: The Film That Was
Denied, Journal of Armenian Studies 3, no. 12 (19861987): 12131; Bloxham, The
Great Game of Genocide, 204. On the resonance of the novel, see Yair Auron, The
Forty Days of Musa Dagh: Its Impact on Jewish Youth in Palestine and Europe, in
Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard G. Hovan-
nisian, 14764 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998).
44. Lewis Thomas and Richard Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951). Lewis Thomas went on to
teach Stanford Shaw at Princeton; Shaw supervised the doctorates of Justin McCar-
thy and Heath Lowry at UCLA. In 1994 Lowry completed the circle by taking up the
Ankara-funded Atatrk Chair in Turkish Studies at Princeton University. Bloxham,
The Great Game of Genocide, 214.
45. Esat Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi (Ankara: Yeni Matbaa, 1950);
later translated as The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question (Istanbul:
Documentary Publications, 1988). Bloxham calls this work the canonical text of
Turkish nationalist historiography on the Armenians, though it contains system-
atic misrepresentations and exaggerations of Armenian revolutionary activism. The
Great Game of Genocide, 213.
46. Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking toward Ararat: The Diaspora and the Home-
land, in Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History, 21330 (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
47. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston and New York: Hough-
ton Mifin, 1999), 12842. Holocaust had been used by the New York Times in the
1890s for the Hamidian massacres of the Armenians, as well as the Adana massa-
cres of 1910. Duckett Z. Ferriman, The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust
at Adana in Asia Minor, during April, 1909 (London: n.p., 1913).
48. The only historical journal dealing with Armenians available in English in
the 1940s and 1950s was the Armenian Review, founded in 1948 by the Dashnak
party. As Bloxham points out, It was not for nearly two decades that the Armenian
Review addressed the genocide with any consistency or frequency. The journals
emphasis was much more on the historical Armenian struggle for freedom against
domination of all sorts, from that of the sultans through the CUP to the USSR, and
Notes to Pages 2226 321

of course the ARFs special role in this ght The Great Game of Genocide, 214. Early
articles in the journal that dealt with the Armenian Genocide included those by
H. Saro (1948), Onnig Mekhtarian (1949), Vahan Minakhorian (1955), Navasard
Deyrmenjian (1961), Vahe A. Saraan (1959), Ruben Der Minassian (1964), James
H. Tashjian (1957, 1962), and H. Kazarian (Haikazun Ghazarian) (1965).
49. Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Holocaust: A Bibliography Relating to
the Deportations, Massacres, and Dispersion of the Armenian People, 19151923 (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, 1978).
50. Yves Ternon, Les Armniens: Histoire dun gnocide (Paris: ditions de Seuil, 1977);
La cause armnienne (Paris: ditions de Seuil, 1983); with Grard Chaliand, The Arme-
nians from Genocide to Resistance, trans. Tony Berrett (London: Zed Press, 1983); and Le
gnocide des Armniens (Paris: Complexe, 1984); his own Enqute sur la ngation dun geno-
cide (Marseilles: ditions Parathses, 1989); and Mardin 1915: Anatomie pathologique
dune dstruction (Paris: Centre dHistoire Armnienne Contemporaine, 2002).
51. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 192.
52. Israel W. Charny and Shamai Davidson, eds., The Book of the International Confer-
ence on the Holocaust and Genocide: Book One: The Conference Program and Crisis (Tel Aviv:
Institute on the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, 1983).
53. A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide, The Permanent Peoples Tribunal
(London: Zed Books, 1985), 227.
54. The work of Leo Kuper (19081994) was particularly important in dening
the eld of comparative genocide studies: Genocide: Its Political Use in the 20th Cen-
tury (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); and The Prevention of Genocide
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). Among the important works of the
late 1980s to early 1990s were: Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide
in Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J., and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1986); The
Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St. Martins Press, 1992); and
Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide
and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
55. Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and
Modern Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 2:31516.
56. Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia
and the End of the Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1983); Turks and
Armenians: A Manual on the Armenian Question (Washington, D.C.: Committee on
Education, Assembly of Turkish American Associations, 1989); Death and Exile: The
Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 18211922 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press,
1995); The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923 (London and New York:
Longman, 1997); The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (London: Arnold, 2001);
and Justin McCarthy, Esat Arslan, Cemalettin Takran, and mer Turan, The Arme-
nian Rebellion at Van (Salt Lake City: Utah Series in Turkish and Islamic Studies,
2006). A professor at the University of Louisville, McCarthy was awarded the Order
of Merit by the Turkish government in 1998.
57. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, Introduction, in Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Volume I: The Central Lands, ed. Ben-
jamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 34.
58. Ibid., 7.
59. Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 18561876 (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 11516.
322 Notes to Pages 2629

60. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers: Accounts and Papers; Turkey, for the years
18771881; A. O. Sarkissian, History of the Armenian Question to 1885, Illinois
Studies in the Social Sciences 35, 80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1938).
Sarkissian used the thirty volumes of records of the Armenian National Assembly in
Istanbul, a true mine of information on Armenian affairs in Turkey Adenakeruti-
unk Azkayin Zhoghovoi, 18701914 (Constantinople: <pub>, 18701914).
61. William L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism (New York and London: Knopf,
1935), i, 160. On this passage Norman Ravitch notes: Langers labeling of the Armenian
movement as national-socialist can hardly be considered a slip of the pen. The Arme-
nian Catastrophe: Of History, Murder, & Sin, Encounter 57, no. 6 (Dec. 1981): 76n16.
62. I am indebted to my colleague Jirair (Gerard) Libaridian for suggestions
informing this section.
63. On the importance of considering perceptions and projections, see Robert
Melson, A Theoretical Enquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 18941986, Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 24 (1982): 481509. Most Armenians, of course,
did not join the revolutionary movement but continued to hope for the best within
the Ottoman legal structure. Even after the Bloody Sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876
1909) abrogated the Ottoman Constitution, the Armenian religious leaders and the
middle class preferred to petition the government or appeal to the Western powers
for redress. Given the general passivity of the Armenian peasantry of Anatolia and
the hostility of the Armenian community leadership, the revolutionaries remained a
vocal and violent irritant for the Turks but no real threat to the continuance of the
sultans power. Resistance attracted only a small minority of Armenians, and the
revolutionary movement itself split over issues of tactics and goals. In the aftermath
of the massacres of 18941896, the Hnchak party broke into two factions, one still
committed to the original populist-Marxist program, the other considerably more
moderate and gravitating toward liberalism. Though it never regained its original
prominence among Armenians, the Hnchak party remained notable as the only Arme-
nian revolutionary party that clearly called for Armenian independence in its party
program until it dropped that demand in 1909after the Young Turk Revolution.
64. Gerard J. Libaridian, Revolution and Liberation in the 1892 and 1907 Pro-
grams of the Dashnaktsutiun, in Transcaucasia, Nationalism, and Social Change:
Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny,
18596 (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983); revised edition (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 187218.
65. The divisions among Ottoman Armenians between those who worked
within the Ottoman system and those who advocated rebellion are detailed in the
local study of Zeytun by Aram Arkun in this volume (chapter 10).
66. See the discussion of the work of Dadrian and Balakian below.
67. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conict
from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, R.I., and Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 1995) and Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conict (New
Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1999).
68. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, xxiii.
69. Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide, 20.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 166.
72. Ibid.
Notes to Pages 3035 323

73. Ibid., 156.

74. Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and Americas
Response (New York: Harper Collins, 2003). See the review by Belinda Cooper, The
New York Times Book Review, October 19, 2003.
75. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961; 2nd ed., 1968), 356. Over the years Lewis has hardened his position. In
2007 he was quoted in an article opposing U.S. recognition of the genocide in the
conservative Washington Times: [T]he point that was being made was that the mas-
sacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was the same as what happened to
Jews in Nazi Germany and that is a downright falsehood. What happened to the
Armenians was the result of a massive Armenian armed rebellion against the Turks,
which began even before war broke out, and continued on a larger scale. Bruce Fein
(identied as resident scholar with the Turkish Coalition of America), Armenian
Crime Amnesia? The Washington Times, Oct. 16, 2007.
76. Sarkis Shmavonian, Mikayel Nalbandian and Non-Territorial Nationalism,
Armenian Review 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 3556; Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 111,
5278.
77. See, for example, the essays by Richard Hovannisian, Robert Melson, R.
Hrair Dekmejian, and Leo Kuper in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, ed. Rich-
ard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1986).
78. See particularly, Stephan H. Astourian, Modern Turkish Identity and the
Armenian Genocide: From Prejudice to Racist Nationalism, in Remembrance and
Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian, 2350
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).
79. Ibid., 27.
80. Ibid, 38.
81. Stephen H. Astourian, Testing World Systems Theory: Cilicia (1830s1890s):
Armenian-Turkish Polarization and the Ideology of Modern Ottoman Historiogra-
phy (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996). My own afnities for
what I called a social ecology approach can be seen in my essay, Toward an Under-
standing of the Armenian Genocide, Looking toward Ararat, 94115.
82. This evolution toward Turkish nationalism is explored in M. kr Hanioglu,
The Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Preparation
for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 19021908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
83. See the chapters in this volume by Dndar (13) and ngr (14), as well as Fuat
Dndar, ttihat ve Terakkinin Mslmlar skan Politikas (19131918) [The Muslim Set-
tlement Policy of the Union and Progress Party] (Istanbul: letim Press, 2001); and his
dissertation, Lingnierie ethnique du rgime jeune-turc (Paris: EHESS, 2006).
84. Taner Akam, Armenien und der Vlkermord: Die Istanbuler Prozesse und die
trkische Nationalbewegung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1996); From Empire to
Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2004);
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
85. Explicit comparisons between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust inform
two important collections: Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds., In Gods Name: Genocide
and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001);
Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller, eds., Der Vlkermord an den Armeniern und
die Shoah/ The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2002).
324 Notes to Pages 3537

86. Bloxham, The Armenian Genocide of 191516: Cumulative Radicalisation

and the Development of a Destruction Policy, Past and Present 181 (Nov. 2003): 141
91; The Great Game of Genocide (2005); Genocide, the World Wars, and the Unweaving
of Europe (London and Portland, Ore.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008).
87. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 19.
88. Ibid., 20.
89. Ibid., 5.
90. Ibid., 6566.
91. Ibid, 75.
92. Ibid., 94.
93. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin estimate that since 1945 total deaths from
civil wars (in cases with 1000 or more deaths) numbered over 12,000,000, while massa-
cres accounted for only 2,500,000, and interstate wars for 4,500,000. James D. Fearon
and David D. Laitin, Mass Violence in the Long Half-Century: 19451999, Memo for
Conference Macro-explanations of Mass Violence and Genocide, Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, Calif., Jan. 1819, 2002. Among the most
inuential pieces from international relations theorists are: Barry Posen, The Security
Dilemma and Ethnic Conict, in Ethnic Conict and International Security, ed. Michael
Brown, 10324 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Stephen Van Evera,
Hypotheses on Nationalism and War, International Security 28, no. 4 (Spring 1994):
539; and V. P. Gagnon, Ethnic Nationalism and International Conict: The Case of
Serbia, International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1995/1996): 13066.
94. For the connection between democratization and violence, see Jack Snyder,
From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conict (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2000); and Michael Mann, The Dark-Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Fearon and Laitin, on the other hand,
nd no correlation between democracy and ethnic and civil violence. Ethnicity, Insur-
gency, and Civil War, American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (Feb. 2003): 7590.
95. See, for example, Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twenti-
eth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Robert F. Melson,
Revolution and Genocide; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University Press, 1989, 2000); Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and
Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Mark Levene,
Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State: The Meaning of Genocide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005);
Volume II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).
96. Reviewing six case studies by other authors that examine ethnic violence from
Northern Ireland, India, Sudan, Rawanda, Sri Lanka, and the Balkans, Fearon and
Laitin make this point graphically: Indeed, based on these studies, one might conjec-
ture that a necessary condition for sustained ethnic violence is the availability of thugs
(in most cases young men who are ill-educated, unemployed or underemployed, and
from small towns) who can be mobilized by nationalist ideologues, who themselves,
university educated would shy away from killing their neighbors with machetes
James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic
Identity, International Organization 54, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 84577 [869].
97. Ibid., 871.
98. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
99. Mann, The Dark-Side of Democracy.
Notes to Pages 3945 325

100. Ibid., 145.

101. Ibid., 141.
102. For an exploration of what I am calling affective disposition, see Ronald
Grigor Suny, Thinking about Feelings: Affective Dispositions and Emotional Ties in
Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire, in Interpreting Emotions in Russia and
Eastern Europe, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol (forthcoming).

CHAPTER 2
1. Elie Kedourie expresses this point well: nationalists make use of the past
and do so strategically depending on what past cleavage they want to mend to
encourage unity and heal internal conict. Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960),
70. Anthony Smith likewise states, if there is no memory, there is no identity; no
identity, no nation. Memory and Modernity: Reections on Ernest Gellners Theory
of Nationalism, Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (1996): 383.
2. Ayla Gl, Imagining the Turkish Nation through Othering Armenians,
Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 1 (2005): 12139.
3. Baskn Oran, Atatrk Milliyetilii: Resmi deoloji D bir nceleme [Atatrk Na-
tionalism: An Analysis outside the Ofcial Ideology] (Ankara: Bilgi, 1993), 179, 272.
4. For an excellent critical analysis of the Speech, see Hlya Adak, National
Myths and Self-Na(rra)tions: Mustafa Kemals Nutuk and Halide Edibs Memoirs and
The Turkish Ordeal, South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 23 (2003): 50927.
5. Taha Parla, Trkiyede Siyasi Kltrn Resmi Kaynaklar: Atatrkn Nutuku
[The Ofcial Sources of Political Culture in Turkey: Atatrks Speech] (stanbul:
letiim, 1991), 1921. Mustafa Kemal also employed his narrative to marginalize all
others who had contributed to the success of the Independence Struggle.
6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
7. Duncan S. A. Bell denes collective myth as the shared understanding, con-
ceptualization, or representation of past events by succeeding generations who have
not themselves personally experienced them. Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology
and National Identity, British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (2003): 65.
8. Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation? in Becoming National, ed. Geoff Eley and
Ronald Grigor Suny, 4255 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
9. As Anthony W. Marx notes, exclusion occurs when the state elite decide who to
include, reward and encourage loyalty form as the core constituency. To identify and
consolidate the core, [they] manipulate established antagonisms against some other
groups thereby excluded. The Nation-State and Its Exclusion, Political Science Quarterly
117, no. 1 (2002): 113. This exclusion is often not class-based because the state elite need
the income generated by these groups. I dene minorities as those social groups who do
not share equally in the power distribution of a society. Even though some present-day
Kurds do not consider themselves to be a minority group and are not ofcially dened as
such by the Turkish state, they would sociologically comprise a minority because they do
not share equally in the distribution of resources in Turkish society.
10. Also eliminated are the frequent interventions of the military in Turkish democ-
racy through a series of military coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and the soft-coup in 1997.
11. See, for instance, Hseyin Nazm Paa, Ermeni Olaylar Tarihi [History of the
Armenian Incidents] (Ankara: Prime Ministers Press, 1994); Erdoan Cengiz, ed.,
326 Notes to Pages 4547

Ermeni Komitelerinin Amal ve Hareket-i htilaliyesi [The Actions and Revolutionary

Movements of the Armenian Committees] (Ankara: Prime Ministers Press, 1983).
See also National Congress of Turkey, The Turco-Armenian Question: The Turkish
Point of View (Constantinople: Societe Anonyme de Papeterie et dImprimerie, 1919).
12. See, for instance, Mehmed Asaf, 1909 Adana Ermeni Olaylar ve Anlarm [1909
Adana Armenian Incidents and My Memoirs] (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society
Press, 1982); Gl aal-Gven, Kamil Paa ve Said Paalarn Anlar: Polemikler [Mem-
oirs of Kamil Pasha and Sait Pasha: The Polemics] (Istanbul: Arba Press, 1991);
Mehmet Kasm, Tlt Paann Anlar [Memoirs of Tlt Pasha] (Istanbul: Say Press,
1986); Ahmet Mehmedefendiolu Srgnden ntihara: Dr. Reid Beyin Hatralar
[From Exile to Suicide: Memoirs of Dr. Reid Bey] (zmir: Belge Press, 1982); Sadrazam
Sait Paa Anlar [Memoirs of the Grand Vezir Sait Pasha] (Istanbul: Hr Press, 1977).
13. See, for instance, 8 Mart sene 335 tarihinde irade-i seniye-i hazret-i padiahiye
iktiran eden kararname ile mteekkil divan- harb-i r muhakemat zabt ceridesi
[Turkish military tribunal records] (Istanbul: Takvim-i Vekayi Press, 19191920).
14. See, for instance, Cemil Birsel, Lozan [Lausanne] (Istanbul: Sosyal Press,
1933); Bilal imir, Lozan Telgraar: Trk Diplomatik Belgelerinde Lozan Bar
Konferans [The Lausanne Telegraphs: Lausanne Peace Conference through Turkish
Diplomatic Documents] (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Press, 1990).
15. See, for instance, Prime Ministry Directorate General of Press and Informa-
tion, Documents (Ankara: Prime Ministry Press, 1989); Prime Ministry Directorate of
State Archives, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler (19151920) [Armenians in Ottoman
Documents] (Ankara: Prime Ministers Press, 1994).
16. See National Congress of Turkey, The Turco-Armenian Question: The Turkish
Point of View (Constantinople: Societe Anonyme de Papeterie et dImprimerie, 1919).
17. Y. G. ark, Trk Devleti Hizmetinde Ermeniler (14531953) [Armenians in the
Service of the Turkish State] (Istanbul: Yeni Press, 1953); Esat Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler
ve Ermeni Meselesi [Armenians in History and the Armenian Question] (Istanbul:
Belge Press, 1953). ark was a priest who unfortunately did not feel comfortable
enough to state what his rst name was. Esat Uras was a member of the former
Committee of Union and Progress Special Organization, initially sent to Anatolia
along with others to research the minorities living there.
18. See Neide Kerem Demir, Bir ehid Anasna Tarihin Syledikleri: Trkiyenin
Ermeni Meselesi [What History Told a Martyrs Mother: The Armenian Question in
Turkey] (Ankara: Hlbe Press, 1976); Atatrk niversitesi Yirminci Yl Armaan,
Ermeniler hakknda makaleler derlemeler [Articles and Selections on the Armenians]
(Ankara: Kalite Press, 1978); Jamanak, Facts from the Turkish Armenians [Realits
exprimes par les armnien turcs/Trk Ermenilerinden gerekler] (Istanbul:
Jamanak Press, 1980); Dokuz Eyll niversitesi Rektrl, Trk Tarihinde Erme-
niler Sempozyumu [Symposium on the Armenians in Turkish History] (Manisa:
afak Press, 1983); Nejat Gyn, Osmal daresinde Ermeniler [Armenians under
Ottoman Administration] (Istanbul: Gltepe Press, 1983); Nurettin Glmez, Trkiye
Byk Millet Meclisi Zabtlarndan Dou ve Gneydou meselesi [Eastern and South-
eastern Question from the Proceedings of the Turkish Grand National Assembly]
(Istanbul: Hamle Press, 1983); Kamuran Grn, Ermeni Dosyas [The Armenian
File] (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Press, 1983); inasi Orel and Sreyya Yuca,
Ermenilerce Tlt Paaya Atfedilen Telgraarn Gerek Yz [The Truth about the Tele-
grams Attributed to Tlt Pasha by the Armenians] (Ankara: Turkish Historical
Notes to Pages 4751 327

Society Press, 1983); Cevdet Kk, Osmanl Diplomasisinde Ermeni Meselesinin Ortaya
k (18781897) [The Emergence of the Armenian Question in Ottoman Diplo-
macy] (Istanbul: Istanbul University Press, 1984); Bilal imir, The Deportees of Malta
and the Armenian Question (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Press, 1983), British
Documents on the Ottoman Armenians (18561880) (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society
Press, 1983), The Genesis of the Armenian Question (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society
Press, 1983a), and British Documents on the Ottoman Armenians (18801890) (Ankara:
Turkish Historical Society Press, 1983b); Anadolu Basn Birlii, Katliam Efsanesi [The
Massacre Myth] (Ankara: Anatolian Press, 1987); Kinyas Kartal, Vandan Erivana
Hatralarm [My Memoirs from Van to Erivan] (Ankara: Anatolian Press, 1987).
19. See, for instance, Bilal Erylmaz, Osmanl Devletinde Gayrmslim Tebaann
Ynetimi [The Administration of the Non-Muslims in the Ottoman State] (Istanbul:
Risale Press, 1990); Azmi Ssl, Ermeniler ve 1915 Tehcir Olay [Armenians and the
Population Transfer Incident] (Ankara: Sistem Press, 1990); Salahi Sonyel, The Great
War and the Tragedy of Anatolia (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Press, 2000), and
Minorities and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire (Ankara: Turkish Historical So-
ciety Press, 1983); Trkkaya Atav, The Armenians in the Late Ottoman Period (Ankara:
Turkish Historical Society Press, 2001), and The Armenian Question: Conict,
Trauma and Objectivity (Ankara: Strategic Research Center Press, 1997).
20. For a full discussion, see Erik Jan Zrcher, Milli Mcadelede ttihatlk [The
Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish
National Movement, 19051926] (Istanbul: Balam Press, 1987).
21. For examples that cover the range of works in this cluster, see for instance
Taner Akam, nsan Haklar ve Ermeni Sorunu [Human Rights and the Armenian
Question] (Istanbul: mge Press, 1999), and Taner Timur, Trkler ve Ermeniler: 1915
ve Sonras [Turks and Armenians: 1915 and Its Aftermath] (Ankara: mge Press,
2001), as well as Hdavendigar Onur, Ermeni Portreleri: Milet-i [sic] Sadkadan
Haykn ocuklarna [Armenian Portraits: From a Loyal Community to the Children
of Hayk] (Istanbul: Burak Press, 1999).
22. For examples of this cluster, see the works of kr Haniolu, Preparation for a Rev-
olution: The Young Turks, 19021908 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), and The
Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Trk Tarih Vakf, 75
Ylda TebaadanYurttaa Doru [From Subject to Citizen in 75 Years] (Istanbul: History
Foundation Press, 1999); Osman Selim Kocahanolu, ttihat-Terakkinin Sorgulanmas ve
Yarglanmas: Meclis-i Mebusan Zabtlar [The Interrogation and Trial of the Union and
Progress: Proceedings of the Ottoman Assembly] (Istanbul: Temel Press, 1998); Fuat
Dndar, ttihat ve Terakkinin Mslmanlar skan Politikas (19131918) [The Muslim
Settlement Policy of the Union and Progress Party] (Istanbul: letiim Press, 2001).
23. For examples of this cluster, see for instance, Pars Tulac, Ermeni
Edebiyatndan Sekiler [Selections from Armenian Literature] (Istanbul: Cem Press,
1982); Hagop Mintzuri, Atina, Tuzun Var m? [Athena, Have You Got Some Salt?]
(Istanbul: Aras Press, 2000); Antan zer, Yaam Beklerken [While Awaiting Life]
(Istanbul: Aras Press, 1997); Yervant Srmakeliyan, Balk Sevdas [Fishermans
Passion] (Istanbul: Aras Press, 2000); Krikor Zohrab, Hayat, Olduu gibi [Life, As It
Is] (Ankara: Ayra Press, 2000); and smail Arkan, Mahallemizdeki Ermeniler [Arme-
nians in Our Neighborhood] (Istanbul: letiim Press, 2001).
24. See, for instance, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and M. Jacob, eds., Telling the
Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 102.
328 Notes to Pages 5557

CHAPTER 3
1. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 193.
2. We will not discuss here the adequacy of the label ethnic for these con-
icts. The literature pertaining to them is enormous and the following should pro-
vide a solid background. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conict (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985) and The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2001). For a psychological interpretation of such events, in
this case Hindu-Muslim riots, see Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Iden-
tities, Religion, and Conict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). On compar-
ative interethnic polarization, see Leo Kuper, The Pity of It All: Polarisation of Racial
and Ethnic Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
3. Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conict (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 3. The italics are from the author.
4. Ibid., 2429. The quotation is on p. 47.
5. On modernization and its impact on ethnicity, on competition, and on niche
overlap, ibid. 1619, 2431. On ethnic boundaries, polyethnic social systems, and
the ecological perspective underlying the concept of niche overlap, see Fredrik Barth,
Introduction, in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture
Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth, 1520 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969). On the
concept of power and the power-conict sociological model, see William J. Wilson,
Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspec-
tives (New York: The Free Press, 1973; Free Press paperback edition, 1976), 368.
6. Among others, see the synthesis by Richard G. Hovannisian, The Arme-
nian Question in the Ottoman Empire, 18761914, in The Armenian People from
Ancient to Modern Times, vol. 2, Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century
to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian, 20338 (New York: St. Martins
Press, 1977); Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (New York: St.
Martins Press, 1980), 100202.
7. These reforms remind one of somewhat similar developments in Europe from the
beginning of the nineteenth century on: the Code Napoleon (1804), later to be called
Code Civil; the reforms of Baron von Stein in Prussia (1807); and in Russia the reforms
of Tsar Alexander II (abolition of serfdom in 1861, the judicial reform of 1864, reform of
municipal government in 1870, etc.). On Frances cultural and ideological impact on the
modernization of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, see Jean-Louis Bacqu-
Grammont and Edhem Eldem, eds., De la Rvolution franaise la Turquie dAtatrk: La
modernisation politique et sociale, Varia Turcica 16 (stanbul and Paris: ditions sis, 1990).
8. Donald Quataert, The Age of Reforms, 18121914, part 4 in An Economic
and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. 2: 16001914, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi,
Bruce McGowan, Donald Quataert, and evket Pamuk, paperback ed., 856 (1994;
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
9. For a discussion of these issues, see Sarah D. Shields, Mosul before Iraq: Like
Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 141.
10. Huri slamolu, Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the
Ottoman Land Code of 1858, in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle
East, ed. Roger Owen, 28 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
11. Quataert, The Age of Reforms, 18121914, 85759; and slamolu, Prop-
erty as a Contested Domain, 32.
Notes to Pages 5760 329

12. Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 18561876 (1963; New
York: Gordian Press, 1973), 99.
13. For a survey and synthesis of the literature, see Quataert, The Age of
Reforms, 18121914, 86170, and Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern
Middle East (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5456.
14. Quataert, The Age of Reforms, 18121914, 860. For a less detailed list of
those factors, but a similar conclusion, see Roger Owen, Introduction, in New Per-
spectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, xiii.
15. Quataert, The Age of Reforms, 18121914, 859.
16. For the eighteenth century, see Yusuf Halaolu, XVIII. Yzylda Osmanl
mperatorluunun skn Siyaseti ve Airetlerin Yerletirilmesi [The Sedentarization
Policy of the Ottoman Empire and the Settling of the Tribes in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury] (Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu Basmevi, 1988).
17. Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 17001922 (Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000), 11617, 129.
18. For one such case, see Quataert, The Age of Reforms, 18121914, 871.
19. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 17001922, 115; also Justin McCar-
thy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 18211922 (Prince-
ton, N.J.: The Darwin Press, 1995).
20. Franois Georgeon, Le dernier sursaut (18781908), in Histoire de lEmpire
ottoman, ed. Robert Mantran, 54445 (Paris: Fayard, 1989).
21. For instance, Faruk Tabak, Local Merchants in Peripheral Areas of the
Empire: The Fertile Crescent during the Long Nineteenth Century, Review: Fernand
Braudel Center 11, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 179214, especially 182, 199, 204. For a detailed
study of one such case of communal turmoil, see Bruce Masters, The 1850 Events
in Aleppo: An Aftershock of Syrias Incorporation into the Capitalist World System,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 22, no. 1 (February 1990): 320.
22. United States of America, Record Group 59, General Records of the Depart-
ment of State, Dispatches from United States Ministers to Turkey, 18181906, Vol-
ume 32, Document 196, Mr. Maynard to the Secretary of State, enclosure, Reports
on Provincial Oppressions (1877), 42 (hereafter cited as U.S., 59/32/196). On the
plight of the Armenian peasantry at the hands of the Kurds, the tolerance of the
state toward the latter, and the process of land usurpations, see E. K. Sarkisyan, Poli-
tika osmanskogo pravitelstva v zapadnoi Armenii i derzhavy v poslednei chetverti XIX i
nachale XX vv. [The Policies of the Ottoman State in Western Armenia and the
Powers in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth
Centuries] (Yerevan: Armenian S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, 1972), 4356.
23. More than half of these refugees seem to have been in Asiatic Turkey during
the 18561878 period. As a result of Ottoman territorial losses, those resettled in
Rumelia were forced to migrate again, this time into Asiatic Turkey in the subse-
quent period (18781914). For the data on the Circassian immigration, see A. ner
Turgay, Circassian Immigration into the Ottoman Empire, 18561878, in Islamic
Studies Presented to Charles J. Adams, ed. Wael B. Hallaq and Donald P. Little, 200
201, 2045, 21014 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991); also Justin McCarthy, An Ottoman
Document on the Refugees of the Crimean Period, The Turkish Studies Association
Bulletin 6, no. 2 (Sept. 1982): 2930. Until the early 1860s, Circassian immigration
into the Ottoman Empire, which had started after the end of the Crimean War
(1856), was still limited. See Kemal H. Karpat, Avrupali Egemenliinde Mslman
330 Notes to Pages 6062

Konumu [sic] erkeslerin Srgn ve Suriyedeki skan [The Status of the Mus-
lims under European Rule [:] The Deportation and Settlement of the Circassians in
Syria], in erkeslerin Srgn (21 Mayis 1864) [The Deportations of the Circassians
(May 21,1864)], no editor, 84 (Ankara: Kafkas Dernei Yaynlar, 2001). This article
appears to be an approximate translation of the same: The Status of the Muslim
under European Rule: The Eviction and Settlement of the erkes [sic], Journal of the
Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 1, no. 2 (1979): 727. The defeat of Sheikh
Shamils resistance to the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in 1859 led to a much
larger Circassian immigration into the Ottoman Empire. Refugee ows, however,
reached their peak from 1864 to 1866, once the Russians had overcome the Circas-
sians resistance in the Western Caucasus; see Andreas Kappeler, The Russian
Empire, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2001),
18285; the essays in erkeslerin Srgn (21 Mayis 1864); and Alan Fisher, Emigra-
tion of the Muslims from the Russian Empire in the Years after the Crimean War,
in A Precarious Balance: Conict, Trade, and Diplomacy on the Russian-Ottoman Fron-
tier, Analecta Isisiana 40 (stanbul: sis Press), 17588. On the Circassians in general,
see Paul B. Henze, Circassia in the Nineteenth Century: The Futile Fight for Free-
dom, in Pass turco-tatar [,] prsent sovitique: tudes offertes Alexandre Bennigsen/
Turco-Tatar Past [,] Soviet Present: Studies Presented to Alexandre Bennigsen, ed.
Ch[antal] Lemercier-Quelquejay, G[illes] Veinstein, and S. E[nders]. Wimbush, 243
73 (Louvain and Paris: ditions Peeters and ditions de lcole des Hautes tudes en
Sciences Sociales, 1986); and Hayri Ersoy and Aysun Kamac, erkes Tarihi [Circas-
sian History] (stanbul: Tmzamanlar Yaynclk, 1994).
24. See M. S. Lazarev, Kurdistan i kurdskaia problema (90-e gody XIX veka-1917)
[Kurdistan and the Kurdish Problem: 1890s1917] (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 3234.
Translated in Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, 18001914, Publica-
tions of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 13 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 6566; and Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, The History of
Armenian-Kurdish Relations in the Ottoman Empire, Armenian Review 39, 4156
(Winter 1986): 810.
25. The description is in H. F. B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol. 2: The
Turkish Provinces, reprint (Beirut: Khayats, 1965), 43031.
26. Osman Nuri, Abdlhamid-i Sani ve Devr-i Saltanat: Hayat-i Hususiye ve Siya-
siyesi [Abdlhamid II and the Period of His Reign: Private and Public Life] (stanbul:
Kitaphane-i Islam ve Asker, 1327 [1911]), 3:821.
27. Manoug J. Somakian, Empires in Conict: Armenia and the Great Powers,
18951920, foreword by Martin McCauley (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 2263.
28. Bayram Kodaman, ark Meselesi I Altnda Sultan II. Abdlhamidin Dou
Anadolu Politikas [The Policies of Sultan Abdlhamid II toward Eastern Anatolia in
the Light of the Eastern Question] (stanbul: Orkun Yaynevi, 1983), 2324. Also,
Stephen Duguid, The Politics of Unity: Hamidian Policy in Eastern Anatolia,
Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 2 (May 1973): 13945. On the provincial notables as a
social class, see Ercment Kuran, XIX. Yzylda Anadolunun Sosyal
Tabakalamasnda Ayanlarn Yeri [The Place of the Notables in the Social Stratica-
tion of Anatolia in the Nineteenth Century], in Tarih ve Sosyoloji Semineri (2829
Mayis 1990): Bildiriler [Seminar in History and Sociology (2829 May 1990): Proceed-
ings], stanbul niversitesi Edebiyat Fakltesi Tarih Aratrma Merkezi (stanbul:
Edebiyat Fakltesi Basmevi, 1991), 16468. The rejection of equality with the
Notes to Pages 6265 331

non-Muslims was widespread even beyond the eastern provinces. For the case of the
vilayet of Hdavendigr, see Mehmet eyitdanliolu, Hdavendigr Eyaletinde
Tanzimatn Uygulanmasna Dair Baz Notlar [Some Notes about the Implementa-
tion of the Tanzimat in the Province of Hdavendigr], in VII. Osmanl Sempozyumu
(St, Eyll 1992) [Seventh Ottoman Symposium (St, July 1992)], 61 (Ankara:
Erturul Gaziyi Anma ve St enlii Vakf Yaynlar No.7, 1993). For the resis-
tance to the Tanzimat reforms in the province of Harput, see Ahmet Akin,
Tanzimatn Harput Eyaletinde Uygulanmas ve Karlalan Glkler [The
Implementation of the Tanzimat in the Province of Harput and the Encountered
Difculties], Belleten 62, no. 235 (December 1998): 85161.
29. Sarkisyan, Politika osmanskogo pravitelstva v zapadnoi Armenii i Derzhavy, 5861.
30. Some sources emanating from local Protestant missionaries suggest that the
Ottoman government had purposely sharpened the existing tension between the Kurds
and the Nestorians in order to establish its direct control of the region. See Hans-Lukas
Kieser, Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen der Trkei 1839
1938 (Zrich: Chronos Verlag, 2000), 67. Clearly, missionary activities among Nesto-
rians also contributed to the growing tension. See Shields, Mosul before Iraq, 5457.
31. See David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris,
1996), 4950. For the fragmentation of Kurdish power and the ensuing turmoil, see
also Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State: The Social and Political Structures
of Kurdistan, 2nd. revised edition (1978; London: Zed Press, 1992), 18182, 22234;
and Arshak Safrastian, Kurds and Kurdistan (London: The Harvill Press, 1948), 5462.
32. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (Washington: Crane Rus-
sak, 1992), 57. On the Naqshbandis, see Hamid Algar, The Naqshband Order: A Pre-
liminary Survey of Its History and Signicance, Studia Islamica 44 (1976): 12352.
33. Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State, 22234.
34. Hofmann and Koutcharian, The History of Armenian-Kurdish Relations in
the Ottoman Empire, 1819.
35. K[aro]. Sasuni, Kurt Azgayin Sharzhumnere yev Hay-Krtakan Haraberutiunnere
[The Kurdish National Movements and Armenian-Kurdish Relations] (Beirut: Hamaz-
kayin, 1969), 12931. Karo Sasuni was a prominent leader of the Armenian Revolu-
tionary Federation. He was uent in Kurdish and knowledgeable in Kurdish affairs.
36. Kodaman, ark Meselesi I Altnda Sultan II. Abdlhamidin Dou Anadolu
Politikas, 31. The author makes it clear that one of the sultans main goals was to
reject any reform in favor of the Armenians; see, 10. As early as the seventeenth
century, the Ottoman state used provincial banditry, organized pastoral nomadic
groups into paramilitary organizations, and manipulated the opposition between set-
tled and nomadic populations to better centralize the empire. See Karen Barkey, Ban-
dits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization, The Wilder House
Series in Politics, History, and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
37. Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State, 186.
38. Great Britain, Foreign Ofce, Condential Print. Turkey, Further Correspon-
dence respecting the Affairs of Asiatic Turkey and Arabia, F.O. 424, Volume 239, Docu-
ment 321, enclosure by Fitzmaurice, annexed to a report by Marling to Sir Edward
Grey (Constantinople, 27 August 1913), 34647. Hereafter FO 424/239/32.
39. Kvorkian and Paboudjian, Les armniens dans lEmpire Ottoman la veille du
gnocide, 4445. For specic cases of Armenian emigration, see for example, Lynch,
Armenia: Travels and Studies, 2:218, 426. See also Sarkisyan, Politika osmanskogo
332 Notes to Pages 6566

pravitelstva v zapadnoi Armenii i Derzhavy, 63, 66. For the systematic use of demanding
the payment of a years taxation in advance to drive the Armenians off their lands,
see also Malcolm MacColl, The Constantinople Massacre and Its Lesson, The Con-
temporary Review (November 1895): 75455.
40. Baron Wladimir Giesl, Zwei Jahrzehnte in Nahen Orient (Berlin: Verlag fr
Kulturpolitik, 1927), 120.
41. Ali Vahbi Bey, Penses et souvenirs de lex-sultan Abdul-Hamid (Paris and Neuchatel:
Attinger Frres, n.d [1910s]), 1415. These thoughts of the sultan are dated 1893. The ed-
itor was his private secretary. The French original being a bit unusual, I will quote it here

Les temps ne sont plus o nous enfoncions des chardes dans notre propre
chair en accueillant des sectateurs de religions trangres. Dans les limites de
notre tat, nous ne saurions tolrer que des membres de notre propre peuple
et des sectateurs de notre propre foi. Il nous faut veiller renforcer llment
turc; il nous faut systmatiquement ramener le flux de lexpansion mahom-
tane qui nous revient de Bosnie et dHerzgovine, ainsi que de Bulgarie. Cette
colonisation-l est pour nous une question vitale. Il sagit, par cette immigra-
tion, daugmenter non seulement la puissance nationale, mais encore la puis-
sance conomique de lEmpire. Il nous faut renforcer le plus possible llment
mahomtan en Roumlie, et tout spcialement en Asie Mineure; avant tout, il
sagit pour nous de nous y assimiler les Kurdes.
42. For a detailed list of thousands of cases of land usurpation and exaction of all
kinds from 1908 to 1912, see the Armenian Patriarchates reports (takrir) to the Sublime
Porte and the Ottoman Ministry of Justice and Cults, La situation des armniens en Turquie
expose par des documents 19081912, vol. 1, 52pp.; vol. 2, 70p.; vol. 3, 61pp.; vol. 4,
52+XXXpp.; vol. 5, 53+XXXIIIpp.; vol. 6, 32+XXVIpp.; vol. 7, 34+XXXVIIIpp; vol. 8,
32+XLIIIpp.; vol. 9, 130+IIpp. (n.p.: [Istanbul], no publisher [Armenian Patriarchate of
Istanbul], n.d.). The total number of usurped properties exceeds 33,000. Volume 3 is of
particular interest, as it consists of an important report on the Adana massacres of 1909
by the Armenian Ottoman deputy Babiguian, written shortly prior to his death in rather
suspicious circumstances. The volume is entitled Rapport en date du 7 juin 1325 (1909),
de feu Babiguian effendi, dput dAdrinople, sur les massacres armniens dAdana.
43. Feroz Ahmad, The Agrarian Policy of the Young Turks, 19081918, in con-
omie et socits dans lEmpire ottoman (n du XVIIIedbut du XXe sicle), Actes du col-
loque de Strasbourg (1er5 juillet 1980), ed. Jean-Louis Bacqu-Grammont and Paul
Dumont, 276 (Paris: ditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientique, 1983).
44. A. S. Hambaryan, Yeritturkeri Azgayin u Hoghayin Kaghakakanutyune yev
Azatagrakan Sharzhumnern Arevmtyan Hayastanum (19081914) [The National and
Land Policies of the Young Turks and the Liberation Movements in Western Arme-
nia (19081914)] (Yerevan: Armenian S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, 1979), 11104.
Refugees were settled on Armenian lands even when uncultivated lands were avail-
able in the same region, see ibid., 6566. On the irrelevance of title deeds held by
Armenians, whose lands were taken over by muhacirs in the province of Bitlis, see
F.O. 424/228/21, Mr. Marling to Sir Edward Grey (Constantinople, July 9, 1911),
enclosure 2, Acting Vice-Consul Safrastian to Consul McGregor (Bitlis, June 18,
1911). On the farcical nature of the activities of the commission of inspection sent
by the Unionist government to inquire into the Armenians agrarian grievances in
1910, see F.O. 424/228/21, Mr. Marling to Sir Edward Grey (Constantinople, July 9,
Notes to Pages 6668 333

1911), enclosure 1, Consul McGregor to Sir Gerard Lowther (Erzerum, June 27,
1911). The inspectors collected their information entirely from the local ofcials.
45. See Grard J. Libaridian, The Ultimate Repression: The Genocide of the
Armenians, 19151917, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of
Mass Death, ed. Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, 211 (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987).
46. Archives of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Boston), Years 1912
15, Part IV, File 1717, Interparty Activities Abroad, Young Turks, Documents 1
(17171), 3 (17173), 4 (17174), 5 (17175).
47. Austria-Hungary, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Politisches Archiv, XII, 463,
number Z.13/P-E, Imperial and Royal Ambassador Markgraf Pallavicini to His Excel-
lency the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Graf Berchtold (Constantinople, Feb. 18, 1914),
see enclosure Deux inspecteurs Gnraux ... as reproduced in sterreich-Armenien,
18721936: Faksimilesammlung diplomatischer Aktenstcke (Fotokopien), vol. 6: 1914
1915, ed. Dr. Artem Ohandjanian, 4315 (Wien: Ohandjanian Eigenverlag, 1995).
48. On the CUPs policies of social and demographic engineering, including
ethnic cleansing and refugee resettlement, see Fuat Dndar, ttihat ve Terakkinin
Mslmanlar skn Politikas (19131918) [The Union and Progresss Settlement
Policy of Muslims (19131918)] (stanbul: letiim Yaynlar, 2001).
49. For the division of Cilicia into two economic regions, see among others Elyas,
ed., Memalik-i Osmaniye-i Corafya-i ktisadisi [The Economic Geography of the Otto-
man Empire] (Dersaadet: Matbaa-i Kadir, 1328), 248; and H. Galustian, Marash kam
Germanik [Marash or Germanik] (New York: Kochnak Tparan, 1934), 305.
The history of the administrative divisions of Cilicia is complex and has been little
studied despite its importance. For an overview of these subdivisions in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century, see Stephan H. Astourian, Testing World-Sys-
tem Theory, Cilicia (1830s1890s): Armenian-Turkish Polarization and the Ideology
of Modern Ottoman Historiography (PhD diss., University of California at Los
Angeles, 1996), footnote 3, pp. 8792.
50. Ik Tamdoan-Abel, Quelques considrations sur les structures agricoles dans la
ukurova de la seconde moiti du XVIIIe sicle au dbut du XIXe sicle, Agriculture et
industrialisation en Turquie et au Moyen-Orient (Paris: Editions LHarmattan, 1992), 93107.
51. Ibid., 98. For the debate about the origins of the iftliks, see the excellent
contributions of Halil nalck, The Emergence of Big Farms, iftliks: State, Land-
lords, and Tenants, in Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East, ed.
alar Keyder and Faruk Tabak, 1734 (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), and Gilles Veinstein, On the iftlik Debate, ibid., 3553.
52. On the existence of some iftliks in the ukurova in the second half of the
eighteenth century, see Kasm Ener, Tarih Boyunca Adana Ovasna Bir Bak [A Look
at the Plain of Adana throughout History] (stanbul: Berksoy Matbaas, 1964), 228. It
is beyond doubt, however, that most iftliks were formed after 1870, see Mustafa
Soysal, Die Siedlungs- und Landschaftsentwicklung der ukurova, Erlangen Geogra-
phische Arbeiten, Sonderband 4 (Erlangen: Selbstverlag der Frankischen Geogra-
phischen Gesellschaft, 1976), 6468.
53. Lothar Rother, Die Stdte der ukurova: Adana-Mersin-Tarsus (Tbingen: Im
Selbstverlag des Geographischen Instituts der Universitt Tbingen, 1971), 6566.
See also Ener, Tarih Boyunca, 218219, and Mustafa Necati plak, el Tarihi [The
History of cel], vol. 1 (Ankara: Gzel Sanatlar Matbaas, 1968), 209.
334 Notes to Pages 6871

54. Victor Langlois, Voyage dans la Cilicie et dans les montagnes du Taurus (Paris:
Benjamin Duprat, 1861), 33. See also Joseph Russegger, Reisen in Europa, Asien und
Afrika, vol. 2: Griechenland, Unteregypten, im nrdlichen Syrien und sdstlichen Klein-
asien (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbartsche Verlagshandlung, 1943), 67879, 727. Charles
Texier, Asie Mineure: Description gographique, historique et archologique des provinces
et des villes de la Chersonnse dAsie (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1862).
55. Langlois, Voyage dans la Cilicie, 36.
56. Langlois, Voyage dans la Cilicie, 33; and William Burckhardt Barker, Lares and
Penates: or, Cilicia and Its Governors (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), 118.
57. Langlois, Voyage dans la Cilicie, 35.
58. Ibid., 33, and P. v. Tschihatscheff, Reisen in Kleinasien und Armenien:
18471863, Petermanns Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes geographischer Anstalt, vol.
4, 186567, no. 20 (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1867), 55.
59. Great Britain, Foreign Ofce Archives (Public Record Ofce), Class 78, Turkey,
Volume 316, Consul Werry to Bidwell (Aleppo, Feb. 18, 1837), Gross Return of
British and Foreign Trade at the Principal Ports within the Consulate of Aleppo and
Its Dependencies during the Year Ending the 31st of December 1836.
60. Charles Issawi, The Fertile Crescent 18001914: A Documentary History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 307.
61. Donald Quataert, Ottoman Reform and Agriculture in Anatolia, 18761908
(PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 157 and 279; see also
Rother, Die Stdte der ukurova, 74, and Issawi, Economic History of Turkey, 23642.
62. Orhan Kurmu, The Cotton Famine and Its Effects on the Ottoman
Empire, in The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy, ed. Huri slamolu-nan,
165 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
63. Issawi, Fertile Crescent, 307.
64. Andrew Gordon Gould, Pashas and Brigands: Ottoman Provincial Reform
and Its Impact on the Nomadic Tribes of Southern Anatolia, 18401885 (PhD diss.,
University of California at Los Angeles, 1973), 195.
65. Donald Quataert, The Commercialization of Agriculture in Ottoman Turkey,
18001914, International Journal of Turkish Studies 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1980): 42.
66. See Issawi, Economic History of Turkey, 24041, and Yurt Ansiklopedisi [Ency-
clopedia of the Mother Country], s.v. Adana, 3234.
67. Prof. Dr. Rfat nsoy, Tanzimat Dnemi Osmanl Sanayii ve Sanayileme
Politikas [Ottoman Industries and Industrialization Policy of the Tanzimat Period]
(Ankara: Trkiye Bankas Kltr Yaynlar, 1988), 58.
68. Soysal, Die Siedlungs- und Landschaftsentwicklung der ukurova, 3940.
69. Jan Hinderink and Mbeccel B. Kray, Social Stratication as an Obstacle to
Development: A Study of Four Turkish Villages (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 13.
70. Langlois, Voyage dans la Cilicie, 23.
71. For the pattern of settlement of nomadic tribes, see Wolfram Eberhard,
Nomads and Farmers in Southeastern Turkey: Problems of Settlement, Oriens 6,
no. 1 (1953): 37. For the quotation, ibid., 38.
72. Ibid., 38.
73. On the diplomatic background of Egyptian-Ottoman-European relations,
see, inter alia, M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 17741923 (London: The
Macmillan Press, 1983), 88109; or J. C. B. Richmond, Egypt, 17981952 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977), 5062.
Notes to Pages 7173 335

74. H. Petermann, Reisen im Orient, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Verlag von Weit & Comp.,
1860), 354.
75. For more on the lawlessness reigning in Cilicia and the irrelevance of the
Tanzimat reforms in that region, see Ener, Tarih Boyunca, 30730, and Barker, Lares
and Penates, 92109. On the rka-i islahiyye, see Paul Dumont, La pacication du sud-
est anatolien en 1865, Turcica 5 (1975): 108130; Ahmed Cevdet Paa, Marzt, ed.
Yusuf Halaolu (stanbul: ar Yaynlar, 1980), 113193, in particular 113115 on
the need to establish conscription in Cilicia; Ahmed Cevdet Paa, Tezkir, ed. Cavid
Baysun, vol. 3, Trk Tarihi Kurumu Yaynlar, II. Seri, No. 17b (Ankara: Trk Tarihi
Kurumu Basmevi, 1963), 10790; Gould, Pashas and Brigands, 45141; Andrew
Gordon Gould, Lords or Bandits? The Derebeys of Cilicia, International Journal of
Middle East Studies 7, 4 (October 1976): 496505; and Cezmi Yurtsever, Ermeni Terr
Merkezi Kilikya Kilisesi [The Center of Armenian Terror, the Cilician Church] (stanbul:
Bayrak Yaymclk-Matbaaclk, 1983), 174226. On the extension of centralization
and provincial and military reforms, see Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, His-
tory of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1977), 8391. On the Zeytun incidents, see Gould, Pashas and Brigands,
5962; Cevdet Paa, Tezkir, 11923 and 21213; Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian
Revolutionary Movement (Los Angeles: California University Press, 1963), 6778; and
a recent publication by Erdal lter, Ermeni Meselesinin Perspekti ve Zeytun syanlar
(17801880) [The Perspective of the Armenian Question and the Zeytun Revolts
(17801880)] (Ankara: Trk Kltrn Aratrma Enstits, 1988), 100119.
76. Yurtsever, Ermeni Terr Merkezi Kilikya Kilisesi, 38.
77. The gure 21,705 is given by Gould, Pashas and Brigands, 63, whereas
19,918 is the gure offered by an Ottoman archival document, see Justin McCarthy,
An Ottoman Document on the Refugees of the Crimean Period, 30. See also Cev-
det Paa, Maruzt, 125.
78. On the resettlement of the Circassians from the end of the 1850s, see H. M.
Poghosian, Zeytuni Patmutiune 14091921 TT. [The History of Zeytun 14091921]
(Yerevan: Hayastan, 1969), 16162; and Aghassi [Garapet Tour-Sarkissian (sic)],
Zetoun: Depuis les origines jusqu linsurrection de 1895, trans. Archag Tchobanian
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1898), 108.
79. Cevdet Paa, Maruzt, 123; Pierre Redan, La Cilicie et le problme ottoman (Paris:
Gauthier-Villars, 1921), 20; and Yurtsever, Ermeni Terr Merkezi Kilikya Kilisesi, 106.
80. On the economic development of Cilicia after the expedition of pacication,
see Dumont, La pacication du sud-est anatolien en 1865, 126130, and Rother,
Die Stdte der ukurova, 7173.
81. This expression is from Eberhard, Nomads and Farmers, 38.
82. Gould, Pashas and Brigands, 185.
83. Ibid., 185, 189, and 191.
84. Ibid., 202.
85. Eberhard, Nomads and Farmers, 38.
86. Ibid., 41.
87. Ibid., 4142.
88. Wolfram Eberhard, Changes in Leading Families in Southern Turkey, in
Settlement and Social Change in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1967), 312326. To have an idea of the extent and forms of semifeudal landlordism
in southern and southeastern Turkey in the 1930s, see smail Hsrev [Tkin], Trkiye
336 Notes to Pages 7376

Ky ktisadiyat [Village Economics of Turkey] (stanbul: Kadro Mecmuas Neriyat,

1934), 176180 and 185193. For the plight of agricultural laborers in southeastern
Turkey at the beginning of the 1950s, see Zlkf Aydin, Household Production
and Capitalism: A Case Study of South-eastern Turkey, in The Rural Middle East:
Peasant Lives and Modes of Production, ed. Kathi Glavanis and Pandeli Glavanis,
170171 (London: Zed Books Ltd.). For the role played by old and new aghas in the
region of Diyarbakir as late as the 1960s, see Nur Yalman, On Land Disputes in
Eastern Turkey, in Islam and Its Cultural Divergence: Studies in Honor of Gustave E.
von Grunebaum, ed. Girdhari L. Tikku, 180218 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1971).
89. See Gould, Pashas and Brigands, 190 for the quotation, 18991 for a sensible
discussion of Eberhards thesis, and 2023 for the rise to prominence of minor tribal
leaders.
90. George Young, Corps de droit ottoman: Recueil des codes, lois, rglements, ordon-
nances et actes les plus importants du droit intrieur, et dtudes sur le droit coutumier de
lEmpire ottoman, vol. 6 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1906), 4849 for article 8 and
8182 for article 130. See also mer Lt Barkan, Trk Toprak Hukuku Tarihinde
Tanzimat ve 1274 (1858) Tarihli Arazi Kanunnamesi, [The Tanzimat and the 1858
Land Code in the History of Turkish Land Law] in his Collected Works, vol. 1, Trkiyede
Toprak Meselesi [The Land Question in Turkey] (stanbul: Gzlem Yaynlar, 1980), 339.
91. C. Favre and B. Mandrot, Voyage en Cilicie 1874 (part one), Bulletin de la
Socit de Gographie, septime srie, tome quinze (Janvier 1878): 23.
92. FO 424/91/171, Sir A. H. Layard, Ambassador at Constantinople, to the
Marquis of Salisbury, Foreign Secretary, (Constantinople, Dec. 17, 1879), see enclo-
sure 2 from Lieutenant Herbert Chermside to Sir A. H. Layard (Adana, Nov. 29,
1879), 221. Also quoted with a mistake in Gould, 159.
93. For article 78, see George Young, Corps de droit ottoman, 6, 67 and mer
Lt Barkan, Trk Toprak Hukuku Tarihinde Tanzimat ve 1274 (1858) Tarihli Arazi
Kanunnamesi, 366.
94. FO 424/91/171 enclosure 1, Lieutenant Chermside to Sir A. H. Layard (Tarsus,
Nov. 26, 1879), 217. I have summarized various comments he makes in that report.
95. FO 424/91/171, enclosure 2.
96. Ibid.
97. FO 424/107/158, Mr. Goschen to Earl Granville (Therapia, Oct.17, 1880),
see enclosure 2 entitled Petition of Christians of Giaour Dagh to British Consul at
Alexandretta.
98. FO 424/107/246 Mr. Goschen to Earl Granville (Therapia, June 22, 1880),
see enclosure entitled Memorandum by Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson on Anatolia
and Necessary Reforms (June 16, 1880).
99. For an idea of the complexity and diversity of the situation in Iraq and Lower
Iraq in particular, see Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 18001914
(London: Methuen, 1981), 18588 and 27985; Albertine Jwaideh, Midhat Pasha
and the Land System of Lower Iraq, in Middle Eastern Affairs: Number Three, ed.
Albert Hourani, 10636 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963); and Saleh Haider, Land
Problems of Iraq, in The Economic History of the Middle East, 18001914, ed. Charles
Issawi, 16478 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966; Midway Reprint,
1975) (hereafter cited as EHME). For Konya, see Wolf-Dieter Hutteroth, Lndliche
Notes to Pages 7678 337

Siedlungen im sdlichen Inneranatolien in den letzten vierhundert Jahren, Gttinger

geographische Abhandlungen, Heft 46 (Gttingen: Im Selbstverlag des Geogra-
phischen Instituts der Universitt Gttingen, 1968), 6668.
100. Rev. E. J. Davis, Life in Asiatic Turkey: A Journal of Travel (London: Edward
Stanford, 1879), 48 and 56; Mrs. Scott-Stevenson, Our Ride through Asia Minor
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1881), 127; and Rother, Die Stdte der Cukurova, 73.
101. Gould, Pashas and Brigands, 205. These gures come from Ottoman
provincial yearbooks.
102. Ibid., 194.
103. Ibid., 2036. The author estimates that 75,350 tribesmen and women were
settled, of whom 55,650 were alive in 1890. The total loss was 19,700 souls, 26 per-
cent of that population (206). On the other hand, the British consul Bennet esti-
mated in 1881 that more than half of the nomads settled in 1865 and of the 1878
refugees had died of malaria and other diseases. See ibid., 167.
104. Ibid., 205.
105. E. J. Davis, Life in Asiatic Turkey, 59.
106. FO 424/106/161, Sir A. H. Layard to the Marquis of Salisbury (Constanti-
nople, Apr. 21, 1880), enclosure 1, Captain Cooper to Sir A. H. Layard (Constanti-
nople, Apr. 14, 1880), 355.
107. FO 424/122/109, Mr. Goschen to Earl Granville (Constantinople, May 20,
1881), enclosure 3, Report on the Vilayet of Adana by Lieutenant Ferdinand Ben-
net (Apr. 28, 1881), 183; an excerpt of it is quoted in Andrew Gordon Gould, Pashas
and Brigands, 165. See also the memoirs of a British traveler, who does not hide her
prejudice against Armenians, which she attributes to their own parsimony and
shrewdness: Mrs. Scott-Stevenson, Our Ride through Asia Minor, 129.
108. FO 424/169/55, enclosure, Report on the Vilayet of Adana by Consul Jago
(Aleppo, Apr. 1891), 67, also 71.
109. Vital Cuinet, La Turquie dAsie: Gographie administrative, statistique descrip-
tive et raisonne de chaque province de lAsie mineure (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1891), 2:14.
110. Damar Arkolu, Hatralarm [My Memoirs] (stanbul: Tan Gazetesi ve
Matbaas, 1961), 4243.
111. Germany, Auswrtiges Amt, Abteilung A, Akten betreffend allgemeine
Angelegenheiten der Trkei, Trkei No. 134, Band 25a, A9304, Consul Schroeder to
His Excellency the Foreign Minister (Beirut, May 29, 1909), 2, and enclosure by can-
didate junior barrister Hamann, 1, 7; also Dr. Johannes Lepsius, Le rapport secret du
Dr. Johannes Lepsius sur les massacres dArmnie (Paris: Payot, 1918), 27273; and FO
424/219/83, Sir G. Lowther to Sir Edward Grey (Constantinople, May 4, 1909), enclo-
sure 1, Vice-Consul Wylie to Sir G. Lowther (Adana, Apr. 21, 1909), 84.
112. Yurtsever, Ermeni Terr Merkezi Kilikya Kilisesi, 26063. Though clearly
biased, this book contains some interesting information. For a useful study of the
Adana massacres, see A. S. Hamparian, Kilikiayi 1909 t. Haykakan Kotoratznere
[The Armenian Massacres of Cilicia in 1909], Patma-Banasirakan Hantes [Historical-
Philological Journal] 4, no. 123 (1988): 1329.
113. This is a common theme in Ottoman and Turkish writings about the Cili-
cian massacres. The problem is that the main Armenian political party at that time
was a socialist party with strong nationalist sentiments (the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation, or Dashnaktsutiun). The second most inuential party, the Hnchak
338 Notes to Pages 7880

Social-Democratic Party, was Marxist. I do not know of any Armenian organization

that wanted to create a kingdom in the Ottoman Empire in general, and even less so
in Cilicia in particular, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twenti-
eth century. Thus, the information reects the Turkish views justifying the massa-
cres. On these parties and their platforms, see Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian
Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the
Nineteenth Century, reprint (1963; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1975), 10478; Anahide Ter Minassian, Nationalisme et socialisme dans le
mouvement rvolutionnaire armnien (18871912), in La question armnienne
(Roquevaire: ditions Parenthses, 1983), 73111.
114. W. J. Childs, Across Asia Minor on Foot (Edinburgh and London: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1917), 350.
115. Quataert, Ottoman Reform and Agriculture in Anatolia, 129140; The
Commercialization of Agriculture in Ottoman Turkey, 18001914, International
Journal of Turkish Studies 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1980): 46; and Agricultural Trends and
Government Policy in Ottoman Anatolia, 18001914, Asian and African Studies 15
(1981): 8283; and Cuinet, La Turquie dAsie, vol. 2, 1415.
116. See Young, Corps de droit ottoman, vol. 6, 78 for art. 115 and Youngs analysis
on pp. 8485.
117. Ibid., 7879.
118. Ibid., 8789. The income of vakfs msakaffat derive from various kinds of
buildings. Vakifs mstagallt are landed urban properties that do not have buildings
and that generate some rent or produce. See Dmtrius Nicolaides, ed., Doustour-i
Hamidi: Appendice la lgislation ottomane (Constantinople: Journal Thraki, 1878),
251, footnotes 1 and 2.
119. Halil Cin, Osmanl Toprak Dzeni ve Bu Dzenin Bozulmas [The Ottoman
Land System and the Corruption of That System] (Ankara: Yenign Matbaas, 1978),
2777, 44650. For the text of the law in question, see Young, Corps de droit ottoman,
vol. 6, 8789. The Ottoman text of the Land Law, transcribed in modern Turkish, can
be found in Dr. Ahmet Akgndz, ed., Mukayeseli slm ve Osmanl Hukuku Klliyat
[Comparative Compendium of Islamic and Ottoman Law] (Diyarbakr: Dicle niver-
sitesi Hukuk Fakltesi Yaynlar, 1986), 683715.
120. Ibid., 8587. On these matters, see Youngs analysis on pp. 8485.
121. The boldface characters indicate that I consider these conclusions as
needing further corroboration from case studies dealing with other regions.
122. F. Eichmann, Die Reformen des Osmanischen Reiches (Berlin: Verlag der
Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1858), 29293; article 14 of the Rescript is on p. 358.
See also A. D. Novichev, Istoriia Turtsii, vol. 3: Novoe Vremia, pt. 2: (183953) (Lenin-
grad: Publishing House of the University of Leningrad, 1973), 195.
123. Theodor Kotschy, Dr. Theodor Kotschys Reise nach Cypern und Klein-
Asien, 1859, pt. 4: Von Kassan Oglu auf den Argaeus und nach Tarsus, Mersina
und Konstantinopel, Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, vol. 9 (1863): 327.
124. FO, Papers Relating to the Condition of Christians in Turkey, 424/21/9,
Consul Skene to Sir H. Bulwer (Aleppo, Aug.4, 1860).
125. A. Schopoff, Les rformes et la protection des chrtiens en Turquie: 16731904
(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1904), 88, 92, 99100.
126. See the text in George Young, Corps de droit ottoman (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1905), 1:345.
Notes to Pages 8085 339

127. Louis Steeg, Land Tenure, in Modern Turkey, ed. Eliot Grinnell Mears, 239
(New York: Macmillan Company, 1924).
128. For instance, an irade [decree] dated May 8, 1892, enjoined that immigrants,
refugees that is, be settled in the Dersim region to face the possibility [italics mine]
that a number of brigands, in this context probably Alevi Kurds, might be in contact
with Armenian subversive elements. The stated goal was to ensure public order and
tranquility. See Nedim pek, Rumeliden Anadoluya Trk Gleri (18771890) [Turk-
ish Migrations from Rumelia to Anatolia (18771890)], 2nd ed. (Ankara: Trk Tarih
Kurumu Basmevi, 1999), 15859.
129. See Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds
Ethnic Hatred and Global Insecurity (2003; New York: Anchor Books, 2004).
130. C. B. Macpherson, The Meaning of Property, in Property: Mainstream and
Critical Positions, ed. with an introductory and concluding essay by C. B. Macpher-
son, reprint, 12 (1981; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
131. Nesim eker, Demographic Engineering in the Late Ottoman Empire and
the Armenians, Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 2 (May 2007): 468.

CHAPTER 4
1. See Gerard Libaridian, Modern Armenia, People, Nation, State (New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Transaction, 2004), 89124. A third party, the Liberal Democratic
[Ramgavar] Party (ADL), was established in Cairo in 1908 and reorganized in 1921;
it was heir to the Armenakan group founded in 1885 in the city of Van. The Ramga-
var Party differed markedly from the rst two since it rejected political or eco-
nomic radicalism. Although its founding following the Young Turk Revolution
and its liberal ideology constitute an important part of the larger historical pic-
ture, I chose not to discuss the Ramgavar Party in the present paper, since they
were neither revolutionary nor a determinant of the character of the conict. I
will also put aside for the time being the analysis of the Armenian Marxist groups
that emerged early in the twentieth century, because they had no direct participa-
tion in the political life of the Ottoman Empire before the war, even though their
approach to the Armenian Question remains important for the understanding
Armenian political thought or and for Armenian history after the war. There are
also a number of small parties that will not feature in my article, such as the
Armenian Socialist Party founded in Europe, in 1900, whose approach was quite
original from the point of view of intellectual history but who did not have a par-
ticular impact on the course of events
2. For a general overview of the rise and development of Armenian political
parties, see J. M. Hagopian, Hyphenated Nationalism: The Spirit of the Revolu-
tionary Movement in Asia Minor, 18961910 (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1943);
Richard Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1968); Libaridian, Modern Armenia; Louise Nal-
bandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1967); Louise Nalbandian, The Origins and Development of
Socialism in Armenia: The Social Democratic Hnchak Party, 18871949 (MA thesis,
Stanford University, 1949); Anaide Ter Minassian, Nationalism and Socialism in the
Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 18871912 (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoryan Institute,
1984).
340 Notes to Pages 8596

3. Dzragir [Program (of the Hnchak Party)], in Hnchak, no. 11/12,1888; repro-
duced in Arsen Kitur, Patmutiun S. D. Hnchak kusaktsutiun [History of the S(ocial)
D(emocratic) Hnchak Party] (Beirut: <pub>, 1962), 1:3237.
4. Droshak, no. 2, 1891.
5. For developments in the nineteenth century see Gerard Libaridian, The Ide-
ology of Armenian Liberation: Armenian Political Thought before the Revolutionary
Movement (16391885) (PhD diss., UCLA, 1987).
6. Arsen Kitur, S. D. Hnchakian kusaktsutian, 18871962 [History of the S(ocial)
D(emocratic) Hnchak Party, 18871962] (Beirut, 1962), 1:5362.
7. Droshak, no. 1, 1890.
8. Dzragir [program of the HSDP.]
9. Dzragir [Program of the Dashnaktsutiun], 1892.
10. Ibid.
11. Droshak, no. 2 (September) 1890.
12. Kitur, Patmutiun, 32.
13. Ibid., 32728.
14. Letter from Antranik and Kevork, Chiefs of the Insurgents Near Mush, July
1904. The bulk of the letter was reproduced in the August 1904 Droshak in Armenia.
This section of the letter, was reproduced from the full English, from the U.S. State
Department Archives.
15. Gabriel Lazian, Heghapokhakan demker, [Revolutionary gures] (Cairo:
<pub>, 1945), p. 17.
16. Ibid., 338.
17. Droshak, no. 7, 1894.
18. Undated meeting between Hnchak representative S. Sabah-Gulian, and
Ahmed Riza and Doctor Nazim, at the Caf Voltaire in Paris, prior to the Young Turk
Revolution but after 1906. Ahmed Riza asked that the Hnchak Party desist from ap-
peals to the Great Powers and accept the Midhatian Constitution as the basis of co-
operation. Sabah-Gulian insisted on the autonomy of the Armenia provinces and the
May 1895 reforms as proposed by the Great Powers following the 189495 massa-
cres of Armenians. The Hnchaks, according to Kitur, were very concerned with the
Pan-Turanic designs of the Young Turks, which would have spelled disaster for the
Armenians.
19. The Armenian diaspora existed even before the word was invented or used for
Armenians, just as genocide would occur before a word was coined for the phenom-
enon. One can argue that an Armenian diaspora was formed during the collapse of the
last Armenian kingdom in historic Armenia at the end of the tenth century.
20. See Libaridian, Modern Armenia, 5171.
21. For a thorough discussion of the rise of populist thought among Eastern
Armenian intellectuals, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking toward Ararat (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1993), 6393.
22. These projects were for the most part seeking the reestablishment of the lost
Armenian medieval kingdoms, which would be achieved with the help of Chris-
tian kings of the West. Shahamir Shahamirian, of the Madras community of mer-
chants, promoted the vision of a republic, a most revolutionary idea for the eigh-
teenth-century Armenian world, which, unfortunately, did not survive the
prevarications of the serf-owning class, who dominated the imperial Russian occu-
pation of Eastern Armenia and the Caucasus. The initial territorialization of the
Notes to Pages 96113 341

Armenian problem by the Patriarchate, in the Treaty of San Stefanoreforms in

the Armenian provinceswas diluted in the Treaty of Berlin, under the form of
reforms in the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
23. Libaridian, Modern Armenia, 7385.
24. Kitur, Patmutiun, 35.
25. Droshak, no. 3, 1892.
26. Kristapor Mikayelian, one of the three founders of the Dashnaktsutiun, and
its leading gure, had proposed the idea in 1904 to the Third World Congress of the
party, and had been assigned the task. He died in 1905 while testing the time bomb,
in Bulgaria.
27. See Houri Berberian, Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of
19051911 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001).
28. Libaridian, Modern Armenia, ch. 5.
29. Dzragir of the HSDP.
30. Droshak, no. 4, 1893.
31. Libaridian, Modern Armenia, ch. 8, and Dikran Kaligian, The Armenian Revo-
lutionary Federation under Constitutional Rule, 19081914 (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Books, 2008).
32. As reported in Kitur, Patmutiun, 38687.
33. Ibid., 387388.
34. Inviting the intervention of the Great Powers was not a new strategy; Patri-
arch Nerses Varjabedian rst adopted it, with the support of some of his National
Council, in anticipation of Russian victory in the 187778 war with the Ottoman
Empire.
35. The value of the internationalization of the Armenian Question is still de-
bated in Armenian political literature.
36. Much has been written, with justication, regarding the role of the rivalry
between Great Britain and Russia, in the determination of positions regarding the
Armenian Question. Russian interference has often been pointed out as a possible
cause for the rise of the Armenian revolutionary movement. Two points need to be
made here. Russian interest in territorial expansion did play an indirect role in pro-
moting the interest of Eastern Armenians in the fate of their brethren in the Otto-
man Empire. But that does not diminish the signicance of the social and economic
factors in the rise of the movement. Second, Russian authorities were equally con-
cerned about the revolutionary aspects of the Armenian movement. After all, Russia
was an empire, too, opposed to popular and socialistic movements.

CHAPTER 5
1. M. Naim Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Military and Ottoman
Collapse (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 285428.
2. For a discussion of some fundamental characteristics of Turkish nationalism
and Ottomanism after the Tripolitan and Balkan wars, see Madami Arai, Between
State and Nation: A New Light on the Journal Trk Yurdu, Turcica 24 (1992): 277-95,
and Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992). The mood of
the contemporaries is best caught by Halk Harun Duman, Balkanlara veda: Basn ve
edebiyatta Balkan Sava, 19121913 [Farewell Balkans: The Balkan War of 191213
in Press and Literature] (Istanbul: Duyap Yaynclk, 2005).
342 Notes to Pages 113114

3. See Hratch Dasnabedian, Histoire de la Fdration Rvolutionnaire Armnienne

Dachnaktsoutioun (18901924) (Milan: OEMME Edizioni, 1988), 99 ff.; Arsen
Avagyan and Gaidz F. Minassian, Ermeniler ve ttihat ve Terakki: birliinden
atmaya [Armenians and the Union and Progress: From cooperation to confronta-
tion] (Istanbul: Aras Yaynclk, 2005), 16987.
4. For a recent study of the ARF-CUP estrangement, see Dikran M. Kaligian,
Armenian Organization and Ideology under Ottoman Rule: 19081914 (New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 2008). On the fraudulent 1912 elections, see Stoyan
Makedonski, La rgime jeune-turc et les deuxime lections parlementaires de
1912 en Macdoine et Thrace orientale, tudes balkaniques 14, no. 2, (1978): 5871;
Aykut Kansu, Politics in Post-Revolutionary Turkey, 1908-1913 (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
2000), 31975; Mehmet Hacsaliholu, Die Jungtrken und die Mazedonische Frage
(18901918) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2003), 31520.
5. Dasnabedian, Histoire de la Fdration Rvolutionnaire Armnienne Dachnakt-
soutioun, 100 ff. See also Richard G. Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Indepen-
dence 1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 3032.
6. On the Ottoman decision to enter World War I, see Yulu Tekin Kurat, How
Turkey Drifted into World War I, in Studies in International History, ed. K. Bourne
and D. C. Watt, 291315 (London: Longmans, 1967); H. S. W. Corrigan, German-
Turkish Relations and the Outbreak of War in 1914: A Re-Assessment, Past and
Present 36 (1967): 14452; Feroz Ahmad, Ottoman Armed Neutrality and Interven-
tion, AugustNovember 1914, in Studies on Ottoman Diplomatic History, ed. Sinan
Kuneralp, 4:4169 (Istanbul: Isis, 1989); Charles D. Haley, The Desperate Ottoman:
Enver Paa and the German Empire, Middle Eastern Studies 30 (1994): 151, 22451;
Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First
World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
7. There is a substantial body of literature characterized by numerous contro-
versies over the causes, the attendant circumstances, and the consequences of the
Armenian deportations of 1915/16. Some recent contributions are Donald Bloxham,
The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Otto-
man Armenians (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Guenter
Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 2005); Taner Akam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Geno-
cide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). It
is not the purpose of this chapter to enter that discussion. However, one point must
be emphasized: There is an (understandable) tendency to focus on the short period of
19141916, which is virtually the zero-hour of modern Armenian history, whereas
developments that preceded that decisive moment are rather neglected.
8. Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review
of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Cambridge, Mass.: Blue Crane Books,
1996), 35.
9. Raymond H. Kvorkian, ed., Recueil de tmoignages sur lextermination des
amele tabouri ou battaillons de soldats-ouvriers armniens de larme ottomane, Revue
dhistoire armnienne contemporaine 1 (1995): 289303, and Erik J. Zrcher, Ottoman
Labour Battalions in World War I, in Der Vlkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah,
ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik Schaller, 18795 (Zurich: Chronos, 2002).
10. Caroline Finkel, The Administration of Warfare: The Ottoman Military Campaigns in
Hungary, 15931606, 2 vols. (Vienna: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften
Notes to Pages 114115 343

sterreichs, 1988); Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 15001700 (London: Routledge,

1999); Gza Dvid and Pl Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central
Europe: The Military Connes in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000).
11. Halil nalck, Timariotes chrtiens en Albanie au XVe sicle daprs un regis-
tre de timar ottoman, Mitteilungen des sterreichischen Staats archivs 4 (1951): 11838;
Bistra Cvetkova, Novye dannye o khristianakh-spakhiakh na Balkanskom poluostrove
v period turetskogo gospodstva [New Evidence on Christian Sipahi in the Balkan
Peninsula under Ottoman Rule], Vizantijski vremennik 13 (1958): 18497; Nicoar
Beldiceanu, Timariotes chrtiens en Thessalie (1454/55), Sdost-Forschungen 44
(1985): 4581; Melek Delilba, Christian Sipahis in the Trhala Taxation Registers
(Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries), in Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire, ed.
Antonis Anastasopoulos, 87114 (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2005). For a payroll
of thirty-three Christian and three Muslim martolos serving in the Ottoman fortress of
Gyula in Hungary in 1591/92, see Lajos Fekete, Die Siyqat-Schrift in der trkischen
Finanzverwaltung (Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad, 1955), 1:51519. For general information
on martolos in the Ottoman Balkans, see Milan Vasi, Die Martolosen im Osmanischen
Reich, Zeitschrift fr Balkanistik 2 (1964): 172-89, and Martolosi u jugoslovenskim zeml-
jama pod turskom vladavinom [The Martolos in the Yugoslav Lands under Turkish Rule]
(Sarajevo: Akademija Nauka i Umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 1967).
12. Spiridion Gopevi, Das Frstentum Albanien, seine Vergangenheit, ethnogra-
phischen Verhltnisse, politische Lage und Aussichten fr die Zukunft (Berlin: Paetel,
1914), 4243, 45, 99.
13. William Smith Cooke, The Ottoman Empire and Its Tributary States (London:
Clowes, 1876), 59; Daniel Panzac, The Manning of the Ottoman Navy in the Heyday
of Sail (16601850), in Arming the State: Military Conscription in the Middle East and
Central Asia 17751925, ed. Erik J. Zrcher, 4157 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
14. Leopold von Ranke, Die serbische Revolution: Aus serbischen Papieren und Mit-
theilungen (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1829), 52; Vera Mutafieva, Krdalijsko
vreme [Krdjali Times] (Soa: Nauka i Izkustvo, 1977). Cf. also Fikret Adanr, Fransz
htilli, Birinci Srp Ayaklanmas ve Osmanl Devleti [The French Revolution, the
First Serbian Uprising, and the Ottoman State], Toplumsal Tarih, No. 147 (March
2006), pp. 3240; Selim Aslanta, Osmanlda Srp isyanlar [Serbian Uprisings in the
Ottoman Empire] (Istanbul: Kitap Yatnevi, 2007), 66106.
15. See Avigdor Levy, Ottoman Attitudes to the Rise of Balkan Nationalism, in
War and Society in East Central Europa, I: Special Topics and Generalizations on the
18th and 19th Centuries ed. Bla K. Kirly and Gunther E. Rothenberg, 341 (New
York: Brooklyn College Press, 1979). The uprising in Greece in 18211828 saw also
the end of the recruitment of Christians for the Ottoman navy. See Tobias Heinzel-
mann, Heiliger Kampf oder Landesverteidigung? Die Diskussion um die Einfhrung der
allgemeinen Militrpicht im Osmanischen Reich 18261856 (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 2004), 27074. The completion of kr Ilcaks PhD thesis on Ottoman
Reaction to the Greek Revolution (18211828) (Harvard University) will deepen our
grasp of this complex issue.
16. Virginia H. Aksan, The Ottoman Military and State Transformation in a
Globalizing World, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27,
no. 2 (2007): 25972, here 268.
17. Aksan, The Ottoman Military and State Transformation, 265. See also Y.
Hakan Erdem, Recruitment of the Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad, in the Arab
344 Notes to Pages 115116

Provinces, 18261828, in Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions, ed.
Israel Gershoni, Hakan Erdem, and Ursula Wokck, 189206 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 2002).
18. See Heinzelmann, Heiliger Kampf oder Landesverteidigung, 7880, 275.
19. For an analysis of discussions over the issue of universal conscription in the
1830s and 1840s, see Heinzelmann, Heiliger Kampf oder Landesverteidigung, 279301.
20. The establishment of an Ottoman cossack service of sorts during the Crimean
War was the most spectacular result in this context. Cf. M. Pawlicowa, O formacjach
Kozackich w czasie wojny Krymskiej [On Cossack Formations during the Crimean
War], Kwartalnik Historyczny 50 (1936): 350. Cf. further Ivan Kr. Stojev, Kazak
alajt na ajkovski [The Cossack Regiment of ajkovski] (Soa: 1944); Vanda Smo-
chovska-Petrova, Michail ajkovski-Sadk paa i blgarskoto vzradane [Michail
ajkovski-Sadk Pasha and the Bulgarian Revival] (Soa: Bulgarska Akademia na
Naukite, 1973); Avigdor Levy, Formalization of Cossack Service under Ottoman
Rule, in East Central European Society and War in the Pre-Revolutionary Eighteenth
Century, ed. G. E. Rothenberg, B. K. Kirly and P. F. Sugar, 491-505 (Boulder, Colo.:
Social Science Monographs, 1982); Winfried Baumgart, The Crimean War, 1853-1856
(London, Arnold and Oxford University Press, 1999), 81ff.
21. Roderic H. Davison, Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim
Equality in the Nineteenth Century, American Historical Review 59 (1953/54): 844
64, here 859. See also Heinzelmann, Heiliger Kampf oder Landesverteidigung, 32539;
Mehmet Hacsaliholu, Inclusion and Exclusion: Conscription in the Ottoman
Empire, in Multi-Ethnic Empires and the Military: Conscription in Europe between
Integration and Desintegration, 18601918, ed. Jrn Leonhard and Ulrike von
Hirschhausen, 26486, here 27075 (Journal of Modern European History 5, no. 2)
(Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007).
22. Robert Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period: A Study of the Midhat
Constitution and Parliament (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 223.
23. See Leopold von Schlzer, Das trkische Heer im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Reformen
bis 1869 (Berlin R. Felix, 1901), 52.
24. See Ahmed Midhat Efendi, Ekonomi Politik (Istanbul: Krk Anbar Matbaas,
1296/188081); Ahmed Gner Sayar, Osmanl iktisat dncesinin adalamas (Kla-
sik Dnemden II. Abdlhamide) (Istanbul: Der Yaynlar, 1986); Franois Georgeon,
Lconomie politique selon Ahmed Midhat, in Premire rencontre internationale sur
lEmpire ottoman et la Turquie moderne, ed. Edhem Eldem, 46179 (Istanbul: Isis, 1991).
25. Nedim pek, Rumeliden Anadoluya Trk Gleri, 1877-1890 [Turkish Migrations
from the Balkans to Anatolia, 18771890] (Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu, 1994), 156-59.
26. Babakanlk Osmanl Arivi (BOA), Yldz Tasni, Sadret Resm Evrk (Y-A.
Res), 111/8, 5 Zilkade 1318 (Feb. 24, 1901). For a general discussion of the question,
see Fikret Adanr and Hilmar Kaiser, Migration, Deportation, and Nation-Building:
The Case of the Ottoman Empire, in Migrations et migrants dans une perspective his-
torique: Permanences et innovations, ed. Ren Leboutte, 273292 (Brussels: Peter
Lang, 2000), and Fikret Adanr, Ottoman Misgivings Regarding the Acquisition of
Land by Foreigners during the Reign of Abdlhamid II, in Great Ottoman-Turkish
Civilization, ed. Kemal iek, 1:634-42 (Ankara: Yeni Trkiye, 2000).
27. Cf. M. kr Haniolus monographic studies, The Young Turks in Opposition
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Preparation for a Revolution:
The Young Turks, 1902-1908 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Notes to Pages 116117 345

28. For the text of the CUP program, see Tark Zafer Tunaya, Trkiyede siyasal partiler,
I: kinci Merutiyet dnemi, 19081918 [Political Parties in Turkey, I: The Second Consti-
tutional Period, 19081918] 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Hrriyet Vakf Yaynlar, 1984), 6567.
29. Lieutenant-Colonel Bonham to Lowther, Drama, Sept. 9, 1908, No. 77, enclo-
sure in Lowther to Grey, Therapia, Sept. 16, 1908, No. 577, Public Record Ofce
(PRO), Foreign Ofce (FO) 371/559/32616.
30. Professor Moritz, director of the Khedivial Library in Cairo, reporting on his
talks in Istanbul with his old friend and the present Chief of the General Staff of
the Ottoman Army zzet Pasha, 22 October 1908, Politisches Archiv des Auswrti-
gen Amtes, Berlin (PAAA), Trkei 142, Bd. 27, A. 18825.
31. The British consul-general in Salonica remarked: The Macedono-Bulgarian
leaders express great satisfaction at the realization of their desire to see their compa-
triots at last wearing the Ottoman uniform and shouldering their ries in the ranks
of the Ottoman army. Lamb to Lowther, Salonica, Apr. 24, 1909, No. 52, PRO, FO
371/772/18457. On Greek reservations toward the Young Turks, see Feroz Ahmad,
Unionist Relations with the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish Communities of the
Ottoman Empire, 1908-1914, in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The
Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 1:405-18
(New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1982).
32. Colonel Surtees to Lowther, Constantinople, Apr. 26, 1909, No. 26, PRO, FO
371/771/16541. See also Manol Pandevski, Kontrarevolucijata vo Carigrad vo 1909
godina i Makedonija [The Counterrevolution in Constantinople in 1909 and Mace-
donia], Glasnik na Institutot za nacionalna istorija 10, no. 23 (Skopje, 1966), 83108;
Kansu, Politics in Post-Revolutionary Turkey, 77125; Hacsaliholu, Die Jungtrken
und die Mazedonische Frage, 26875.
33. Lowther to Grey, Pera, Apr. 28, 1909, No. 303, PRO, FO 371/771/16537.
34. Colonel Conyers Surtees to Lowther, Constantinople, May 16, 1909, No. 42,
PRO, FO 371/776/19401.
35. Ufuk Glsoy, Osmanl gayrimslimlerinin askerlik serveni [The Conscription
Adventure of Ottoman Non-Muslims] (Istanbul, Simurg 2000), pp. 12740. A good
summary of the parliamentary debates over the general conscription can be found
also in Uur Pee, Greek Ottomans in the 1908 Parliament (unpublished MA
thesis, Sabanc University, Summer 2007), 7699.
36. Colonel Surtees to Lowther, Constantinople, June 20, 1909, No. 73, PRO, FO
371/776/23991.
37. BOA, Rumeli Mfettilii Tasni Umum Evrak (TFR-1-UM), 29/2868, 25
Receb 1327 (Aug. 12, 1909).
38. Colonel Surtees to Lowther, Constantinople, Sept. 25, 1909, No. 117, PRO,
FO 371/781/36616.
39. For the text of the Ottoman soldiers oath of loyalty, see Glsoy, Osmanl gay-
rimslimlerinin askerlik serveni, 187-88.
40. Although the law prescribed military service for all male subjects, the well-to-
do, Muslim or non-Muslim, could arrange for their relegation to the reserve after
having performed six months service by paying the considerable sum of 50 Otto-
man gold pounds. See H. Bowen, Bedel, Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1960), 1:855. Under these conditions, the majority of the recruits continued
to come from lower classes. Cf. Friedrich Immanuel, Der Balkankrieg 1912 (Berlin:
Mittler, 1913), 55.
346 Notes to Pages 117120

41. German Consulate Salonika, Mar. 14, 1910, No. 564/48, PAAA, Trkei
142/29/4806; German Military Attach, Constantinople, Apr. 10, 1910, J.No. 64.10,
Mil.-Bericht No. 269, PAAA, Trkei 142/29/6418.
42. See Glsoy, Osmanl gayrimslimlerinin askerlik serveni, 14148.
43. German Consulate Baghdad, Oct. 11, 1909, No. 64, PAAA, Trkei 142/28/18171.
44. Elliot to Grey, Athens, May 12, 1910, No. 73, PRO, FO 371/1009/17734.
45. Cartright to Grey, Vienna, Feb.6, 1910. FO 371/1003. 4632/4632/10/44A (No.
19.) Condential. Printed in British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898-1914,
Vol. 9: The Balkan Wars, ed. G. P. Gooch and H. Temperley, 117-18 (London, 1933).
46. Cartright to Grey, Marienbad, Aug. 12, 1910. F.O. 371/1013.
30404/30404/10/44A (No. 137.) Condential. Printed in ibid., Vol. 9, 196.
47. Les lections en Turquie: Comment le gouvernement ottoman a falsi le scrutin
(Cairo, 1912); Stojan Makedonski, La rgime jeune-turc et les deuxime lections
parlementaires de 1912 en Macdoine et Thrace orientale, tudes Balkaniques 14,
no. 2 (1978): 5871; Cf. also Hasan Kayal, Elections and the Electoral Process in the
Ottoman Empire, 18761919, International Journal of Middle East Studies 27 (1995):
26586; Kansu, Politics in Post-Revolutionary Turkey, 31975; Hacsaliholu, Die
Jungtrken und die Mazedonische Frage, 276320.
48. Wangenheim to Auswrtiges Amt, Cipher Tel., Constantinople, July 27, 1912,
No. 196, PAAA, Trkei 142/35/13078. On the career of the new Ottoman foreign
minister, see Raymond H. Kvorkian, Gabriel Noradounghian (1852-1936), Revue
dhistoire armnienne contemporaine 1 (1995): 199-245.
49. At least this is how the Austro-Hungarian diplomacy interpreted it. See Ber-
chtolds circular to the embassies in Berlin, London, Paris, Rome, and St. Petersburg
of Aug. 13, 1912, in K.u.K. Ministerium des uern, Diplomatische Aktenstcke betre-
ffend die Ereignisse am Balkan. 13. August 1912 bis 6.November 1913 (Vienna: K.k.
Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1914), 12.
50. Military Report, No. 609, Constantinople, Aug. 27, 1912, PAAA, Trkei 142/
35/15126.
51. Wangenheims Cipher Tel. of Sept. 22, 1912, No. 297, PAAATrkei 203/1/16334.
52. For a severe critic of the Ottoman government for remaining inactive during
this decisive period and for trusting the Great Powers who had promised to protect
the Ottoman territorial integrity, see Aram Andonian, Balkan Harbi Tarihi [The His-
tory of the Balkan War], trans. from Armenian by Zaven Biberyan (Istanbul: Sander
Yaynlar, 1975), 196ff.
53. Major Tyrrell to Lowther, Constantinople, Oct. 5, 1912, No. 68, PRO, FO 371/1500/
42894. Cf. also Abdullah Paa [Klemen], 1328 Balkan Harbinde ark Ordusu kumandan
Abdullah Paann hatrat [Memoirs of Abdullah Pasha, the Commander of the Eastern
Army during the Balkan War of 191213] (Istanbul: Erkn- Harbiye Mektebi Matbaas,
1336/1919-20), 14ff. For an exhaustive treatment of the subject, see Edward J. Erickson,
Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 19121913 (Westport and London:
Praeger, 2003). For a compact general history, see Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars,
19121913: Prelude to the First World War (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
54. See Glsoy, Osmanl gayrimslimlerinin askerlik serveni, 162. Immanuel
names 40,000 as the number of the non-Muslim recruits in the Ottomans army, see
Der Balkankrieg, 60ff.
55. See Andonian, Balkan Harbi tarihi, 224.
Notes to Pages 120123 347

56. 25 evval 1330 (Oct. 7, 1912), BOA, DH-SYS 112-7A/7-4.

57. Mr. Gross, Director of the Oriental Railways Company, to von Kiderlen, Con-
stantinople, Oct. 30, 1912, PAAA, Trkei 203/9/20786. Accusations against the non-
Muslim railroad personnel can be found in the scholarly literature as well. See Yusuf
Hikmet Bayur, Trk inklb tarihi [History of the Turkish Revolution] (Ankara: Trk
Tarih Kurumu, 1943), 2:13.
58. Hans Rohde, Meine Erlebnisse im Balkankrieg und kleine Skizzen aus dem
trkischen Soldatenleben (Charlottenburg: Baumann, 1913), 7.
59. 1 Zilkade 1330(Oct. 12, 1912), BOA, DH-SYS 112-1/1-2.
60. Anders to Wangenheim, Adana, Oct.12, 1912, incl. in Wangenheims report
of Oct. 21, 1912, No. 339, PAAA Trkei 203/6/18537.
61. Exarchate of the Bulgarian Millet to the Ministry of Justice and Religious Af-
fairs, 12 Zilkade 1330 / 10 Terinievvel 1328 (Oct. 23, 1912), No. 626, BOA, DH-SYS
112-13/16-9.
62. 13 Zilkade 1912 (Oct. 24, 1912) BOA, DH-SYS 112/13-16/9.
63. 4 Cemaziyelahir 1331 (May 10, 1913), BOA, DH-SYS 112-13/16-9.
64. May 18, 1913, BOA, DH-SYS 112-13/16-9.
65. Mutesarrk of Sinop to the Ministry of Interior, Cipher Tel., 12 Eyll 1329
(Sept. 25, 1913), BOA, DH-SYS 112-13/16-6.
66. G. von Hochwaechter, Mit den Trken in der Front im Stabe Mahmud Muchtar
Paschas: Mein Kriegstagebuch ber die Kmpfe bei Kirk Kilisse, Lle Burgas und Cataldza
(Berlin: Mittler, 1913), 25.
67. Wangenheim to Bethmann Hollweg, Constantinople, Nov. 4 1912, No. 486,
Cipher Tel., PAAA Trkei 203/7/19365.
68. Tyrrell to Lowther, Constantinople, Nov. 9, 1912, No. 88, PRO, FO
371/1506/48795.
69. Mahmud Muhtar Pascha, Meine Fhrung im Balkankriege 1912 (Berlin: Mit-
tler, 1913), 164.
70. German Embassy Constantinople, June 7, 1913, No. 181, Incl. I. The Period
of the Siege. Written in January, 1913, PAAA, Trkei 203/16/11579. Muslim Otto-
man contemporaries endorse this view. See Rza Nur, Hayat ve Hatratm [My Life
and Memoirs] (Istanbul: aret Yaynlar, 1968), 2:368ff.; Ratip Kazancgil, Hafz
Rakm Ertrn anlarndan Balkan Savanda Edirne savunmas gnleri [The Defense
of Edirne Days during the Balkan War in the Memoirs of Hafz Rakm Ertr] (Edirne:
Edirne Aratrmas Merkezi, 1986), 18, 24, 28; Ratip Kazancgil and Nilfer Gke,
Dadevirenzde M. evket Beyin Edirne Tarihi ve Balkan Sava anlar [Dadevirenzde
M. evket Beys History of Edirne and the Balkan War Memoirs] (Edirne: Trk Kt-
phaneciler Dernei, 2005), 158, 162.
71. La Guerre Turco-Balkanique 1912-1913: Thrace-Macdoine-Albanie-Epire (Paris:
Chapelot, 1913), 284.
72. Briefe aus dem Balkankriege 1912-1913. Kriegsberichte der Klnischen Zeitung
von Richard von Mach (Berlin: Eisenschmidt, 1913), 50.
73. Colin Ross, Im Balkankrieg (Munich: Mrikes, 1913), 112.
74. Leo Trotzki, Die Balkankriege 1912-13, trans. from the Russian by Hannelore
Georgi (Essen: Arbeiterpresse-Verlag, 1996), 222.
75. Daily News, Thursday, Nov. 7, 1912, quoted in Lt.-Colonel Sir Reginald Rankin,
The Inner History of the Balkan War (London: Lane, 1930), 365.
348 Notes to Pages 123125

76. Otto Kessler, Der Balkanbrand 1912/13. Militrgeschichtliche Darstellung des

Krieges gegen die Trken (Leipzig: Reektor-Verlag, 1913), 78ff.
77. Glen W. Swanson, A Note on the Ottoman Socio-Economic Structure and Its
Response to the Balkan War of 1912, Middle Eastern Studies 14 (1978): 119.
78. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912-1913, 18.
79. See Sadi Skan, Edirne kalesi etrafndaki muharebeler [The Battles around the
Fortress of Adrianople] (Trk Silahl Kuvvetleri tarihi. Osmanl devri, Balkan Harbi
1912-1913, Vol. 2, Part 3) (Ankara: Bakanl, 1980), 153.
80. Apr. 16, 1913, DH-SYS 112-22/51.
81. Oct. 21, 1913, DH-SYS 112-26/79.
82. Sept. 26, 1913, DH-SYS 112-7B/7-53.
83. Y. Hikmet Bayur, Trk inklb tarihi, 2:17ff. For a persuasive analysis of Otto-
man expectations and frustrations during this period, see Eyal Ginio, Mobilizing
the Ottoman Nation during the Balkan Wars (19121913): Awakening from the Otto-
man Dream, War in History 12 (2005): 15677.
84. Kprlzade Mehmed Fuad, mit ve AzmTrk Genlerine [Hope and
DeterminationTo Turkish Youth], Trk Yurdu 2, no. 31 (10 Knunisan 1328/Jan.
23, 1913): 13942. On the historian, literary scholar, and politician Fuad Kprl
(18901966), see George Thomas Park, The Life and Writings of Mehmet Fuad
Kprl: The Intellectual and Turkish Cultural Modernization (PhD thesis, Johns
Hopkins University, 1975); Halil Berktay, Cumhuriyet ideolojisi ve Fuat Kprl [The
Ideology of the Republic and Fuat Kprl] (Istanbul: Kaynak Yaynlar, 1983).
85. See Taha Parla, The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gkalp, 18761924
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 21 and 2556. On Young Ottoman liberalism, see erif
Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turk-
ish Political Ideas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962).
86. Franois Georgeon, Aux origines du nationalisme turc: Yusuf Akura (1876
1935) (Paris: ditions ADPF, 1980). See also Yusuf Akuras tarz- siyaset (Three
Kinds of Policy), introduced and translated by Ismail Fehmi, Oriente Moderno 61
(1981): 120, and Davis Thomas, Yusuf Akura and the Intellectual Origins of
tarz- siyaset, Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1978): 12740.
87. Trk Yurdu, no. 140, Aug. 12, 1333/Aug. 25, 1916, 2521ff. The English trans-
lation has been taken from Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey
(Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), 426.
88. Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey
(New York: Macmillan, 1932), 1820; Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum
Ersten Weltkrieg. Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 269 f.; Fuat Dndar, Modern Trkiyenin ifresi: ttihat
ve Terakkinin Etnisite Mhendislii (19131918) [The Code to Modern Turkey: Eth-
nicity Engineering of the Committee of Union and Progress, 19131918] (Istanbul:
letiim, 2008), 18291.
89. Flix Sartiaux, Le sac de Phoce et lexpulsion des Grecs ottomans dAsie
Mineure en juin 1914, Revue des deux mondes 24 (1914): 65486, here 663. See
also Phoce, 19131920: Le tmoignage de Flix Sartiaux, ed. Haris Yiakoumis (Paris:
ditions Kallimages, 2008); Matthias Bjrnlund, The 1914 Cleansing of Aegean
Greeks as a Case of Violent Turkication, Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 1
(March 2008): 4158; F. Dndar, Modern Trkiyenin ifresi, 191210.
Notes to Pages 125127 349

90. See Bill N. imir, ed., Ege Sorunu. Belgeler, II (19131914) / Aegean Question.
Documents, II (19131914) (Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu, 1982), 568. Cf. also Alexander
A. Pallis, Exchange of Populations in the Balkans (London: The Anglo-Hellenic League,
1925), 3; Dimitri Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact
upon Greece (Paris and The Hague, 1962), 5457; Yannis G. Mourelos, The 1914
Persecutions and the First Attempt at an Exchange of Minorities between Greece and
Turkey, Balkan Studies 26, no. 2 (1985): 389411; Ayhan Aktar, Homogenising the
Nation, Turkifying the Economy, in Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923
Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, ed. Rene Hirschon,
7995, here 8284 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); F. Dndar, Modern Trkiyenin
ifresi, 21025.
91. In the coastal districts, some of which had a predominantly Greek population
before 1914, practically no Greek was left by 1917. See Engin Berber, Sancl yllar:
zmir 1918-1922. Mtareke ve Yunan igali dneminde zmir Sanca [The Painful
Years: Izmir 19181922; The Sanjak of Izmir during the Armistice and the Greek
Occupation] (Ankara: Ayra Yaynevi, 1997), 57-72; F. Dndar, Modern Trkiyenin
ifresi, 22548.
92. In addition to Fuat Dndars Modern Trkiyenin ifresi, see Erol lker, Con-
textualising Turkication: Nation-building in the late Ottoman Empire, 190818,
Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 4 (2005): 61336, and Uur mit ngr, Seeing
Like a Nation-State: Young Turk Social Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 19131950,
Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 1 (March 2008): 1539.

CHAPTER 6
1. A much earlier and longer version of this chapter was published under the
title Dr. Mehmed Reid (18731919): A Political Doctor in Der Vlkermord an den
Armeniern und die Shoah/ The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, ed. Hans L. Kieser
and Dominik J. Schaller, 24580 (Zrich: Chronos, 2002). For more on Reids gov-
ernorship, see . Uur ngr, Center and Periphery in the Armenian Genocide:
The Case of Diyarbekir Province, in Der Genozid an den Armeniern, die Trkei und
Europa/ The Armenian Genocide, Turkey and Europa, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser and
Elmar Plozza, 7188 (Zrich: Chronos, 2006); and David Gaunt, Massacres, Resis-
tance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I
(Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2006).
2. Salhattin Gngr, Bir Canl Tarih Konuuyor, Resimli Tarih, July 5, 1953, 2445.
3. I am using the edition by Nejdet Bilgi: Mehmed Reid [ahingiray], Hayat ve
Htralar, ed. N. Bilgi (Izmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1997). I will refer to it as Bilgi,
Hayat ve Htralar, but will cite the texts of Mehmed Reid by their titles, e.g.,
Reid, Balkesir Notlar, giving the page numbers according to Bilgis edition,
which comprises the following texts of Reid: (1) Takla Htralar, 5764; (2)
Balkesir Notlar, 6576; (3) Mlhazt: Ermeni Meselesi ve Diyarbekir Htralar,
77114; (4) Gnlk: Tevkiften ntihara kadar, 11554; (5) Vasiyetnme, 15758; (6) Hal
Tercmesi: Kendi El Yazs le Biyograsi, 16365; and (7) Arz: 1911 Ylna Ait Bir Arz,
17377.
The edition Dr. Reid Beyin Htralar: Srgnden ntihara, by A. Mehmetefendi-
olu (Istanbul: Arba, 1993), contrary to Bilgis edition, only gives the censored versions
350 Notes to Pages 127130

of Mlhazt and Gnlk as they were published in 1919 in the newspapers Alemdar
and Memleket.
In addition, I will use the following text: Cevr (Mehmed Reid Bey), nklb Niin ve
Nasl Oldu (Msr: Matbaa-i ctihad, 1909). There is a new edition by Bilgi (Izmir:
Akademi Kitabevi, 1994). I will cite it as Cevr, nklb. Most probably Cevr is a pseu-
donym for Mehmed Reid (see N. Bilgis arguments in the introduction: Cevr,
nklb, 1123), even if before 1908 Mehmed Reid had used the CUP nickname
erkes Lmi or Lli; see kr Haniolu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 28689, n. 410, n. 478, n. 487, and 356, n. 86.
4. Cf. Franois Georgeon, Aux origines du nationalisme turc: Yusuf Akura
(18761935) (Paris: Ed. ADPF, 1980). For a study of the Russian Turks in late Otto-
man Istanbul see Volker Adam, Russlandmuslime in Istanbul am Vorabend des Ersten
Weltkriegs (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002).
5. Cf. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Vorkmpfer der neuen Trkei: Revolutionre Bil-
dungseliten am Genfersee (18701939) (Zrich: Chronos, 2005); in Turkish: Trkle
htida: 18701939 sviresinde yeni Trkiyenin ncleri (Istanbul: Iletisim, 2008).
6. Yurdcular Yasas, svirede Cenevre ehrine yakn Petit-Lancy Kynde Pension
Racinede kurulan kinci Yurdcular Derneinin muzakerat ve mukerrerat (Istanbul:
Yeni Turan Matbaas, 1914), 21.
7. Reid, Takla Htralar, 6061.
8. As he wrote to shak Skti of the CUP-center in Geneva; Haniolu, Young
Turks in Opposition, 105; brahim Temo, ttihad ve Terakki Cemiyetinin kurucusu ve
1/1 nolu brahim Temonun ttihad ve Terakki Anlar (1939; Istanbul: Arba yay.,
1987), 14.
9. For a poignant example see Osmanl no. 7, French edition, Geneva, June 5,
1898, 12, quoted in Kieser, Vorkmpfer, 21.
10. Cf. Yusuf Sarnay, Trk Milliyetiliinin Tarih Geliimi ve Trk Ocaklar
19121931 (Istanbul: tken, 1994), 12127.
11. Tevk Salam, Nasl Okudum (1959; Istanbul: Atlas & Nehir letiim, 1991),
7475.
12. Cevr, nkilb, 50.
13. Cevr, nklb, 4851. Cf. Tark Zafer Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler, vol.
3: ttihat ve Terakki, bir an, bir Kuan, bir Partinin Tarihi, (1989; Istanbul: letiim,
1998), 27.
14. Temo, ttihad ve Terakki, 1315.
15. Salam, Nasl Okudum, 85.
16. Rza Nur, Hayat ve htralarm (Istanbul: Ahndag Yaynevi, 1967), vol. 1,
12334 and 252, citation 127, distich cited in Georgeon, Aux origines du nationalisme
turc, 14. Cf. Salam, Nasl Okudum, 7779.
17. According to the Mal calendar (massacre in Sassun, 1894pogrom in
Istanbul, 1896).
18. Cevr, nkilb, 5253.
19. Temo, ttihad ve Terakki, 42. See also points 1 and 2 of the regulations of the
CUP in its rst years: Tark Zafer Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler, vol. 1: kinci
Merutiyet Dnemi, 190818 (Istanbul: letiim, 199899), 70.
20. Cevr, nkilb, 37, 4243 and 52.
Notes to Pages 130135 351

21. Reid, Takla Htralar, 5763, quotation 6061.

22. Haniolu, Young Turks in Opposition, 207.
23. Cevr, nklb Niin ve Nasl Oldu, 1909.
24. Reid, Hal Tercmesi, 164.
25. Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler, 1:175.
26. Cf. Reids memorandum of Oct. 14, 1904, to the Hamidian authorities, in
which he criticizes the insufciency and irresponsibility of the Ottoman administra-
tion at Tripolis. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 17.
27. Reid, Htralar, 7980.
28. Ahmed Bedevi Kuran, nklap Tarihimiz ve Jn Trkler (1945; Istanbul:
Kaynak, 2000), 328. Cf. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 1819.
29. With the ttihadists in place, however, the Osmanl ttihad ve Terakki Cemiy-
eti Hums Liv Heyet-i Merkeziyesi thanked him in a letter of June 19/20 for his valu-
able services to the nation, the fatherland and the party; Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar,
2021.
30. Reid, Arzi, 17576.
31. Ibid., 176.
32. namusum derecesinde mukaddes bildiim vazifemi. Ibid., 177.
33. Doktor Reid, Hadisat, 8 ubat 1919, entirely transliterated in Bilgi, Hayat
ve Htralar, 16771, here 16869.
34. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 21.
35. While the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria in November 1913 concluded the
rst intergovernmental treaty for population transfer in modern history, talks with
Greece did not happen. Therefore the ttihadists implemented secret policies of ex-
pulsion by spreading panic in the Rum villages from the beginning of 1914. Cf.
Babakanlk Osmanl Arivi Dahiliye (BOADH) KMS 17/29, cited in Bilgi, Hayat ve
Htralar, 22; Stephen Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece, and Tur-
key (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 1823; Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic
Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2001), 43; Erkan enekerci, Trk devriminde Celal Bayar, 19181960 (Istanbul: Alfa,
2000), 3541.
36. Celal Bayar, Ben de yazdm (Istanbul: Baha Matbaas, 196567), 5:1573. The
nationalist author Nurdoan Taalan wrote in 1970: Union and Progress had taken
a nal decision. The sources of trouble had to be eliminated, the Rumlar had to be
eliminated by political and economic measures. At the very outset, the Rumlar who
were economically powerful needed to be broken and destroyed. Nurdoan Taalan,
Egede Kurtulu Sava balarken (Istanbul: Milliyet, 1970), 65, cited in Taner Akam,
nsan Haklar ve Ermeni Sorunu. ttihad ve Terakkiden Kurtulus Savana (Ankara:
mge, 1999), 179.
37. Cf. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 46.
38. Reid, Balkesir Notlar, 65.
39. Ibid., 66.
40. Ibid., 68.
41. Ibid., 69.
42. Ibid., 70.
43. Ibid., 71.
352 Notes to Pages 135137

44. Ibid., 75.

45. slam unsurunun kann emmekdedirlerin a text from the end of 1918,
which retrospectively refers to Reids experiences in Diyarbekir. Reid, Mlhazt,
9799.
46. Tekin Alp, Trkismus und Pantrkismus (Weimar: Verlag Gustav Kiepen-
heuer, 1915), 3940 and 62. Tekinalp later became the family name of Moiz Kohen
alias Tekin Alp Bey in the Republic of Turkey.
47. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 22.
48. Letter partly cited in Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 22.
49. Fortunately World War One broke out thus preventing the implementation
of that harmful [reform] project, a member of the Turkish Historical Society later
wrote, who was an employee of the Ministry of the Interior in 1914. Hasan Reit
Tankut, Dou ve Gneydou Blgesi zerine Etno-Politik Bir nceleme, in Ak-
Gizli/ Resmi-Gayrresmi Krdoloji Belgeleri, ed. M. Bayrak, 21832, here 219 (1961;
Ankara: zge, 1994). Cf. Ahmed Djemal, Erinnerungen eines trkischen Staatsmannes
(Munich: <pub>, 1922), 33754; and Talt, Talt Paann Htralar, ed. A. Kabacal
(1946; Istanbul, 1994), 5871.
50. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 23; cf. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Der verpasste Friede:
Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen der Trkei 18391938 (Zrich: Chro-
nos, 2000), 444.
51. Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First
World War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001), 67.
52. Sleyman Nazif, son of Said Pasha of Diyarbekir, resigned from his post in
Baghdad in December 1915 and dedicated himself to journalism and literature. Abdul-
lah Uman, Sleyman Nazif, Osmanllar Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Yap Kredi, 1999).
53. Sleyman Nazif, Doktor Reid, Hadisat, 8 ubat 1919, cited in Bilgi,
Hayat ve Htralar, 169.
54. Cf. Ali ankaya, Mlkiye ve Mlkiyeler (Ankara: Mars Matbaas, 19681969),
3:956; evket Beysanolu, Diyarbakr Tarihi (Ankara: Irmak Matbaas, 1998), 2:788;
Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 25 and 78.
55. Reid, Mlhazt, 102.
56. In a telegram of 5 Eyll 1331 (Sept. 18, 1915) from Diyarbekir to the Minis-
try of the Interior; see Armenians in Ottoman Documents (19151920) (Ankara: The
Turkish Prime Ministry General Directorate of the State Archives, 1995), 105. In
Memleket, 29 Nisan 1919, is cited, according to Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 28, a
similar telegram of 15 Eyll 1331 (Sept. 28, 1915).
57. Cf. Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Ana-
tolia and the End of the Empire (New York University Press, 1983), 6970. The ofcial
Ottoman number is 73,226, McCarthy gives a recitied number of 89,131. Cf. Vital
Cuinet, La Turquie dAsie (Paris: <pub>, 1892), 2:412.
58. 144,000 disappeared during the persecutions in 1915/16, most of them
killed. Yves Ternon, Empire ottoman: Le declin, la chute, leffacement (Paris: Editions
Michel de Maule, 2002), 18587.
59. PA-AA/R14086; see Wolfgang Gusts online edition http://www.armeno-
cide.de; or Johannes Lepsius, ed., Deutschland und Armenien 19141918: Sammlung
diplomatischer Aktenstcke (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919), document 126.
60. Gngr, Bir Canl Tarih Konuuyor,, 244445.
Notes to Pages 138141 353

61. Ternon, Empire ottoman, 83. Cf. Kieser, Der verpasste Friede, 33536.
62. Reid, Mlhazt, 102. For the recurring use of cret (audacity, imperti-
nence), see, e.g., 99.
63. Doktor Reid, Hadisat, 8 ubat 1919, in Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 16771,
here 171.
64. Cf. Beysanolu, Diyarbakr Tarihi, 786860; the transcribed telegram is on
72729; a list of the notables closely cooperating with Dr Reid is on 79394. For the
roles of Cemil Pasha and Pirinccizde Arif see Gustave Meyrier, Les massacres de Diar-
bkir: Correspondance diplomatique du Vice-Consul de France 18941896, prsente et
annote par Claire Mouradian (Paris: LInventaire, 2000), 172, 185, 186, 216; for the
designation of the committee as Young Turk see 170. As far as I understand, Mustafa
Cemilpaazde, colonel and chief of Dr. Reids milice, was the son of Cemil Pasha,
former governor of Yemen.
65. Extracts of the interview in Ternon, Empire ottoman, 351.
66. Ibid., 86, 8990, 281.
67. Reid, Mlhazt, 89. Cf. Abidin Nesimi, Yllarn inden (stanbul: Gzlem
yay, 1977), 3940.
68. Reid, Mlhazt, 103 and 107; cf. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 26.
69. Reid, Mlhazt, 1045.
70. Ternon, Empire ottoman, 88.
71. Faits et documents: Episodes des massacres armniens de Diarbkir (Constanti-
nople: Imprimerie G. Kchichian ls, 1920), 3135, cited in Ternon 2002, 92.
72. J. Rhtor, Les chrtiens aux btes! Souvenirs de la guerre sainte proclame par
les Turcs contre les chrtiens en 1915, manuscript in the Bibliothque du Saulchoir,
Paris, 3536, cited in Ternon 2002, 94.
73. Telegram of July 20, 1915, BOA DH.FR 54-A/49.
74. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission, the strongest
and best established missionary organization in Asia Minor during the last Otto-
man decades. Dr. Smith mentions several Christian notables having been tor-
tured and nally killed. Many died from typhus. He could not get access to the
suffering people. Metassian, the representative of the Standard Oil, was taken
down in prison... . They refused me admittance [into the prison] rather rudely
asking what business I had there. One of the guards said: Let him die like a dog.
He died that same afternoon. Letter to James Barton, Vevey (Switzerland), Sept.
18, 1915, 34, Archives of the ABCFM, Houghton Library, Boston, ABC 16.9.7
(reel 716: 436).
75. Ofcially on March 25 only.
76. Letter to James Barton, Vevey (Switzerland), Sept. 18, 1915, 23, ABC 16.9.7
(reel 716: 434436).
77. Reid Bey had persons from the entourage of Dr. Smith tortured and one of
them sign that 1. I (Dr. Smith) am an Armenian, 2. I (Dr. Smith) was Maynards
agent to incite insurrection in Diyarbekir as at Van. Smiths letter to Barton, Vevey,
Aug. 25, 1915, ABC 16.9.7.
78. T. C. Genelkurmay Bakanl, Ariv belgeleriyle Ermeni faaliyetleri 1914
1918/ Armenian activities in the archive documents 19141918, (Ankara: Genelkurmay
Basm Evi, 2005), 1:23581.
79. Smiths letter to Barton, Rowley (Iowa), Sept. 20, 1917, ABC 16.9.7.
354 Notes to Pages 141144

80. Cf. Dr. Smiths (Diyarbakir) and Dr. Thoms (who had lived for forty
years at Mardin) letters to Barton from 1914 to March 1915, ABC 16.9.7 (reels
716 and 717).
81. Faits et documents 1920, 4548, cited in Ternon 2002, 95.
82. This dispatch very probably concerns the murder of the notables deported
on May 30 (cf. Ternon 2002, 8980, 28182), but seems to blend it together with si-
multaneous murders (therefore the mention of women and children). June 10, 1915,
Walter Holstein, German vice-consul in Mosul to the embassy in Constantinople,
PA-AA/BoKon/169 (Lepsius 1919, doc. 78 and 80).
83. The Dominican Pater Hyacinthe Simon in Mardin reported a group of 510
deportees passing through Mardin, but killed soon after at Dara on July 13, 1915.
Hyacinthe Simon, Mardine, la ville hroque: Autel et tombeau de lArmnie (Asie
Mineure) durant les massacres de 1915, manuscript in the Bibliothque du Saulchoir,
Paris, 13738, cited in Ternon 2002, 96.
84. Rhtor, Les chrtiens aux btes! 49, cited in Ternon 2002, 103. On Lice in
1915 see also J. Naayem, Les Assyro-chaldens et les Armniens massacrs par les Turcs:
Documents indits recueillis par un tmoin oculaire (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1920). Naaman
Efendi was director of the Dette Publique at Lice.
85. PA-AA/BoKon/169 (Lepsius 1919, doc. 112); note of Johannes Mordtmann,
Generalkonsul in Konstantinopel: am 12/7 persnlich an Talaat bej bergeben.
86. July 10, 1915, Walter Holstein, deutscher Vizekonsul in Mossul an die
Botschaft in Konstantinopel, DE/PA-AA/BoKon/169 (cf. Lepsius 1919, doc. 110).
87. BOA DH.FR, no. 54/406, July 12, 1915, transcribed in Armenians in Otto-
man Documents, 75. Cf. Akams deliberations in Akam, nsan Haklar ve Ermeni
Sorunu, fn. 61, 2526. Also, DH. FR no. 54-A /248, July 20, 1915.
88. Rhror, Les chrtiens aux btes! 37, cited in Ternon, Empire ottoman, 96, cf. 97.
89. Aug. 14, 1915, Walter Holstein, German vice-consul in Mosul to the em-
bassy in Constantinople, PA-AA/BoKon/170 (Lepsius 1919, doc. 139). In an earlier
dispatch, Holstein refers to the murder of the kaymakam of Midyat (cf. Reid, Ml-
hazt, 85), and estimates a very low percentage of survivors among the deportees:
July 16, 1915, Walter Holstein, deutscher Vizekonsul in Mossul an die Botschaft in
Konstantinopel, PA-AA/BoKon/169 (cf. Lepsius 1919, doc. 115).
90. Ambassador Hohenlohe-Langenburg to the German Foreign Ofce, Sept.
11, 1915, PA-AA/BoKon/170 (Lepsius 1919, doc. 167).
91. Armenians in Ottoman Documents, 105.
92. Cited in Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar, 29. For more on Halil Edib see ngr,
Center and Periphery in the Armenian Genocide, 73.
93. Reid, Mlhazt, 7991. Abidin Nesim Bey, son of Hseyin Nesim Bey
(the liberal kaymakam of Lice, murdered in 1915), wrote in his memoirs: He [Reid
Bey] invited him to Diyarbekir and had him killed by ordering a band of Tcherkess
Harun, part of the Special Organization, to lay an ambush. Nesimi, Abidin, Yllarn
inden (stanbul: Gzlem yaynlar, 1977), 3940. Cited in Ayhan Aktar, Osmanl
Meclisi Ermeni meselesini tartyor. KasmAralk 1918, Gr (Istanbul: TSAD,
August 2001), 4254, here 52.
94. Reid, Mlhazt, 1067. Cf. T. C. Genelkurmay Bakanl, Ariv belgeleriyle
Ermeni faaliyetleri 19141918/ Armenian activities in the archive documents 19141918,
(Ankara: Genelkurmay Basm Evi, 2005), 1: 23581.
Notes to Pages 144152 355

95. Cf. Ulrich Herbert, ed., Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 19391945:

Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Hamburg: Fischer, 2001).
96. Cf. Sleyman Nazif, Doktor Reid, Hadisat, 8 ubat 1919; Bilgi, Hayat ve
Htralar, 170.
97. Cf. Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar 41.
98. Reids last words to his family were undeniably tactful and touching.
Reid, Son Szm, Tasvir-i Efkar, 10 February 1919; Bilgi, Hayat ve Htralar,
15556.
99. Cf. Sleyman Nazif, Doktor Reid, Hadisat, 8 ubat 1919;Bilgi, Hayat ve
Htralar, 171.
100. Reid, Gnlk, 119, 135.
101. Gngr, Bir Canl Tarih Konuuyor,, 244445.
102. Mithat kr Bleda, mparatorluun ok (Istanbul: Remzi, 1979), 6162.
103. Reid, Mlhazt, 77113.

CHAPTER 7
The following archival abbreviations are used in the notes to this chapter:

AMAE France, Archives du Ministre des Affairs trangres/Guerre,

19141918/Turquie/vols. 887894 (Paris: Service international
de microlms, 1981), 3 reels.
AVPRI Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi imperii [Foreign Policy
Archive for the Russian Empire] (Moscow)
GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [State Archive of
the Russian Federation] (Moscow)
HIA Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
PRO FO Public Record Ofce, Foreign Ofce (London)
RGIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi imperii [Russian
State Archive of the Russian Empire] (St. Petersburg)
RGVIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv [Russian
State Military-Historical Archive] (Moscow)
SHAA State Historical Archives of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia)
SSTsSA Georgian State Historical Archive (Tbilisi, Georgia)

1. E.g., esp. Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman
Muslims, 18211922 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1995), esp. ch. 6 (Russian Impe-
rialism).
2. E.g., Richard Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967), 67; Manoug Somakian, Empires in Conict:
Armenia and the Great Powers, 18951920 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995).
356 Notes to Page 152

3. These narratives often rely on the valuable early Soviet documentary collec-
tions, intended to demonstrate how Great Powers pursued imperialism as the
highest stage of capitalism: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v epokhu imperializma:
Dokumenty iz arkhivov tsarskogo i vremennogo pravitelstva, 18781917, ed. M. N.
Pokrovskii (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1935), available also in German translation: Interna-
tionale Beziehungen im Zeitalter des Imperialismus, trans. Otto Hoetzsch. Pokrovskii,
the series editor, was the leading Marxist historian of the late 1920s before his dis-
grace. Also crucial for this narrative is the documentary collection: E. A. Adamov,
Razdel Aziatskoi Turtsii po sekretnym dokumentam b. ministerstva inostrannykh del
(Moscow: Litizdat, 1924). Armenian Soviet scholars wrote many of works in this
vein: Dzh. Kirakosian, Zapadnaia Armeniia v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Ereven:
Izdatelstvo Erivanskogo universiteta, 1971), 38795; S. M. Akopian, Zapadnaia
Armeniia v planakh imperialisticheskikh derzhav (Erevan: Izdatelstvo Akademii
Nauk Armianskoi SSSR, 1967); A. O. Arutiunian, Kavkazskii front, 19141917 (Ere-
van: Aiastan, 1971).
4. This is beginning to change. See two excellent recent studies: Halt Dndar
Akarca, The Russian Administration of the Occupied Ottoman Territories during
the First World War, 19151917 (MA thesis, Bilkent University, 2002); Michael A.
Reynolds, The Ottoman-Russian Struggle for Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus,
19081918: Identity, Ideology, and the Geopolitics of World Order (PhD diss., Princ-
eton University, 2003). An early exception is the nuanced work of M. S. Lazarev on
the Kurdish question and Russian policies in relation to it: M. S. Lazarev, Kurdskii
vopros, 18911917 (Moscow: Nauka, 1972).
5. In this chapter, I address only the policies of the Russian Foreign Ministry
and the Russian military. Elsewhere I discuss the agenda of the Ministry of Agricul-
ture and its Resettlement Bureau, the agencies that had the most ambitious plans for
occupied Armenia. Here I merely note that this agencys campaign to convince the
Russian government to annex and settle occupied Armenia was one conducted in
opposition to existing government policy and had little actual effect on the ground.
Peter Holquist, In accord with State Interests and the Peoples Wishes: The Tech-
nocratic Ideology of Imperial Russias Resettlement Administration (in prepara-
tion). Relying on the memorandum of Agriculture Minister V. Krivoshein to S.
Sazonov, Feb. 28, 1915, in Adamov, Razdel Aziatskoi Turtsii, appendix, 36062, which
in fact was a plea for the government to alter its policy at the time, many existing
studies take this one institutions agenda as representative of Russian policy overall.
E.g., Hovannisian, Armenia, 58; and Somakian, Empires in Conict, 1078, portray
this document as representative of Russian policy.
6. Literature on the Ottomans has focused on key action ministries and the
role of the CUP and Secret Organization: see Taner Akam, A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Henry Holt,
2006), and The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction
of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For Germany: the
classic Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princ-
eton University Press, 1968); Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and
the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
2005), ch. 11; and Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Who Still Talked about the Arme-
nians: German Talk and German Silences ch. 9 in this volume.
Notes to Pages 152153 357

7. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 266. Pace the treatments of a unitary Russian

policy found in, e.g., Somakian, Empires in Conict or McCarthy, Death and Exile,
studies of the prewar and wartime Russian imperial state have made this point abun-
dantly clear: see Alfred Rieber, Bureaucratic Politics in Imperial Russia, Social Sci-
ence History 2, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 399413, esp. 408; D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the
Outbreak of the First World War (New York: St. Martins Press, 1983); David M. McDon-
ald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 19001914 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1992); and most recently, Ronald Bobroff, Roads to Glory:
Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2006).
8. On the political culture of the CUP, and esp. its cult of secrecy and elaboration
of an institutional cult around the secret committee, see M. Skr Haniolu, A Brief
History of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 15767.
9. For various inections of this argument, see: Hovannisian, Armenia on the
Road to Independence, 67; Somakian, Empires in Conict, 106119, esp. 111, 116; Alan
Bodger, Russia and the End of the Ottoman Empire, in The Great Powers and the
End of the Ottoman Empire (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 76110, here at
99; Kirakosian, Zapadnaia Armeniia, 38795; A. Iu. Bakhturina, Okrainy Rossiiskoi
Imperii: Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie i natsionalnaia politika v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny
(Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 20824; McCarthy, Death and Exile, ch. 6; Donald Blox-
ham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the
Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 143.
10. Bloxham, Great Game, 72; in an otherwise prosaic treatment of the Russian
occupation of Armenia, Bakhturina rightly stresses the cautiousness of the Russian
government: Okrainy rossiiskoi imperii, 21213; pace Somakian, Empires in Conict;
and Akam, Shameful Act, 21112.
11. On the reforms, see Andr Mandelstam, Le sort de lEmpire Ottoman (Laus-
anne-Paris: Payot, 1917), 20645 (as dragoman at the Russian Embassy in Constan-
tinople, Mandelstam was the driving force behind the reforms); Roderic H. Davison,
The Armenian Crisis, 19121914, American Historical Review 53, no. 3 (April 1948):
481505; Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, 3139; Lazarev, Kurd-
skii vopros, 24046. For documents concerning the reforms, see Budushchee ustroistvo
Armenii po otsialnym diplomaticheskim dokumentam Oranzhevoi knigi, traktuiush-
chei reformy v Armenii. (Tretia oranzhevaia kniga.) [= Diplomaticheskii arkhiv tom
VIII] (Petrograd: Osvobozhdenie, 1915).
12. Mandelstam, Le sort; and Andr Mandelstam, Das armenische Problem im
Lichte des Vlker- und Menschenrechts (Berlin: G. Stilke, 1931). On Mandelstam,
see: Vladimir Emmanuilovich Grabar, The History of International Law in Russia,
16471917: A Bio-Bibliographical Study, trans. W. E. Butler (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990), 39091; K. J. Partsch, Die Armenierfrage und das Vlkerrecht in
der Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges: Zum Wirken von Andre Mandelstam, in Geno-
zid und Moderne, vol. 1: Strukturen kollektiver Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. M.
Dabag and K. Platt (Opladen, 1998); Lubor Jilek, Violences de masse et droits de
lhomme: Andrei Mandelstam entre Constantinople et Bruxelles, Les cahiers de la
Facult des Lettres de Genve (2000): 6471. Mandelshtam was a Jewish convert to
Christianity.
13. Ambassador Girs to the Russian Consul in Van, Aug. 6/19, 1914, in Mezhdunar-
odnye otnosheniia v epokhu imperializma: Dokumenty iz arkhivov tsarskogo i vremennogo
358 Notes to Pages 153156

pravitelstva, 18781917, ed. M. N. Pokrovskii (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1935), series 3, vol.

6, pt. 1, doc. 191, n1.
14. Viceroy in the Caucasus Vorontsov-Dashkov to Chairman of the Council of
Ministers Goremykin, Aug. 9/22, 1914; and Foreign Minister Sazonov to Chairman
of the Council of Ministers Goremykin, Aug. 17/30, 1914; Goremykin to Vorontsov-
Dashkov, Aug. 19/Sept. 1, 1914 (RGIA, f. 1276 (Council of Ministers), op. 10, d. 848,
ll. 4, 1, 910).
15. Mark von Hagen, The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the
Russian Empire in Post-Soviet Political Order: Conict and State-building, ed. Barnett
Rubin and Jack Snyder (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3457, here at 4148; Aleksan-
dra Bakhturina, Politika rossiiskoi imperii v vostochnoi Galitsii v gody pervoi mirovoi
voiny (Moscow: AIRO, 2000); Peter Holquist, The Role of Personality in the First
(19141915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina in Anti-Jewish Violence:
Reconceptualizing the Pogrom in European History, 17th20th Centuries, ed. John
Klier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), under consideration.
16. Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, 45; Rech Ministra
inostrannykh del Sazonova, Izvestiia MID, no. 2 (1915): 4451, here at 48.
17. Lazarev, Kurdskii vopros, 15769, 22239, 32126; Reynolds, Ottoman-Rus-
sian Struggle, ch. 2.
18. Peter Holquist, The Origins of Crimes against Humanity: The Russian
Empire, International Law, and the Allies 1915 Note on the Armenian Genocide (in
preparation).
19. [Boris Nolde], Budushchee ustroistvo Armenii: Osnovnye polozheniia
(AVPRI, f. 340, op. 610 [B. E. Nolde]. d. 172).
20. FM Sazonov to Ambassador Benckendorff, July 7/20, 1915, in Adamov,
Razdel aziatskoi Turtsii, doc. 46.
21. V. Krivoshein to S. Sazonov, Feb. 28, 1915, in Adamov, Razdel Aziatskoi Turt-
sii, appendix, 36062. Hovannisian, Armenia,58, and Somakian, Empires in Conict,
1078, portray this document as representative of Russian policy
22. A. N. [Nicolson] to Edward Grey, Mar. 18, 1915 (PRO FO 371/1915/2485/le
30439/no. 32321). Benckendorffs conversation with Nicolson took place on Mar.
3/16.
23. Michael Cherniavsky, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Notes of A. N. Iakhontov on
the Secret Meetings of the Council of Ministers, 1915 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice
Hall, 1967), meeting of July 30, 1915, 3637; see also B. D. Galperina, ed., Sovet
Ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Bumagi A. N. Iakhontova (St.
Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), 210. The issue was again taken up on August 4,
1915: see Prologue, 45.
24. General A. N. Kuropatkin, Granitsy Rossii v rezultate voiny 19141915
godov. (Soobrazheniia k trebovaniiam pri zakliuchenii mira), 2 vols., vol. 2: Gran-
itsy s Turtsiei, Persiei, i Kitaem, (1915) (GARF, f. 543 (Kollektsiia rukopisei
tsarskoselskogo dvortsa), op. 1, d. 751, ch. 2, ll. 24048). Kuropatkins 1915 report
on proposed border changes after the wars conclusion was submitted directly to
Emperor Nicholas II.
25. Pavel Miliukov, Sudba Turetskoi Armenii, Rech, Dec. 5/18, 1914, no. 329.
26. P. P. Migulin, Zavoevanie Maloi Azii, Novyi ekonomist, no. 8 (Feb. 20,
1916): 26. Armenian activists were vocally opposed to this proposal: see Russkii
Notes to Pages 156158 359

professor ob ekonomicheskom budeshchem Armenii, Armianskii vestnik, no. 46

(Dec. 11, 1916): 23.
27. For a ne overview, see C. Jay Smith Jr., The Russian Struggle for Power: A
Study of Russian Foreign Policy during the First World War (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1969; reprint of 1956 original), 36382. The Russians came to distrust Picot,
but warmed to Sykes.
28. M. Palologue, Ambassadeur de France Petrograd, M. Aristide Briand,
Prsident du Conseil, Ministre des Affaires trangres, Petrograd, Mar. 11, 1916,
nos. 203, 204, in Les grandes Puissances, lEmpire ottoman et les Armniens dans les
archives franaises (19141918), ed. Arthur Beylerian (Paris: Publications de la Sor-
bonne, 1983), docs. 185, 186; see also Sir G. Buchanan (Petrograd) to FO, Feb. 26/
Mar. 10, 1916 (PRO FO 371/vol. 2767/1916/47088). The French claimed that if they
did not take the territory, the British would have demanded it all for themselves. This
erroneous and self-serving justication outraged the British Foreign Ofce: M.
Palologue is really incorrigible ... This is really intolerable impertinence ... the
Russians [are] preferable neighbors to the French anywhere in the East.
29. Ambassador Buchanan to FO, Petrograd, Feb. 28/Mar. 12, 1916, no. 351
(PRO FO 371/vol. 2767/1916/47088).
30. M. Palologue M. Aristide Briand, Petrograd, Mar. 13, 1916, no. 210, in
Beylerian, Les grandes Puissances, doc. 189; see also Maurice Palologue, La Russie des
tsars pendant la Grande Guerre, 3 vols. (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1921), 2: 2046.
31. Smith, Russian Struggle for Power, 36882. See also Buchanan to the Foreign
Ofce, Mar. 4/17, 1916 (PRO FO 371/1916/2767/le 938/no. 51376); and, Palo-
logue to Briand, Mar. 2/15, 1916; Georges Picot to M. Defrance, Mar. 4/17, 1916;
Briand to Palologue, Mar. 4/17, 1916, in Beylerian, Les grandes Puissances, docs. 191,
192, 193.
32. Exchange of notes between French and Russian governments, Apr. 13/26,
1916, in Beylerian, Les grandes Puissances, docs. 219220; Russian translation of
these documents in Adamov, Razdel Aziatskoi Turtsii, docs. 103104.
33. Lt. Colonel Sir Mark Sykes to Colonel Clayton, Mar. 28/Apr. 10, 1916 (PRO
FO 371/1916/2768/le 938/no. 68431, p. 66); reiterated in telegram from Col. Clay-
ton (London) to Sir H. McMahon (Cairo), Apr. 1/14, 1916 (PRO FO 371/1916/2768/
le 938/no. 70889, p. 105).
34. Prince Grigorii N. Trubetskoi, Tseli voiny, a forty-page memorandum on
Russias war aims addressed to Foreign Minister N. N. Pokrovskii, Jan. 10, 1917
(HIA, Grigorii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi Papers, d. 66, here at ll. 1216, quote at l. 15).
On Trubetskoi and his agenda, see Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 92102.
35. It had been the Franco-Prussian War of 187071 that had brought attention
to the distinction between occupation and annexation: see Doris Appel Graber,
The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation, 18631914 (New York: AMS
Press, 1968); for the role of the Russian government in advancing the codication of
this aspect of international law, see Peter Holquist, The Russian Empire as a Civi-
lized State: International Law as Principle and Practice in Imperial Russia, 1874
1878 (unpublished paper).
36. Sazonov to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, June 14/27, 1916 (RGVIA, f.
2005 [Grazhdanskoe upravlenie pri Verkhovnom Glavnokomanduiushchem], op. 1,
d. 17, ll. 12 ob.); reprinted in Adamov, Razdel aziatskoi Turtsii, doc. 140.
360 Notes to Pages 158159

37. Von Hagen, The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity; Bakhturina,
Politika rossiiskoi imperii; Holquist, Role of Personality.
38. Viceroy to the Caucasus Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to Sazonov, July
3/16, 1916 (AVPRI, f. 151, op. 482 [Politarkhiv], d. 3481, ll. 1516 ob.; reproduced in
Razdel aziatskoi Turtsii, doc. 144). These overall guidelines were reconrmed under
Strmer, Sazonovs replacement: Viceroy for the Caucasus to Chairman of the Coun-
cil of Ministers Strmer, July 15/28, 1916; Strmer to the Viceroy, July 19/Aug. 1,
1916 (AVPRI, f. 151, op. 482 [Politarkhiv], d. 3481, ll. 21, 23; reproduced in Razdel
Aziatskoi Turtsii, docs. 148, 151).
39. Cited in Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during
World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 152. The Yakuts were an
indigenous population living in Eastern Siberia.
40. RGVIA, f. 2005 (Grazhdanskoe upravlenie pri Verkhovnom Glavnokoman-
duiushchem), op. 1, d. 17, ll. 3 ob.-13 ob. Subsquent directives reiterated these goals:
see Organization of the Military Administration of the Territories of Turkey, Occu-
pied by Right of War, [ca. Dec. 1916] (RGVIA, f. 2168 (Staff of the Caucasus Army),
op. 1, d. 268, ll. 2023 ob.); and, Trubetskoi, Tseli voiny, ll. 1516.
41. George Buchanan to Edward Grey, Petrograd, Aug. 30, 1916, no. 198 (PRO
FO 371/1916/2781/no. 181170) and Secret telegram from Stolitsa, the Ofcial for
Border Relations for the Caucasian Viceroy, Tiis, Aug. 30, 1916, no. 1191 (AVPRI, f.
151, op. 482 [Politarkhiv], d. 4128, l. 16), regarding whether Russia had annexed Trebi-
zond (it had not); Letter from the Chief of the Descent Detachment in the Odessa Port
to MID, Oct. 7, 1917 and reply from the Second Political (Near Eastern) Department
of MID, Oct. 15, 1917 (AVPRI, f. 151, op. 482 (Politarkhiv), d. 4128, ll. 4142)
42. Bloxham, Great Game, 7375; Akam, Shameful Act, 117, 12223; see also
David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance and Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in East-
ern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2006), 5357.
43. Dispatch of agents and appeals for uprising among Russian Muslims:
Secret report from the Kutaissi provincial gendarme department to the Chancellery
for the Viceroy in the Caucasus, 14 May 1914 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika
na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 3265, l. 8991); more reports on activities of Ottoman agents
found in this archival le (ll. 17, 103, 107, 128); see also Bloxham, Great Game; and
Akam, Shameful Act.
Marauding in Persia: Decrypted telegram from the Vice-Consul in Khoi Kir-
sanov to the Diplomatic Ofcial for the Caucasus Stolitsa, Sept. 16, 1914, no. 218
(SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 3361, ll. 35);
Decrypted telegram from the Vice-Consul in Khoi Kirsanov to the Diplomatic Of-
cial for the Caucasus Stolitsa, Sept. 16, 1914, no. 220 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia
namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 3361, ll. 37); Decrypted telegram from the
Vice-Consul in Urmia Vvedenskii to the Diplomatic Chinovnik na Kavkaze Stolitsa,
Sept. 21, 1914, no. 648 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s.,
d. 3361, ll. 18). See also Vladimir Genis, Vitse-konsul Vvedenskii: Sluzhba v Persii i
Bukharskom khanstve (19061920 gg.): Rossiiskaia diplomatiia v sudbakh (Moscow:
Sotsialno-politicheskaia mysl, 2003), 2234; and Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance and
Protectors, 5657.
44. See the reports submitted by Russian ofcials over the course of November
December 1914 and January 1915 in SSTsSA f. 13 (Kantseliariia namestnika na
Notes to Pages 159161 361

Kavkaze), op. 27s., d. 3193. Also Bloxham, Great Game: The Ottoman invasions of
Persia and the Caucasus saw the plunder of 45,000 Armenian villages and the mur-
der of some 27,000 Armenians and many Assyrians in and beyond Ottoman terri-
tory between November 1914 and April 1915 (75).
45. Report of Viceroy in the Caucasus to Nicholas II, Jan. 16, 1916 (RGIA, f.
1276, op. 19, d. 1061, l. 62), conrming cases of pillage and rape by Russian units;
Anonymous Memorandum Regarding Atrocities by Cossacks against Muslims
(1915) (RGIA, f. 1276, op. 19 [Namestnik na Kavkaze], d. 1198); military investiga-
tion conrming murder of Muslim villager by soldiers (RGVIA, f. 2100 [Shtab armi-
iam Kavkazskogo fronta], op. 9, d. 3, l. 135135ob.). Also Bloxham, Great Game, 74.
46. M. Philips Price, War and Revolution in Asiatic Russia (London: George,
Allen & Unwin, 1918), 22324; see also 208.
47. On anti-Jewish policies in Galicia, see: Von Hagen, The Great War and the
Mobilization of Ethnicity; Bakhturina, Politika rossiiskoi imperii, 187202; Holquist,
Role of Personality.
48. List of detainees held under guard by order of the Miltiary Governor of Kars
region, Jan. 25, 1915 (SSTsSA, f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s.,
d. 3966, ll. 5759). Within several months, those who had not died of typhus65 of
the 159 perished during detentionwere either released or returned to their native
settlements while they awaited further investigation.
49. Telegram from Governor Podburskii in Kars to O.O., copy to Gofmeister
Peterson, [Jan. 8, 1915], no. 28; Otnoshenie ot Nachalnika Polevogo Shtaba Kavk.
Armii Gen. Iudenich to Pomoshchnik Namestnika EIV na Kavkaze po grazhdanskoi
chasti, Jan. 11, 1915, no. 134 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op.
27s., d. 3966, ll. 1, 3).
50. Governor Podburskii to the Special Department, cc. to Peterson, Jan. 8,
1915; General Iudenich to Peterson, Jan. 11, 1915 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia
namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 3966, ll. 1, 3).
51. Peterson to Minister of Internal Affairs, Jan. 12, 1915, and reply, Jan. 15, 1915
(SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 3966, ll. 78); Letter
from MVD, Department of Police to the Glavnoe Tiuremnoe Upravlenie, Feb. 10,
1915 [sekretno] (GARF, f. 102, II-oe deloproizvodstvo, op. 73 [1915 god], d. 83, l. 6).
52. Letter from Pomoshchnik po grazhdanskoi chasti Namestnika E.I.V. na Kavkaze
N. Peterson to Zameniaiushchii namestnika E.I.V. na Kavkaze v vysshikh ustanovleni-
iakh, Aleks. Pet. Nikolskii, Jan. 17, 1915, no. 203 (RGIA, f. 1276, op. 19, d. 1061, l. 12).
53. See Fuat Dundars contribution to this volume (ch. 13), Pouring People
into a Desert.
54. Telegram from Acting Governor in Kharkov to Kantseliariia Namestnika in
Tiis, Jan. 23, 1915, no. 486; Telegram from Gubernator Troinitskii in Tula to Kant-
seliariia Namestnika in Tiis, Jan. 27, 1915, no. 634; Telegram from Gubernator
Katerinich in Kharkov to Direktor Kantseliarii Namestnika in Tiis, Feb. 15, 1915;
Telegram from Gubernator Andreevskii in Orel to Direktor Kantseliarii Namestnika
in Tiis, Feb. 14, 1915 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s.,
d. 3966, ll. 16, 21, 49, 50).
55. Telegrams from Prints Aleksandr Oldenburgskii in Petrograd to General
Myshlaevskii in Tiis, Jan. 30, 1915, no. 1627 and Jan. 31, 1915, no. 1648 (SSTsSA f.
13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 3966, ll. 25, 28).
362 Notes to Pages 161163

56. Letter from Nikolskii to Chariman of the Council of Ministers Goremykin,

Apr. 11, 1915; Journal of the Council of Ministers for Apr. 28, 1915 (RGIA, f. 1276,
op. 19, d. 1061, ll. 3840, 5054 ob.). This same le contains the memoranda of each
ministry regarding the proposed measure: Ministries of Justice (ll. 1215, Feb. 14,
1915) and of Foreign Affairs (ll. 1618, Feb. 25, 1915).
57. Telegram from Senator Nikolskii in Petrograd to Gofmeister Peterson in
Tiis, Feb. 28 and Mar. 9, 1915 (RGIA, f. 1276, op. 19, d. 1061, ll. 26, 36).
58. Memorandum of Grand Prince Georgii Mikhailovich to Emperor Nicholas
II, May 16, 1915 (RGIA, f. 1276 [Council of Ministers], op. 19, d. 1061, l. 55).
59. Telegrams from Senator Nikolskii in Petrograd to the Viceroy in the Caucasus,
May 21 and 26, 1915 (RGIA, f. 1276, op. 19, d. 1061, l. 58; SSTsSAop. 27s., d. 3193, ll. 176).
60. Chlen Gos. Dumy K. Chkheidze, Kavkazskoe slovo, Apr. 5, 1915, no. 76;
Telegram from General Ad. [Kants-ia Namestnika] to Senator Nikolskii in Petrograd,
Aug. 4, 1915 (SSTsSA, f. 13, op. 27s., d. 3193, l. 187: interpolation from deputy Dzha-
farov regarding persecution of Muslims); Letter from Nikolskii to M. V. Rodzianko,
Aug. 6, 1915 (RGIA, f. 1276, op. 19, d. 1061, l. 61); Report from Viceroy to Nicholas
II, Jan. 16, 1916 (RGIA, f. 1276, op. 19, d. 1061, l. 62).
61. Report of Viceroy in the Caucasus to Nicholas II, Jan. 16, 1916 (RGIA, f.
1276, op. 19, d. 1061, ll. 6266). For a court case determining that Russian soldiers
had murdered a Muslim villager, see military investigation conrming murder of
Muslim villager by soldiers (RGVIA, f. 2100 [Shtab armiiam Kavkazskogo fronta],
op. 9, d. 3, l. 135135ob.). See also Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The
Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 15152although Lohr overestimates the unity and purpose-
fulness of Russian state action.
62. Lohr, Nationalizing, 152.
63. Chancellery of the Viceroy to the Acting Governor-General of the Batum
region, June 21, 1916 (SSTsSA, f. 13, op. 15 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze:
Otdelenie sudebnoe], d. 2684, l. 15).
64. Memorandum on the composition of lists of Russian-subject Muslims who
went over to the Turks, Feb. 22, 1917 (SSTsSA, f. 13, op. 15 [Kantseliariia namestnika
na Kavkaze: Otdelenie sudebnoe], d. 1570, ll. 12ob.).
65. List of individuals convicted in the case of certain inhabitants of Kars dis-
trict going over to the Turks [n.d. (ca. May 1917)] (RGVIA, f. 2100 [Shtab armiiam
Kavkazskogo fronta], op. 9, d. 17, ll. 6467ob.).
66. For case les, see: RGVIA, f. 2100 (Shtab armiiam Kavkazskogo fronta), op.
9, d. 3, l. 135135ob; ibid., d. 17, ll. 62.
67. On the simultaneity of Ottoman violence against the Armenians and the
Russian violence against the Jews, and the riddle of why the Russian government did
not embark on genocidal measures, see Mark Levene, Frontiers of Genocide: Jews in
the Eastern War Zones, 19141920 and 1941, in Minorities in Wartime: National and
Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars, ed.
Panikos Panayi, 83117 (Oxford & Providence: Berg 1993); Eric Lohr, The Russian
Army and the Jews: Mass Deportations, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,
Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 40419; and Holquist, Role of Personality.
68. Peter Holquist, The Russian Armys Violence against the Jews: Causes and
Limits, forthcoming in The Great War and Extreme Violence: The Turning-Point of
1915, ed. John Horne (under consideration).
Notes to Pages 164166 363

69. A. Britnev, Ot redaktsii, Biulleteni glavnogo kavkazskogo komiteta Vserossi-

iskogo soiuza gorodov, no. 16 (Oct. 20, 1917): 16, here at 1.
70. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 167, 174.
71. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 228; see also 324. Most relevant to my argument
here is Hulls ch. 10, Civilians as Objects of Military Necessity.
72. William Fuller, Civil Military Conict in Imperial Russia, 18811914 (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1532; John Bushnell, The Tsarist
Ofcer Corps, 18811914: Customs, Duties, Inefciency, American Historical
Review 86, no. 4 (Oct. 1981): 75380.
73. For the nature and distinctiveness of the Caucasus front, see the standard
military histories: General E. V. Maslovskii, Mirovaia voina na Kavkazskom fronte,
19141917 gg.: strategicheskii ocherk (Paris: Vozrozhdenie-La Renaissance, 1933);
W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battleelds: A History of the War on the
Turco-Caucasian Border, 18281921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953);
A. O. Arutiunian, Kavkazskii front, 19141917 (Erevan: Aiastan, 1971), as well as
eyewitness accounts of participants: Philips Price, War and Revolution in Asiatic Rus-
sia, esp. 75, 7980, 12728, 14853; and F. I. Eliseev, Kazaki na Kavkazskom fronte,
19141917 (Moscow: Voennoe izdatelstvo, 2001).
74. Summary of material prepared by the censor points of the Caucasus Front
in excerpts from letters for the period from 1 to 15 August 1916 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kant-
seliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 4428, ll. 4070ob., here at l. 28 ob.).
75. For a military history of the Caucasus front, see Maslovskii, Mirovaia voina
na Kavkazskom fronte; and Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battleelds.
76. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battleelds, 240.
77. Holquist, Role of Personality. For the later unfolding of the Jewish expul-
sions, which rst originated in Bukovina, see Lohr, The Russian Army and the
Jews.
78. Armenian Katolikos Kevork V to Vorontsov-Dashkov, Aug. 5, 1914; Vorontsov-
Dashkov to Goremykin, Aug. 9, 1914; Goremykin to Vorontsov-Dashkov, Aug. 19,
1914 (RGIA, f. 1276 [Council of Ministers], op. 10, d. 848, ll. 79, 4, 10). The Council
of Ministers discussed the issue on Sept. 23, 1914 (Galperina, ed., Sovet Ministrov, 74).
79. Lazarev, Kurdskii vopros, 32126, 34247; Reynolds, Ottoman-Russian
Struggle, 107, 116, 121, 202, 211.
80. Kudashev (director of the diplomatic chancellery at General Headquarters)
to Sazonov, Oct. 8, 1915, and Feb. 2, 1916 (Stavka i ministerstvo inostrannykh del,
Krasnyi arkhiv vol. 28 [1928], pp. 10, 30; quote from Vice-director of the diplomatic
chancellery Bazili, Memorandum Apr. 48, 1916; and, Bazili to Sazonov, Apr. 11,
1916 (both in HIA, Nikolai A. Bazili Papers, Box 2: File General Headquarters,
19141917: Correspondence).
81. For a sympathetic portrayal of the grand dukes conduct during the war, see
General Iu. N. Danilov, Velikii kniaz Nikolai Nikolaevich (Paris: Imprimerie de
Navarre, 1930); ch. 11 covers his period as viceroy to the Caucasus.
82. Armenians are the same as Jews: Grabar diary entry, Apr. 26, 1915 (Tartu
University Library, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Estonia, f. 38, s. 50,
l. 86 ob.). For his anti-Semitic program, see Holquist, Forms of Violence.
83. E.g., Colonel Tsyss, Memorandum on the purchase by Armenians of lands
of Persia and Turkey which border the Caucasus [n.d., c. May 1916?] (SSTsSA f. 13
364 Notes to Pages 166168

[Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 4353, ll. 15). On Russian views
toward Armenians overall, see Ronald G. Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in
Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), ch. 2.
84. Summary of material prepared by the censor points of the Caucasus Front
in excerpts from letters for the period from 1 to 15 August 1916 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kant-
seliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 4428, ll. 4070ob., here at l. 67).
85. Vremennoe polozhenie ob upravlenii oblastiami Turtsii, zaniatymi po
pravu voiny (RGVIA, f. 2005 [Grazhdanskoe upravlenie pri Verkhovnom Glavnoko-
manduiushchem], op. 1, d. 17, ll. 3 ob.-13 ob.). New guidelines for the occupation of
Galicia were issued less than one month later.
86. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to Sazonov, July 3/16, 1916 (AVPRI, f. 151,
op. 482 [Politarkhiv], d. 3481, ll. 1516 ob.; reproduced in Razdel aziatskoi Turtsii,
doc. 144).
87. For a general overview, see Reynolds, Ottoman-Russian Struggle, ch. 4.
Specically, see Prince Berdikhan and Prince Shakhovskoi to Lieutenant Chardigny
(French military attache to the Caucasus Front); translation from French; Tiis, Sept.
29, 1917 (AVPRI, f. 144, op. 489 (Persidskii stol B), d. 567, ll. 3042, here at 36).
Somakian incorrectly identies Prince B. N. Shakhovskoi as Dmitrii Ivanovich Shak-
hovskoi, who became the Minister for Social Welfare in the Provisional Government.
Somakian, Empires in Conict, 113.
88. Report from Prince Shakhovskoi to the Headquarters of the Caucasus Army,
Jan. 16, 1916, no. 10 (AVPRI, f. 144, op. 489 (Persidskii stol B), d. 567, ll. 612); also
Shakhovskois report to Lieutenant Aleksandr Kotsebu, July 12, 1916 (SSTsSA f. 13
[Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 4552, ll. 23). The British were
sceptical of Shakhovskois efforts: Colonel Marsh to the Department of Military In-
telligence, May 13/26, 1916 (PRO FO 371/1916/2778/no. 101880): Russias Kurdish
contacts have proved to be unprotable and even dangerous allies.
89. Secret Report of Prince Shakhovskoi to the Chief of Staff of the Caucasus
Army, Jan. 31, 1917, no. 14: Tiis (AVPRI, f. 144, op. 489 (Persidskii stol B), d. 567,
ll. 1328); the grand dukes marginal notations to this document indicate his en-
dorsement of Shakhovskois proposals.
90. Letter of appointment for Prince Gadzhemukov, Feb. 12, 1917; General-
maior Tomilov to the General Commissar for the occupied provinces of Turkey, Aug.
9, 1917 (RGVIA, f. 2168 [Shtab Kavkazskoi armii], op. 1, d. 274, ll. 32, 63).
91. Regional administrator for the Dersim region Gadzhemukov to the Com-
mander of the Caucasus Army Iudenich, Mar. 14, 1917 (RGVIA, f. 2168 [Shtab
Kavkazskoi armii], op. 1, d. 274, ll. 13, here at 2 ob.)
92. Somakian, Empires in Conict, 111; Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking:
Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999),
152.
93. Bodger, Russia, 99; Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 97; Somakian,
Empires in Conict, 1078, 111; Bloxham, Great Game, 136.
94. Aleks. Iv. Khatisov et al., Zapiska ob armianskom voprose i armianskikh
druzhinakh (Oct. 29, 1915) (SHAA, f. 57 [Kantseliariia Katolikosa Vsekh Armian],
op. 5, d. 102, ll. 3648ob., here at 4142); Doklad deputata sezda turetskikh arm-
ian Grigoriia Khlkhatiana [X aa], na imia chlena Osobogo Kavkazskogo
Komiteta M. I. Papadzhanova, June 30, 1917 (SHAA, f. 374 [Upravlenie komissara
Notes to Pages 168170 365

general-komissariata Turetskoi Armenii i drugikh oblastei, zaniatykh po pravu

voiny], op. 1, d. 56, l. 6869).
95. See the very large collections generated by his chancellery: SSTsSA, ff. 520,
521.
96. Correspondence and conrmation of this policy found in SSTsSA, f. 520,
op. 1, d. 32: petitions from Tamamshev (l. 11) and Duma Deputy Dzhafarov (ll. 67,
23). Several Russian commanders petitioned for aid to be extended to local Kurdish
tribes, but the Caucasus command generally declined such requests. General
Iudenich reported that he had no complaints about the conduct of the Turkish Mus-
lim population, but that the Kurdish population staged continual assaults on Rus-
sian forces (l. 10).
97. Order 121 (RGIA, f. 391 [Pereselencheskoe upravlenie MID], op. 6, d. 77, ll.
9ob.-10; English translation found in FO 371/1916/2781/no. 181170).
98. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to Sazonov, July 3/16, 1916 (AVPRI, f. 151,
op. 482, d. 3481, ll. 1516 ob.; reproduced in Razdel aziatskoi Turtsii, doc. 144).
99. Secret telegram from Petraiev, the Aide to the Second Political Department
(Near East) to the General Consul in [illegible], Aug. 10/23, 1916, no. 3644 (AVPRI,
f. 151 [Political Archive], op. 482, d. 4128, l. 9).
100. Interview with General Peshkov in Novoe Vremia; excerpted in Armianskii
vestnik, no. 45 (Dec. 4, 1916): 810, here at 10. For military orders permitting or de-
nying the return of refugees on consideration of the military and food supply situa-
tion in a particular region, see, e.g.,: SSTsSA, f. 520, op. 1, d. 33, ll. 18, 20, 32; ibid., d.
34, ll. 78
101. Bezhentsy, Armianskii vestnik, no. 32 (Sept. 4, 1916): 2021.
102. E. Arutiunian, General Kalitin v Armenii, Armianskii vestnik, no. 3536
(Sept. 10, 1917): 35.
103. General Iudenich to Head of the Caucasian Fronts Committee for Reset-
tling Refugees, Feb. 17, 1917, no. 356 (RGVIA, f. 2168 (Shtab Kavkazskoi armii), op.
1, d. 288, l. 10).
104. On institutional culture in general, and of the military in particular, see
Hull, Absolute Destruction.
105. Note from Colonel Tsyss to the Chief of Staff of the Caucasus Military dis-
trict, May 1, 1916, regarding copy of General Iudenichs Apr. 5, 1915, report; (SSTsSA
f. 13 (Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze), op. 27s., d. 4353, ll. 1).
106. Report from General Iudenich to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, 4 April
1916 (SSTsSA f. 13 (Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze), op. 27s., d. 4353, ll. 1616
ob.). Iudenich was responding to a request from one of his subordinates, the com-
mander of Diadin district.
107. Memoranda from the Chief of Staff of the Caucasus Army to Prince Vladi-
mir Orlov, May 5, 1916, and to Petr Istomin, May 25, 1916 (SSTsSA f. 13 [Kantse-
liariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 4353, ll. 15, 29).
108. For the eastern front: Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking; Lohr, The Russian
Army and the Jews; Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire; Joshua Sanborn, Un-
settling the Russian Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during
World War I, Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (June 2005): 290324. For the west-
ern front: Robert Armeson, Total Warfare and Compulsory Labor: A Study of the Mili-
tary-Industrial Complex in Germany during World War I (The Hague: Martinus
366 Notes to Pages 170173

Nijhoff, 1964); Annette Becker, Oublis de la Grande Guerre: Humanitaire et culture de

guerre 19141918; Populations occupes, deports civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: No-
sis, 1998); and Hull, Absolute Destruction, ch. 10.
109. John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 18951898 (Chapel Hill,:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006), ch. 14; S. B. Spies, Methods of Barbarism:
Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics, January 1900May 1902 (Cape
Town: Human and Rousseau, 1977); for Germany, see Hull, Absolute Destruction, ch. 3.
110. For the armys general treatment of the Jews, see Lohr, Russian Army and
the Jews; for the specicity of the 1915 operations and the shift in policies in 1916,
see Holquist, Forms of Violence in Occupied Galicia.
111. [M. Philips Price], Russias Conquests in Armenia: Their New Governor,
Manchester Guardian Sept. 13, 1916, p. 6 (interview conducted July 25/Aug. 7, 1916).
112. Sanborn, Unsettling the Russian Empire, 3029, 31522; and, on Arme-
nia, Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 9697. Lohr rightly treats these as gen-
eral policies. I believe he is wrong, however, that the Russian Army on the Caucasus
front sought to expel Armenians to make way for Cossacks.
113. Report of the Head of the Erzurum Region, College Assessor Maksimov, to
the Quartermaster-General of the Caucasus Army, Sept. 7, 1916, no. 3051 (AVPRI,
f. 151, op. 482 [Political Archive], d. 4128, ll. 1824). For the expulsion of the inhabi-
tantsArmenian and Kurdishof one entire district in the Erzurum region, see
Report of the Head of the Erzurum Region, College Assessor Maksimov, to the Aide
of the Quartermaster-General of the Caucasus Army, 20 March 1917 (RGVIA, f.
2168 [Headquarters for the Caucasus Army], op. 1, d. 274, ll. 46).
114. Telegram correspondence between the Military Governor for the Regions of
Turkey occupied by right of war and the head of the Erzurum district, Jan. 12 and 17,
1917 (RGVIA, f. 13249 [Ofce for the head of the Erzurum district of the General
Commissariat for Turkish Armenia], op. 3, d. 10, ll. 23, 45).
115. Joshua Sanborn has provided a promising start: see Unsettling the
Empire.
116. Eliseev, Kazaki na Kavkazskom fronte, 144.
117. Report of the Head of the Erzurum Region, College Assessor Maksimov, to
the Quartermaster-General of the Caucasus Army, Sept. 7, 1916, no. 3051 (AVPRI, f.
151, op. 482 [Political Archive], d. 4128, ll. 1824).
118. Head of the rst district to the Commissar of the City of Erzurum, May 8,
1917, no. 896 (RGVIA, f. 13249 [Ofce of the head of the Erzurum region of the
General Commissariat for Turkish Armenia], op. 2, d. 14, l. 112).
119. See Peter Holquist, Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism: Russia in the Epoch
of Violence, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 3 (Summer
2003): 62752.
120. Summary of material prepared by the censor points of the Caucasus Front in
excerpts from letters for the period from 1 November to 15 December 1916 (SSTsSA
f. 13 [Kantseliariia namestnika na Kavkaze], op. 27s., d. 4428, ll. 100124, here at l.
112). See also the observations in Eliseev, Kazaki; for similar sentiments in 1918, see
Viktor Shklovksy, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 19171922, trans. Richard Sheldon
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984; Russian original, 1923), 72130.
121. War Ofce to Commander-in-Chief, India, Oct. 4, 1915 (PRO/FO 371/1916/2778/
no. 101879) (expulsion of disloyal Kurds between Bayazet and Diadin); from Prince
Notes to Pages 173176 367

Shakhovskoi to the Headquarters of the Caucasus Army, Jan. 9, 1916, no. 7 (AVPRI,
f. 144, op. 489 [Persian Desk B], d. 567, ll. 25) (expulsion of Kurds from the Gia-
verskii, Bashkalinskii, Saraiskii, and Koshurskii regions); V Erzurume, Armianskii
vestnik, no. 1213 (24 April 1916): 3738 (Kurds expelled from regions occupied by
Russian Army); Chief of staff of the Sixth Caucasus Army Corps to the Head of the
Erzurum Region, Mar. 19, 1917 no. 925 (RGVIA, f. 2168 [Headquarters of the Cau-
casus Army], op. 1, d. 274, l. 5).
122. E. Arutiunian, General Kalitin v Armenii, Armianskii vestnik, no. 3536
(Sept. 10, 1917): 35. Kalitin commanded the I Army Corps in the Erzican region.
123. See copies of General Nikolaevs orders and Armenian protests against
them in GARF, f. 579 (P. N. Miliukov), op. 1, d. 1880, ll. 38.
124. AVPRI, f. 151, op. 482 (Politarkhiv), d. 3504, ll. 2929ob. The letters recip-
ient, V. Sharbin, forwarded the letter to the Russian Foreign Ministry, which high-
lighted this passage.
125. Director of Military Intelligence to Colonel Marsh, May 19, 1916 (FO
371/1916/2768/le 938/no. 96903, p. 306); Colonel Marsh to the DMI (Secret-Intel-
ligence), May 24, 1916 (FO 371/1916/2778/no. 101879); Prince Shakhovskoi to the
Headquarters of the Caucasus Army, Jan. 9, 1916, no. 7 (AVPRI, f. 144, op. 489 (Per-
sidskii stol B), d. 567, ll. 25); Defrance in Cairo to Ministre des Affaires trangres,
Cairo, May 2, 1916, no. 144 (AMAE, Guerre 19141918, Turquie, vol. 888 (reel 1),
sheet 31).
126. See the excellent discussion in Reynolds, Ottoman-Russian Struggle, 260;
for a memoir of one Cossack participant, see Eliseev, Kazaki.
127. Secret Report of Prince Shakhovskoi to the Chief of Staff of the Caucasus
Army, Jan. 31, 1917, no. 14: Tiis (AVPRI, f. 144, op. 489 (Persidskii stol B), d. 567,
ll. 1328); Prince Berdikhan and Prince Shakhovskoi to Lieutenant Chardigny
(French military attache to the Caucasus Front); translation from French; Tiis, Sept.
29, 1917 (AVPRI, f. 144, op. 489 (Persidskii stol B), d. 567, ll. 3042.
128. Reynolds, Ottoman-Russian Struggle, 5.
129. See the exemplary study by David McDonald: United Government and For-
eign Policy in Russia, 19001914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

CHAPTER 8
1. Kaiserlich Botschafter Marschall to Reichskanzler Hohenlohe-Schillings-
frst, Pera, Dec. 26, 1899, Politisches Archiv des Auswrtigen Amts (hereafter
PAAA)/R14155/A15422/No. 164, 34 (of report).
2. For one document along these lines, see the report of German ambassador
Paul Wolff-Metternich to Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, Pera, Jan. 17, 1916,
PAAA/R13750/A1840/No. 454, 71. Among the population at large as well as ofcers
and ofcials, Wolff-Metternich wrote, the conviction was widespread that Germany
had called forth the Armenian massacres just as it was now sucking Turkey dry and
stripping it of food supplies.
3. See, for example, A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 18481918
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954); and Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich: Deut-
sche Auenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler, 18711945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, 1995).
368 Notes to Pages 176179

4. See, Christoph Dinkel, German Ofcers and the Armenian Genocide, Arme-
nian Review 44, no. 1 (1991): 77133; Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the
Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Water-
town, Mass.: Blue Crane, 1996); Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Geno-
cide: Ethnic Conict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 3rd ed. (Providence:
Berghahn Books, 1997); and Wolfgang Gust and Sigrid Gust, eds., The Armenian Geno-
cide 1915/16: Documents from the Political Archives of the German Foreign Ofce, http://
www.armenocide.de/armenocide/armgende.nsf, accessed February 2005.
5. See the still-important study by Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman
Empire, 19141918 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), and the
recent works by Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices
of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Don-
ald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruc-
tion of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Taner Akam,
Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), argues that the Young Turks used the Germans to
cover their own actions, and may well have consulted with the highest German au-
thorities in Berlin in March 1915.
6. See Hilmar Kaiser, The Baghdad Railway 19151916: A Case Study in Ger-
man Resistance and Complicity, in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Arme-
nian Genocide, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian, 67122 (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1999). For a very interesting study that demonstrates the prevalence of a tur-
cophile position in Germany, see Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Down in Turkey, far
away: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine
Germany, Journal of Modern History 79, no. 1 (2007): 80111.
7. For a rather different argument about German afnities for Ottoman rule,
see Anderson, Down in Turkey, far away.
8. See especially Malte Fuhrmann, Der Traum vom deutschen Orient: Zwei deut-
sche Kolonien im Osmanischen Reich 18511918 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006);
and Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in
Germany, 17501970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
9. Fuhrmann, Traum vom deutschen Orient, argues, correctly in my view, that both
the traditional histories of German imperialism and the more recent work on the
African colonies have ignored the centrality of the Ottoman Empire for German elites.
10. Especially for the development of Anglo-German rivalry, see Taylors classic
account, Struggle for Mastery, esp. 45782; Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-
German Antagonism, 18601914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980); and Hildebrand,
Das vergangene Reich, 149301.
11. See John C. G. Rhls sharply drawn portrait, Wilhelm II: Der Aufbau der
Persnlichen Monarchie, 18881900 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001). Just the rst few
pages convey well the disastrous consequences of Wilhelm IIs pretensions.
12. Wilhelm and Abdlhamid had met in 1889 during the kaisers rst visit, along
with a large entourage, to Istanbul. His impressions of the sultan at that point were not
very positive, and would worsen in view of the Armenian massacres of 189596. No less
outlandish than the Damascus declaration was Wilhelms sudden enthusiasm for Zion-
ism, which just as suddenly evaporated when it became clear that Abdlhamid would
Notes to Pages 179183 369

hear nothing about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. On all these points,
see Rhl, Wilhelm II, 15354, 104244, 105060, quote of the Damascus speech, 1059.
13. Imperial Ottoman Ambassador Tewsik to Staatssekretr Blow, Berlin, June
23, 1898, PAAA/R14155/A7383.
14. Kaiserlich Deutsche Gesandschaft Altrensleber to Hohenlohe-Schillings-
frst, Brussels, Feb. 10, 1898, PAAA/R14155/A1814/No. 16.
15. Telegram, Marschall to Auswrtiges Amt (hereafter AA), Pera, Mar. 18, 1899,
PAAA/A3222/No. 989. Marginal notation indicated that the German government
would most denitely follow up on Marschalls suggestion. For the Swiss response,
see Treutler to Hohenlohe-Schillingsfrst, Bern, Mar. 23, 1899, PAAA/R14155/
A3547/Nr. 32; Treutler to HohenloheSchillingsfrst, Bern, Mar. 24, 1899, PAAA/
R14155/A3548/Nr. 333; and Swiss Ambassador Rom [?] to Herr Baron [?], Berlin,
Mar. 30, 1899, PAAA/R14155/A3720.
16. See, for example, Flotow to Hohenlohe-Schillingsfrst, The Hague, June 22,
1899, PAAA/R14155/A7639/No. 86; Oberndorff to Hohenlohe-Schillingsfrst,
Cairo, Oct. 20, 1899, PAAA/R14155/A12645; and concerning the case of Achmed
Bey, Reichenau to Hohenlohe-Schillingsfrst, Soa, Oct. 16, 1909, PAAA/R14155/
A12746/No. 97. See M. kr Haniolu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), for a nely differentiated analysis of the various op-
position movements in the late Ottoman Empire.
17. Telegram, Marschall to AA, Pera, Dec. 25, 1899, PAAA/R14155/A15242/No.
388.
18. Blow to Kaiser Wilhelm II, Berlin, Dec. 28, 1899, PAAA/R14155. Marginal
notations are presumably the kaisers, and indicate agreement with Blows recom-
mendations. The designation of state secretary, a slightly lower term than foreign
minister, was meant to convey that the chancellor typically retained major power
over foreign policy.
19. Telegram, Marschall to AA, Dec. 27, 1899, PAAA/R14155/A15307/No. 392,
with marginal notations of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
20. Marschall to Hohenlohe-Schillingsfrst, Pera, Dec. 26, 1899, PAAA/R14155/
A15422/No. 164, 34 (of report).
21. Ibid., 47.
22. Ibid., 89.
23. Ibid., 911.
24. Ibid., 1517.
25. Botschaft, Kiderlen to Blow, Therapia, July 10, 1908, PAAA/R14159/
A11112/Nr. 111.
26. Telegram, Kaiserlich Geschftstrger Rantzau to AA, Vienna, Aug. 7, 1908,
PAAA/R14159/A12541/Nr. 210.
27. This is Haniolus description of Rizas politics in, Young Turks in Opposition.
28. Minute envoye a Ahmed Riza le 1. aot 1908, Paris pour Ltre prsente a
S. M. lEmpereur, PAAA/R14159.
29. Telegram, Lancken to AA, Paris, Aug. 15, 1908, PAAA/R14159/A13052/Nr.
164.
30. Ibid. Riza apparently did not speak German, though he was of course uent
in French.
370 Notes to Pages 183188

31. See the brieng memo prepared by the Foreign Ofce for Blow in advance
of the meeting with Riza: Telegram, Kaiserlicher Gesandte Flotow to AA, Nordeney,
Aug. 30, 1908, with Promemoria, PAAA/R14159/A13999/No. 80.
32. See, for example, Telegram, Blow to AA, Nordeney, Oct. 5, 1908, PAAA/
R13746/A16145/No. 111. See also Telegram, Marschall to AA, Therapia, Oct. 4,
1908, PAAA/R13746/A16073/No. 322; Telegram, Marschall to AA, Therapia, Oct. 7,
1908, PAAA/R13746/A16278/No. 336; Telegram, Marschall to AA, Therapia, Oct. 7,
1908, PAAA/R13746/A16278/No. 336; and Marschall to AA, Therapia, Oct. 8, 1908,
PAAA/R13746/A16384/No. 339. For Kaiser Wilhelms position, which accorded
with Blows, see Telegram, Jenisch to AA, Rominten, Oct. 6, 1908, PAAA/R13746/
A1521/No. 158; and Telegram, Jenisch to AA, Rominten, Oct. 8, 1908, PAAA/
R13746/A16387/No. 171.
33. See various dispatches from the always well informed ambassador: Marschall
to AA, Pera, Apr. 13, 1909, PAAA/R14160/A6551/No. 117; and Telegram, Marschall
to AA, Constantinople, Apr. 14, 1909, PAAA/R14160/A6579/No. 123.
34. Telegram, Marschall to AA, Constantinople, Apr. 14, 1909, PAAA/R14160/
A6579/No. 123.
35. Reichskanzler Blow to Seine Majestt den Kaiser und Knig, Berlin, Apr. 21,
1909, PAAA/R13182/zuA7014/No. 36, and Blow to Kaiser, Berlin, Apr. 21, 1909,
PAAA/R13183/zuA7160/No. 52, both times quoting Marschall; and Kaiserlicher
Botschaft to AA, Pera, Apr. 24, 1909, PAAA/R13183/A7214/No. 176.
36. Kaiser to Reichskanzler Blow, Achilleion, Apr. 21, 1909, PAAA/R13182/
A7018/No.13.
37. Marschall to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Therapia, Oct. 7, 1909, PAAA/R14160/
A16690/Nr. 310, 1 (of report).
38. Ibid., 2.
39. Ibid., 23.
40. Ibid., 34. For similar complaints, see also Schwrbel to Bethmann-Hollweg,
Salonika, Jan. 26, 1912, PAAA/R14161/J246/K12.
41. Ibid., 6.
42. Ibid., 8.
43. Ibid., 911.
44. Marschall to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Pera, Nov. 8, 1910, PAAA/R13747/
A18813/No. 346, p. 15 (of report).
45. Kaiserlich Botschafter Wangenheim to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Therapia, Oct.
20, 1913, PAAA/R14161/A21246/Nr. 302, 34 (of report).
46. Ibid., 4.
47. In addition to some of the other documents cited above, see Wangenheim to
Bethmannn-Hollweg, Therapia, Oct. 20, 1913, PAAA/R14161/A21246/Nr. 302.
48. Marschall to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Pera, Nov. 8, 1910, PAAA/R13747/
A18813/No. 346, 17.
49. Marschall to Bethmannn Hollweg, May 13, 1911, Constantinople, PAAA/
R14160/A7812/Nr. 112, 34.
50. Ibid., 6.
51. See also, Anderson, Down in Turkey, far away.
52. Miquel to Bethmannn Hollweg, Therapia, July 6, 1911, PAAA/R15749/
A10830, No. 173.
Notes to Pages 189193 371

53. Bloxham, Great Game of Genocide, 11533, has rightly warned against drawing
a direct line from the prejudicial statements against Armenians to German involve-
ment in the Armenian Genocide. At the same time, such attitudes no doubt contrib-
uted to a certain indifference among some ofcials to CUP actions in World War I.
On negative attitudes, see also Anderson, Down in Turkey, far away.
54. Marschall to Reichskanzler Bethmannn-Hollweg, May 13, 1911, Constanti-
nople, PAAA/R14160/A7812/Nr. 112, 1112 (of report).
55. Marschall to Bethmannn-Hollweg, May 13, 1911, Constantinople, PAAA/
R14160/A7812/Nr. 112, 1617.
56. Abschrift, Dr. H. Belart to the Delegates of the Verwaltungsrates der Mersina-
Tarsus-Adana Railway, Mersina, Oct. 10, 1908, PAAA/R13746.
57. Kaiserlich Deutsches Konsulat Christmann to Marschall, Mersina, Oct. 15,
1908, PAAA/R13746./J538.
58. Telegram, Marschall to AA, quoting telegram from S.M.S. Hamburg, Pera,
Apr. 30, 1909, PAAA/R13747/A1609/No. 303.
59. Telegram, Marschall to AA, Therapia, May 23, 1909, PAAA/R13747/A8956/
No. 241. The kaiser had also vigorously protested the 189596 Armenian massacres,
even calling for Abdlhamids removal, at least in internal communications. He
complained about the failure of the European powers to intervene, but also refused
Marschalls request to send German war boats. See Rhl, Wilhelm II, 104244.
60. See Fat Dndar, Lingenierie ethnique du Comit Union et Progres et la
turcisation de lAnatolie (19131918) (Thse de Doctorat, cole des Hautes tudes
en Sciences Sociales, 2006).
61. Wangenheim to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Korfu, Apr. 2, 1912, PAAA/R14161/
A6382/No. 4.
62. Wangenheim to Bethmannn-Holloweg, Therapia, Oct. 20, 1913, PAAA/
R14161/A21246/No. 304.
63. Ibid., 34 (of report).
64. This is the conclusion of the most recent research that challenges the older,
standard view that Enver, Tlt, and Cemal dragged a reluctant Ottoman society into
war on the side of the Central Powers. For the new interpretation, see Mustafa
Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World
War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
65. Akam, Shameful Act, 145, 15253.
66. For the following I am drawing on Akam, Shameful Act, 111204; Bloxham,
Great Game of Genocide, 11533; Hull, Absolute Destruction, 27190; and Trumpener,
Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 200270.
67. Bloxham, Great Game of Genocide, 125, argues that the period from mid-June
to early July 1915 was a watershed in German reaction and that Wangenheim did
pursue fervent protests. My sense is that it was all too little too late.
68. Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 21517.
69. Trumpener tracks this all very well. Ibid., 21740.
70. Bericht von Dr. Jckh ber Konstantinopel und Dardanellen, Oct. 17, 1915,
PAAA/R13750, 3444.
71. Ibid., 2 (of report).
72. Ibid., 14 (of report). Jckh is quoting Halil, but it is not clear from the report
which Halil he means.
372 Notes to Pages 193200

73. Ibid., 1415 (of report).

74. Ibid., 15 (of report).
75. Ibid., 1718 (of report). The original of the quote: Talaat freilich machte
keinen Hehl daraus, dass er die Vernichtung des armenischen Volkes als eine poli-
tische Erleichterung begrsse.
76. Telegram, Wangenheim to AA, Oct. 19, 1915, Pera, PAAA/R13759/A30309/
No. 2414, 3031.
77. Metternich to Bethmannn-Hollweg, on journey form the Dardanelles to Con-
stantinople, Dec. 15, 1915, PAAA/R13750/A36980/No. 722, 65.
78. Ibid. Literally, they had been lulled to sleep by the current rulers.
79. Matthias Erzberger, Bericht ber meine Reiseeindrcke in der Trkei (5.
13. Februar 1916), PAAA/R13750, 8794. On the same trip, Reichstag deputy Gus-
tav Stresemann reached similar cautionary conclusions about the situation in the
Ottoman Empire and the strong reaction against Jckh among German busi-
nessmen. See his report, Trkei, Mar. 14, 1916, ibid., 12141. Jckh defended him-
self in a secret report, Bericht von Dr. Jckh ber Konstantinopel im Mrz und April
1916, Berlin, Apr. 20, 1916, PAAA/R13751/A12238, 4648, in which he complained
about Germans who come to the Ottoman Empire with no knowledge and no expe-
rience and presume to comment on the situation.
80. Quoted in Hull, Absolute Destruction, 284.
81. Wangenheim to an unnamed Dear Friend, Pera, Dec. 30, 1914, PAAA/
R13263/AL46. This volume generally has a great deal of material on the conicts
between Wangenheim and Liman.
82. Kaiserliche Botschaft to AA, Pera, Mar. 2, 1915, PAAA/R13263/A7636/Nr. 503.
83. Khlmann to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Pera, Jan. 20, 1917, PAAA/R14162/
A2616/ quotes on 23.
84. Khlmann to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Pera, Feb. 5, 1917, PAAA/R14162/
A4660, quote on 4.
85. Khlmann to Bethmannn-Hollweg, Pera, <date?> 1917, PAAA/R14162/
A4660, quote on <page?>.

CHAPTER 9
1. E.g., H. Lowry, The U.S. Congress and Adolf Hitler on the Armenians, Political
Communication and Persuasion 3, no. 2 (1985): 11140; C. zgnl, Der Mythos einer
Vlkermordes eine kritische Betrachtung der Lepsiusdokumente sowie der deutsche Rolle in
Geschichte und Gegenwart der Armenischen Frage (Cologne: Onel, 2005), 4850. For a
painstaking analysis of the documents provenance, see Winfried Baumgart, Zur
Ansprache Hitlers vor den Fhrern der Wehrmacht am 22. August 39. Eine quellenkrit-
ishe Untersuchung, Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte 16 (1968): 12049.
2. Hitler had just revealed that his military objective was the physical extermi-
nation of every man, woman, and child of Polish extraction and tongue. Akten zur
deutschen auswrtigen Politik, Serie D, Bd. VII (Baden-Baden: Imprimerie nationale,
1956), No. 193: 17172n1.
3. Eine groe Kundgebung gegen die Gruel in Armenien, Reichsboten, Sept.
11, 1896, 2. Beilage, No. 214; Bergischen Landeszeitung No. 79, Sept 30, 1896. Geheimes
Staatsarchiv Preuischer Kulturbesitz [hereafter GStPK], I. HA Rep. 77, tit. 343 No.
Notes to Pages 200201 373

177, Bl. 20. M. L. Anderson, Down in Turkey, far away: Human Rights, the Arme-
nian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany, Journal of Modern History
79, no. 1 (Mar. 2007): 80113; Helmut Donat, Nachwort, in Heinrich Vierbcher,
Armenien 1915: Was die kaiserliche Regierung den deutschen Untertanen verschweigen
hat. Die Abschlachtung eines Kulturvolkes durch die Trken (1930; Bremen: Donat &
Temin, 1985), 90, 101nn14, 16, 17; Pour lArmnie et la Macdoine (Paris: Nouvelle de
librairie et ddition, 1904), vii, xii, 53, 65; Bratskaia pomoshch postradavshim v Turtsii
armianam [Brotherly Help for Armenians Suffering in Turkey], 2nd ed. (1897; Mos-
cow: Tipo-litografia Vysochashe utverzhdennago T-va I.N. Kushnerev i ko, 1898).
Thanks to Rebecca Manley for her ms. Between Orthodoxy and Humanity: Re-
sponses of the Russian Public to the Bulgarian and Armenian Massacres.
4. H.-L. Kieser, Einleitung: die Armenische Frage im Osmanischen Reich
und die Schweiz; H.-L. Kieser, Die Schweiz des Fin de Sicle und Armenien:
Patriotische Identikation, Weltbrgertum und Protestantismus in der Schweizeri-
schen Philarmenischen Bewegung; and Christoph Dinkel, Die schweizerische
Armenierhilfe: Chronik von 1896 bis in die Zwischenkriegszeit, all in Die Armenische
Frage und die Schweiz (18961923), ed. H.-L. Kieser, 925, 13357, 187210 (Zurich:
Chronos, 1999).
5. S. E. Moranian, The American Missionaries and the Armenian Question,
19151927 (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1994), 22224; M. D. Peterson,
Starving Armenians: America and the Armenian Genocide, 19151930 (Charlottes-
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); P. Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Arme-
nian Genocide and Americas Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
6. M. kr Haniolu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902
1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1315; M. kr Haniolu, The Young
Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 152; Selim Deringil, The
Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire,
18761909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 13549.
7. A. Koenigs to J. Lepsius, Nov. 18, 1896, Lepsius Archiv, Halle (hereafter
LAH), microform edition of Hermann Goltz and Axel Meiner, Deutschland, Arme-
nien und die Trkei 18941925: Dokumente und Zeitschriften aus dem Dr. Johannes-
Lepsius-Archiv ... (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1999), NC [=Numerus Currens] 103.
8. Friedrich Naumann, Asia: Eine Orientreise ber Athen, Konstantinopel,
Baalbek, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Kairo, Neapel (Berlin-Schneberg: Buchverlag der
Hilfe, 1904), 140.
9. Marian Kent, Introduction, in The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman
Empire, ed. Marian Kent, 1 (London: Frank Cass, 1996).
10. Sir E. Grey to Amb. Sir G. Lowther in Constantinople, June 19, 1913, in
British Documents on the Origins of the War 18981914, ed. G. P. Gooch and H. Tem-
perley, vol. 10, pt. 1: 460, doc. 516 (London: His Majestys Stationery Ofce, 1936).
11. Speculation about massacres: Axel Meiner, Martin Rades Christliche Welt
und Armenien: Bausteine fr eine internationale politische Ethik des Protestantismus
(PhD diss., Halle-Wittenberg, 2001), 24344; reports of a pogrom in Rodosto
[Tekinda] on July 16, 1913, in the New York Times [hereafter NYT], p. 4 col. 5; a tele-
gram from the German embassy, contradicted, July 18. Both in the Politischen
Archiv des Auswrtigen Amt [hereafter: PAA] Trkei 183, Bd. 31. Murders of Arme-
nians, London Times, July 23, 1913, p. 8 col. a.
374 Notes to Pages 201203

12. Izvolski to Sazonov, Oct. 23, 1912. Nr. 40, in Medunarodnye otnoenija v
epochu imperializma, ed. M. N. Pokrowski et al.; German ed. by O. Hoetzsch: Die
Internationalen Beziehungen im Zeitalter des Imperialismus: Dokumente aus den
Archiven der Zarischen und der Provisorischen Regierung (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing,
193139), Reihe 3, Bd. IV (hereafter IBZI 3/IV) Halbband 1: 41.
13. I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, Gov.-Gen. of the Caucasus, to Nicholas II: wanted
to demand reforms, but rejected annexation (n.d., mid-Oct. 1912), Nr. 78, IBZI 3/
IV/Halbband 1: 7983. V. N. Kokovzov to Sazonov, Nr. 6125, Nov. 13, 1912, put
Vorontsov-Dashovs proposal on hold: the Balkan war made reforms impossible for
the Ottomans, and the Powers would not back unilateral Russian action, ibid., 246
47. Conrming public pressure and fear of massacres: Amb. Pourtals to Bethmann
Hollweg [hereafter: BH], Jan. 23, 1913, Nr. 25, GP Bd. 38: 5. Sazonov rejected Arme-
nian demands for annexation: W. J. van der Dussen, The Question of Armenian
Reforms in 19131914, Armenian Review 39 (Spr. 1986): 1128; 20. Armenian oppo-
sition to annexation: A. J. Kirakosian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question
from the 1830s to 1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute, 2003), 32122, 314, 317.
Armenian appeals: PAA Trkei 183, Bde. 28 and 30; R. H. Davison, The Armenian
Crisis, 191214, American Historical Review 53, no. 3 (Apr. 1948): 481505; 48485.
14. Wangenheim to BH, Feb. 24, 1913, Nr. 38, PAA Trkei 183 Bd. 29, also GP
Bd. 38: 1015. Previous characterizations of Wangenheim overlook his acknowledg-
ment of the urgency of Armenian Reforms.
15. Jagow to Wangenheim, June 10, 1913, PAA, NL Wangenheim. Rejecting
Wangenheims proposal: A. Zimmermann, minute of Mar. 5; and Jagow to Wangen-
heim, Apr. 22. Nr. 369, GP Bd. 38: 3031 and 30n.
16. Jagow to Wangenheim, June 10, 1913, PAA, NL Wangenheim; Jagow to C.
von Eisendecher, July 24, 1913, PAA, NL Eisendecher 3/5.
17. Electric, Giers, Jan. 13, 1914, Nr. 1142, IBZI 1/I: 7n3; Russo-German coop-
eration to prevent massacres: S. N. Sverbeev to Sazonov, Jan. 15, 1914. Nr. 17, ibid., 20.
18. Jagow to Wangenheim, May 13, 1914, PAA, NL Wangenheim; Boghos Nubar
Pashas Papers and the Armenian Question: Documents, ed. V. Ghazarian, 199
(Waltham: Mayreni, 1996); van der Dussen, Armenian Reforms, 1722.
19. Adolf Grabowsky, Kleinasien und Deutschland: Anatolische Fahrten und deut-
sche Gedanken (Berlin: Politik, n.d. [JulyAug. 1914]), 8.
20. For Ahmed Cemal [Djemal] Pasha, Turkeys chief goals in entering the war
were annulling the Lebanon statute, the capitulationsand these reforms. Erinnerun-
gen eines turkischen Staatsmannes (Munich: Drei Masken, 1922), 35354; Russias pro-
posal and nal accord: 34047, 34951. Kirakossian, British Diplomacy, 31330.
21. Sponsor list: GStPK I. HA Rep. 92, NL Becker folder 170 [herefter: NL
Becker, fol... . ]; H. Goltz, Die armenischen Reformen im Osmanischen Reich,
Johannes Lepsius und die Grndung der Deutsch-Armenianschen Gesellschaft, 75
Jahre Deutsch-Armenische Gesellschaft: Festschrift (Mainz: Deutsch-Armenischen Ge-
sellschaft, 1989), 476, 46; Deutsche Levante-Zeitung 4, no. 7 (Apr. 1, 1914): 290.
22. E. H. Clement, Open Secrets, Armenia 6, no. 12 (July 1913): 36062.
23. Jagow to Wangenheim, May 13, 1914, NL Wangenheim; Mustafa Aksakal,
The Ottoman Road to War in 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
24. Becker to Dr. Hafner, Mar. 20, 1916, NL Becker fol. 788.
25. Skepticism: Jagow to Wangenheim, July 28, 1913, PAA, NL Wangenheim.
Notes to Pages 204206 375

26. Tekin Alp [M. Cohen], Turkismus und Panturkismus ([Istanbul: Trk Yurdu
Kitabhanesi, 1914]; Weimar: G. Kiepenheuer, 1915); Becker to Jckh, Aug. 27, 1915,
NL Becker fol. 2059.
27. Littmann to Becker, Mar. 26, 1915, NL Becker fol. 4579; L. Freiherr von
Mackay, Die Entwicklung der Trkei zum Rechtsstaat, in Deutschland und der
Orient, 3341 (Berlin: Feldpostbucherei des Neuen Deutschland, 1915).
28. Tolerance: Straburger Post, July 19, 1915, quoted critically in Tagesberi-
cht, Baseler Nachrichten, no. 379, 1. Blatt, July 29, 1915; Paul Schubring, Die
Geschenke des Islam an das Abendland, Die Hilfe, no. 30 (July 29, 1915): 48385.
29. Jckh interview, June 15, 1915, Heinrich Kanner Papers [hereafter KP], Box
II vol. 2, Hoover Archive, Stanford; Humann to Jckh, Dec. 22, 1913, Jckh papers,
Sterling Library, Yale University [hereafter: Jckh-Y] fol. 2; two typescripts labeled
Vertraulich, Humann to Jckh, June 17, 1916, ibid. fol. 24; Friedrich Giese, Der
Toleranz des Islam (Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1915). Heinrich Bergfeld, Trape-
zunt, to BH, July 9, 1915, PAA Trkei 183 Bd. 37.
30. Dr. Ruth Parmelee, Harpoot, diary entry, June 8, 1915, Parmelee Papers, Box
I, Hoover Archives; excerpt, n.d., Jckh-Y fol. 51, doc. 3; encl. 3, B. von Dobbeler to
F. Schuchardt, Adana, July 12, 1915, PAA Trkei 183 Bd. 38.
31. Blank to F. Schuchardt, Marash, Apr. 6, 1915, encl. in Schuchardt to Aus-
wrtigen Amt[hereafter AA], Aug. 20, 1915, PAA Trkei 183, Bd. 38. Blank to
Schuchardt, Marash, Apr. 14, 1915, encl. in Roler to BH, May 10, 1915; encl. with
Wangenheim to BH, May 27, 1915; AA to embassy, June 18, 1915; K. von Neurath to
Schuchardt, June 29, 1915, ibid. Bd. 37.
32. M. Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), 51, 54.
33. Quote: Humann, June 9, 1915, Jckh-Y fol. 24; Wangenheim to BH, June 5,
1915, PAA Trkei 183 Bd. 37.
34. Lines highlighted by the AAs blue pencil. Wangenheim to BH, June 17, 1915, ibid.
35. Wangenheim to BH, July 7, 1915, ibid.
36. Zimmermann to Acting Amb. Hohenlohe, Aug. 18, 1915, PAA Trkei No.
183 Bd. 38.
37. Holstein to embassy, July 21, 1915, PAATrkei 183 Bd. 37; Holstein to Wangen-
heim, July 28, 1915, reprinted in J. Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, 19141918; Sam-
mlung diplomatischer Aktenstcke (Potsdam: Tempel, 1919), no. 124. All of us are indebted
to Wolfgang Gust and Sigrid Gusts invaluable criticial edition of Lepsiuss documents,
with English translations, published online, with numerous other documents: avhttp://
www.armenocide.de/armenocide/armgende.nsf/WebStart_En?OpenFrameset [hereaf-
ter: Gust, ed., armenocide.de, followed by their document number]. When possible, I cite
Gusts print edition, Der Vlkermord an den Armeniern 191516: Dokumente aus dem Poli-
tischen Archiv des deutschen Auswrtigen Amts (Springe: Klampen, 2005). My own foreign
ofce research, begun before I was aware of armenocide.de, is cited as PAA Trkei 183.
38. Scheubner-Richter to Wangenheim, July 28, 1915; to Hohenlohe, Aug. 5, 1915,
PAATrkei 183 Bd. 37; P. Leverkuehn, Posten auf ewiger Wache. Aus dem abenteuerreichen
Leben des Max von Scheubner-Richter (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1938), 25.
39. Oberzensurstelle, Kommunikationsberwachende Vorschriften des Jahres
1917 in Pressekonzentration & Zensurpraxis im Ersten Weltkrieg: Texte und Quellen, ed.
H.-D. Fischer, 194275; quotes: 266 (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1973).
376 Notes to Pages 206208

40. Unterredung Enver Paschas mit P. Weitz fr Frankfurter, Mar. 3, 1915,

Jckh-Y fol. 22; Turkish alibi: Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 186, July 7, 1915.
41. Elizabeth Khorikians ne study, Die Behandlung des Vlkermordes an
den Armeniern 1915 in der Deutschen Literatur und Presse von 1915 bis 1925 (MA
thesis, Free University, Berlin, 1989) examines every issue of the BT.
42. Alfred Nossig, Ein trkischer Staatsmann, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, no.
606, Nov. 27, 1915; and Enver Pascha (Die Reform der trkischen Armee), Berliner
Lokal-Anzeiger, n.d.[1915], 33. Jg. Jckh-Y fols. 45, 42.
43. Kriegschronik, Die Hilfe, no. 38 (Sept. 28, 1915): 6067, and no. 10 (Mar.
11, 1915): 150. Casualties: A. Buchholz, in German Studies Review 24, no. 3 (Oct.
2006): 702.
44. K.-W. Schmidt, berwachung-Reglementierungen im Ersten Weltkrieg
(19141918), in Deutsche Kommunikationskontrolle des 15. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, ed.
H.-D. Fischer (Munich: H. G. Saur, 1982), 185205; 186.
45. Bundesarchiv Koblenz [hereafter BAK], NL Erzberger 1097, Bd. 3. Foreign
press: Capt. Lothar Persius, Nov. 16, 1914, and Eduard Bernstein, Jan. 18 and
19, 1915: KP Box II, vol. 2; Becker to Hellmut Ritter, Aug. 30, 1915, NL Becker
fol. 3521. Attacking a Swiss appeal: C. A. Bratter, Die armenische Frage (Berlin:
Concordia, 1915).
46. E.g. Freiherr von Bissing, Ein neuer Bundesgenosse der Entente, Krieg-
shefte der Sddeutschen Monatshefte (Apr. 1915Sept. 1915): 1030; Neuer Rekord eng-
lisher Heuchelei, Hamburger Fremdenblatt (stamped Oct. 15, 1915, penciled 10/10),
responding to London Times, Oct. 8, 1915: Jckh-Y fol. 50.
47. L. Frhr von Mackay, Der Weltkrieg und das armenische Problem, Die Hilfe,
no. 36 Sept. 9, 1915: 57981; Max Roloff, Trken und Armenier, ibid., 58182.
48. Littmann to Becker, Oct. 26 [?] and Oct. 29; Becker to Littmann, Oct. 27, and
Nov. 9, 1915. NL Becker fol. 4579.
49. E. Mittwoch, Jan. 24, 1916, AA, Feb. 3, 1916. Gust, ed., Der Vlkermord, 423.
50. Becker to Jckh, Aug. 27, 1915; Littmann to Becker, May 2, 1916. NL Becker,
fol. 2059, and 4579. The archeologist Lt. E. Herzfeld wrote that he would never for-
get the Armenian evacuations in my entire life. Herzfeld, Mosul, to E. Meyer, June
28, 1916. Boundless misery of the thousands upon thousands: Goltz to his wife,
Aleppo, Nov. 22, 1915. Both in K. A. Krethlow, Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz und
der Genozid an den Armeniern 19151916, Sozial. Geschichte 21, no. 3 (2006):
5377; 76, and 6869.
51. Becker to Littmann, 14 Oct. 1915, NL Becker, fol. 4579.
52. Martin Tamcke, Armin T. Wegner und die Armenier: Anspruch und Wirklich-
keit eines Augenzeugen (Hamburg: Lit, 1996), 16465, 164n; Gerlach, Die Grosse Zeit
der Lge ([1926] Bremen: Donat, 1994), 11617; Feigel, Das Evangelisches Deutschland,
227.
53. Tamcke, Wegner, 16171, 239; Wegners notes on Harden conversation: 163.
As usual, Wegner leaves everything unspecied. Did he attempt to see the empress?
He never says. Names and dates are vague; the tone of self-promotion is never
absent.
54. Von Rechts Nach Links (Zurich: Europa, 1937). Quote: Die groe Zeit der Lge,
11617.
55. F. J. Gnther to Gwinner, quoted in G. D. Feldman, Die Deutsche Bank
vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Weltwirtschaftskrise 19141933, in Die Deutsche Bank,
Notes to Pages 208211 377

18701995 ed. L. Gall et al., 138314; 153 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995); cf. Hofmann,
German Eyewitness.
56. Hilmar Kaiser, The Baghdad Railway and the Armenian Genocide demon-
strates a coherent company policy to save Armenians. In Remembrance and Denial,
ed. R. G. Hovannisian, 67112; quotes, 9495 (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1998). Feldmans evidence supports this picture: Deutsche Bank, 15254.
Contrast Gust, ed., Der Vlkermord, 248.
57. J. H. von Bernstorff to Chancellor G. von Hertling, Apr. 6, 1918. BAK, NL
Erzberger 1097, Bd. 14. Rathenau had contacts with several in-the-know: Wegner,
von Gerlach, Harden, and Lepsiuss brother.
58. Stresemann, Balkan Tagebuch, Jan. 29, 31, Feb. 1, Feb. 5, 1916, PAA, NL
Stresemann Bd. 158.
59. Eine Balkanreise im Weltkrieg. Nach einem Vortrage des Reichstagsabg. Dr.
Stresemann, Annaberger Wochenblatt June 21, 1916, PAA, NL Stresemann Bd. 158.
60. [Memorandum] Mar. 9, 1916, PAA, NL Stresemann Bd. 158.
61. J. Froberger to Erzberger, Oct. 15, 1915; Erzberger to E. Saunier, Oct. 21,
1915; P[ater] Paschalis to Erzberger, Jan. 10, 1916. BAK, NL Erzberger, 1097 Bd. 3.
62. Erzberger to BH, May 27, 1916, Gust, ed., armenocide.de, 19160527-DE-001.
63. BAK, NL Erzberger, 1097, Bd. 10.
64. Memo, Mar. 3, 1916, Gust, ed., armenocide.de, 19160303-DE-001; Erz-
berger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1920), ch. 6.
65. Erzberger to AA, Feb. 25; Erzberger to BH, May 27, 1916, Gust, ed., armeno-
cide.de, 19160225-DE-001; 19160527-DE-001.
66. Minutes, Vorstandssitzung, May 16, 1915. NL Becker fol. 1913.
67. Deutsche Tageszeitung, Jan. 12, 1916; Jan. 11 Reichstag exchange reprinted in Gust,
ed., Der Vlkermord, 42223; interview with Gerlach, Feb. 9, 1916, KP, Box I, vol. 1.
68. Bernstorff to Hertling, Apr. 6, 1918. BAK, NL Erzberger 1097, Bd. 14.
69. See Gust, ed., Der Vlkermord, 483; 55153.
70. E. v. Dryander to Zimmermann, Sept. 27, 1915; F. Schuchardt to BH, Aug.
21, 1915, PAA Trkei 183, Bd. 39.
71. Reprint: New York Times, Sept. 25, 1915, p. 3, cols. 34, in The Armenan
Genocide: News Accounts from the American Press: 19151922, ed. R. D. Kloian, 36
(Berkeley: Anto Printing, 1988).
72. Neurath to AA, Oct. 26, 1915, PAA Trkei 183, Bd. 39. Anger at mission-
aries: Zimmermann to Neurath, Nov. 9, 1915; embassy to BH (No. 692), Nov. 11
[1915], in Gust, ed., armenocide.de, 19151109-DE-001; Feigel, Das evangelische
Deutschland, 23032, 327.
73. T. Hofmann, beginning with Pogrom: Zeitschrift fr bedrohte Vlker 10, no. 64
(MayJune 1979); C. Dinkel, German Ofcers and the Armenian Genocide, Arme-
nian Review 44, no. 1/173 (Spr. 1991): 77133; V. N. Dadrian, German Responsibility
in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity
(Watertown: Blue Crane Books, 1996); Gust, Die Anregung zur Unschdlichmach-
ung der Armenier erfolgte von deutscher Seite, Mittelweg 36. Zeitschrift des Ham-
burger Institut fr Sozialforschung 4 (April/May 1995): 2936.
74. Littmann to Becker, Oct. 26 [28?], 1915, NL Becker, fol. 4579. Donald Blox-
ham traces the picture of German culpability to Entente propaganda and a CUP
whispering campaign aimed at shifting opprobrium. The Great Game of Genocide:
Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford:
378 Notes to Pages 211215

Oxford University Press, 2005), 11533. Persuasively pessimistic about German

options: Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War
in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 26390.
75. The Power of the Powerless, in Open Letters: Selected Writings 19651990,
ed. Paul Wilson, 125214; esp. 14445 (New York: Knopf, 1991).
76. News travels: Ritter to Becker, Aug. 1, 1915, NL Becker, fol. 3521; Rohrbach to
Jckh, Sept. 21, 1915; R. Faber to Zimmermann, Sept. 30, 1915, PAATrkei 183 Bd. 38;
Zimmermann to Faber, Oct. 4, 1915, ibid. Bd. 39; Wunderlich, Basel, to BH, Sept. 22,
1915, ibid., Bd. 38; Kanner interview with Lepsius, Oct. 4, 1915, KP Box II, vol. 2; Swiss
clippings from Sept. 18, and 20, 1915: Jckh-Y fol. 50; Lepsius, Der Todesgang des
Armenischen Volkes, 4th ed. (1919; Potsdam, 1930), xxiv; Feigel, Evangelisches Deutsch-
land, 213215.
77. Zimmermann to Wangenheim, Aug. 4, 1914, PAA Trkei 183, Bd. 37.
78. Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 19141918 (1968; Delmar,
N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1989), 22025.
79. Minute, Maj. E. Deutelmoser, led in the PAA by Capt. R. Nodolny. LAH,
NC 136513796.
80. Prophet is Lepsiuss phrase. A. W. Schreiber to Faber and Oberprsident
von Hegel, n.d. LAH NC 1397; also Gust, ed., Der Vlkermord, 33132.
81. Compare, e.g., Lucien Wolf in Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe.
82. BH to Neurath, Nov. 10, 1915, enclosing Protestant petition, Oct. 15, 1915;
Catholic committee to BH, Oct. 29, 1915): Gust, ed., Der Vlkermord, 35460.
83. Faber to Zimmermann, Sept. 30, 1915; Zimmermann to Faber, Oct. 4, 1915,
PAA Trkei 183, Bd. 38 and Bd. 39. Excerpts in Jckh-Y fol. 50; Faber to Zimmer-
mann, Oct. 12, 1915, LAH, NC 13798, and Gust, ed., Der Vlkermord, 33133.
84. Lepsius, Preface, Der Todesgang, xxv, xxvii.
85. R. Schfer, Geschichte der Deutschen Orient-Mission (Potsdam: Missionshan-
dlung und Verlag, 1932), 9091; Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland, 21821.
86. Bericht ber die Lage des armenischen Volkes in der Turkei (Potsdam: Tempel,
1916); later editions: Der Todesgang and Le rapport secret du Dr Johannes Lepsius, pres-
ident de la Deutsche orient-mission et de la Societe germanoarmenienne. Sur les massacres
dArmnie (Paris: Payot & cie, 1918). Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland, 22021.
87. Goltz, Armenische Reformen, 7677n. 115; Dadrian, German Responsi-
bility, 194n. 165; Schfer, Orient-Mission, 9094. Budget Committee, Sept. 29, 1916.
Gust, ed., Der Vlkermord, 55153.
88. Lepsius, Der Todesgang, xxiiivi; Steinhauer, Kriminalpolizei Potsdam, Apr.
1, 1917, GStPK I Rep. 191 Nr. 3664; Schfer, Orient-Mission, 90, 9293.
89. E.g., P. Rohrbach, Moral und Politik, Christliche Welt 33, no. 27 (July 3,
1919): col. 435; P. Schwarzhaupt, Die Wahrheit ber die Trkei: Die Armeniergreuel
und Deutschen-Bedrckungen durch die Jungtrken (Berlin: Gesellschaft und Erzie-
hung, 1919); J. W. E. Sommer, Die Wahrheit ber die Leiden des armenischen Volkes in
der Trkei whrend des Weltkrieges (Frankfurt/M: Orient, 1919).
90. Cf. later editions of F. C. Endres, Die Trkei: Bilder und Skizzen von Land und
Volk (Munich: Delphin, 1916; Turkish translation, Ankara: Edebiyat ve Elestiri Yayin-
lari, 1994). See Peter Nagel, Reaktionen Deutscher Orientalisten auf das Schicksal der
Armenier im Osmanischen Reich, in Internationales Dr. Johannes-LepsiusSymposium,
ed. Hermann Goltz, 10515; 11011. (Halle/Saale: Wissenschaftliche Beitrge, 1986).
Notes to Pages 215221 379

91. The Turks in a photo of a bastonnade were in fact Persiansa discrep-

ancy, exposed by Turks in the audience, that Wegner claimed he had intended to
mention. Rler, Report to AA, Mar. 24, 1919, PAA, NL Rler, Bd. 1.
92. Deutschland und Armenien, 19141918; Sammlung diplomatischer Akten-
stcke (Potsdam: Tempel, 1919). Quote: Jagow note of Nov. 6, 1916: Gust, ed., armeno-
cide.de 19161025-DE-001.
93. Jckh, Talaat, Deutsche Politik 14: 315; and Der Goldene Pug: Lebenserin-
nerung eines Weltbrgers (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1954), 23233. Zum
Andenken Talaat Paschas, eulogy by Count Bernstorff, Germanys last wartime am-
bassador to Constantinople, Das demokratische Deutschland 12: 265.
94. Cf. Harden, Teilirian, Die Zukunft 29, no. 36 (June 4, 1921): 27394;
Zwischen Ost und West. Armenien in Moabit, ibid., 29, no. 37 (June 11, 1921):
295302; Proze Talaat, ibid., 29, no. 51 (Sept. 17, 1921): 30231.
95. Covering these debates in detail: Dinkel, German Ofcers, 9399; Donat,
Nachwort.
96. Tessa Hofmann, Deutschland und die Vernichtung der Armenier im
Osmanischen Sultanat, in Armeni zyn die menschen genannt ... Eine Kulturbegeg-
nung in der Staatsbibliothek, ed. M. Pehlivanian, 169n69 (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek zu
Berlin-Preuischer Kulturbesitz, 2000); New York Times, Apr. 19, 1922: p. 4, col. 2;
ibid., Apr. 20, 1922: 19, col. 5.
97. Goltz, ed., Internationales. . . . Lepsius-Symposiums, 276; and Sophies
Erzhlung vom Tode Hadschi Murats und Lev Tolstojs kritische Kulturtheorie der
Wiesendistel, in Myslashchiu svobodno imenm i nravom: zu Ehren von Dietrich Frey-
dank, ed. Swetlana Mengel, 5782, 61 (Mnster: Lit, 2000).
98. Meine Kriegserinnerungen (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1919), 136, 500,
cited in Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland, 280.
99. Leverkuehn, Posten auf ewiger Wache, 9.
100. Adolf Hitler, Smtliche Aufzeichnung 19051924, ed. E. Jckel with A. Kuhn
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1980), 775. Also, eradication of Armenia:
Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten 1931 interview with Hitler. K. D. Bardakjian, Hitler and
the Armenian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoryan Institute, 1985), 2728, citing .
Calic, ed., Ohne Maske: Hitler-Breiting Geheimgesprche, 1931 (Frankfurt: Societts-
Verlag, 1968), 101.
101. Politik der Woche, Illustrieter Beobachter, May 24, 1930, in Hitler: Reden,
Schriften, Anordnungen: February 1925 bis January 1933. Bd. III. . . ., ed. C. Hart-
mann, doc. 49: 2026 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1995). Thanks to Peter Black of the U.S.
Holocaust Museum for this information.
102. W. G. H., Vorlesung von Franz Werfel in der Akademie, Deutsche Allge-
meine Zeitung Dec. 9, 1932. NL Becker, fol. 7399.

CHAPTER 10
1. Djemal Pasha, Memoirs of a Turkish Statesman, 19131919 (New York:
George H. Doran Company, 1922), 167.
2. Tghtagits, Suriagan Namagani: Lurer Zytunn; Urfayi gatsutiwn;
Kmalagan sharzhumner; hay ggher gayban hay hanrabedutean errort dare-
tartz; gusagtsagan geank, Eridasart Hayasdan, July 15, 1921, 138.
380 Notes to Pages 221222

3. E.g., S[ebuh]. Aguni, Milion m hayeru charti badmutiwn, 2nd printing

(Constantinople: Hayasdan kradun, 1921), 4546; Krikoris Balakian, Hay koghkotan:
truakner hay mardirosakrutenn; A. Hador: Berlinen tbi Zr, 19141920 (Vienna:
Mkhitarean Dbaran, 1922), 62; Vahram Dadrian, Tbi anabad (prtsuadz cher
rakrs) (New York: Gochnag Dbaran, 1945), 170.
4. On the rebellion: Kiwd Mkhitarian, Husher ew verhishumner (19181935)
(Antilias: Dbaran Tbrevanuts Gatoghigosutean Giligioy, 1937), 1025; zhn
Papazian, Inknagensakrutiwn ew husher (azkayin kordzeru haragtsuteamp)
(Cairo: Hay Azkayin Himnatram, 1960), 2935: Lewon Mgrdichian, Alexandria,
Egypt, to [Vahan] Malzian, Dec. 19, 1912, in Vahan Malzian, Jampus dzayr (P.
hador): hnatroshm namagner ew kragan nshkharner (Paris: [self-publ., Araks Dbaran],
1955), 6264; Awedis Yapujian, Hay zhoghovurtin angakhutean baykar Giligioy
mch 19191921 tt. (Cairo: Madenashar Hay Azkayin Himnatrami, 1977), 8993;
M[ushegh]. Seropian, Tidumner ew tadumner (cher rakrs) (Beirut: Dbaran Aztag,
1932), 7684; Ara Krchuni [Kalemjian], Yergu haduadz nger Ara Krchunii
hushern, in Zartnk patsarig nuiruadz Ramgavar Azadagan Gusagtsutean
karasnameagin, ed. Kersam Aharonian and Hrach Vahuni, 9899 (Beirut: Dbaran
Adlas, 1962); Bedros H. Depoyan, Mihran Damadian (18631945) (Beirut:
Zartnk, 1964), 12936; Balakian, Hay koghkotan, 65.
5. Tghtagits, Giligean artzakank, Piwzantion, July 3/16, 1914, 1; France,
Archives du ministre des Affaires trangres, Centre des Archives diplomatiques
de Nantes (CADN), Turquie, Constantinople Ambassade, Srie E, carton 86 (for-
merly reference no. 70, Emigration 19101914) Halib Edde, Vice Consul Mara, no.
8, to Ambassador Bompard, Constantinople, July 25, 1914.
6. H. M. Bogosyan, Zeytuni badmutyun 14091921 t. t. (Erevan: Hayasdan
hradarachutyun, 1969), 37980.
7. Haji Garabed Komuvian [Kmuvian], Zytuni antseal (Cairo: Haygagan
Dbaran nnig Halblian, 1918), 12; Hovhanns Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni
18771915,in Zytuni badmakirk, 65152 (Buenos Aires: Zytuni hayrenagtsagan
miutiwn [Montevideo, Uruguay], 1960).
8. Vart-Mekhag [Vartewar Karanlian], Zytuni verchin antsker (19101918):
tertn Eridasart Hayasdani tiw 2, Eridasart Hayasdan, Dec. 10, 1927. My thanks to Dr.
Sebouh Aslanian for photographing many installments of this serialized article.
9. Bedagan geank: Zanazan lurer, Azadamard, June 17/30, 1914, 2; Nerkin
lurer, Piwzantion, June 16/29, 1914, 3.
10. Nerkin lurer, Piwzantion, June 13/26, 1914, 3.
11. Piwzant Eghiayan, ed., Adanayi hayots badmutiwn (Antilias, Lebanon:
Adanayi Hayrenagtsagan Miutiwn, 1970), 318.
12. Catholicos Sahag, no. 4536/326, Aleppo, to Patriarch Archb. Zawen, Sept.
27[/Oct. 10], 1914, in Sahag Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner: 19031915, compiler Kiwd
Mkhitarian, publisher Zakaria Bzdigian, 115 (Beirut: Db. Hraztan, 1927); and an
excerpt (Archives of the Armenian Catholicossate of Cilicia (AACC), Correspondence
of Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian, notebook/le no. 100/1, no. 4586/326), in Piwzant
Eghiayan, Zhamanagagits badmutiwn Gatoghigosutean Hayots Giligioy 19141972,
41 (Antilias, Lebanon: Gatoghigosutean Hayots Medzi Dann Giligioy, 1975).
13. Bedagan geank: Prpagand ew bykt Giligioy mch, Azadamard,
Feb. 8/21, 1914, 2; Great Britain, Public Record Ofce, Kew, London, Foreign Ofce
Notes to Pages 222224 381

(FO) 195/2459/1465 Fontana, Aleppo, no. 19, to Louis Mallet, Constantinople, Apr.
3, 1914, ff. 3089.
14. Bibliothque Nubar 705716 AA, Boghos Nubar Pasha, Paris, to Catholicos
Kevork V, Etchmiadzin, July 28, 1915, in Vatche Ghazarian, ed., Boghos Nubars
Papers and the Armenian Question, 19151918 (Waltham, Mass.: Mayreni Publishing,
<years?>), 212.
15. References are plentiful in the British FO 371 series, Arthur Beylerian, Les
grandes puissances, lEmpire Ottoman et les armniens dans les archives franaises (1914
1918): Recueil de documents (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1983); and Ghazarian,
Boghos Nubars Papers.
16. See FO 371/2146, 2480, 2484, and 2485; Manoug J. Somakian, Empires in
Conict: Armenia and the Great Powers, 18951920 (London and New York: I. B. Tau-
ris, 1995), 81, 1045; Matthew Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East,
19171919 (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999), 3234; Yigal Sheffy, British
Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign, 19141918, (London and Portland:
Frank Cass, 1998), 110113; Beylerian, Les grandes puissances, 7, 1314, 1045, and
introduction, xxxvi; W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battleelds: A His-
tory of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 18281921 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1953), 231.
17. Paul von Hindenburg, Out of My Life, 2 vols., (New York: Harper, 1921), 2:95
96, in Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Inuence on
American Policy,18101927, 9495 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971).
18. L. B. Weldon, Hard Lying: Eastern Mediterranean, 19141919 (London:
Herbert Jenkins, Limited, 1925), 200201, 2045, 208; SHM SS S4 Dartige du Four-
net, Saint Louis, Port Said, no. 35, to Minister of the Marine, Mar. 30, 1915, and SS
S1 Folder tat-Major 3me Escadre: Ordres particuliers, Captain [M.-J.] Chamonard,
Chief of Headquarters of the Third Squadron, First Naval Army, Order P No. 37,
Mar. 25, 1915; Germany, Politisches Archiv des Auswrtigen Amts, Berlin (PAAA),
Rssler, Aleppo, Aleppo, K. No. 55/ J.No. 1000, to Wangenheim, Constantinople,
May 10, 1915, in Trkei 183/37 A17735 Wangenheim, no. 324 to von Bethmann
Hollweg, May 27, 1915; S. Agabalian, Adana, to Bge, Adana, Mar. 12, 1915, in PAAA
Botschaft Konstantinopel (K) 168 A53a/1712 Bge, Adana, to Wangenheim, Adana,
Mar. 13, 1915; Vice-Consul Hoffman, Alexandrette, B. No. 944, to Rssler, Aleppo,
Nov. 8, 1915, in PAAA Trkei 183/41 A2889 Rssler, Aleppo, no. 10, to Wolff-Metter-
nich, Constantinople, Jan. 3, 1916; Mehmet Kanar, ed., Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri
ve htill Hareketleri Merutiyetten nce ve Sonra (stanbul: Der Yaynevi, 2001), 227,
originally published as Ermeni Komitelerinin Aml ve Harekt- htilliyyesi,
Merutiyetten Evvel ve Sonra (Istanbul: Matbaa-y Amire, 1332 [1916]).
19. Levon Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t. (husher) (Erevan: Hayga-
gan SSH Kidutyunneri Agatemia Badmutyan Insdidud, 1984), 8; Aharonian,
Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 655; Misak Siserian (M. Ulnetsi), Badmutiwn
Zytuni (14091921) (Lebanon [Antilias: self-published], 1996), 428; Vart-Mekhag,
Zytuni verchin antsker, Dec. 17, 1927, 4; Catholicos Sahag, no. 595, to Ministry
of Justice and Religious Denominations, 1 Terin-i Evvel [1]330 [Oct. 14, 1914], in
Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 125; also in Bishop Kiwd [Mkhitarian], Giligean
tbker, II, Hayrenik, Mar. 8, 1919, 5; Khoren K. Davidson, Odyssey of an Armenian
of Zeitoun (New York: Vantage Press, 1985), 56, 59.
382 Notes to Pages 224225

20. Sleyman Beyolu, Fahreddin Paann Ermeni Meselesindeki Rol,

in Tarihi Gerekler ve Bilim Inda Ermeni Sorunu, ed. Blent Bakar, Necdet ztrk,
and Sleyman Beyolu (Istanbul: IQ Kltr Sanat Yaynclk, 2007).
21. PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Beth-
mann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915.
22. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t.,89, 26; Siserian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni, 429; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Dec. 24, 1927, 4; D[ikran].
Antrasian, Zytuni antznaduutiwn ew Sudioy inknabashdbanutiwn (panakhsu-
tiwn Amrikn Mishni mch) (Cairo: H. E. K. ng[erut].ean, 1915), 10; Republic of
Turkey, Genelkurmay Askeri Tarih ve Stratejik Etd Bakanl stikll Arivi (ATASE),
Archive no. 1/131, Cabinet no. 201149, Drawer no. 1414, File no. 2287, Dossier (or
section) no. 32/12, Index no. 110 Ali Mnif, Undersecretary, Ministry of the Interior,
no. 725, to Ministry of War, Aug. 19, 1330 [Sept. 1, 1914], document no. 3 in Documents:
Volume 1, 2nd ed. (Ankara: Prime Ministry, Directorate General of Press and Informa-
tion, [n.d., c. 1982]), 2425; ATASE, Archive no. 1/131, Cabinet no. 149, Drawer no. 4,
File no. 2287, Dossier no. 12, Index no. 126, 127, [Signatories:] Ahmet and Mahmut
of the ulema; Ahmet of the mderris in the name of the Andrn people; Mehmet,
muhtar of the Andrn kaza (subdistrict); members of the notables (eraf) Abdullah,
Mustafa, and Sleyman; iekli village muhtar Ali; Boztoprakl village muhtar Hse-
yin; Koca Mftzade Mehmet; Muttalibzde Muttalip; Arakelyan Miyanes [sic?];
Semerciyan Artin; Imam Ali; Andrn, telegram no. 143, to the Ministry of
War, stanbul, 9 Terin-i evvel [1]330 [Oct. 22, 1914], 9 a.m., document no. 2049 in
Askeri Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi [ATBD] 36:86, Apr. 1987, 58; Kanar, Ermeni Komitelerinin
Emelleri, 224.
23. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Dec. 31, 1927; Siserian,
Badmutiwn Zytuni, 429430; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 9.
24. ATASE Ali Mnif to Ministry of Defense, Sept. 1, 1914, document no. 3 in
Documents, 2425.
25. Catholicos Sahag, Aleppo, no. 4536/326, to Patriarch Archb. Zawn, Sept.
27[/Oct. 10], 1914; Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 112; Kiwd Mkhitarian, Truakner
hayg[agan]. koghkotayn (19121937), Armenia (Buenos Aires), Nov. 22, 1940;
Kanar, Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri, 224; Mehmet Talt, Talt Paann Hatralar
(Istanbul: Enver Bolayr, 1946), 65; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 1011;
Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 65354; Archives of the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Houghton Library, Har-
vard University, Unit 5 Reel 672 Central Turkey Mission, 19101919, Letters NZ,
vol. 6 in original [vol. 26 in microlm edition], ABC 16.9.5, E. C. Woodley, Mara, to
Rev. James L. Barton, Oct. 7, 1914; Komuvian, Zytuni antseal, 1314; Vart-Mekhag,
Zytuni verchin antsker, Jan. 7, 1928; Zytuntsineru darakrutiwn, Zhog-
hovrti tzayn, Mar. 15, 1919 (copy in Bibliothque Nubar Aram Andonian les no. 34).
My thanks to Jorge Vartparonian of Buenos Aires for obtaining copies of Mkhitarians
article in Armenia via Pedro Mouratian.
26. For example, Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian to Very Rev. Fr. Khachadur Dr
Ghazarian, Sept. 21, 1914, AACC Khabayian le 100/1, no. 4,586/391, quoted in
Eghiayian, Zhamanagagits badmutiwn, 40.
27. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 654; Norashkharhyan,
Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 12; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Feb. 11, 1928.
Notes to Pages 225226 383

28. Norashkharyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 1519.

29. Norashkharyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 2526; Partoghimos Takajian,
Inknagensakrutiwn Partoghimos Dz. Vrt. Takajiani nakhgin vanahayr Frnuzi
vanuts (badgerazart), transcriber Vaghamerig Vah Mkhalian (Jerusalem: Z[ytuni].
H[ayrenagtsagan]. Miutiwn, 1933), 292.
30. Hagop Mavian, Teghnadz cher Zytunn, Harach, no. 2 Nov. 4, 1993,
3; ibid., no. 3, Nov. 5, 1993, 3.
31. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 28. Compare with Vart-Mekhags
numbers in Zytuni verchin antsker, Feb. 18, 1927, 4.
32. Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn,
[Constantinople], Apr. 8/21, 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 146.
33. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 28; Aharonian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni 18771915, 65455; Kiwd [Mkhitarian], Giligean tbker, 1, Mar. 7, 1919,
1; Hay-azkayin lurer, Piwzantion, Sept. 19/Oct. 2, 1914, 2; Komuvian, Zytuni
antseal, 15; ABCFM Woodley to Barton, Oct. 7, 1914; Hayg A. Aramian, Shahegan
deghegakir m Zytuni ew Zytuntsineru oghperkutean masin, in Hushamadean
Medz Egherni, 19151965, ed. Kersam Aharonian, with Nazart Topalian, 852 (Bei-
rut: Zartnk ratert, 1965); Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Feb. 18,
1927, 4; Kanar, Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri, 224.
34. Republic of Turkey, Babakanlk Osmanl Arivi (BOA), Dhiliye Nezreti
(DH) Emniyyet-i Ummiyye Mdriyyeti (EUM), 2 ube, dossier no. 68, docu-
ment no. 20 Celal, Aleppo, no. 567, to Bb- l, DH, ifre Kalemi [FR], [Constan-
tinople], 16 Eyll [1]330 [Sept. 29, 1914], Document 44 in Yusuf Sarnay, ed.,
Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar (19091916): IV (Ankara: T[rkiye].
C[umhuriyeti]. Bakanlk Devlet Arivleri Genel Mdrl, 2009), 8889, 330;
BOA DH EUM 2 ube 68/21 Celal, Aleppo, no. 581, to DH, FR, 21 Eyll [1]330
[Oct. 4, 1914], Document 45 in ibid., 8990, 331; Khabayian, Giligean Gsgidzner,
110 note to letter of Sahag, Aleppo, no. 4536/325, to Bishop Kiwd, Sept. 25 [Oct. 8],
1914, and note, 129; Kiwd [Mkhitarian], Giligean tbker, 1, Mar. 7, 1919, 1; K
[erop]. P[apazian]., Irer ew lurer (darakir hushers), Jerusalem, Jan. 1919,
Azk, Apr. 17, 1919, 1.
35. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 655; PAAA Trkei 183/36
A28983 Rler, Aleppo, J. No. 2480/K. No. 107, to von Wangenheim, Oct. 16, 1914,
and A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Bethmann Hollweg, Apr. 12,
1915; Sahag, no. 4536/326, Aleppo, to Patriarch Archb. Zawen, Sept. 27[Oct. 10],
1914; in Armenian, Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 114.
36. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 3031.
37. PAAA Sister Helene Stockmann, Mara, Mar. 21, 1915, Annex 1, in Trkei
183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Bethmann Hollweg, Apr. 12,
1915.
38. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 656; Norashkharhyan,
Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 24.
39. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 31.
40. Antrasian, Zytuni antznaduutiwn, 13.
41. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 65556; Vart-Mekhag,
Zytuni verchin antsker, Mar. 3, 1928, 4; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922
t.t., 32.
384 Notes to Pages 226227

42. Catholicos Sahag, no. 595, to Ministry of Justice and Religious Denomina-
tions, 1 Terin-i Evvel [1]330 [Oct. 1/14, 1914], in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 125
26; also in Kiwd [Mkhitarian], Giligean tbker, 2, Mar. 8, 5.
43. ATASE Ahmet and Mahmut, et al., to the Ministry of War, Oct. 22, 1914, in
ATBD, 58; ATASE Archive no. 1/131, File no. 2287, Dossier no. 12, Index no. 33
Councillor Ali in the name of the Minister of the Interior, to Acting Commander-in-
Chief of the Imperial Army, Sept. 2 [sic], 1330 [1914], in Appendix document 1, Yaar
Akbyk, Ariv Belgeleri Inda Zeytun Ermeni Meselesinin Halli, Belleten 154,
no. 209 (Apr. 1990): 456.
44. Republic of Turkey, Birinci Dunya Harbi Koleksiyonu (BDH) of ATASE, File
no. 1768, Old Dossier 192, New Dossier 206, Index No. 25, [Aleppo], to DH, in
Ahmet Tetik, Ariv Belgeleriyle Ermeni Faaliyetleri, 19141918: Cilt I (19141915) /
Armenian Activities in the Archive Documents, 19141918: Volume I (19141915), ed.
T. C. Genelkurmay Bakanl, 72, 74, 35859, 361 (Ankara: T. C. Genelkurmay
ATASE ve Genelkurmay Denetleme Bakanl, 2005). The year of the events of this
telegram appears to have been incorrectly written as 1331 instead of 1330.
45. Bishop Kiwd, Giligean tbker, 3, Mar. 15, 1919, 34.
46. ATASE Ahmet and Mahmut, et al., to the Ministry of War, Oct. 22, 1914,
document no. 2049 in ATBD, 58. In fact, some Mara notables had already
demanded in September that the Zeytun Armenians be relocated to Pazarck, a pri-
marily Muslim populated kaza or subdistrict of Mara lying in the plains, terrain
that lacked the defensive advantages that Zeytuns mountains provided its inhabi-
tants. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Dec. 31, 1927.
47. PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Beth-
mann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915; John E. Merrill, Statement Regarding Affairs in the
Mara Region, [Apr. 20, 1915], in United States National Archives and Records Ad-
ministration (NARA), College Park, Maryland, Record Group (RG) 59 867.00/761
Robert Lansing, Counselor, for the Secretary of State, to the Reverend James L. Bar-
ton, Boston, June 5, 1915, enclosures: J. B. Jackson, Aleppo, no. 254, to Secretary of
State, Apr. 21, 1915: enclosure: Consul J. B. Jackson, no. 269, to Henry Morgenthau,
Apr. 21, 1915: enclosure J. E. Merrill, Aleppo, to Jesse B. Jackson, American Consul,
Aleppo, Apr. 20, 1915.
48. Annotation in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 129; P[apazian]., Irer ew
lurer, Apr. 17, 1919, 1.
49. Catholicos Sahag, Aleppo, no. 4536/326, to Patriarch Archb. Zawen, Sept.
27[/Oct. 10], 1914, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 115.
50. Kiwd [Mkhitarian], Giligean tbker, 5, Mar. 21, 1919, 1.
51. Note to Sahag, to Interior Ministry, with copy to Justice Ministry, 13 Terin-i
Evvel [1]330 [Oct. 13/26, 1914], in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 129.
52. Eberhard Count Wolffskeel von Reichenberg, Adana, to Soe-Henriette
Countess Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg, Apr. 24, 1915, NL 138/4, in Eberhard Count
Wolffskeel von Reichenberg, Zeitoun, Mousa Dagh, Ourfa: Letters on the Armenian Geno-
cide, ed. Hilmar Kaiser, trans. Colin Benert, 12, 42 (Reading, England: Taderon Press
[by arrangement with the Gomidas Institute, Princeton, N.J.], 2001).
53. Cell Bey, Ermeni Vakyi-i ve Esbb- ve Tesrt, 2, Vakit 12 Kanun-i Evvel
[Dec.] 1918, 1. My thanks to Taner Akam for kindly providing me with a transcrip-
tion of this article, as well as photocopies of some misplaced ATBD pages.
Notes to Pages 227230 385

54. Annotation in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 129. Karanlian did not

manage to remain free. In the beginning of May 1915 he was escorted to Mara
under guard to be tried by the court-martial. He received a ten-year sentence and was
sent to Der Zor, after which he was not heard from again. Kiwd [Mkhitarian], Gili-
gean tbker, 4, Mar. 19, 1919, 1.
55. Mordtmann, Mar. 26, 1915, notes to PAAA Trkei 183/36 A11682 Wangen-
heim, Pera, no. 191, to von Bethmann Hollweg, Mar. 26, 1915.
56. PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Beth-
mann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915.
57. Ibid.
58. Mkhitarian, Truakner hayg. koghkotayn (19121937), Armenia, Nov. 26,
1940; Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 656.
59. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 656; Norashkharhyan,
Zeytun 19141922 t.t.,3233; Siserian, Badmutiwn Zytuni, 456; Zytuntsineru
darakrutiwn, Zhoghovrti tzayn; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Mar.
31, 1928; Takajian, Inknagensakrutiwn, 309; Klshian, 55355.
60. BOA DH EUM 2 ube, no. 5/32 Mmtaz, [Mara], to DH, FR, 23 ubat
[1]330 [Mar. 8, 1915], document 56 in Sarnay, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar,
105, 347; Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian to Very Rev. Fr. Khachadur Dr Ghazarian,
Feb. 22, 1915, AACC Khabayian le 100/1, no. 4,950/35, 205, quoted in Eghiayian,
Zhamanagagits badmutiwn, 43; Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian, Feb. 11/24, 1915
entry, in AACC Halb (Aleppo) le 2/1, no. 190/194, quoted in Eghiayian, Zhamana-
gagits badmutiwn, 42; Catholicos Sahag, Adana, to Bishop Kiwd, Feb. 25[/Mar. 10],
1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 12930; Mkhitarian, Truakner hayg.
koghkotayn (19121937), Armenia, Nov. 26, 1940.
61. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 657, 659; Vart-Mekhag,
Zytuni verchin antsker, Mar. 24, 1928, 4; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922
t.t., 33; Siserian, Badmutiwn Zytuni, 456; BOA Mmtaz, to DH, FR, 23 ubat
[1]330, document 56 in Sarnay, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar, 1056, 347.
62. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Mar. 24, 1928, 4; Komuvian,
Zytuni antseal, 1617; Eruant Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zeytun, 18951917,
Eridasart Hayasdan, Mar. 27, 1918, 4/348. Hovhanns Aharonian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni 18771915, 65859, provides a slightly different version of events.
63. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Mar. 24, 1928, 4, and Mar. 31,
1928, 4.
64. Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn,
[Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 147; Norash-
kharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 33; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker,
Mar. 31, 1928, 4.
65. BOA Mmtaz, to DH, FR, 23 ubat [1]330, document 56 in Sarnay,
Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar, 106, 347.
66. Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zytun, 18951917, Mar. 30, 1918, 4/352.
67. PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Beth-
mann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915.
68. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 658, 660; Takajian,
Inknagensakrutiwn, 295; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 34; Antrasian,
Zytuni antznaduutiwn, 1516; Kanar, Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri, 225; Mirijanian,
386 Notes to Pages 230233

Panasiragan: Zytun, 18951917, Apr. 3, 1918, 2/354; Komuvian, Zytuni

antseal, 1819; Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop
Zawn, [Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 147;
Siserian, Badmutiwn Zytuni, 457; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker,
Apr. 7, 1928, 4, Apr. 14, 1928, 4, and June 2, 1928, 4; Zytuntsineru darakrutiwn,
Zhoghovrti tzayn.
69. BOA DH EUM 2 ube no. 68/30_1 Mmtaz, Mara, to DH FR, 24 ubat
[1]330 [Mar. 9, 1915], document 57 in Sarnay, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar,
1067, 348.
70. Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zytun, 18951917, Apr. 3, 1918, 2/354; Komu-
vian, Zytuni antseal, 1819; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, May 5,
1928, 4, and June 30, 1928, 4.
71. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Apr. 14, 1928, 4; Komuvian,
Zytuni antseal, 19; Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zytun, 18951917, Apr. 3, 1918,
3/355; Kiwd [Mkhitarian], Giligean tbker, 5, Mar. 21, 1919, 1; Norashkharhyan,
Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 34.
72. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, May 5, 1928, 4; Catholicos
Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn [Dr Eghiayan, Constan-
tinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 148; Siserian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni, 460; Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 660.
73. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, May 12, 1928, 4; Komuvian,
Zytuni antseal, 1920; Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zytun, 18951917, Apr. 6,
1918, 2/358; Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 660.
74. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 34; Siserian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni, 458; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, June 30, 1928, 8.
75. ATASE BDH File no. 537, Dossier no. 2096, Cemal Pasha, Jerusalem, no.
2566, to Enver, 27 ubat 330 [Mar. 12, 1915], cited in Ahmet Eyicil, Osmanlnn Son
Dneminde Marata Ermeni Siyas Faaliyetleri, Ankara: Gn Yaynclk, 1999, 335.
76. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, May 26, 1928, 4 and June 2,
1928, 4; Khachadur, Zeytun Armenian prelate, and Akarian, Catholic spiritual
leader, to the Cilicia Catholicate, Kozan, 27 ubat [1]330 [Mar. 12, 1915], Khabayan,
Giligean gsgidzner, 131; Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Arch-
bishop Zawn, [Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in ibid., 148; BOA DH EUM 2
ube, no. 68/31 Mmtaz, Zeytun, to DH ifre Kalemi [DH FR = Cipher Ofce/
secretariat, Interior Ministry, Constantinople, 28 ubat 1330 [Mar. 13, 1915], docu-
ment 58 in Sarnay, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar, 108, 349.
77. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 66061.
78. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, July 21, 1928, 4.
79. Komuvian, Zytuni antseal, 21; Siserian, Badmutiwn Zytuni, 46162;
Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, Apr. 21, 1928, 4; Aharonian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni 18771915, 660.
80. BOA DH EUM 2 ube, no. 68/31 Mmtaz, Zeytun, to DH FR, 28 ubat
1330 [Mar. 13, 1915], document 58 in Sarnay, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar,
108, 349; Civil Council chairman Pasilosian, and vicar Khachadur, Zeytun, to Cili-
cian Catholicate, Adana, 6 Mard [1]331 [Mar. 19, 1915], in Khabayian, Giligean gsgid-
zner, 133. Other accounts give varying gures of dead and wounded: Catholicos
Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn, [Constantinople], Apr.
Notes to Pages 233234 387

8[/21] 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 148; Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin

antsker, Aug. 4, 1928, 4; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 3536;
Siserian, Badmutiwn Zytuni, 462; Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 1877
1915, 660; Komuvian, Zytuni antseal, 2122; Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zytun,
18951917, Apr. 6, 1918, 3/356 and Apr. 10, 1918, 4/364; Krikor Ktnjian in
Manas Sewag, Ksan ew mg dariner, Hayrenik amsagir 15: 5 (173), Mar. 1937,
121.
81. BOA Mmtaz, to DH FR, 28 ubat 1330, document 58 in Sarnay, Osmanl
Belgelerinde Ermeni syanlar, 108, 349.
82. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, June 9, 1928, 4.
83. Vart-Mekhag, Zytuni verchin antsker, June 16, 1928, 4, June 30, 1928,
4, and July 28, 4; Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop
Zawn, [Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 14849;
Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 66162.
84. Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian to Cemal Pasha, AACC Khabayian le no.
100/1, letter no. 880/4954, to Cemal, Mar. 10[/23] 1915, and Cemals reply of Mar.
16[/29], [1]331 [1915], quoted in Eghiayian, Zhamanagagits badmutiwn, 43; Cathol-
icos Sahag, Adana, to Command of the Fourth Army, 14 Mard [1]331 [Mar. 14/27,
1915], and Ahmet Cemal, Commander of the Fourth Army and Minister of the Navy,
to Catholicos Sahag, Adana, 16 Mard [1]331 [Mar. 16/29, 1915], in Khabayian, Gili-
gean gsgidzner, 13738.
85. Eberhard Wolffskeel to Soe-Henriette Wolffskeel, Apr. 24, 1915, 13, 4344.
Norashkharhyan adds that Ghalib Beys troops would come from Adana. Norash-
kharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 37.
86. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 664; Trkei 183/36 A14801
Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Bethmann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915. Accord-
ing to another source, the ofcials moved on Mar. 25: Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia,
Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn, [Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in
Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 15152. Rler seems to indicate that the governor of
Mara red the governor of Zeytun and a captain of the gendarmerie either during
or immediately after the Mar. 2526 attack on the monastery.
87. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 47.
88. Aram Shorvghlian, Zytuni verchin tiwtsazn Aram Bg Cholakian (1915
1921) (Beirut: Db. Sewan, 1980), 34, 1034; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922
t.t., 3738; Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 665, 667; Siserian,
Badmutiwn Zytuni, 46263; PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No.
39/J. No. 764, to Bethmann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915; PAAA Karl Blank, Mara, to
Schuchardt, Apr. 6, 1915, enclosure 3 in Trkei 183/38 A24658 F. Schuchardt,
Frankfurt a. Main, to Auswrtige Amt, Berlin, Aug. 20, 1915; Antrasian, Zytuni
antznaduutiwn, 1819.
89. Eberhard Wolffskeel to Soe-Henriette Wolffskeel, Apr. 24, 1915, 1314, 44;
PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Bethmann Hol-
lweg, Apr. 12, 1915. However, according to Cemal Pasha, there were ve to six hun-
dred Armenians in the monastery (ATASE no. 1131, Cabinet no. 149, Drawer no. 4,
File no. 2287, Dossier no. 12, Index no. 133, 134 Cemal Commander of the Fourth
Army and Marine Minister, Damascus, teleg. no. 3023, to Enver Pasha, 23 Mart
[1]331 [Apr. 5, 1915], document no. 2053 in ATBD, 2326). Antrasian, Zytuni
388 Notes to Pages 234235

antznaduutiwn, 17, writes that there were ve thousand Ottoman troops in the
barracks.
90. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 41; Aharonian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni 18771915, 669.
91. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 39.
92. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 668; Norashkharhyan,
Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 40; Shorvghlian, Zytuni verchin tiwtsazn, 1034; Cathol-
icos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn, [Constantinople],
Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 150151; Komuvian, Zytuni
antseal, 22.
93. Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn,
[Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 15152; Aharo-
nian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 669; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922
t.t., 4445.
94. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 669; Antrasian, Zytuni
antznaduutiwn, 19; Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 851.
95. NARA RG 59 867.4016/80 Morgenthau, Constantinople, to Sec. of State
[Robert Lansing], Washington, D.C., June 26, 1915, encl.: Rev. J. E. Merrill, Aintab,
June 14, 1915 (see also Library of Congress Morgenthau Papers 7/591, cover letter J.
B. Jackson, Aleppo, no. 293, to Henry Morgenthau, Constantinople, June 16, 1915);
Antrasian, Zytuni antznaduutiwn, 20.
96. ATASE Cemal Pasha to Enver Pasha, 23 Mart [1]331 [Apr. 5, 1915], document
no. 2053 in ATBD, 2326. Roughly the same numbers were later given by Erden
(Birinci Dnya Harbinde, 116) and Wangenheim (PAAA Trkei 183/36 A1195 Wan-
genheim, Pera, no. 195, to von Bethmann Hollweg, Mar. 29, 1915though the next
day the latter verbally reported twenty-one Ottoman dead to Morgenthau (Diairies,
202)), and Wolffskeel (Eberhard Wolffskeel to Soe-Henriette Wolffskeel, Apr. 24,
1915, 14, 44). However, Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri (Kanar, 226) states that one
major and twenty-ve regular soldiers were killed.
97. PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Beth-
mann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915; NARA Merrill, June 14, 1915. Wangenheim reported
that all 2030 dead rebels were headless (PAAA Trkei 183/36 A1195 Wangenheim,
Pera, no. 195, to von Bethmann Hollweg, Mar. 29, 1915).
98. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 669; Komuvian, Zytuni
antseal, 26; Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn,
[Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 152; Kanar,
Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri, 227; ATASE Cemal Pasha to Enver Pasha, 23 Mart
[1]331 [Apr. 5, 1915], document no. 2053 in ATBD, 2326. In the latter telegraph
Cemal writes that in addition to ve ghters, on March 28 sixteen suspects were
arrested.
99. Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn,
[Constantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 153; PAAA
Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Bethmann Hollweg,
Apr. 12, 1915; Ali Fuad Erden, Birinci Dnya Harbinde Suriye Htralar: Birinci Cilt
(Istanbul: [n.p.], 1954), 116.
100. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 669.
101. ATASE Cemal Pasha to Enver Pasha, 23 Mart [1]331 [Apr. 5, 1915], document
no. 2053 in ATBD, 2326.
Notes to Pages 235236 389

102. Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915, 669.

103. Eberhard Wolffskeel to Soe-Henriette Wolffskeel, Apr. 24, 1915, 14, 44.
104. Shorvghlian, Zytuni verchin tiwtsazn, 104.
105. Some fty heads of prominent families were in prison in Mara in mid-May.
NARA RG 59 867.4016/72 Consul J. B. Jackson, Aleppo, no. 276, to Henry Morgen-
thau, May 12, 1915, in J. B. Jackson, Aleppo, no. 256, to Secretary of State, May 12,
1915, in 867.00/761 Robert Lansing, to Rev. James L. Barton, Boston, July 10, 1915.
An Armenian report from 1919 states that 304 Zeytun Armenians were sent to
Mara in all, including 150 originally brought by Ali Haydar in the fall of 1914.
Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 852.
106. Shorvghlian, Zytuni verchin tiwtsazn, 39; NARA Merrill, June 14, 1915.
107. Antrasian, Zytuni antznaduutiwn, 21; [Karl Blank], Mara, to Schucha-
rdt, Apr. 14, 1915, in Rssler, Aleppo, K. No. 55/J.No. 1000, to Wangenheim, May 10,
1915, both enclosed in PAAA Trkei 183/37 A17735 Wangenheim, no. 324, to von
Bethmann Hollweg, May 27, 1915; NARA Merrill, Statement, [Apr. 20, 1915];
Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 4755; Exiles from Zeitoun: Further
Statement by the Author of the Preceding Document; Communicated by the Amer-
ican Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, document no. 124 in The Treat-
ment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 19151916: Documents Presented by Vis-
count Grey of Falloden, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by Viscount Bryce, comp.
James Bryce, ed., Arnold J[oseph]. Toynbee, 48788 (London: His Majestys Statio-
nery Ofce, 1916); and E. Briquet [Tarsus], Enclosure no. 5 in NARA RG 59
867.4016/95 Morgenthau, Constantinople, no. 370 [sic], to Secretary of State, July 20,
1915; Catholicos Sahag of Cilicia, Adana, no. 4980/74, to Archbishop Zawn, [Con-
stantinople], Apr. 8[/21], 1915, in Khabayian, Gsgidzner, 153; ATASE Archive no.
1/131, le no. 2287, dossier no. 12, index no. 134, Cemal Pasha, Fourth Army, teleg.
no. 3089, to Acting Commander in Chief, Jerusalem, Mar. 2527, 1331 [Apr. 79,
1915], Appendix document 2 in Akbyk, Ariv Belgeleri Inda, 456.
108. BOA DH FR, no. 52/203, DH EUM telegram to Mara Mutasarr, 20
Nisan 1331 (May 3, 1915), quoted in Taner Akam, Ermeni Meselesi Hallolunmutur:
Osmanl Belgelerine Gre Sava Yllarnda Ermenilere Ynelik Politikalar (stanbul:
letiim Yaynlar, 2008), 157; BOA DH FR, no. 52/235 Minister [Talat], Bb-i l,
DH, EUM, special teleg. no. 21, to Konya Vilyeti, 22 Nisan [1]331 (May 5, 1915),
document no. 9 in Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler (19151920), ed. smet Binark et
al., 25, 297 (Ankara: T. C. Babakanlk Devlet Arivleri Genel Mdrl, 1994);
BOA DH FR no. 52/253, May 6, 1915, quoted in Yusuf Halaolu, Ermeni Tehciri ve
Gerekler (19141918) (Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu, 2001), 42; BOA DH FR, no.
52/286, Talat, Bb- l, DH, EUM, special teleg. no. 14, to Mara Mutasarr, 24
Cemziyelhir 1333 (May 9, 1915), document no. 13 in Binark, Osmanl Belgelerinde
Ermeniler, 28, 301.
109. Antrasian, Zytuni antznaduutiwn, 22; Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zytun,
18951917, Apr. 20, 1918, 4/376 and Apr. 24, 1918, 4/380; Catholicos Sahag, Adana,
no. 4980/86, to Archbishop Zawn, Patriarch, May 10 [/23], 1915, German translation
by Simon Agabalian, in K169/22 Bge, Adana, J. No. 516, to von Wangenheim, Con-
stantinople, June 3, 1915; NARA Merrill, June 14, 1915; ABCFM Unit 5 Reel 669 Cen-
tral Turkey Mission, 19101919, Vol. 3 [vol. 23 in microlm edition], Letters A-CHA
(ABC 16.9.5), Kate E. Ainslie, S.S. Caledonia, en route for Bombay, to Dr. James L.
Barton, Boston, July 6, 1915. Antrasian identies the major as Hsn, which is
390 Notes to Pages 236237

most likely a confusion with Hurit, although he could also be referring to the Zeytun
governor, since he never mentions, unlike other sources, that Hsn had been red
previously.
110. Hovsp Dr-Vartanian, Marshi chart 1920-in ew badmagan hamard
agnarg m ir antsealin vray (Jerusalem: Dbakr. Araks-P. Tpalian, 1927), 44.
111. NARA RG 59 867.4016/72 Jackson, no. 276, to Morgenthau, May 12, 1915.
112. Merrill, Statement, Apr. 20, 1915.
113. William S. Dodd, American Hospital, Konya, to Henry Morgenthau, Con-
stantinople, May 6, 1915, in NARA RG 59 867.4016/71 Morgenthau, Constantinople,
no. 310, to Secretary of State, Washington, May 25, 1915; [William S. Dodd], Exiles
from Zeitoun: Letter, dated Konia, 17th July 1915, from a Foreign Resident at Konia
to Mr. N. [Peet] at Constantinople. Communicated by the American Committee for
Armenian and Syrian Relief, document 125 in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of
Armenians, 490; William S. Dodd, Report of Conditions Witnessed in the Armenian
Deportations in Konia, Turkey, Montclair, N.J., Dec. 21, 1917, in Turkish Atrocities:
Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in
Ottoman Turkey, 19151917, comp. James L. Barton, ed. Ara Saraan (Ann Arbor:
Gomidas Institute, 1998), 145.
114. George Abel Schreiner, From Berlin to Bagdad: Behind the Scenes in the Near
East, (New York, London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1918), 195202; Morgen-
thau Papers 22/474 George Schreiner, Statement Concerning Armenians Met on
Road from Bosanti to Tarsus, Constantinople, May 25, 1915.
115. Cell Bey, Ermeni, 2, Dec. 12, 1918, 1.
116. NARA RG 59 867.4016/95 E. Briquet, Enclosure no. 5, in Morgenthau, July
20, 1915.
117. Eberhard Wolffskeel to Soe-Henriette Wolffskeel, Apr. 24, 1915, 14, 44.
118. BOA DH FR, no. 52/235 Minister [Talt], Bb-i l, DH, EUM, special no.
21, to Konya Vilyeti, 22 Nisan [1]331 [May 5, 1915], document no. 9 in Binark,
Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 25, 297; BOA DH FR, no. 52/152 Ali Mnf in the
name of the Minister [Talat], Bb-i l, DH, skn- Aayir ve Muhacirn Mdriyyeti,
teleg. no. 21, to Konya Vilyeti, 16 Mays [1]331 [May 29, 1915], in Binark, Osmanl
Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 36, 312.
119. NARA RG 59 867.4016/95 E. Briquet, Enclosure no. 5, in Morgenthau, July
20, 1915.
120. [Dodd], Exiles from Zeitoun, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Arme-
nians, 491.
121. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 57; NARA RG 59 867.4016/71
Dodd to Morgenthau, May 6, 1915; [Dodd], Exiles from Zeitoun, in Bryce and
Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians, 490; Dodd, Report of Conditions, in Barton,
Turkish Atrocities, 145; Willy Seeger, Georg Biegel, Heinrich Janson, J. E. Maurer,
Konya, to [Gnther], Aug. 16, 1915, in K170 A53/4857 Gnther, Constantinople, no.
8/W, to von Neurath, Constantinople, Aug. 21, 1915; Aharonian, Badmutiwn
Zytuni 18771915, 670; Henry Morgenthau, United States Diplomacy on the Bos-
phorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 19131916, comp. Ara Saraan
(Princeton, N.J. and London: Gomidas Institute, 2004), 227, 233, 245, 280, 288, 296;
BOA DH FR, no. 53/312 Minister Talat, Bb-i l, DH EUM, special no. 32, to
Konya Vilyeti, 28 Mays [1]331 [June 10, 1915], document no. 32 in Binark, Osmanl
Notes to Pages 237238 391

Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 42, 321; NARA RG 59 867.4016/137 William S. Dodd, Konia,

to Henry Morgenthau, Constantinople, Aug. 15, 1915, in Morgenthau, Constanti-
nople, to Secretary of State, Washington, Aug. 21, 1915; Aramian, Shahegan deghe-
gakir, 852; Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zytun, 18951917, May 1, 1918, 4/4.
122. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 56; NARA RG 59 867.4016/71
Dodd to Morgenthau, May 6, 1915; NARA RG 59, 867.4016/97 Stanley Hollis, Beirut,
no. 1130, to U.S. Secretary of State [Robert Lansing], Washington, D.C., July 6, 1915:
enclosure A Brief Statement of the Present Situation of the Armenian Exiles in This
Region, June 20, 1915 (also with another cover dispatch: RG 59 867.4016/104
[Henry] Morgenthau, Constantinople, to Sec. of State [Robert Lansing], Washington,
D.C., July 21, 1915); [Dodd], Exiles from Zeitoun, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment
of Armenians, 490); Zytuntsineru darakrutiwn, Zhoghovrti tzayn.
123. Komuvian, Zytuni antseal, 32. See also NARA RG 59 867.4016/137
William S. Dodd, Konia, to Henry Morgenthau, Constantinople, Aug. 15, 1915, in
Morgenthau, Constantinople, to Secretary of State, Washington, Aug. 21, 1915;
Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 852.
124. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 69; Zytuntsineru
darakrutiwn, Zhoghovrti tzayn; Aharonian, Badmutiwn Zytuni 18771915,
670; NARA RG 59 867.4016/137 William S. Dodd, Konia, to Henry Morgenthau,
Constantinople, Aug. 15 and 16, 1915, in Morgenthau, Constantinople, to Secretary
of State, Washington, Aug. 21, 1915.
125. Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 85253; Takajian, Inknagensakrutiwn,
3024; Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the
Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,
1993), 8384.
126. BOA DH FR nr. 52/93, Talat, Bb- l DH EUM, special no. 14, to Cemal
Pasha, Commander of the Fourth Army 9 C. 1333 (11 Nisan [1]331) [Apr. 24, 1915],
document no. 7 in Binark, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 2324, 295. A similar order
was sent two days later, on Apr. 26 (BOA DH FR, nos. 52/235, 52/102, and DH
EUM 2 ube nos. 68/90, 68/88, 68/92, 68/95, 68/96, 68/99, quoted in Binark,
Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 9; FR nos. 52/93, 52/235, 52/102 quoted in
Halaolu, Ermeni Tehciri, 42.
127. ATASE Archive no. 1/1, File 44, Dossier 207, Index no. 23, quoted in
Kamuran Grn, The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (London, Nico-
sia, Istanbul: K. Rustem & Bro., and Weiderfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1985), 206. There
are a number of similar extant commands telegraphed in later months. See Binark,
Osmanl Belgelerinde, 9, 61, 62, 68, 123, 352, 353, 360, 445; and discussion in Akam,
Ermeni Meselesi Hallolunmutur, 5562.
128. NARA RG 59 867.4016/137 William S. Dodd, Konia, to Henry Morgenthau,
Constantinople, Aug. 15, 1915, in Morgenthau, Constantinople, to Secretary of State,
Washington, Aug. 21, 1915; Ttig, Koghkota hay hokeworaganutea new ir hdin
aghdali 1915 darin, ed. Aray Kalayjian (New York: St. Vartan Press), 476; Raymond
Kvorkian, Le Gnocide des Armniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 712713.
129. [Aris Dr] Garabed Kalfayan, Kirk elits hayots: hishadag anshirim nahada-
gats hnots ew norits, haydits ew anhaydits, (Beirut: Db. G. Dnigian, 1955), 265.
Later Zeytun caravans also passed through Rakka (Mirijanian, Panasiragan:
Zeytun, 18951917, May 15, 1918, 4/16).
392 Notes to Pages 238239

130. Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 853.

131. PAAA Trkei 183/38 A24524 Rssler, Aleppo, K. No. 82/B. No. 1665, to Dr.
von Bethman Hollweg, Berlin, July 31, 1915.
132. NARA Merrill, June 14, 1915; NARA RG 59 867.4016/92 H[enry]. Morgen-
thau, Constantinople, to Sec. of State [Robert Lansing], Washington, D.C., July 13,
1915, encl.: J. B. Jackson, Aleppo, no. 303, to Henry Morgenthau, Constantinople,
June 28, 1915: Rev. F. H. Leslie report of June 14; NARA RG 59 867.4016/72 Jackson,
no. 276, to Morgenthau, May 12, 1915.
133. NARA RG 59 867.4016/72 Jackson, no. 276, to Morgenthau, May 12, 1915.
134. Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 853.
135. Vart-Mekhag [Vartavar Karanlian], Zytuni nahanch (Aleppo: Dbakr. H.
Vanlian, 1922), 13; AACC Khabayian le 100/2, 38487, Catholicos Sahag to Bghos
Nubar Pasha, Oct. 12, 1921, excerpted in Eghiayan, Zhamagagits badmutiwn, 123;
Bibliothque Nubar, APC DOR/31 Marashi Azk[ayin]. Miutiwn (Azk[ayin].
Khnamadarutean ghruadz), Marashi ew shrchagay kiwgheru hayutean tiw (1919
Hogd. 11-in kruadz namag m kaghuadz), f. 39 (my thanks to Ara Saraan and
Raymond H. Kvorkian for this photocopy); ABCFM ABC: 16.9.5 Central Turkey Mis-
sion Volume 27, Central Turkey, 19201924 Volume 1 Documents [762] W. N.
Chamber, 19151920 Statistics of Armenian Population and Losses in the Four Dis-
tricts Mentioned, Adana, Apr. 19, 1920; CADN Archives du Haut-Commissariat de la
Rpublique franaise au Levant, Mandat Syrie-Liban 1er Versement, Cilicie-Adana
Carton 166 Commandant Multrier, Rapport sur la reconnaissance effectue du 12 au
17 Novembre 1919 dans la region au nord de Marash, in Lt.-Col. Flye-Sainte-Marie,
Commandant le Cercle dAintab, no. 6/A, to Brmond, Administrateur en Chef, Nov.
26, 1919; CADN Cilicie-Adana Carton 166, Rapport du Capitaine P. J. Andr, Gouver-
neur du Sandjak du Djebel-Bereket, sur lorganisation actuelle du Sandjak du Marache
(Octobre 1919), Osmaniye, Oct. 24, 1919; CADN Cilicie-Adana Carton 166 Rapport
sur le Sandjak de Marache, Mara, Oct. 14, 1919; ATASE Archive no. 1/105, File no.
255, Dossier 2, Index nos. 431, 2, 3, 4, Gendarmerie Squad Commander Osman,
Governor of Frns Nahiye (township) Cemil, and Telegraph Director Rza, Sleymanl
[Zeytun], to Mdafaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti Riyaseti, Sivas, 22 Terin-i evvel [1]335 [Oct.
22, 1919], Appendix document no. 3 in Akbyk, Ariv Belgeleri Inda, 457. A Feb.
1919 report by Zeytun survivors (Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 853) estimated
that as many as twenty-ve hundred survived the deportations, including some ve
hundred still with Bedouin tribes or in a Baghdad orphanage.
136. ABCFM Ainslie to Barton, July 6, 1915; Dudu Giwlvansian, Zytunn
Der-Zr (Zytuntsi hay gnoch m badmutiwn), Bahag, Nov. 14, 1919, 2;
Aramian, Shahegan deghegakir, 852.
137. BOA DH FR, no. 52/51, Ali Mnif to Fourth Army Command, 5 C. 1333
[Apr. 20, 1915], document no. 6, in Binark, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 23, 294.
Merrills Apr. 20, 1915, statement conrms that Muslim villagers from Aintab were
being brought in to replace the deported Armenian villages. Merrill, Statement,
Apr. 20, 1915.
138. ABCFM Ainslie to Barton, July 6, 1915.
139. Fuad Dndar, ttihad ve Terakkinin Mslmanlarn skn Politikas (1913
1918) (Istanbul: letiim Yaynlar, 2001), 93173; Akam, Ermeni Meselesi
Hallolunmutur, 6770.
Notes to Pages 239242 393

140. Antrasian, Zytuni antznaduutiwn, 22.

141. AMAE, Guerre 19141918, Turquie, vol. 903, f.53 Ledoulx, Constantinople,
no. 30, to Delcass, Paris, June 12, 1915, in Beylerian, Les grandes puissances, 41;
Akbyk, Ariv Belgeleri Inda, Apr. 1990, 438. The change was published in
Takvim-i Vekay no. 2196, May 26, 1331 [June 8, 1915].
142. Zytuntsi [Mnatsagan Smrjian], Zytuni antsealn ew nergayn, Vienna:
Mkhitarian Dbaran, vol. 1, 1900, 910; Mirijanian, Panasiragan: Zeytun, 1895
1917, Apr. 24, 1918, 4/380; Antrasian, Zytuni antznaduutiwn, 22; Norashkhar-
hyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 58.
143. Dndar, skn Politikas, 8283. Dndar seems to indicate that the sugges-
tions about the specic types of names actually were issued in July 1915.
144. Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 58, 68; Lewon Khulmuneans
account, transcribed by Aris Aharonian and Harutiwn Aharonian, in Zytuni bad-
makirk, 964.
145. Zytuntsian, 999; CADN Multrier, Rapport sur la reconnaissance.
146. Komuvian, Zytuni antseal, 23.
147. Aghasi [Garabed Tur-Sarkisian], Zytun ew ir shrchanagner: ngarakrutiwn,
ahskharhakragan, badmagan ew baderazmagan Rupinean takaworutean angumn
minchew mer rer (Beirut: Dbaran Shirag, 1968), footnote, 388.
148. Schreiner, From Berlin to Bagdad, 197.
149. See note 71 above.
150. Armenian historian Bogosyan (Zeytuni badmutyun, 390) argues that the
overwhelming majority of Zeytuns inhabitants were on the side of rebellion, but,
while possible, this is hard to prove, and in any case, even if true, circumstances led
them to act differently.
151. Cell Bey, Ermeni Vakyi-i ve Esbb- ve Tesrt, 2, Vakit 12 Kanun-i Evvel
[Dec.] 1918, 1. There is a dispatch from an unnamed Ottoman ofcial or army ofcer
to the Fourth Army command, dated a day or two after Mar. 1/14, 1915, that reects
similar sentiments. There is a possibility that the ofcial is Celal himself, though it
could also be Mmtaz Bey, the governor of Mara. The ofcial states that he only
knew that a few individuals attacking the Zeytun prison killed several gendarmes.
Only the attackers, he feels, should be punished, not the notables and clergy being
sent as hostages to Mara or Aleppo. He concludes that it was unlikely for the Arme-
nians to rebel under the present circumstances, when the Great Powers, which
would normally support them, were preoccupied with their own problems (To
Drdnc Ordu Kumandanl Vekleti, [sometime after Mar. 1/14, 1915], in BDH
File no. 1768, Old Folder 192, New Folder 206, Index No. 21 (12), in Tetik, Ariv
Belgeleriyle: 1, 71, 7273, 35556, 360).
152. NARA Merrill, June 14, 1915.
153. PAAA Trkei 183/36 A14801 Rler, Aleppo, K. No. 39/J. No. 764, to Beth-
mann Hollweg, Apr. 12, 1915.
154. Bibliothque Nubar Ms. no. 288 Cote P.I. 26 [Eruant Vartabed Perdahjian]
Antsker u tbker Bolsoy mch tiduadz pokhanortarani goghm ([1]914[1]916),
Jerusalem, Feb. 1/14, 1918, Dedr. A. [Notebook I] folio 0200 [also in French transla-
tion by R[aymond]. H. Kvorkian: R. P. Yervant Perdahjian, vnements et faits
observs a Constantinople par le vicariat [patriarcal] (19141916), Revue dhistoire
armnienne contemporaine 1(1995): 252]; von Tyszka, Constantinople, Sept. 22, 1915,
394 Notes to Pages 242243

in PAAA Trkei 183/39 A29593 von Tyszka, Constantinople, to Zimmerman, Berlin,

Oct. 1, 1915.
155. PAAA Trkei 183/36 A1195 Wangenheim, Pera, no. 195, to von Bethmann
Hollweg, Mar. 29, 1915
156. Mehmet Talt, Talt Paann Hatralar (Istanbul: Enver Bolayr, 1946),
6567.
157. Djemal, Memoirs, 277.
158. No. 128 [William N. Chambers], Adana: Statement, dated 3rd Dec., 1915,
by a foreign resident at Adana: Communicated by the American Committee for
Armenian and Syrian Relief, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians, 5023;
NARA RG 867.4016/95 Committee of Dashnaktsoutioun, Section of Balkans, to
Morgenthau, Statement of Facts, Soa, June 2/15, 1915, Enclosure 2 in Morgen-
thau, Constantinople, no. 370 [sic], to Secretary of State, July 20, 1915; Aguni, Milion
m hayeru charti badmutiwn, 305, 308; Kalfayan, Kirk elits hayots, 210, 268, 31014.
159. Aguni, Milion m hayeru charti badmutiwn, 226; [Dodd], Exiles from
Zeitoun, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians, 490; Morgenthau, Diaries,
271; Norashkharhyan, Zeytun 19141922 t.t., 57); Sdepan Sdepanian, Ktasird
Turk gusagal, in Hushamadean Gudinahayeru, ed. Arshag Albyajian, 21415
(Beirut: Db. Dnigian, 1961); Aguni, Milion m hayeru charti badmutiwn, 266;
Ardashs Bibrian and Vartan Eghishyan, eds., Badmakirk Adapazar Asduadza-
real kaghakin (Paris: Imp. Der Hagopian, 1960), 687; Ss-Vani, Deghahanutiwn:
Deghahanutean nakhreagin, in Bibrian and Eghishyan, Badmakirk Adapaazar,
705; ATASE 1134, Dossier 1037, Index 118, 8. The testimony of Minas Gendjians
son suspect Antranik, 42, living in Gne Mahallesi of Adapazar, an agent of the
Ottoman Insurance Agency in Adapazar (Aug. 22, [1]331/Sept. 4, 1915), in Ahmet
Tetik, Ariv Belgeleriyle Ermeni Faaliyetleri, 19141918: Cilt IV (19141915) / Arme-
nian Activities in the Archive Documents, 19141918: Volume IV (19141915), ed. T. C.
Genelkurmay Bakanl, 148, 324, 531, 711 (Ankara: T. C. Genelkurmay ATASE ve
Genelkurmay Denetleme Bakanl, 2006); Enovk Armn, Medz Egherni re-
run, in Aharonian, Husamadean Medz Egherni, 601; Nawasart Dyirmnjian
[Navassart Deirmendjian], Knjlar kiwghi badmutiwn: Azkakragan, deghakragan,
ngerayin ew kaghakagan (Beirut: Db. Sewan [Sevan Press], <year?>), 164; Hrant
Terizans Story of Kunjilar, Turkey during the Armenian Genocide, translated by V.
Rev. Shnorhk Kasparian [unpublished, unknown date] (I thank Nancy Terzian Fox
for providing a copy of this translation); BOA DH EUM, 2b. no. 68/36, Zek, Kay-
seri mutasarrf, to Bb- l DH ifre Kalemi, 27 Mays [1]331 [June 9, 1915], docu-
ment 30 in Binark, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 41, 319; BOA DH FR no. 53/326,
Minister, Bb- l DH EUM, special no. 24, to Kayseri Mutasarr, 29 B. 1333/30
Mays [1]331 [June 12, 1915], document no. 33 in Binark, Osmanl Belgelerinde Erme-
niler, 423, 322.
160. Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian, Feb. 11/24, 1915 entry, in AACC Aleppo le
2/1, no. 190/194, quoted in Eghiayian, Zhamanagagits badmutiwn, 42. Shortly there-
after, in early March, Zeytun was removed from Celals jurisdiction (PAAA K168
A53a/1516 Rssler, Aleppo, teleg., to Botschaft Konstantinopel, Mar. 12, 1915 5 p.m.).
161. Balakian, Hay koghkoghtan, 7175.
162. Zawn [Dr Eghiayan], Badriarkagan hushers: vawerakirner ew vgayutiwnner,
assisted by Arshag Albyajian, Cairo: Mdaworagan Sbasarguteants Kraseneag,
Notes to Pages 243244 395

1947, 79; Mkhitarian, Truakner hayg[agan]. koghkotayn (19121937), Armenia,

Nov. 26, 1940; Eghiayan, Adanayi hayots badmutiwn, 325.
163. See my forthcoming detailed study, Drtyol and the Armenian Genocide.
164. BDH File no. 13, Old Dossier 1049, New Dossier 63, Index No. 2, DH EUM
attachment to Index No. 21, DH EUM to Ord-yu Hmayn Bakumandanl
Veklet-i Cellesine, Feb. 14/27, 1915, in Tetik, Ariv Belgeleriyle: I, 55, 5758, 337,
341.
165. BOA DH FR, no. 50/141, Talat, tel. no. 121, to Adana province, Feb. 17,
[1]330 [Mar. 2, 1915], document no. 2 in Binark, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 20, 289.
166. BDH File no. 13, Old Dossier 1049, New Dossier 63, Index No. 2 (23),
Cemal Paa, Fourth Army Commander, Jerusalem, teleg. no. 2247, to [Enver Paa],
Acting Commander of the Ottoman Imperial Army, Feb. 15, [1]330 [/Feb. 28, 1915],
in Tetik, Ariv Belgeleriyle: I, 57, 60, 340, 343.
167. BOA DH FR, nr. 52/338, Talt to Adana province, Apr. 29 [1]331 [May 12
1915], document no. 16 in Binark, Osmanl Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 30, 304; Minas
Kojayan, ed., Badmutiwn Chork-Marzbani (Drt-eol) kiwghakaghakm Giligioy
mch (Los Angeles: Los Anjelsi Chork-Marzbani hayrenagtsagan miutiwn, 2005),
10.
168. ATASE archive no. 1/131, cabinet no. 101/149, drawer no. 144, le no. 2287,
dossier no. 3212, index no. 137, Cemal Pasha, Fourth Army, Jerusalem, teleg. no.
3108, to Acting Commander in Chief, Mar. 27, 1331 [Apr. 9, 1915], document no. 19 in
Documents, vol. 1, 2nd ed., 70 (the date of Apr. 10 is erroneously given in the English
translation for the old style date of Mar. 27 (71); Catholicos Sahag, Adana, to [name
omitted], Sis, Apr. 15[/28], 1915, in Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 15556; Catholicos
Sahag, Adana, no. 4980/86, to Archbishop Zawn, Patriarch, May 10 [/23], 1915, in
Khabayian, Giligean gsgidzner, 165, and its slightly abridged translation by Simon Aga-
balian, with a few additional sections like the postscript, in PAAA K169/22 Bge,
Adana, J. No. 516, to von Wangenheim, Constantinople, June 3, 1915; Kiwd
[Mkhitarian], Giligean tbker, 6, Mar. 22, 1919, 3; P[apazian]., Irer ew lurer, May
6, 1919, 1; Merrill, Statement, Apr. 20, 1915; Catholicos Sahag II Khabayian mem-
oirs, used in Eghiayian, Zhamanagagits badmutiwn, 50; ABCFM Ainslie to Barton,
July 6, 1915.

CHAPTER 11
1. La question assyro-chaldene devant la Conference de la paix (Paris) July 16,
1919; Joseph Yacoub, La question assyro-chaldenne, les puissances europennes et la
Socit des nations (19081938) 3 vols. (unpublished PhD thesis Universit Lyon II:
U. E. R. des Sciences Historiques et Gographiques 1984).
2. Basile Nikitine, Une petite nation victime de la guerre: Les chaldens, in La
revue des sciences politiques (Oct.Dec. 1921), 60225; K. P. Matveev and I. I. Mar-
Yukhanna, Assiriiskii vopros vo vremya i posle pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Izdatelstvo
Nauka, 1968); M. S. Lazarev, Kurdistan i kurdskaya problema (90-e gody XIX veka1917
g.) (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Nauka, 1964); W. A. Wigram, Our Smallest Ally (London:
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920).
3. F. N. Heazell, The Woes of a Distressed Nation: Being an Account of the Assyrian
People from 1914 to 1934 (London: Faith Press, 1934).
396 Notes to Pages 245249

4. For a general introduction see John Joseph, Muslim-Christian Relations and

Inter-Christian Rivalries in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1983), and The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western
Christian Missions, Archaeologists, and Colonial Powers (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
5. Ishaq Armalto, Al-Qusara Nakabat Al-Nasara [The Calamities of the Chris-
tians] (Lebanon: Al Sharfe Monastery, 1919, reprinted Beirut, 1970); Sbastien de
Courtois, The Forgotten Genocide: Eastern Christians, The Last Arameans (Piscataway,
N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2004).
6. For local specics of the genocide see David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance,
Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscat-
away, N.J.: Gorgias, 2006).
7. Jacques Rhtor, Les chrtiens aux btes Souvenirs de la guerre sainte procla-
me par les turcs contre les chrtiens en 1915 (Paris: Cerf, 2005).
8. There were 75,000 Assyrians and 50,000 Armenians in Urmia district.
9. The six tribes were classed as ashirets, a term for autonomous tribes that paid
tribute to the government, but otherwise administered themselves. They did not pay
taxes, were never part of a census, and they could carry weapons.
10. Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA) DH FR 54/240 Talaat to valis of Mosul
and Van June 30, 1915.
11. Russian Archive for Foreign Policy, Moscow (AVPRI), I.F. 293, des. 571, dos-
sier 420, list 56.
12. AVPRI, I.F. 293, des. 571, dossier 420, list 5961.
13. Russian State Military History Archive, Moscow (RGVIA) fond 2000-II, d.
3931, l. 9293, cited in Matveev and Mar-Yukhanna, Assirskii vopros, 42.
14. BOA DH FR 46/78, Ministry of Interior to Van vilayet Oct. 26, 1914.
15. BOA DH. FR 46/102 Ministry of Interior to Van vilayet Oct. 28, 1914.
16. Gawar region was divided between Turkey and Iran, with provinces with the
same name in both.
17. Surma, Assyran Church Customs and the Murder of Mar Shimun (London:
Faith Press, 1920), 67.
18. Ulrich Gehrke, Persien in der deutschen Orientpolitik whrend des ersten Welt-
krieges (Stuttgart: Kohlhammar, 1961) 1:17, 2:67.
19. Minorsky to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Sept. 24, 1914, AVPRI Persidskii stol
F 144 O528/b D83 L42, cited in John Tchalenko, Images of the Endgame (London: I.
B. Tauris, 2006), 186.
20. Jacques Sontag to Pre Fiat, Nov. 30, 1914 in Saint Vincent de Paul Annales de
la Mission 80 (1915): 528; Gehrke, Persien in der deutschen Orientpolitik, 1:20.
21. William Walker Rockwell, The Pitiful Plight of the Assyrian Christians in Persia
and Kurdistan (New York: American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief,
1916), 64.
22. Statement by the Rev. William A. Shedd, in James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee,
eds., The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N. J.: Gomidas
Institute, 2000, originally 1916), 13640.
23. Eugne Griselle, Syriens et chaldens leur martyre, leurs esprances (Paris: Bloud
et Gay, 1917), 4142; Vladimir Genis, Vitse-konsul Vvedenskii sluzhba v Persii i Bukhar-
skom khanstve (19061920gg.) (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Sotsialno-politicheskaya Mysl,
2003), 3031.
Notes to Pages 249253 397

24. Minister of Foreign Affairs to Turkish Ambassador in Tehran, Oct. 7, 1914;

Minister of Foreign Affairs to Persian Ambassador in Constantinople, Oct. 7, 1914;
Kargozar of Tabriz to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 9, 1914; Kargozar of Tabriz to
Foreign Ministry, Oct. 10, 1914, in Irans ofcial publication Neutralit persane: Doc-
uments diplomatiques (Paris: Georges Cadet, 1919), 79.
25. Report from vice-governor of Azerbaijan, Oct. 14, 1914; Russian Ambassador
Tehran to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 19, 1914; Minister of Foreign Affairs to
Ottoman Ambassador in Tehran, Oct. 29, 1914; Report from Kargozar of Tabriz to
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nov. 1, 1914, in Neutralit Persane, 11, 14, 1920, 2324.
26. Gehrke, Persien in der deutschen Orientpolitik, 1:32, 2:22.
27. Statement of Y. K. Rushdouni, June 7, 1915, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment
of the Armenians, 88, 96.
28. RGVIA, Extraordinary Investigation Commission, Taganrog, No. 11329. Tes-
timony of Simon Lazarev, Mar. 9, 1916.
29. Johannes Lepsius, Les massacres dArmnie (Paris: Payot, 1918), 9192.
30. RGVIA, Fund 13159, dossier 1428, list 22, testimony of Judad Abdarova, Aug.
27 and 30, 1916.
31. Gehrke, Persien in der deutschen Orientpolitik, 1:3843.
32. Russian Foreign Minister to Viceroy in Caucasus, Nov. 2, 1914, in Die Inter-
nationalen Beziehungen, 39394.
33. Minister of Foreign Affairs to Persian Ambassador in Constantinople, Oct.
27, 1914, ibid., 17.
34. Gehrke, Persien in der deutschen Orientpolitik, 1:44.
35. Report from Sawuj-Bulak, Dec. 12, 1914, Neutralit Persane, 66; Russian Gen-
eral-Consul in Tabriz to Russian Foreign Minister, Dec. 9, 1914, document 632 in Die
Internationalen Beziehungen, 540.
36. Russian Ambassador in London to Russian Foreign Minister, Jan. 7, 1915, in
Die Internationalen Beziehungen series II, vol. 6, doc. 731.
37. Nikitin to Russian Imperial Mission in Teheran, Jan. 1916, AVPRI, 1. Y.F.
Persian Table B, des 489, 19101916, dossier 529, list 3440.
38. Yerevanskaya statisticheskaya komissiya, Odnodnevnaya Perepic Bezhentsev iz
Turtsii, Persii i iz mest pogranichnikh s Turtsiei (Armyan, Aisorov, Grekov i pr.) (Yerivan:
Tipograya Luis, 1915), 6869.
39. Paul Shimmon, Massacres of Syrian Christians in N. W. Persia and Kurdistan
(London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1916), 913.
40. Narrative of Dr. Jacob Sargis, Feb. 12, 1912, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment
of the Armenians, 191.
41. Wangenheim to Foreign Ofce, Feb. 13, 1915, in Gehrke, Persien in der
deutschen Orientpolitik, 2:30910.
42. Whole Plain Strewn by Armenian Bodies, New York Times, Mar. 20, 1915.
43. Genis, Vvedenskii, 44; Rockwell, Plight of the Assyrians, 65.
44. K. Matikyan, letter of Mar. 9, 1915, in Genotsid armyan v osmanskoi imperii:
Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, ed. M. G. Nersisyan, 27677 (Erevan: Izdatelstvo
Aiastan, 1982).
45. Genis, Vvedenskii, 44.
46. Genelkurmay Bakanl, Birinci Dnya Harbinde Trk Harbi Kafkas Cephesi
3nc Ordu Harekt, vol. 2:1 (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basm Evi 1993), 582.
398 Notes to Pages 254257

47. Minister of Foreign Affairs Moaven ud-Dowleh to Turkish Ambassador, Mar.

5, 1915; Minister of Foreign Affairs Moaven ud-Dowleh to Persian Ambassador in
Constantinople, Mar. 18, 1915; Ambassador of the United States Caldwell to Minis-
ter of Foreign Affairs, Mar. 19, 1915, in Neutralit Persane, 139, 153, 155.
48. Statement of Larabee, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of the Armenians, 146.
49. AVPRI, III. F. 133, 1915, des. 470, dossier 49, vol. II, list 580.
50. AVPRI, III. F. 133, 1915, des. 470, dossier 49, vol. II, list 586.
51. AVPRI, III. F. 133, 1915, des. 470, dossier 49, vol. II, list 438.
52. AVPRI, III. F. 133, 1915, des. 470, dossier 49, vol. II, list 444.
53. Genelkurmay, Birinci Dnya Harbinde, vol. 2:1, 570577; E. F. Ludshuveit,
Turtsiya v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Izdatelstvo moskovskogo universiteta,
1966), 7679.
54. Under the name of Nazarbekian he commanded the Armenian Republics army.
55. N. G. Korsun, Alashkertskaya i khamadanskaya operatsii na kavkazkom fronte
mirovoi voiny v 1915 gody (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Voneenoe Izdatelstvo, 1940),
42; testimony of Abraham Shlemon in Rockwell, The Pitiful Plight of the Assyrians, 32;
Andranig Chalabian, General Andranig and the Armenian Revolutionary Movement
(Southeld, Mich.: Author, 1988), 23748.
56. Genelkurmay, Birinci Dnya Harbinde, vol. 2:1, 597598; Griselle, Syriens et
chaldens, 55.
57. Vakharshak Ovakiyan, V pokhode s Andranikom, Armyanskii vestnik 30 and
34 (1916), reprinted in Russkie istochniki o genotside armyan, 3442.
58. Scheubner-Richters report of Dec. 4, 1916,in Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland
und Armenien (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919), 308; Vahakn Dadrian, The Armenian
Genocide: An Interpretation, in America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, ed. Jay
Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6465.
59. Narrative of Dr. Jacob Sargis, Feb. 16, 1916, in Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment
of the Armenians, 190.
60. Genelkurmay, Birinci dnya harbinde, vol. 2:1, 654.
61. Rafael de Nogales, Four Years beneath the Crescent (London: Charles Scrib-
ners, 1926), 134.
62. Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, xiv and 471; Lepsius, Les massacres
dArmnie, 94.
63. Cited in Griselle, Syriens et chaldens, 24.
64. Genelkurmay, Birinci Dnya Harbinde, 592.
65. AVPRI, III. F., 1915, des. 470, dossier 49, vol. II, list 597.
66. Ambassade de Russie au Dpartement, May 5, 1915, Arthur Beylerian, Les
grandes puissants: Lempire ottoman et les armniens dans les archives franaises (1914
1918) (Paris: Sorbonne, 1983), 17.
67. Robert M. Larabee to Presbyterian Missions Board, April 19, 1915, in Bryce
and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians, 147.
68. Wangenheim to Foreign Ofce, May 10, 1915, Lepsius, Deutschland und
Armenien, 65.
69. Holstein to German Embassy, May 14, 1915, ibid., 67.
70. Holstein to German Embassy, May 18, 1915, ibid., 7273.
71. Nogales, Four Years, 100103.
72. Lepsius, Les massacres dArmnie, 116; Sorgun, Halil Paa, 99.
Notes to Pages 257264 399

73. BOA DH. FR 53/276 Ministry of the Interior to Mosul vilayet, June 7, 1915.
74. Hazqiyel Rayyis Gabriyel Beth-Malik Babane, Tashita d Aturaye (Trichur,
India: Mar Narsay Publishing House, 1975), 47.
75. BOA FR 54/81 Ministry of Interior to Mosul vilayet, June 20, 1915.
76. Surma, Assyrian Church Customs, 7273.
77. AVPRI, III. F. 133, 1915, des 470, dossier 49, vol. II, list 465.
78. In Griselle, Syriens et chaldens, 2224.
79. Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians, 198.

CHAPTER 12
1. This is an appropriation of Hans Mommsens term cumulative radicaliza-
tion. See his Der Nationalsozialismus: Kumulative Radikalisierung und Selbstzer-
strung des Regimes, Meyers Enzyklopdisches Lexikon, 16 (Mannheim: Bibliogra-
phisches Institut, 1976), 78590. Mommsen used the term to address the way in
which Hitlers charismatic leadership interacted with the centrifugal forces present
in the oddly unstructured Nazi-German state. In the present analysis, it refers more
to the interaction of the Ottoman state within an international system and with de-
velopments within Ottoman borders at a crisis moment.
2. Anahide Ter Minassian, Nationalism and Socialism in the Armenian Revolu-
tionary Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoryan Institute, 1984), 45, 15, 18. This study
also suggests that whatever the doctrinal differences between the political parties,
nationalism was their most signicant characteristic. On Hamidian policies, Bayram
Kodaman, ark Meselesi I Altnda Sultan II Abdlhamidin Dou Anadolu Politikas
(Istanbul: Orkun Yaynevi, 1983), including 16181 on the Armenian question.
3. Vahakn N. Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction,
1999), 9798.
4. Fuat Dndar, ttihat ve Terakkinin Mslmanlar Iskn Politikas (19131918)
(Istanbul: Isis, 2001), esp. 92173.
5. On Arabs, ibid, 92107; on Jews, Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zion-
ism, 18971918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
6. David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in
Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2006). See also
his chapter in this volume (ch.11).
7. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7276.
8. Artem Ohandjanian, Der verschwiegene Vlkermord (Cologne: Bhlau, 1989),
8182.
9. For the Ottoman view, Affaires armeniennes: Les telegrammesde Talt Pacha:
Fait historique ou ction? eds. inasi Orel and Sreyya Yuca (France: Triangle, 1983),
111112, Talt to provincial leaderships, 24 Apr. 1915.
10. G. Korganoff, La participation des armniens la Guerre mondiale sur le front du
Caucase (Paris: Imprimerie Massis Editions, 1927), 2021; Hratch Danabedian, His-
tory of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutiun (Milan: Oemme
EdizionI 1989), 117. See Peter Holquists chapter in this volume (ch. 7), which mod-
ies my interpretation of the Russian role in chs. 1 and 2 of my The Great Game of
Genocide.
400 Notes to Pages 264265

11. Boghos Nubar, the leader of the Armenian National Delegation established in
1912 to forward the cause of reforms on the international scene, recalled that the
battalions were to provide an example for their Ottoman compatriots . . . in a
common action to acquire the rights of autonomy: Bibliothque Nubar, Paris,
Archives of the Dlgation Nationale Armnienne (hereafter, ADNA), Correspon-
dence Armnie 1915, I, Nubar to Kouchakian, Oct. 26.
12. Auswrtiges Amt-Politisches Archiv, Bonn (Political Archives of the German
Foreign Ofce, hereafter, AAPA), Trkei 183/36, Pera, Mar. 9, 1915.
13. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 7276.
14. Documents on Ottoman Armenians, 3 vols., ed. Prime Ministry Directorate
General of Press and Information (rst volume simply entitled Documents) (Ankara:
Prime Ministry Directorate General of Press and Information, 19821986), (hereafter,
Documents), vol. 2, Sept. 18, 1914. See also nos. 1894, 1903, and, the following year,
interview of Talt, Berliner Tageblatt, May 4, 1916. For concurrence in German sources,
AAPA, Abt 1AWeltkrieg, WK 11d geheim, vol. 4, Pera, Mar. 26, 1915.
15. Gabriele Yonan, Ein vergessener Holocaust: Die Vernichtung der christlichen
Assyrer in der Trkei (Gttingen: Gesellschaft fr bedrohte Vlker, 1989), 11112;
Manuel Sarkisyanz, A Modern History of Transcaucasian Armenia (Nagpur: Udyama
Commercial Press, 1975), 192; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Role of the Special Organi-
sation in the Armenian Genocide during the First World War, in Minorities in War-
time, ed. Panikos Panayi (Oxford: Berg, 1993).
16. Gotthard Jschke, Der Turanismus der Jungtrken (Leipzig: Otto Harrasowitz,
1941), 14.
17. John Buchan, A History of the Great War, vol. 1 (London: Nelson, 1921), 173
74, euphemistically on Russian ferocity. Maurice Larcher, La guerre turque dans la
Guerre mondiale (Paris:<pub>, 1925), 393, on expulsions. Osmanl Belgelerinde Erme-
niler (19151920), ed. Trkiye Cumhuriyeti, Babakanlk Devlet Arivleri Genel
Mdrl (Ankara: Trkiye Cumhuriyeti Babakanlk Devlet Arivleri Genel
Mdrl, 1995), (hereafter, Osmanl Belgelerinde), 21, on atrocities against Mus-
lims in Kars and Ardahan.
18. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 2829, Interior Ministry to Van and Bitlis, May 9, 1915.
For earlier Muslim resettlements, AAPA, Trkei 183/36, Pera, Apr. 15, 1915.
19. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: Tauris, 1996), 1026;
Yonan Shahbaz, The Rage of Islam (Philadelphia: Roger Williams, 1918), 5761; James
Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, eds., The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915
1916. Uncensored Edition (Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute, 2000), docs. 27, 32, 34.
20. Documents, vol. 1, nos. 11, 17, 21; vol. 2, no. 1903; vol. 3, no. 2001.
21. Documents, vol. 3, no. 2001; vol. 1, no. 18 (part 4).
22. Les telegrammesde Talt Pacha, 105, Third Army Command, Oct. 11, 1914.
23. Dadrian, Role of the Special Organisation, 62ff.
24. See David Gaunt, chapter 11 in this volume.
25. Generally for Turkish evidence, Trkiye Cumhuriyeti Babakanlk Devlet
Arivleri Genel Mdrl, Osmanl Arivi Daire Bakanl, Ariv Belgelerine Gre
Kafkaslarda ve Anadoluda Ermeni Mezalimi, I. 19061918 (Ankara: Trkiye Cum-
huriyeti Babakanlk Devlet Arivleri Genel Mdrl, 1995); Ahmed Rustem Bey,
La guerre mondiale et la question turco-armnienne (Berne: Ferdinand Wyss, 1918),
173202.
Notes to Pages 265267 401

26. Rustem, La Guerre mondiale, 19293, 200.

27. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Der verpasste Friede (Zurich: Chronos, 2000), 449.
28. Anahide Ter Minassian, Van 1915, in Armenian Van/Vaspurakan, ed. Rich-
ard Hovannisian (California: MAZDA, 2000), 22324.
29. Ibid, 223.
30. Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna (hereafter HSSA), PA I, 947, folder
21c, Pera, Dec. 21, 1914; folder 21d, Constantinople, Mar. 11, 1915, on Tlts pre-
paredness to use the police in the resettlements.
31. Taner Akam, Armenien und der Vlkermord (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition,
1996), 64; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Providence:
Berghahn, 1995), 236.
32. Berliner Tageblatt, May 4, 1916, interview with Tlt.
33. By March 6 the administrations archives were taken to the interior, the ci-
vilian population was scheduled for evacuation on any Entente forcing of the harbor,
and a number of families had already been ordered to leave: Ernst Jckh papers, Yale
University Library, le 22, Humbert to Smyrna consulate, Mar. 6, 1915. On the bom-
bardment and fears that it was intended to inspire unrest among the Greeks of the
city, see HHSA, PA I, 943, Smyrna, Mar. 8, 1915.
34. Akam, Armenien, 59.
35. Ibid, 59, 6465. On the complexity of the irregular forces, see Edward J. Erick-
son, Armenian Massacres: New Records Undercut Old Blame, Middle East
Quarterly 13, no. 3 (2006): 6775.
36. HHSA, PA I, 942, Pera, 24, Mar. 28, 1915; Constantinople, 15, Apr. 22, 1915;
Liman von Sanders, Fnf Jahre Trkei (Berlin: Scherl, 1920), 137.
37. HHSA, PA I, 942, Pera, Mar. 24, 1915; Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Arme-
nians, docs. 56, 57.
38. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Dr. Mehmed Reshid (18731919): A Political Doctor, in
Der Vlkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik
J. Schaller (Zurich: Chronos, 2000), 24580.
39. Akam, Armenien, 59.
40. Bloxham, The Great Game, 7882. The ongoing work of Aram Arkun is by far
the most detailed on this area. See his chapter in this volume (ch.10).
41. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 24, Interior Ministry to Fourth Army, Apr. 24, 1915, ending
deportations to Konya and redirecting further deportations from Cilicia southward.
42. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG
59, 867.4016/97, Beirut to Secretary of State, July 6, 1915.
43. Cited in Taner Timur, Trkler ve Ermeniler (Ankara: mge, 2000), 33. On Mus-
lim refugees, notes 10 and 11 above. On military pressure for deportations, Mehmet
Kasm, Talat Paann An1ar (Istanbul: Say, 1986), 82, cited in Fatma Mge Gek,
Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on the Armenian Massacres and Depor-
tations of 1915, unpublished manuscript.
44. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 2829, Interior Ministry to Van and Bitlis, May 9, 1915.
For earlier Muslim resettlements, AAPA, Trkei 183/36, Pera, Apr. 15, 1915.
45. AAPA, Trkei 183/36, Pera, May 6, 1915.
46. Larcher, La guerre turque, 394; Ternon, Les armniens, 230; Pomiankowski,
Zusammenbruch, 147; H. Pasdermadjian, Histoire de lArmnie (Paris: Librairie orien-
tale H. Samuelian, 1971), 458.
402 Notes to Pages 267270

47. Christopher Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London: Routledge,

1980), 208. Many defenseless Muslims did, however, remain in the city. See Kieser,
Verpasste Friede, 451.
48. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 54, Interior Ministry to Erzurum, June 27, 1915.
49. Johannes Lepsius, ed., Deutschland und Armenien (hereafter, DA), Erzurum,
May 15, 16, 18, 22 Aug. 5, 23, 1915; Pera May 30. Lepsius, Todesgang, 4243. On in-
appropriate deportations to the west, Osmanl Belgelerinde, 3233, Interior Ministry
to Erzurum, May 18, 1915.
50. Arthur Beylerian, ed., Les grandes puissances, lempire ottoman et les armniens
dans les archives franaises (Paris: Panthon Sorbonne, 1983); Allen and Muratoff, Cau-
casian Battleelds, 299. DA, Pera, May 8, 1915, for German knowledge of Armenians
escaping from Van to unite with the Russians. For the Turkish view Tevk avdar,
Talt Paa: Bir rgt Ustasnn Yaam yks (Ankara: Dost Kitabevi, 1984), 34445.
51. Horst Gnther Linke, Das zarische Russland und der erste Weltkrieg (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink, 1982), 215; cf. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battleelds, 299.
52. Pomiankowski, Zusammenbruch, 147; Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide, 115.
53. Beylerian, Grandes puissances, doc. 26, May 8, 1915; AAPA, Trkei 183/36,
Pera, May 18, 1915.
54. DA, lxxiv.
55. AAPA, Trkei 183/6, Wangenheim to Foreign Ofce, May 18, 1915.
56. On the Russian advance, see note 185, and DA, Mosul, June 10, 1915.
57. Walker, Armenia, 21112, 222. Mush and Sasun had been specied for the
earlier, targeted deportations conceived early in May: see note 183.
58. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 3233, Interior Ministry to Erzurum, May 18, 1915. On
Khynss, see Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians, docs. 53, 57.
59. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 3334, Interior Ministry to Erzurum, Van, and Bitlis,
May 23, 1915; Orel and Yuca, Les telegrammesde Talt Pacha, Interior Ministry to
Adana, Aleppo, and Marash, May 23, 1915. Specically, the deportations ordered for
Cilicia and Aleppo stipulated: (1) the districts (sancaks) of Adana, Mersin, Sis/Kozan,
and Cebel-i Bereket/Drtyol, except the central towns of Adana, Sis, and Mersin; (2)
all the districts and villages in Aleppo, Iskenderun/Alexandretta, Bilan, Cisr-i Shu-
gur, and Antakya, with the exception of the central district of Aleppo; (3) the sancak
of Marash except the central town.
60. Reproduced in Kamuran Grn, The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence
Exposed, (London: Rustem, 2005), 206.
61. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 3032, May 30, 1915; Dadrian, History, 221.
62. DA, Erzurum, June 18, and Aug. 23, 1915.
63. Kevorkian, Le sort des dports Armniens Ottomans, 1112, 16; Hilmar Kaiser,
At the Crossroads of Der Zor (Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute, 2001), 10.
64. Kevorkian, Le sort des dports Armniens Ottomans; Kaiser, At the Crossroads of
Der Zor.
65. Alice Odian Kasparian, The 1915 Massacres of the Armenians in the State
of Angora, Turkey, Journal of Armenian Studies 4, nos. 1, 2, (1992): 12425.
66. DA, Erzurum, June 18, 1915.
67. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 43, Interior Ministry to Erzurum, June 14, 1915.
68. AA, Trkei 183/37, Pera, June 17, 1915.
69. Orel and Yuca, Les telegrammesde Talt Pacha, Interior Ministry to Erzurum
(Tahsin Bey), June 9, 1915.
Notes to Pages 271273 403

70. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 62, Interior Ministry to provincial leaderships, July 5,

1915.
71. See Taner Akam, Rethinking the Ottoman Archival Material: Debunking
Existing Myths, unpublished manuscript.
72. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 68, Directorate of Settlement of Tribes and Refugees
communiqu, July 12, 1915. On subsequent deportations to Der Zor, see 12426. On
the district governor of Der Zor redirecting deportees to Mosul because they exceeded
the quota, DA, Rler to Bethmann, Apr. 27, 1916.
73. On the historiography of disease and genocide in the Second World War, see
Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 7879.
74. Kvorkian, Le sort des dports armniens ottomans, esp. 6061. For German
sources testifying to Circassians attacking the Armenians at Ras-ul-Ain in April
1916, see DA, Rler to Constantinople, Apr. 6, 1916; on the same around Der Zor,
DA, Hoffmann to Metternich, Aug. 29, 1916; Hoffmann to Metternich, Sept. 5, 1916;
also Rler to Bethmann, Apr. 27, 1916, recording deaths at the rate of 300500
daily or almost daily for a month. On Bedouins attacking Armenian convoys on
the road to Mosul and Der Zor, DA, Loytved Hardegg to Bethmann, May 30, 1916.
On Halils statement of murderous intent as he arrived in Mosul in Nov. 1915, see
DA, doc. 190, Holstein to Constantinople, Nov. 4, 1915.
75. Kvorkian, Le sort des dports armniens ottomans, esp. 6061. On the inconsis-
tent and utterly inadequate provision, DA, Mosul, May 4, 1916, annexe 4 to doc. 263.
76. DA, Metternich to Bethmann, Mar. 29, 1916.
77. Annette Hss, Die trkischen Kriegsgerichtsverhandlungen 19191921
(PhD: Vienna, 1991), on the postwar trial of these responsible secretaries. Also
Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in
the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal, Journal of Political and Military
Sociology, 22 (1994): 97132, and Dadrian, The Complicity of the Party; DA, no. 282.
78. Osmanl Belgelerinde, 140, Interior Ministry to Cemal, Apr. 26, 1916, on the
dispatch of an inspector to Marash owing to the leniency shown toward Armenians
by the district governor; also Kaiser, Der Zor, 1516.
79. Dadrian, Documentation, 98.
80. Dadrian, The Complicity of the Party, 87; Hss, Die trkischen Kriegsgeri-
chtsverhandlungen, 76, 78, 81, 8233, 96, 130.
81. Reid, Militarism, 611; Arnold J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece
and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations (London: Constable and Co., 1923),
27880.
82. On these massacres, Walker, Armenia, 21112, 222.
83. C. Sorabji, A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
in War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalised Violence, ed. R. Hinde and H.
E. Watson, 8099 (London: Tauris, 1995). Thanks to Mark Levene for this reference.
84. Immortalized in Franz Werfels fact-based novel of the same name (1933).
85. Documents, 2, no. 1903, 49, 52.
86. Van Tosp, Jan. 9, 1915.
87. Sarkisyanz, Transcaucasian Armenia, 119.
88. Ibid, 13334.
89. Opinion of Varandian in Pavlovitch, La Russie et les armniens, 479.
90. Katchaznouni, Armenian Revolutionary Federation, 67.
404 Notes to Pages 274277

91. ZdI, series II, vol. 7, part 1, no. 765. In April 1915 too, Nubar had been assigned
with la mission dlicate de dfendre les intrts armniens auprs des Puissances
allies: Boghos Nubar Pacha, Revue des tudes Armniennes 10 (1930): 213216, here
213.
92. Chalabian, Andranik, 21819.
93. DNA, Correspondence Armnie 1915, I, Nubar to Sahag, Apr. 30.
94. On the politics of this Darwinian international system, and the longer-term
impact of the agendas of the European powers on intercommunal relations in the
Ottoman Empire, see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, ch. 1.
95. Berliner Tageblatt, May 4, 1916. Interview with Talt.
96. See, e.g., Guenther Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Turkey: A Disputed Geno-
cide (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), and the critiques of his argu-
ments about genocide (or the absence thereof) in various European colonial contexts
on the basis of the absence of a clear prior intent. The critiques may be found in the
Journal of Genocide Research (2008).
97. Or conversely, like Dyer (Turkish Falsiers), they have depicted Van as
bringing a shift to deportation in Ittihadist policy out of a clear blue sky.

CHAPTER 13
1. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conict from
the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995), and
Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conict (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1999); Taner Akam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Na-
tionalism and the Armenian Genocide (New York and London: Zed Books, 2004), and
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Raymond Kvorkian, Le gnocide des armni-
ens (Paris: O. Jacob, 2006).
2. Especially Esat Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi (Ankara: Yeni Matbaa,
1950); Kamuran Grn, Ermeni Dosyas, 5th ed. (Lefkoa: Rstem, 2001); Yusuf
Halaou, Facts on the Relocation of the Armenians (19141918) (Ankara: TTK, 2002);
and Kemal iek, Ermenilerin Zorunlu G 19151917 (Ankara: TTK, 2005).
3. For more details see kr Haniolu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Preparation for a Revolution:
The Young Turks: 19021908 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
4. This chapter will not address these cases. For the problems Cemal Pasha had
in this context, see Fuat Dndar, Modern Trkiyenin ifresi: ttihat ve Terakkinin
Etnisite Mhendislii [The Modern Turkeys Cipher: The Ethnicity Engineering of
CUP] 19131918 (Istanbul: letiim, 2008), especially see the subchapter entitled
The Issue of the Inclusion of Aleppo in the Resettlement Area and Cemal Pasha;
and the English edition: Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Ques-
tion (18781918) (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2010).
5. In the 1890s an Ottoman map named the Deir-ez-Zor region the Province of
Desert/Desert Province (l Vilayeti), see BOA, Yldz Arivi Resmi Maruzat (Y. A.
Res.), 55/38, 21 Za 1308 (1891). Published the rst time by Sarah D. Shields, Mosul
before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2000).
Notes to Pages 277281 405

6. Mehmet Nasrullah and Mehmet Rd, Mehmet Eref, Memlik-i Mahrse-

i hneye Mahss Mkemmel ve Mufssal Atlas (Istanbul, 1907); new edition edited
by Rahmi Tekin and Yaar Ba, Osmanl AtlasXX yy. balar (Istanbul, OSAV,
2003).
7. Its population density also was the least ten years previously; 1.2 per km2, cf.
Halil nalck and evket Pamuk, eds., Osmanl Devletinde Bilgi ve statistik (Ankara:
Babakanlk Devlet statistik Enstits, 2001), 17273. Even though its surface is
smaller today, the population of the Deir-ez-zor region of Syria has not increased a
lot; it population was 133,000 habitants in 1994.
8. Jean Hannoyer, Campagnes et pouvoir en Syrie: Essai dhistoire socio-conomique
sur la rgion de Deir-ez-Zor (PhD dissertation: Paris 5, E.H.E.S.S., 1982), 41.
9. Dahiliye Nezareti Emniyet-i Umumiye Mdriyeti Kalem-i Umumi (DH.
EUM.KLU) 9.24. (Aug. 2, 1918).
10. Hannoyer, Deir-ez-Zor, op. cit., 80.
11. Dahiliye Nezareti dare-i Umumiye (DH.ID) 45.1253.
12. Hannoyer, Deir-ez-Zor, op. cit., 37.
13. DH.ID 45.1238.
14. Vahi airetlerin iskan ve yerletirilmesi ile ziraat ve iftilie ynlendirilmesi ile
sorunlarn zlmesi ve bylece ticaret ve mahalli servet ve dolaysyla devlet hazinesine
gelirler katks. Cf. DH.ID 45.125.1.
15. DH.ID 45.1253.5.
16. DH.ID 45.12/59.1.
17. DH.ID 45.1253.
18. DH.ID 45.1259.
19. In 1918, Zor region had not lost its wild (vahi) character. On the Feb. 23,
1918, session of the Ottoman Parliament (Meclis-i Mebusan), during the discussion
on the draft bill for changing the regional boundaries of Aleppo, the undersecretary
of the Interior Ministry Mustafa Abdlhalik Bey proposed the installation of three
new districts (kaza) south of the Aleppo-Zor line, where

there is no district today. As I proposed just now, there are 650 villages which
have not yet been disciplined (zaptrapt) and fettered. Before the register, we
have to establish a government [authority] there.... The government wanted
to move along the desert. And it proposes to form three districts.... A caravan
that left Aleppo reaches Zor without the authority of the government. There is
no government anywhere. Therefore, when there are attacks by Arab nomads
(urban) and bandits, the perpetrators disappear by the time the governments
of Zor and Aleppo are informed.

Cf. Meclis-i Ayan Zabt Ceridesi (MAZC), 3,4,1,28, 1918.02.23, 429.

20. Emmanouil Emmanouilidis was the Ottoman Greek deputy who left Turkey
after the population exchange in 1922. His memoirs were then published in 1924 in
Greece as Ta teleftaia ete tes Othmanikes Aftokratias (the Last years of the Ottoman
Empire) (Athens:<pub>, 1924).
21. Meclis-i Mebusan Zabt Ceridesi (MMZC), 3, 1, 1, 26, July 6, 1914, 60910.
22. MMZC, 3, 1, 1, 26, July 6, 1914, 611.
23. DH.FR 50.141 (2.3.1915) From the EUM to Adana. See especially 118 Report
in Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 191516.
406 Notes to Pages 281287

24. Alpay Kabacal, ed., Talat Paann Anlar, 3rd ed. (stanbul: letiim, 1994), 81.
25. Essentially the members of two Armenians parties were targeted: the Hnchak
(1887, Geneva), and the Dashnaktsutiun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation, 1890).
26. According Esat Uras, on the night of April 24, 240 Armenians, and in two
days 2,345 Armenians were arrested in Istanbul. cf., Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni
Meselesi (Ankara:<pub>, 1950), 620; English translation, The Armenians in History
and the Armenian Question (Istanbul: Documentary publications, 1988).
27. Dahiliye Nezareti ifre Kalemi (DH.FR) 52.93 (April 24,1915). From the
EUM to Cemal Pasha.
28. Askeri Tarih ve Stratejik Aratrmalar Enstits (ATASE) Cl. 44, Ds. 207, F.
21, 22 in Documents sur les armniens, VI, Presidence du conseil direction gnrale
de la presse et de linformation, 8990.
29. The command is sent to the governors of Van (Cevdet Bey), Bitlis (Mustafa Abdl-
haluk Bey), and Erzurum (Tahsin Bey). DH.FR 52.200 and DH.FR 52.281282.
30. Gadz F. Minassian, Les relations entre le CUP et la FRA la veille de la
Premire guerre mondiale daprs les sources armniennes, Revue dhistoire arm-
nienne contemporaine 1 (1995): 4599.
31. DH.FR 53.93 (23 .5.1915) and DH.FR 53.94, 941 (May 23, 1915) to Cemal
Pasha.
32. Genelkurmay, N 1/1, c. 44, d. 207, f. 23, cited by Erdal Aydoan, ttihat ve
Terakknin Dou Politikas (Istanbul: tken, 2005), 358.
33. Founded with the Law for the Settlement of Immigrants dated May 13,
1913, as skan- Ayir ve Muhacirn Mdriyeti (IAMM), its main mission was the
settlement of the Muslim immigrants and refugees and the settlement of nomads.
It was reorganized as the General Directorate for Settlement of Tribes and Refugees
Aayir ve Muhacirn Mdriyet-i Umumiyyesi (AMMU) on Mar. 14, 1916. For
more details see Fuat Dndar, ttihat ve Terakkinin Mslmanlari skan Politikas
(19131918) (stanbul: letiim, 2001), 5761.
34. Meclis-i Vkela Mazbatalar (Cabinet Protocoles, MVM), V 198, N 1331/163.
Cf. Y.H. Bayur, Trk nkilap Tarihi 3/3, Ankara 1957, 4042.
35. Published in the ofcial journal, Takvm-i Vekyi, May 19, 1331 [1915], 7/2189.
For transcription, see Bayur, op. cit., 4042. This law was conrmed Sept. 15, 1915,
by Ottoman Parliament.
36. DH.FR 54.87 (June 21, 1915). From the EUM to Trabzon, Mamuretl-aziz,
Sivas, Diyarbakr and Canik.
37. DH.FR 54.122 (June 23, 1915) From the IAMM to Musul and Zor.
38. See the document 189 in Salhi R. Sonyel, Displacement of the Armenians:
Documents/ Le Dplacement des Populations Armniennes: Documents/ Ermeni Tehciri
ve Belgeler (Ankara: TTK, 1978).
39. DH.FR 54.315 (July 5, 1915). And also see, DH.UMVM 131.87 (July 5, 1915).
40. Ermeni meselesinin suret-i katiyede halli, DH.FR 54.426 (July 13, 1915).

CHAPTER 14
1. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1985), 3; Mark Levene, Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide? Jour-
nal of World History 11, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 30536; Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide:
Notes to Pages 287290 407

Utopias of Race and Nation (Princton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Samuel
Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds., Century of Genocide: Critical
Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2004); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age
of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 19141991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994);
Jol Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, eds., Le sicle des camps: Dtention, concentration, exter-
mination: Cent ans de mal radical (Paris: Latts, 2000); Jonathan Steele, It Will Be
Remembered as the Age of Barbarism, Guardian Weekly, Dec. 30, 1999; Albert
Camus, Le sicle de la peur, in: Combat 2 (Nov. 1946): 331; Niall Ferguson, The War
of the World: Historys Age of Hatred (London: Penguin, 2006).
2. The overlap with the age of dictatorships is no coincidence: Stephen J. Lee,
European Dictatorships, 19181945 (London: Routledge, 2003).
3. Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War (New York: Doubleday, 1954).
4. Ian Kershaw, War and Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe, Con-
temporary European History 14, no. 1 (2005): 10723, at 1078; original italics.
5. Micha Brumlik, Das Jahrhundert der Extreme, in Vlkermord und Kriegsver-
brechen in der ersten Hlfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Irmtrud Wojak and Susanne
Meinl (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 2004), 1936, at 34.
6. Gtz Aly and Suzanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the
Logic of Destruction (London: Phoenix, 2003), 285.
7. Amir Weiner, Introduction: Landscaping the Human Garden, in Landscaping
the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Frame-
work, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8.
8. Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars, and the Unweaving of Europe (Lon-
don: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 101.
9. Willam H. Tolman, Social Engineering (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1909); Jacob
C. van Marken, Sociale ingenieurs, Delftsche Corps-Almanak (1894): 15570. For an
overview of this trend, see David stlund, Det sociala kriget och kapitalets ansvar:
Social ingenjrskonst mellan aff rsintresse och samhllsreform i USA och Sverige 1899
1914 (unpublished PhD thesis, Stockholm University, 2003).
10. For an example of persecution in the Middle Ages, see David Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
11. Cf. Milica Zarkovic Bookman, The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Polit-
ical Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World (London: Frank Cass,
1997); Myron Weiner and Michael S. Teitelbaum, Political Demography, Demographic
Engineering (New York: Berghahn, 2001); John McGarry, Demographic Engi-
neering: The State-Directed Movement of Ethnic Groups as a Technique of Conict
Regulation, in Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 4 (1998): 61338.
12. Alison Palmer, Ethnocide, in Genocide in Our Time: An Annotated Bibliogra-
phy with Analytical Introductions, ed. Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann,
121 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian, 1992); Robert van Krieken, Reshaping Civiliza-
tion: Liberalism between Assimilation and Cultural Genocide, Amsterdams Sociolo-
gisch Tijdschrift 29, no. 2 (2002): 21547.
13. This word is derived from the German term Eindeutschung, which denoted the
envisioned forced assimilation of non-Germans eligible for Germanization during
World War II. Nazi intellectuals further devised the concept of eindeutschf hig, which
can be literally translated as Germanizable, the degree to which non-Germans
408 Notes to Pages 290294

were suited for assimilation under racial criteria. Guy Thewes, Stdteplanung als
Instrument der nationalsozialistischen Eindeutschungs-Politik, THmecht:
Zeitschrift fr Luxemburger Geschichte 54, no. 3 (2002): 36986.
14. Fatma M. Gek, Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on the Arme-
nian Deportations and Massacres of 1915, in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating
the Twentieth Century, ed. Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, and Y. Hakan Erdem (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2006), 10127.
15. Mark Levene, Creating a Modern Zone of Genocide: The Impact of Nation-
and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 18781923, Holocaust and Genocide
Studies 12, no. 3 (1998): 393433.
16. Fikret Adanr and Hilmar Kaiser, Migration, Deportation, and Nation-Build-
ing: The Case of the Ottoman Empire, in Migrations et migrants dans une perspective
historique: Permanences et innovations, ed. Ren Leboutte, 27392 (Florence: Euro-
pean University Institute, 2000); Hilmar Kaiser, The Ottoman Government and the
End of the Ottoman Social Formation, 19151917, paper presented at the confer-
ence Der Vlkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, University of Zurich, Nov. 7,
2001, available at: http://www.hist.net/kieser/aghet/Essays/EssayKaiser.html.
17. Fuat Dndar, ttihat ve Terakkinin Mslmanlar skn Politikas (19131918)
(stanbul: letiim, 2001).
18. Taner Akam, Trk Ulusal Kimlii ve Ermeni Sorunu (stanbul: Su, 2001),
49147, 16174.
19. Rfat Bali, Bir Trkletirme Serveni 19231945: Cumhuriyet Yllarnda Trkiye
Yahudileri (stanbul: letiim, 1999).
20. Ayhan Aktar, Varlk vergisi ve Trkletirme politikalar (stanbul: letiim,
2000), 10134.
21. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ost-
provinzen der Trkei 18391938 (Zrich: Chronos, 2000).
22. The latter is analyzed in great detail in David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance,
Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscat-
away, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2006).
23. Erol lker, Contextualising Turkication: Nation-Building in the Late Otto-
man Empire, 190818, Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 4 (2005): 61336.
24. Kerem ktem, Incorporating the Time and Space of the Ethnic Other: Na-
tionalism and Space in Southeast Turkey in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Cen-
turies, Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 4 (2004): 55978.
25. Soner aaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is
a Turk? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).
26. For a sound analysis see: Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Im-
perialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
27. Erik-Jan Zrcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and
Progress in the Turkish National Movement (19051926) (Leiden: Brill, 1984).
28. For examples of hostile parliamentary debates including rich use of profanity
and even an occasional brawl, see: Tark Zafer Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler,
vol.1, kinci Merutiyet Dnemi (Istanbul: letiim, 1997), 62728, 488 footnote 11.
29. Ziya Gkalp, Trklemek, slmlamak, Muasrlamak (Ankara: Ziya Gkalp
Yaynlar, 1976), 93. For postwar programs of Turkication cf.: Ziya Gkalp,
Notes to Pages 294295 409

Trkln Esaslar (Istanbul: Kamer, 1996 [1921]), translated into English: Ziya
Gkalp, The Principles of Turkism, transl. Robert Devereux (Leiden: Brill, 1968).
30. Yorgo Boo was a Greek member of parliament known for vehemently criti-
cizing the CUP policies.
31. Fevziye A. Tansel, ed., Ziya Gkalp Klliyat 1: iirler ve Halk Masallar
(Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu Yaynlar, 1989), 113.
32. Ziya Gkalp, Kzlelma (Ankara: Kltr Bakanl Yaynlar, 1976 [1914]).
33. Enver Behnan apolyo, Ziy Gkalp ve ttihad Terakki ve Merutiyet Tarihi:
Evli ve Fotora, coedited by Nevzat Kzlcan (Istanbul: n.p., 1974), 149.
34. Agh Srr Levend, ttihat ve Terakki Kongreleri, in Memleket, Dec. 16, 1947, 2.
35. Halil Mentee, Osmanl Mebusan Meclisi Reisi Halil Menteenin anlar (Istan-
bul: Hrriyet Vakf Yaynlar, 1986), 165.
36. According to British sources, Tlt spoke these words at the 1910 CUP con-
gress. George P. Gooch and Harold W.V. Temperley, eds., British Documents on the
Origins of the War, 18981914 (London: Printed and published by His Majestys Sta-
tionery Ofce, 1926), vol. 9, part 1, document no. 181, 2078. However, there is no
denitive evidence that corroborates this claim, although at this conference the
Turkists gained the upper hand. Tark Zafer Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler, vol.
3, ttihat ve Terakki (Istanbul: letiim, 1997), 28687. According to a Turkish sociol-
ogist educated in the United States, the slogan aimed at economic Turkication.
Ahmed Emin, Turkey in the World War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1930), 113. Judging from the then reigning Zeitgeist, the Young Turks may have
adopted the term from the Polish nationalist slogan Poland for the Poles (Polska
dla Polakw). Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World
Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 37.
37. Cell Bayar, Ben de yazdm: Mill Mcadeleye Gidi (Istanbul: Baha, 1967),
5:1573.
38. Ibid., 5:1578, 1579. The concentration of Greeks in zmir (Smyrna) prompted
Turkish nationalists to use the term Indel zmir (gvur zmir) to describe that
harbor city. Vangelis Kechriotis, From Giavour Izmir to Hellenic Smyrna: Recon-
struction of a Lost Atlantis, paper presented at the conference Nationalism, Society
and Culture in Post-Ottoman Southeast Europe, University of Oxford, May 29, 2004.
39. Covert oral orders were an important phenomenon during CUP rule.
Although it was logical that genocidal orders were issued orally, even critical
decisions like the alliance with Germany, and the declaration of war on the Entente
powers were taken this way. Said Halim ve Mehmed Tlt Paalar kabinelerinin
Divan- liye sevkleri hakknda Divaniye mebusu Fuad Bey merhum tarafndan verilen
takrir zerine bery- tahkikat kura isbet eden Beinci ube tarafndan icr olunan
tahkikat ve zabt edilen ifdat muhtevidir (Istanbul, 1918), 4.
40. kdam, Dec. 29, 1913 (no. 6052), 3.
41. Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanl mparatorluunda Airetlerin skn (Istanbul:
Eren, 1987), 120.
42. Hilmar Kaiser, Shukru Kaya and the Extermination of the Ottoman Arme-
nians: The Portrait of a Perpetrator, lecture at California State University, Apr. 6,
2000.
43. Adil Hikmet Bey, Asyada Be Trk (Istanbul: tken Neriyat, 1999); Cemal
Kutay, Birinci Dnya Harbinde Tekilt- Mahsusa ve Hayber Cengi (Istanbul: Tarih, 1962).
410 Notes to Pages 295297

44. Dr. Bahaeddin akir was born in Thrace and enjoyed his medical education
at the Military Medical Academy in Istanbul. After joining the CUP in 1906 he
moved to Paris, where he assisted Ahmet Rza in reviving the CUP. After returning
to Istanbul he became one of the most inuential members of the CUPs Central
Committee in 1912. His closeness to Tlt quickly allowed him to rise in rank, exem-
plied by the fact that he was charged with organizing the Special Organization in
1914. His role in the persecution of the Armenians was pivotal. He was shot dead in
Berlin on April 17, 1922, by Aram Yerganian, an Armenian hitman. Hikmet iek,
Dr. Bahattin akir: ttihat ve Terakkiden Tekilat Mahsusaya bir Trk Jakobeni
(stanbul: Kaynak, 2004).
Dr. Nzm was born in Salonica and joined the rst CUP in 1889 during his med-
ical education. He continued his study in Paris, where he met Dr. Bahaeddin akir
and worked with Ahmet Rza to unite the CUP with the Ottoman Freedom Com-
mittee in 1907. After 1908 he too became a member of the Central Committee, and
even made it to secretary-general of the CUP. His role in the persecution of the
Armenians was as covert as it was profound. In 1918 he became minister of educa-
tion but ed the country before the armistice. He was executed in 1926 by the Kemal-
ist government for his alleged role in a plot to assassinate Mustafa Kemal (Atatrk).
Ahmet Eyicil, Doktor Nzm Bey: ttihat ve Terakki Liderlerinden (Ankara: Gn, 2004).
45. Fuat Dndar, ttihat ve Terakkinin Etnisite Aratrmalar, Toplumsal Tarih
16, no. 91 (2001): 4350.
46. Nejat Birdoan, ed., Baha Said Bey, ttihat ve Terakkinin Alevilik-Bektailik
Aratrmas (Istanbul: Berfn, 1995), 9.
47. Zekeriya Sertel, Hatrladklarm (Istanbul: Gzlem, 1977), 82.
48. BOA, DH.FR 54-A/51, Tlt to provinces, July 20, 1915.
49. Murat Koraltrk, Milliyeti bir reeks: Yer adlarnn Trkletirilmesi, in
Toplumsal Tarih 19, no.117 (2003): 9899.
50. BOA, DH.D 97/1.
51. Kerem ktem, The Nations Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the
Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey, European Journal of Turkish Studies 7
(2008), available at: http://ejts.revues.org/index2243.html
52. Ticaret ve Zraat Nazryla mlakat, Trk Yurdu 1, no. 1 (Feb. 21, 1915): 6,
quoted in Zafer Toprak, Trkiyede Mill ktisat (19081918) (Ankara: Yurt, 1982),
8081, footnote 26.
53. Bayar, Ben de yazdm, 5:160611.
54. Yannis G. Mourelos, The 1914 Persecutions and the First Attempt at an
Exchange of Minorities between Greece and Turkey, Balkan Studies 26, no. 2 (1985):
389414.
55. Uur mit ngr, When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: The Proces-
sive Nature of Genocide, Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 2 (2006): 173196.
See also the chapters by Donald Bloxham (12) and Fuat Dndar (13) in this volume.
56. BOA, DH.FR 53/91, 53/92, and 53/93, Tlt to provinces, May 23, 1915.
This is the single instance in which the empirewide nature of the deportations are
reected in one order at the most central level.
57. BOA, DH.FR 53/85, Tlt to Cemal Paa, May 23, 1915.
58. On Feb. 12, 1915, Mahmud Kmil replaced General Hafz Hakk, who had
died in a spotted typhus epidemic. Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the
Notes to Pages 297301 411

Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000),
104. Takvim-i Vekyi, no. 3540, 7.
59. PRO, FO 371/2488/51010, May 28, 1915; National Archives RG 59,
867.4016/67, May 29, 1915.
60. BOA, MV 198/163, May 30, 1915.
61. Halil nalck, Ottoman Methods of Conquest, Studia Islamica 2 (1954):
10329.
62. Hilmar Kaiser, Armenian Property, Ottoman Law, and Nationality Policies
during the Armenian Genocide, 19151916, in The First World War as Remembered
in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and
Stephan Dhne, 4971 (Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2006).
63. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Zwischen Ararat und Euphrat: Abendlndische Mis-
sionen im sptosmanischen Kurdistan, in Kurdistan und Europa: Einblicke in die
kurdische Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Zrich: Chronos, 1997), 11350.
64. BOA, DH.FR 54/216, AMM to Konya, June 28, 1915.
65. BOA, DH.FR 54/246, AMM to Diyarbakr, June 6, 1915.
66. BOA, DH.FR 54/246, AMM to Konya, June 30, 1915.
67. BOA, DH.FR 54/246, AMM to Diyarbakr, July 1, 1915.
68. BOA, DH.FR 54/39, AMM to Diyarbakr, June 17, 1915.
69. BOA, DH.FR 54/101, AMM to provinces, June 22, 1915.
70. BOA, DH.FR 54/331, AMM to Diyarbakr, July 7, 1915.
71. Vah Mamas Kitabdjian, ed., Rcit de Garabed Farchian, n Palou en 1906
ou 1907, reproduced in: Yves Ternon, Mardin 1915: Anatomie pathologique dune
destruction, special issue of the Revue dHistoire Armnienne Contemporaine 4 (2002):
287.
72. BOA, DH.UM E-26/9, December 27, 1916.
73. BOA, DH.FR 91/197, AMMU to Diyarbakr, September 22, 1918.
74. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage, 1998), 415; Erik-Jan
Zrcher, The Ottoman Empire and the Armistice of Moudros, in At the Eleventh
Hour: Reections, Hopes, and Anxieties at the Closing of the Great War, 1918, ed. Hugh
Cecil and Peter H. Liddle, 26675 (London: Leo Cooper, 1998).
75. evket S. Aydemir, Makedonyadan Orta Asyaya Enver Paa, vol. 2, (1908
1914) (Istanbul: Remzi, 1972), 497.
76. Tark Zafer Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler, vol. 2, Mtareke Dnemi (Istan-
bul: letiim, 1997), 2961.
77. Levon Marashlian, Finishing the Genocide: Cleansing Turkey of Armenian
Survivors, 19201923, in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Geno-
cide, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian, 11345 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University
Press, 1998).
78. Erik-Jan Zrcher, Een geschiedenis van het moderne Turkije (Nijmegen: Sun,
1995), 78, 271.
79. Taner Akam, Another History on Svres and Lausanne, in Der Vlkermord
an den Armeniern und die Shoah: The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, ed. Hans-
Lukas Kieser and Dominik Schaller, 281299 (Zrich: Chronos, 2000).
80. Donald Bloxham, Changing Perceptions of State Violence: Turkeys West-
ward Development through Anglo-Saxon Eyes, in Myths of Europe, ed. Richard Lit-
tlejohns and Sara Soncini, 22334 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).
412 Notes to Pages 301306

81. Gavin D. Brockett, Collective Action and the Turkish Revolution: Towards a
Framework for the Social History of the Atatrk Era, 19231938, in Turkey before
and after Atatrk: Internal and External Affairs, ed. Sylvia Kedourie, 4466 (London:
Frank Cass, 1999).
82. Hamit Bozarslan, Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey: From Tacit Contract to
Rebellion (19191925), in Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, ed. Abbas
Vali, 163190 (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 2003).
83. Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebel-
lion, 18801925 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
84. See Mehmet Bayrak, ed., Krtler ve Ulusal-Demokratik Mcadeleleri: Gizli Bel-
gelerAratrmalarNotlar (Ankara: zge, 1993), 481.
85. Weiner, Landscaping the Human Garden.
86. For a comprehensive overview of these see: Cemil Koak, Umm Mfettilikler
(19271952) (Istanbul: letiim, 2003).
87. Bayrak, Krtler, 48189, quoting the councils nal report.
88. The text of this law, numbered 1097, is available at: http://mevzuat.basbakan-
lik.gov.tr.
89. Airetler Raporu (Istanbul: Kaynak, 2000).
90. Mete Tunay, Trkiye Cumhuriyetinde Tek-Parti Ynetiminin Kurulmas
(19231931) (Istanbul: Yurt, 1981).
91. Resmi Gazete, no. 2733, June 21, 1934.
92. Koak, Umm Mfettilikler, 8182, 1001.
93. Airetler Raporu, 92102.
94. Interview conducted with Azizolu family, Stockholm, June 11, 2005.
95. Malmsanij, Diyarbekirli Cemilpaazdeler ve Krt Milliyetilii (Istanbul:
Avesta, 2005).
96. Tekin Alp, (Istanbul: Resimli Ay Matbaas, 1928), 32, 33.
97. Ibid., 65.
98. Bayrak, Krtler, 509.
99. Anl een, Atatrkn Kltr Kurumu: Halkevleri (Ankara: Gndoan, 1990).
100. Interviews conducted with several families in Palu and Midyat, June 2004.
101. Cumhuriyet, July 13, 1930, 4.
102. Cumhuriyet, Aug. 18, 19, and 20, 1930, 3.
103. Jrgen Osterhammel, The Great Work of Uplifting Mankind: Zivilisier-
ungsmissionen und Moderne, in Zivilisierungsmissionen, ed. Boris Barth and Jr-
gen Osterhammel, 363425 (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005).
104. For the Diyarbakr region see, e.g., Bedri Gnkut, Diyarbakr Tarihi
(Diyarbakr: n.p., 1937); Basri Konyar, Diyarbakr Tarihi (Ankara: n.p., 1936).
105. Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 4.
106. For a study arguing the continuity of Young Turk social engineering see Uur
mit ngr, Young Turk Social Engineering: Mass Violence and the Nation State in East-
ern Turkey, 19131950 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2009).

CHAPTER 15
1. Erik Jan Zrcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and
Progress in the Turkish National Movement (19051926) (Leiden: Brill, 1984).
Notes to Pages 306314 413

2. Erik Jan Zrcher, Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims, and Turkish National-
ists: Identity Politics, 19081938, in Ottoman Past and Todays Turkey, ed. Kemal H.
Karpat, 15079 (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
3. Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of
Power in the Ottoman Empire (18761909) (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998); and Hakan
Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 2003).
4. Erik Jan Zrcher, How Europeans Adopted Anatolia and Created Turkey,
European Review 13, no. 3 (2005): 37994.
5. Cf. George Gawrych, The Culture and Politics of Violence in Turkish Society,
19031914, Middle Eastern Studies 3 (1986): 30730. Halil Berktay has analyzed the
discourse of hatred and revenge in mer Seyfettins short stories in a number of
articles in the newspaper Taraf.
6. Erik Jan Zrcher, The Vocabulary of Muslim Nationalism, International
Journal of the Sociology of Language 137 (1999): 8192.
7. Underground networks trying to prepare for the postwar situation became
active as soon as the armistice had been concluded. Members of Enver Pashas Spe-
cial Organization (Tekilat-i Mahsusa), especially those of Circassian origin, seem to
have formed the backbone of these networks. The most important of the networks
was Karakol (The Guard), founded in October 1918 at the behest of Enver and Tlt
Pashas. This network smuggled quite signicant amounts of weaponry and equip-
ment as well as a large number of people to Anatolia in the period between Novem-
ber 1918 and March 1920. Many of those smuggled to Anatolia were people who not
only brought vital skills to the emerging resistance movement but who could also be
expected to be arrested for alleged war crimes. In 19191920 Karakol also nursed
political ambitions, trying to determine the course of the national resistance in Ana-
tolia and establishing independent relations with the Bolsheviks.
8. Tark Zafer Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler: Cilt II Mtareke Dnemi
(stanbul: Hrriyet, 1986), 92137.
9. Tunaya, Trkiyede Siyasal Partiler, 7184.
10. Andrew Mango, Atatrk (London: John Murray, 1999), 199.
11. Ulu demir, Sivas Kongresi Tutanaklar (Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu, 1969), 113.
12. Ibid., 222.
13. Ibid., 107.
14. Nimet Unan, ed., Atatrkn Sylev ve Demeleri, vol. 2 (19061938) (Ankara:
Trk Tarih Kurumu, 1959), 12.
15. Taner Akam, Sevr ve Lozann baka tarihi, in Trkiye de Etnik atma:
mparatorluktan Cumhuriyete, ed. Erik Jan Zrcher, 5189 (stanbul: letiim, 2005).
16. Selma Ilkan and Faruk Ilkan, Ankara stikll Mahkemesi (stanbul: Simurg,
2005) [a transcript of the court records].
17. The reasons to doubt the authenticity of the text are internal as well as exter-
nal. The provenance is unclear as, to the best of my knowledge, no one has been able
to trace this supposed Swiss journalist, not even under the more usual spelling of
Emil Hildebrandt or any other permutation. There is no mention of the interview in
contemporary Turkish sources either. The text itself seems to be strangely at odds
with the actual proceedings of the tribunals (which did not mention the massacres).
There are slips, which may have been due to the reporter, but are otherwise hard to
explain. Surely, someone as intimately familiar with the CUP as Mustafa Kemal would
not talk about the Committee of the Union of the Young Turks? The interview
414 Notes to Pages 314316

could easily have been made up, as it contains no actual facts beyond those that were
common knowledge in Turkey by July 1926 and were widely published in the Turkish
press.
18. Taner Akam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Question and the Question of
Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 11.
19. Hseyin Cahit Yaln, Tandklarm (stanbul: YKY, 2001), 8183, italics
added.
20. I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Mge Gek here, who has
pointed out to me the importance of the existence of this coalition in explaining the
silence of the early republic on the Armenian issue.
Index

Page numbers in the photo gallery are indicated in italics, thus: p1

ABCFM. See American Board of agrarian relations

Commissioners for Foreign Mission Armenian Question and, 80
Abdlhamid II (Sultan), 1819, 28, 33, 61, 79, ethnicity, power and, 5581
132, 261, p8 agricultural estates (iftliks), 6870, 74
abolishment of, as revolutionary project, Aharonian, Awedis, 227
12728 Aharonian, Hovhannes, 221
Dashnaktsutiuns attempt to assassinate, Ainsworth, 63
101 Akam, Taner, xiv, 35, 266, 276, 291, 313
education under, 305 Akura, Yusuf, 124, 126
Hamidiye and, organization of, 64 Aktar, Ayhan, 291
main goals of, 331n36 Albanians, 299
policies in eastern provinces under, 61 Alekseev, Mikhail, 165, 166, 17172
praise of, as ruler, 181 Aleppo, 67, 222, 23738, 405n19.
proclamation of holy war, 250 See also specic places
Reid and, 132 cotton crops in, 69
talk about exterminations after massacres deportation for, 402n59
led by, 199200 governor-general of, 224, 22628, 241
Turkish nationalism during reign of, Der Zor to, road from, 279
115 Ali Bey, 76
use of massacres, 3940 All-Russian Union of Towns, 168
Wilhelm II and, 179, 368n12 Aly, Gtz, 287
acrimonious relations, 93 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Adana Mission (ABCFM), 14041, 353n74
after pogrom of Armenians, p5 American Civil War (18611865), 69
sancak, 7677 AMMU. See General Directorate for Tribes and
Adana massacres (1909), 6, 8, 28, 41, 65 Immigrants
ARF after, 6667 Anatolia(ns), 50, 52
Assyrians as victims in, 245 Armenians permitted to stay in, 283
economic factors in, 7778 deportations within, 27071
Adanr, Fikret, ix, xiv, 11325 Greek population from, expulsion of,
ADL. See Liberal Democratic Party xviixviii, 41, 125
Aegean coast, 145 history, 32
Greek population from, expulsion of, homogenization of, 35
13233, 145 Muslim refugees in, 279
Greeks along, 29697 Railway, 208
Turkication in, 29697 threats to, 266
affective disposition, 40 Turkication of, through immigration and
aghas, 59, 62, 66, 73 assimilation, 66, 291
behavior of, 75 as Turkish fatherland, 307
power of, 61 Western, 298

415
416 Index

Anatolia, Eastern, 304 Armenian National Delegation, 223, 400n11

economic development and ethnic conict in, Armenian nationalism, 36, 110
relationship between, 5960 actions, 273
expulsions from, 269 as catalyst, 27273
interethnic tension in, 80 Armenian peasantry, 58, 62, 273
Kurds in, 58 Armenian revolutionary parties focus on
Muslim refugees in, 299300 peasantry, 9499
as obstacle, 274 general passivity of, 322n63
populations in, 58 as hafr, 60
report on reforming, 301 perspective on, 95
settlers sent to, 299 Tanzimat reforms and, 6263
Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, ix, 199217 Armenian Question, 200, 341n36
Andonian, Aram, 120 agrarian relations and, 80
Andonian documents, 320n41 Britan/Russia regarding, 341n36
Andranik, 91, 274 core of, 5859
Anz, 279 denitive solution to, 27684
anti-Christian actions/attitudes, 265 framing of, 88
of Dr. Reid, 13233, 135, 14447 Great Powers and, 100, 113
among ttihadists, 133 internalization of, 261, 341n35
Muslim refugees and, 26061 internationalization, territorialization and
by social envy, 135 radicalization of, 110
anti-Communist camp, 21 land in origins of, role of, 59
anti-Kurd sentiment, 17273 Russia, within boundaries of, 158
Arabs, 271 akir in, role of, 315
Ararat, 25859 solving, 26970
Arendt, Hannah, 22 territorialization of, 97
ARF. See Dashnaktsutiun Turkish Republic and, inception of, 43
Arkun, Aram, ix, 22143 Armenian Reforms, 201, 203, 261, 26263
armed struggle, 99101 Armenian refugees, 168. See also specic groups
Armenakans, 86 evacuation of, 16970
Armenian-American historians, xiv in Russia, 252
Armenian Apostolic Church, 86 Armenian Republics army, 398n54
Armenian Church, 223 Armenian Review, 320n48
divisions in, 22 Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF).
as representative of peoples, role of, 8687 See Dashnaktsutiun
Armenian diaspora activists, 340n19 Armenian Revolutionary Fighters, p4
during Cold War, concerns of, 2122 Armenian revolutionary parties, 27, 82112,
Armenian Genocide, 3334, 41 273, 322n63. See also Dashnaktsutiun;
criminalization of denial, 8 Hnchak Party
denialist claims about, 35 class struggle and peasantry, focus on,
development of, and WWI, 26075 9499
evidence of intent, 26869 empowerment of weak through positive laws
evolution of persecution and, 29798 of history, 8794
historiography of, 35, 275 factors of politics adopted by, 11011
Hitler and, 21617 grassroots participation, efforts towards,
holdout states toward recognition of, 23 1035
Holocaust and, 23 Great Powers and, 1034, 108
Kemalist and postwar Unionist rhetoric on, after Hamidian massacres (18941896), 92
30616 objectives of, 91
scholarship breakthroughs and, 39 Ottoman Empire, within parliamentary
as state project, 27172 system of, 28
as successful in own terms, 274 party system/structure, 8587
two poles of, 2829 peasantry, perspective on, 95
United States recognition of, 323n75 question of loyalty and, 1057
The Armenian Holocaust (Hovannisian), 22 revolutions and revolutionaries, 85105
Armenianization, 106 as threat, 109
Armenian National Assembly in Istanbul, 59 Turkish historiographys portrayal of, 83
Index 417

Armenian-Russian ties, 24647, 249, 259, after Battle of Dilman, 255

26364 Astourian, Stephan H., ix, 3334, 5581
as form of resistance, 273 Austria-Hungary, 183
military collaboration and, 269 defeat of, 19192
Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Avshar derebeys, 60
Armenia (ASALA), 4445, 48 Ayvalk, appeal to Reid, 134
assassinations of Turkish diplomats and azat Haiastan. See free Armenia
bombings by, 4243 Azerbaijan, 246, 259, 264
responses to, 49 azgaser, 94, 98
Armenians extermination, talk about, 199217. use of millet system, 9495
See also German talk Azizolu family, 302
after Balkan War, 2012
contradictions in, 2078 Bab- Ali, 279
between governments, 200201 Baghdad Railway, 179
after Hamidian massacres, 199200 Balakian, Krikoris, 240
Jckh protest against, 210 Balakian, Peter, 31
during 1915, 2067 Bali, Rfat, 291
outside of academics, 2089 Balkesir Norlar, 13334
by powerful individuals, 20810 Balkan Alliance (1912), 118
Protestant clergy, 210 Balkan Wars (19121913), xv, 33, 190
in Switzerland, 200 effects of, 34, 133
in United States, 200 Muslim-Christian relations after, 261
during WWI, obstacles of, 2045 Ottoman defeat in, and non-Muslims in
among Young Turks, 200 Ottoman army, 11326
Armenian threat, 266 stipulations after, 222
CUP, as deemed by, 1056 talk about extermination after, 2012
propagandizing about, 274 treason during, precautionary measures
Army of Action (Hareket Ordusu), 116 against, 121
Arsharuni, Hovannes, 201 Young Turks experiences after, 34, 3839
ASALA. See Armenian Secret Army for the Bashkale, 256
Liberation of Armenia Basic Principles for the Future Ordering of
Ashekian (Patriarch), 87 Armenia, 155
ashirets, 396n9 Basso, Lelio, 23
asker. See Ottoman military Battle of Dilman, 255, 268
Asker-i Tibbiyeli, 129 Batum, 15961, 162
Asmnian, Hayg, 225, 236 Bauman, Zygmunt, 294
Association for the Defense of the National Bedouin, 278, 279, 403n74
Rights in the Eastern Provinces, 13839 Bell, Duncan S. A., 325n7
Assyrian(s), 10. See also Chaldean Christians; Benckendorff, A. K. (Count), 155
Nestorians Berktay, Halil, 7
characteristics of attacks on, 24546 Berliner Tageblatt, 206
death rates, 244 Berlin Treaty (1878), 65, 86, 178, 183, 340n22
decree to deport, 248 article 61, 97
defense, 25758 revised, 108
deserters/traitors, 265 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald, 187, 192, 197
disloyalty of, 251 bey, 59, 73, 75. See also specic beys
dispersal, 24849 von Biberstein, Marschall, 175, 181, 18485,
history of, 24445 18788
inclusion of, 205 assessments of difculties in Turkey, 186
killings of, 41, 13940 bigoted killers, 38
militia, 249, 255 Bilgi University, 78
refugees in Russia, 252 Bismarck, Otto von, 178
Tlt and, 247, 248 Bitlis, 268, 270, 272
as victims in 1890s and 1909 massacres, 245 annexing regions of, 157
Assyrian-Russian ties, 244, 24647, 249, 255, 259 Muslim refugees in, 268, 332n44
Assyrians, Ottoman treatment of, 24459 refugees from, 29899
vs. Armenians, 246 Blank, Karl, 204
418 Index

Bloxham, Donald, ix, 35, 153, 26075, 288, orders from, 243
371n53 in Syria, 18
Boghossian, Paul, 10 Cemilpaazde family, 302
Bogosyan, H. M., 393n150 centralization policy, 63, 65
Bosnia(n) Central Powers, xvi
annexation, 18283, 198 Cevdet, Abdullah, 126, 12829
mass killing in, xiv Cevdet Bey
refugees, 299 in Bitlis, 270
Boucabeille, Bernard, 12223 as instigator in Haftevan, 253
Boxer Rebellion, 180, 197 Van massacres and, 25557, 26566
Britain, 18, 67, 147, 155, 164, 187, 192, 313 Cevdet Pasha, Ahmed, 71, 73
dangers from, 40 Cevr, 128, 129, 350n3
military comments on non-Muslim Chakrian, Panos, 229, 230
enrollment in Ottoman army, 117 Chaldean Christians, 205
regarding Armenian Question, position of, Chaldean Church, 245
341n36 Chamar, 279
Brumlik, Micha, 287 Charny, Israel W., 23
Buchanan, George (Sir), 156, 205 Chavush, Nazart, 239, 240
Bukovina, planned annexation of, 165 Chechens camps, 271
Bulgarians, 116, 125, 3078 Chermside, Herbert, 74, 75
deportation of, 121 children, Armenian, 140
military service, 11920 Cholakian, Mesrob, 229
Ottoman army and, 12223 Chrisliche Welt, 2067
treaty for population transfer, 351n35 Christian (Ottomans). See also anti-Christian
Blow, Bernard von, 180, 183, 369n18 actions/attitudes; Muslim-Christian
bureaucratic killers, 38 relations; non-Muslims; specic
denominations and groups
aaptay, Soner, 292 animosity toward, 18
careerist killers, 38 European power and, 3839
ark, Y. G., 47, 49, 326n17 land ownership and, 7779
Catholicos of Cilicia. See Sahag II Khabayan, merchants in Cilicia, 222
Catholicos murders of, 13645
Caucasian Republic of Armenia, 273 in Ottoman military, fteenth/sixteenth
Caucasus, 15566, 263, 330n24, 358n14, centuries, 114
360n44. See also Russian Caucasus Army under Rechtsstaat, 26
army, 159, 169, 364n88 resentment against, 307
Circassian refugees from, 72 Russian efforts to gain loyalty of, 247
Muslim refugees from, 56, 62, 278 Russian humanitarian aid to, 168
programs for ethnic consolidation in, 163 soldiers, execution of, 255
Russian military in, 15658 Syriac, 144
threat in, 201 iek, Cemil, 7
Caucasus front, 155, 17172 iftliks. See agricultural estates
ceasere on, 158 Cilicia, 67, 7475. See also Zeytun Armenian(s)
censor points, 363n74, 364n84, 366n120 administrative divisions of, 333n49
Russian military on, 169, 366n112 agricultural development of,
Cebel-i Bereket, 76 18001850s, 6870
Cell (Bayar) Bey, Mahmut, 133, 222, Christian merchants in, boycott of, 222
22628, 236, 297, 3078, 351n36, coast of, as potential weak point, 223
393n151 cotton production/cultivation in, 6869, 70,
warnings to Catholicos Sahag, 243 71
Cemal, Ahmed (Cemal Paa), xvii, 221, 231, deportations, 267, 402n59
387n89, p2 1830s-1914, 6780
assassination of, 21, 216 ethnic relations in, 67
deportations and, 281 ethnoreligious economic niches and ethnic
driving motivation of, 16 conict in, 7780
escape of, 300 interethnic tension in, 80
Germany and, 177 lawlessness in, 7576
Index 419

massacres in, 337n113 postwar, 308

Muslim immigration into, 222 power of, 16
as obstacle, 274 power structure in, 145
Ottoman ofcials ambiguity in, 243 propaganda leaets, 12930
pastoral nomads in, pacication and radicalization of policy, 260, 263, 269
immigration of, 7072 regime, 10910
refugees in, 60 removals as population policy vs. security
social impact of improvement division and policy, 205
land ownership in, (mid1860s-1890s), resignation of members from, (1911), 119
7276 revolutionary parties and, 109
Turkication of, 72 Russian policy, agitation of, 15253
Cilician economy slogan of new policy, 294
development in, and American Civil War, 69 student propaganda activities in response to
European ties with, and impact of anti-Armenian pogroms of 18941896, 129
improvement division, 7677 Turkication, preparations/plans for, 293
improvements of, 6869, 7172 use of WWI, 205
regions of, 67 Van rising and, 27475
Circassian(s) von Wangenheim and, 2045
attack on Armenians, 403n74 comradely killers, 38
camps, 271 Congress of Sivas, 311
colonies, 278 Constantinople, Islamic law code and, 184
immigration, 329n23 Constantinople Treaty (1913), 125
Circassian refugees, 72 Constitutional-Democrat Party, 156
from Caucasus, 72 Constitutional Revolution (1908), 81
role of, 60 continuity thesis, 317n2
class struggle, 9499 Convention of London (July 15, 1840), 71
Clinton, Bill, 5 converted Armenians, 140, 270, 283
Cold War, 2122 cotton production/cultivation, 6871
collective consciousness, 33 coup dtat of January 26, 1913, 16
collective memory, 4344 Crimean War (1850s), 69, 72, 344n20
collective myth, 4344, 325n7 armed forces in, 115
Commission of Usurped Lands, 65 crimes against humanity, 19192
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), xvii, as identied by Russia, 154
66. See also ttihadists ukurova, 68, 76
Armenian, paranoia about concentrated lawlessness in, 7576
groups of, 271 cumulative radicalization, 3536, 399n1
Armenians as threat as deemed by, 1056 CUP. See Committee of Union and Progress
coup, 113, 124 Cyprus, 68
Dashnaktsutiun and, 93, 106, 111, 113
demographic engineering and, 290, 300 Dadrian, Vahakn N., xiv, 23, 31, 276
Entente powers, declaration of war on, arguments from religion, 2830
409n39 Dashnaktsutiun (Armenian Revolutionary
founders of, 126, 12829 Federation; ARF), 21, 27, 261, 337n113,
Foyers turcs and, 128 341n26. See also Armenian revolutionary
German relations with, 185 parties
Germany, pact with, 263 after Adana massacres (1909), 6667
imperial mission of, 34 armed struggle, use of, 99101
inner enemy, meeting regarding, 266 assassinate Abdlhamid II, attempt to, 101
inspections of, pressure from neutral CUP and, 93, 106, 111, 113
countries for, 136 Droshak, second issue, 85, 90
investigations conducted for, 294 founders of, 8788
nationalism of, 3536 goals of, 8889, 90
Nationalist movement and, connection guerrilla leaders, 91
between, 4647 after Hamidian massacres (18941896), 92,
nationalization, adjustments to carry out, 100
29596 Hnchaks and, differences/similarities
oral and secret telegraph orders, 272, 409n39 between, 90, 9293, 98
420 Index

Dashnaktsutiun (continued) orders for, 272

on liberation, 103 Permanent Peoples Tribunal trial
members in Mara, 227 examining, 2324
one nation concept and, 1013 policed, 38
program (1892), 8990 Reform Plan and, 302
revolutionary nature of, 84, 10712 scope of, 27071
in Russian Armenia, 102 in Syria, 281
socialism and, 96 Tlts effort to disguise, 29798
systems/structure of, 8587 by train, p6
terror, use of, 100101 after Van rebellion/uprise, 26869
Daudet, Justin, 70 of Zeytun Armenians, 23638, 24243, 267
Davidson, Roderic H., 115 to Der Zor, 277, 28081
death estimates since 1945, 324n93 Deportation Law, 283
The Death March of the Armenian People derebeys, 60, 71
(Lepsius), 215 behavior of, 75
dehumanizing image of Armenians, 137, 145 Deringil, Selim, 306
democratic peace, 37 Dershowitz, Alan, 23
democratization, 37 Dervi Pasha, 71
demographic engineering deserters/traitors, 265. See also Zeytun bandits/
CUP, 290, 300 deserters
deportations and, 291 Desert Province. See Der Zor
during Kemalist Republic, 3034 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 216
19141945, 287305 Deutsche Bank, 179, 208
six strategies of, 28889 Dink, Hrant, 8
of space/property, 29192 assassination of, 9
Turkish nationalism and, 29091 demonstrator at funeral procession for, p4
Young Turk, phases of, 288 Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and
denial(ist) Immigrants (AMM), 282. See also General
claims about Armenian Genocide, 35 Directorate for Tribes and Immigrants
as crime, 8 four units, 295
culture of, 29 Law for Settlement of Immigrants (May 13,
reduced, 35 1913), 406n33
Turkish, xiii, 45 disciplined killers, 38
viewpoints of events, 2425 disloyalty, 263
deportation(s) (srgn), 39, 41, 19192, 297, p7 Diyarbakr, 266, 272
Aleppo, 402n59 characteristics of extermination in, 14344
within Anatolia, 27071 First General Inspectorate in, 302
of Armenian intellectuals and politicians, Muslim refugees in, 299
28182 in 1915, 13642
Assyrian, 248 public awareness of murder in, 14143
beginnings of, xvii, 1920, 4041 resettlement in province of, 300
Bulgarian, 121 Reid as vali of, 136
Cemal and, 281 Djezireh (Cizre), 139
Cilicia, 267, 402n59 Dodd, William S., 236
crimes and, 269 Dreyfusards, 200
demographic engineering and, 291 Droshak, 85, 90
into desert regions as deadly, 276 Dschahid, Hussein, 196
divergent interpretations of, 276 Dndar, Fuat, x, 27684, 291
driving factors of, xv Dring Pasha, 130
ve waves of, 28184
history, 298 Eastern Crisis (18751878), 115, 260
Kemalist campaigns after 1930, 302 eastern provinces (1860s-1914), 5867, 13839.
of Kurds, 297, 298 See also specic places
legitimating, 268 under Abdlhamid II, policies in, 61
mass, goals of, 17071 Hamidian massacres and, 6567
Morgenthaus elaboration of causes for, Kurds in, 6364
1819 provincial politics of, 6163
Index 421

socioeconomic and interethnic relations in, ethnoreligious conicts, 55

5859 ethnoreligious economic niches, 7780
Eastern Question, 96, 304 Etniki Heteria, 129
Eberhard, Wolfram, 70, 73, 75 Eucken, Rudolf, 203
Ebu-kemel, 278 Europe
Ecevit, Blent, 5 Cilicias economic ties with, 7677
Edhem, brahim (Temo), 12829 intervention from, hopes of, 2728
Edict of Glhane, 115 nationalism in Eastern, 127
Edirne, 12122, 28384 power of, 3839
suspicious persons, arrest of, 121 exaggerated nationalism, 195, 196
Egyptian army, evacuation of, 71 reference to, 197
Egyptian rule, 68 exemplary repression, 38
Eichmann, Adolph, 22 extermination, 14344. See also Armenians
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 22 extermination, talk about
eindeutschf hig, 407n13 eyalet. See governorate
Elekda, kr, 89 Ezgilian Efendi, Nshan, 22831
lmajian, Eruant, 233
Emin, Hikmet, 12829 Fahri Pasha, mer, 224
Emmanouilidis, Emmanouil, 280, 405n20 farmers (zer kurri), 61
empire, 30 fearful killers, 38
Entente, 122, 214, 263, 27374, 309, 312 Fearon, James D., 324n93
appeal to powers of, 261 fellahs, 72
Armenian sympathy with, 19, 263, 266, 269 Ferid Pasha, 190
CUP declaration of war on, 409n39 Fethi, Ali, 310
German co-responsibility, charges of, 209, Feyzi, Pirinizde, 13839
211 Frka-i Ahrar, 131
propaganda, 176, 206 frka-i islahiyye. See improvement division
Entente, sympathy with, 19, 263, 266, 269 First Army Corps, 117
Enver, Ismail (Enver Paa), xvii, 183, 295, p1 First General Inspectorate, 302
on Armenian policy, 211 First Report on Provincial Oppressions, 59
command of Caucasian front against Russia, First Republic of Armenia, 9394
18 Fitzmaurice, Henry, 65
driving motivation of, 16 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Werfel), 21, 217
escape of, 300 Foyers turcs, 128
Germany and, 177 France, 18, 67, 17576, 187, 192, 199200, 262,
military campaign, 268 328n79
Erzberger, Matthias, 195, 20910 German atrocities in occupied northern, 164
Erzurum, 156 proposed criminalization of denial of
annexing regions of, 157 Armenian Genocide in, 8
arrests in, 267 Franco-Prussian War (19701871), 359n35
massacre in, 266, 270 Frankfurter Zeitung, 206
Eref, Kuuba, 295 free Armenia (azat Haiastan), 2728
ethnic cleansing, 55 Freedom and Coalition Party, 300
acceptance of events of 1915 as, 10 French National Assembly, 8
in Hakkari Mountains, 247, 257, 25859 French Revolution, 88, 98
historiography narratives on Armenian, Frye, Richard, 320n44
4445 Fuad, Kprlzade Mehmed, 124, 348n84
ethnic competition, 5556
ethnic conict, 55 Gadzhemukov (Prince), 364nn9091
in Cilicia, 7780 pro-Kurdish policy of, 16768
in eastern Anatolia, relationship between Galicia
economic development and, 5960 planned annexation of, 165
ethnic engineering, 125 Russian occupation of Austrian, 153, 158,
ethnicity, agrarian relations/power and, 5581 16263
ethnic mobilization, 16364 second occupation of, 171
ethnic reprisal policy, 265 Garo, Armen, 282
ethnic violence, 324n96 Gaunt, David, x, 24459
422 Index

gvur. See indels Germanophiles, 183

Gawar region, 250, 256, 257, 258, 396n16 German Orient Mission, 213
General Directorate for Tribes and Immigrants German-Ottoman relations, 17598
(AMMU), 296, 406n33 alliance, 19698
genocide, 275 commitment in, 18687
conception of, 6 concerns over internal affairs of Empire and,
scholars of Turkish and Kurdish origin, 35 18485
societal levels of, xvixvii near end of WWI, 195
structural-cultural analysis of, 3334 WWI and, 177
studies, xiv, 24, 37 German Peace Society, 208
term invented by Lemkin, 22 German Press Association, 211, 212
UNs denition of, 910 German talk, 200, 210, 21415, 216
war and, xivxv after Balkan War, 2023
von Gerlach, Hellmut, 208 censorship of, 2068
German(y). See also Nazi-Germany Church and, involvement of, 21213
atrocities in occupied Belgium and northern silence of, 21213
France, 164 after WWI, 21217
Cemal and, 177 German-Turkish Association, 193
co-responsibility, charges of, 209, 211 German-Turkish Friendship Society, 18889
CUP military, pact with, 263 German-Turkish Union, 203, 210
CUP relations with, 185 Germany and Armenia (Lepsius), 215
defeat of, 19192 Giddens, Anthony, 287
documents, silence in, 195 globalization, 81
Enver Paa and, 177 Gek, Fatma Mge, x, xiv, 314, 7, 4252, 290,
Gulpashan, intervention to protect, 252 316, 319n10
inaction of, 19697 Gkalp, Ziya, 33, 124
intervention of embassy, 143 on Turkication, 294
knowledge of Reid, 137, 14243 Gould, Andrew Gordon, 7374, 75, 76
missionaries and businessmen from, role of, governorate (eyalet), 67
176, 188 Great Game of Genocide (Bloxham), 371n53
neoclassicism, 177 Great Powers, 356n3
noninterventionist path of, (1980s), 201 appeal to powers of, 261
Ottoman Empire, interest in, 177 Armenian Question and, 100, 113
Ottoman Empire, representatives in, 180 dangers from, 40
penetration of Ottoman Empire, political and help from, xv
economic, 179 Hnchak Party appeals to, 340n18
policy vs. Russian policy, 152 intervention, 341n34
Protestantism, 213 involvement/noninvolvement of, xviii, 36
role of, 20 politics, 200
settlements, 178 revolutionary parties and, 1034, 108
strategy, 18182 Greek(s)
Tlt and, 143, 177 in Aegean area, 29697
WWI, role in, 20 expulsion of, from Aegean coast, 13233, 145
Young Turk and, relations between, 179, 183 expulsion of, from Anatolia, xviixviii, 41, 125
Young Turk Revolution and, 183 law on general conscription and, 117
German Aid Federation for Christian Charity in movement of, 36
the Orient, 210 Muslim refugees in, villages, 280
German-Armenian relations, 18990 Ottoman army and, 12223
German-Armenian Society, 202 Greek city (Yunan), 134
German East, 178 Greek-Orthodox clergy, 116
German-Islam relations, 184 Greek-Orthodox Ottomans (Rumlar), 26162,
Germanizable, 407n13 351n36
German military expulsion of, 13335, 143, 147
censorship, 2068 Greek Revolution (18211829), 114
institutional culture of, 164 guerrilla ghters, 91
pre WWI, 180 guilt, 48
Young Turk Revolution, aid to, 17576 Gulpashan, 254
Index 423

German intervention to protect, 252 Dashnaktsutiun and, differences/similarities

von Gwinner, Arthur, 208 between, 90, 9293, 98
rst program released by, 85
hafr, 60 founders of, 8788, 88
Haftevan, mass executions in, 253 Great Powers, appeals to, 340n18
Hakkari Mountains, 247, 257, 25859 after Hamidian massacres (18941896), 92,
Halil (Mentee) Bey, 194, 25455, 294 322n63
defeat of troops, 255 Kum Kapu (1890), 87
Urmia, departure from, 25657 Long Term Goal, 88
Hamidian massacres (18941896), 6, 28, 3940, one nation concept and, 1013
41, 261 program of change, 9798
Armenian revolutionary parties after, 92 provocation thesis after decline of, 27
Assyrians as victims in, 245 revolutionary nature of, 84, 10712
CUP student propaganda activities in socialism in, 9091
response to, 129 strategies, 96
Dashnaktsutiun after, 92, 100 systems/structure, 8587
eastern provinces and, 6567 terror, use of, 100101
Hnchak Party after, 92, 322n63 trial of leaders for, 106
land and demographic policies and, 6567 Veragazmial, 92
talk about, 199200 Hofmann, Tessa, 23
Wilhelm IIs protest against, 371n59 Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Ernst zu, 19495
Hamidiye, 26, 40, 64. See also Kurd(ish) Holocaust
Hanm, Mazlme, 130 Armenian Genocide and, 23
Hareket Ordusu. See Army of Action awareness, xiv
Hasan Pasha, 13132 consciousness, 22
Hatt- Hmayun, 79. See also Imperial Decree historical uniqueness of, xiv
Havel, Vclac, 211 internationalists vs. structuralists views, 6
Hayastantsi(s), 97 scholarship, 35
Haydar Bey, Ali, 222, 389n105 term used in New York Times, 320n47
imprisonment/torture of Zeytun Armenians Holquist, Peter, x, 15174
by, 22526 Holstein, Walter, 141, 205, 215, 354n89
hayrenaser, 94, 98 demand for removal of Reid, 143
view of millet systems, 95 Horne, John, 164
Hazarabedian, Melkon Agha, 22425 House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 5
Hertzberg, Arthur, 23 Houzi, 25051
Hilderbrand, Emile, 314 Hovannisian, Richard G., xiv, 22, 23
von Hindenburg, Paul, 223 Hull, Isabel, 164
historiography, Turkish, 4252 humanitarian intervention, xvi
of Armenian Genocide, 35, 275 Humann, Hans, 215, 216
land relations and, 5758 Hurit Bey, 231
mythicized, 4243 attack on monastery, 23435
narratives on Armenian ethnic cleansing of Hseyinzade, Ali, 126
1915, emergence of, 4445 Hsn Bey, Hseyin, 222, 225, 226
nationalism and, 51
origins of ofcial, 4344 AMM. See Directorate for the Settlement of
portrayals of revolutionary parties, 83 Tribes and Immigrants
Hitler, Adolf, 199 Ianushkevich, N. N., 158, 16364, 165, 166
Armenian Genocide and, 21617 brahim Pasha, 71
genocidal intentions of, 27475 to Cilicias economic improvements,
military objective, 372n2 contributions of, 68
Hnchak Congress of 1909, 91 identity, 11
section 4 of program, 103 Armenian vs. Turkish, 3233, 8385
Hnchak Party (Social Democratic), 261, demographic engineering and, 288
337n113. See also Armenian revolutionary Islamic, 33
parties national, 42
aims and motives of, 27 ideological killers, 38
armed struggle, use of, 99101 Imperial Decree (Hatt- Hmayun) (1856), 57
424 Index

imprisonment of, 14041 Jagow, Gottlieb von, 202

improvement division (frka-i islahiyye), 71 Janissary Corps, 115
economic developments to Cilicia and, 7172 JCOAG. See Justice Commandos of the
economic impact of, 7677 Armenian Genocide
social impact of, and land ownership, 7276 Jevdet Bey. See Cevdet Bey
Independence Tribunal, 314 Jews, 291
indels (gvur), xv, 25 Russian violence against, 362n67
zmir, 295, 409n38 Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide
voluntary inferiority of, 26 (JCOAG), 4445, 48
ingratitude, 25 assassinations of Turkish diplomats and
ingratitude, Armenian, 25 bombings by, 4243
inner enemy, 266, 270, 319n32 responses to, 49
nn, smet, 49 justication, 24, 135, 14447, 268
inspectorate, 136
intellectuals and politicians, deportations of, Kadri, Hseyin, 310
28182 Kaiser, Hilmar, 291
internationalists vs. structuralists, 6 Kmil Paa, Mahmud, 297
irade (1982), 339n128 memoirs, 4546
Iran Karakol, 3089, 313, 413n7
forces, 25152 Kars, 15961, 162
pre-WWI political situations in, 24648 Kaya, kr, 295
protest over atrocities committed by Ottoman Kedourie, Elie, 325n1
military, 25354 Kemal, Kara, 297
Russian relations with, 250, 25152 Kemal, Mustafa (Atatrk), 4344, 48, 49, 51,
Russian retreat from, 252 308, 313
Russian victory in, 25556 elimination of Unionist leaders, 314
Iranian Christian militia, 247 opening speeches, 312
Iranian-Turkish border strip, 24649 Kemal Bey, smail, 19091
Iranian Christian militia for border defense, Kemalist (regime), 291, 301
247 assault on Kurds, 262
irredentism, 307 censorship in, 316
Islam, 30 demographic engineering during, 3034
German relations with, 184 deportation campaigns after 1930, 302
identity, 33 nationalism, 36
mobilization along, 113 policies toward non-Muslims, 293
superiority, 64 press laws under, 316
violence and, 18 rhetoric on Armenian Genocide, 30616
Islamic law code, 184 theocracy and, 30
Islamization, 66 Kent, Marian, 200
Ismael Agha, 257 Kessler, Harry (Count), 208
ttihadist party. See Committee of Union and Kvorkian, Raymond, 276
Progress Khan, Bedr (Bedirhan), 63
ttihadists (CUP members), xv, 127 Khrimian (Archbishop), 86
anti-Christian attitudes among, 133 Khurshid (Hurit) Bey, 1067
ttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti. See Committee of Kieser, Hans-Lukas, x, 12648, 291
Union and Progress killers, nine types of, 38
Iudenich, Nikolai, 159 Konya province, 237, 24243
zmir, 67, 121, 124, 125, 266, 284 Kot, James, 70
economy, 297 Kramer, Alan, 164
indel, 295, 409n38 Krivoshein, Alexander, 15556
von Khlmann, Richard, 196, 197
Jckh, Ernst, 188, 193, 194, 372n79 Kum Kapu (1890), 87
eulogy for Tlt, 215 Kuper, Leo, 23, 321n54
as Jckh-the-Turk, 204 Kuran, Ahmet Bedevi, 131
Orient Library of, 2034 Kurd(ish), 40. See also anti-Kurd sentiment;
protesting talk, at German-Turkish Union, pro-Kurdish policy
210 anti-Kurd sentiment, 17273
Index 425

deportations of, 297, 298 Law for Settlement of Immigrants (May 13,
derebeys, 60, 71 1913), 406n33
in eastern Anatolia, 58 Law of Fundamental Organization, 30910
in eastern provinces (1860s-1914), 6364 laws of humanity, 154
Gadzhemukov, pro-Kurdish policy of, 16768 Lemkin, Raphael, 22, p3
genocide scholars, 35 Lepsius, Johannes, 193, 200, 202, 21214
Kemalist assault on, 262 power of, 211
Nestorians and, tensions between, 331n30 reports by, written during war, 318n1
nomadic tribes, 70 in trial for Tehlirian, 215
racism towards, 3034 Levene, Mark, 291
Reform Plan and, 3012 Lewis, Bernard, 3132
religious intolerance, 64 opposing United States recognition of
Russia, relations with, 61 genocide, 323n75
Russian military, subject to labor for, 17172 Libaridian, Gerard J., xxi, 82112
Russian relocation of, 171 Liberal Democratic Party (Ramgavar) (ADL),
treatment of Armenians, 26 211, 339n1
Turkication of, 298 liberation, 88
violence against, communities, 173 Liebermann, Max, 203
Kurdish tribe leader/landlord Liebknecht, Karl, 210
hafr to, 60 Lifton, Robert Jay, 23
Nikolaevich and, 167 on Morgenthau, 15
Vorontsov-Dashkov and, 167 List, Friedrich, 177
Kuropatkin, Aleksei, 156, 358n24 literature, 15152
Little Armenia, 157
Laitin, David D., 324n93 Littmann, Enno, 207
land Livingston, Bob, 5
fraudulent registration, 81 Lohr, Eric, 366n112
Hamidian massacres, and demographic London Times, 2012
policies after, 6567 Los Angeles Examiner, 314
legalization of conscation of, 62 Lowry, Heath, 15, 23, 318n4
in origins of Armenian Question, role of, 59 the loyal millet (millet-i sadka), 25
power differentials and, 81 loyalty/patriotism
landholding, 81 questions of, 1057, 263
patterns, 5758 suspicions over, 39
Russian policy on, in occupied territories, to Turkish nation, xiiixiv
16869 Ltf Efendi, 279
Land Law (1858), 5758, 62, 338n119
article 8, 74 Macedonian Muslims, 23839
article 14, 7980 Macedonian Slavs, 116
article 78, 7475 Macedono-Bulgarian leaders, 345n31
article 115, 7879 Mahmud II, 115
article 116, 79 Maji-Maji, 180, 197
article 117, 79 malikne, 68
article 130, 74 Mandelshtam, Andrei, 153
benefactors of, 64 Mann, Michael, 3738
land ownership Mann, Thomas, 203
Christian Ottoman, 7779 Mara, 222
improvement division and, social impact of, Dashnaktsutiun members in, 227
7276 governor, replacement of, 226
winter settlement patterns and, 7071 heads of prominent families in prison in,
land relations, 57 389n105
historiography and, 5758 relations with/reactions to Zeytun, 22425,
practices in, 6061 23133
land usurpation, 59, 65, 81 Marashlian, Levon, 23
cases of, 332n42 Marschall. See von Biberstein, Marschall
Langer, William L., 25, 2627 Mar Shimun, 24445, 248
Lausanne Treaty (1923), 21, 293 capture of, 25758
426 Index

Martens, Fedor, 153 modernization, 81

Marx, Anthony W., 325n9 of Ottoman military, 115
Marxist ideology, 88, 92, 96, 98, 322n63, secular, 21
337n113, 339n1 Mommsen, Hans, 36, 399n1
massacres, xvii. See also specic massacres Morgenthau, Henry, xvi, 30, 318nn23,
Abdlhamids use of, 3940 319nn3132, p3
beginning of, xvii, 1920, 4041 contributions to history, 2021
in Cilicia, 337n113 deportation and massacres of Armenians,
comparative study of modern, 3738 elaboration of causes for, 1819
culture of, 29 memoirs, 1520, 215
in Diyarbakr, 13642 the Turk as used by, 17
driving factors of, xv Mosul, 271
in Erzurum, 266, 270 attack of convoys on road to, 403n74
in Haftevan, 253 Motherland (Vatan) (Gkalp), 294
Morgenthaus elaboration of causes for, muhacirs. See Muslim refugees
1819 Muhtar Pasha, Ahmed, 119, 122
of Muslim Turks, 48 mullahs, 59
Permanent Peoples Tribunal trial Mmtaz Bey, Mustafa Ahmet, 226, 231,
examining, 2324 393n151
study of, 37 conclusions of, 24142
in Van, 25557, 26566 Mnf, Ali, 238
at Der Zor, 238 Musa Dagh, 27273
materialist killers, 38 Muslim(s), 17. See also Russian-Muslims;
Mazhar, Yusuf, 303 Zeytun Armenian-Muslim relations;
McCarthy, Justin, 23 specic people and groups
media, 316. See also specic publications actions in accordance with doctrine, 30
censorship in Kemalist Turkey, 316 Christians and, economic competition
coverage, 8, 2012 between, 38
liberalized censorship over, 49 decline of power (eighteenth century), 26
Mehmed Asaf, 4546 immigration into Cilicia, 222
Mekteb-i Tbbiye-i Askeriye. See Military Medical Macedonian, 23839
School massacres of, 48
Melson, Robert, 2425 nationalism, 308
MID. See Russian Foreign Ministry social status and, 2527
Mikayelian, Kristapor, 92, 341n26 superiority, 29
Mikhailovich, Georgii, 16162 villager by Russian soldier, murder of,
Military Medical School (Mekteb-i Tbbiye-i 362n61
Askeriye), 128, 147, 410n44 Muslim-Christian relations
religious education at, 129 after Balkan Wars, 261
military necessity logic, 18687, 19293, 197 economic competition and, 38
militia, 249, 255 Muslim refugees (muhacirs), xv, 267, 3067
Miliukov, Pavel, 156 in Anatolia, 279
millet-i sadka. See the loyal millet anti-Christianity and, 26061
millet system, 2526, 30, 86, 292 in Bitlis, 268, 332n44
azgaser use of, 9495 from Caucasus, 56, 62, 278
hayrenaser view of, 95 in Diyarbakr, 299
mill iktisat. See national economy in Eastern Anatolia, 299300
Milovanovi, Milovan, 118 expulsions and, 26465
minorities, 8384 in Greek villages, 280
dened in Lausanne Treaty, 293 resettlement of, 66, 8081
exclusion of, 325n9 Tlt on, 280
past and present, 44 Mustafa, Cemilpaazde, 13839
research on, 29293 Musul, 28284
in Turkey, 52, 29293
Turkication of, by force, 3023 Naimark, Norman M., xi
Minority Memorial Narrative, 290 Nalchajian, Garabed, 225
miribe, 60 Naqshbandi order, 64
Index 427

narratives on Armenian ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims. See also specic peoples

1915. See also Ottoman Investigative British military comments on, enrollment in
Narrative on 1915; Post-Nationalist Critical Ottoman army, 117
Narrative on 1915; Republican Defensive Kemalist policies toward, 293
Narrative on 1915 in Ottoman army, Ottoman defeat in Balkan
emergence of, 4445 Wars and, 11326
toward post-nationalist, 5052 recruits, role of, 12223
national economy (mill iktisat), 33 resistance to join Ottoman army, 12021
nationalism, 2829, 31, 325n1. See also Noradunghian, Gabriel, 28, 119
Armenian nationalism; exaggerated Norashkharhian, Eghia, 230, 234
nationalism; Turkish nationalism Norashkharhian, Nazart Chavush, 222, 225
amnesia in, 44 Norashkharhian clan, 229, 23031
arguments from, 3334 Novick, Peter, 23
clashing, 4 Nubar Pasha, Boghos, 223, 27374, 400n11
of CUP, 3536 Nuri, Osman, 61
in Eastern Europe, 127 Nutuk. See Speech
Kemalist, 36
logic of, 3637 October Revolution, 158
modern ideologies of, xv ktem, Kerem, 292
Muslim, 308 Okyar, Fethi, 31213
role of, 41 olam, 60
Turkish ofcial historiography and, 51 Oldenburg, Alexander, 161
Turkism/Pan-Turkism and, 3334 one nation concept, 1013
violence and, 288, 289 Operation Nemesis, 314
Young Turk, 36 oppressors (Rum), 134
Nationalist movement, 4647 organizations from outside Empire, 223
National Pact, 311 Osman, Topal, 313
Naumann, Friedrich, 188, 206 the Other, 40
Nazarbekov (Nazarbekian) (Prince), 255, concept of, 34
398n54 The Ottoman Armenians during the Era of
Nazif, Sleyman, 132, 136, 138, 225, 234, Ottoman Decline (May 2005), 78
352n52 Ottoman Constitution (1908), 109
Nazi-Germany, 175, 407n13. See also Hitler, Ottoman Empire, 304. See also Assyrians,
Adolf; Holocaust Ottoman treatment of; German-Ottoman
genocide and, 207 relations; specic places and events
Nzm Pasha, Hseyin, 126, 29596, 410n44 application of law in, 76
escape of, 300 Armenian political parties within
memoirs of, 4546 parliamentary system of, 28
Nesim Bey, Abidin, 142, 354n93 Armenian power in, 30
Nesim Bey, Hseyin, 354n93 centralization of, 63, 65
Nestorians, 24445 defeat of, 19192
Kurds and, tensions between, 331n30 eastern provinces of, (1860s-1914), 5867
revolt, 256 as German interest, 177
Nestorians of Tiyari massacres (1943), 63 German penetration of, political and
New York Times, 253 economic, 179
Holocaust, term used in, 320n47 German representatives in, 180
niche overlap, 55, 328n5 as land of tolerance, 204
Nicholas II (Emperor), 154, 162, 165 nationalist violence in, 289
Niepage, Martin, 214 political culture of, dominant element in,
Nikitin, Basil, 248, 252 2930
Nikolaevich, Nikolai (Grand Duke), 165, 166, population politics in, 26263
173 religion in, 31
Kurdish leaders and, 167 shift in nature of, 39
Sazonov correspondence with, 15758 social conditions of, 52
Nogay Tatars, 72 as state actor, 17374
Nolde, Boris, 153 theocracy and, 3031
noninterference, principle of, xvi Turkish-Armenian relations within, 8384
428 Index

Ottoman Empire (continued) exchange, 16061, 300301

to Turkish Republic, transition from, 46 policy vs. security policy, 205
WWI, entry into, 26263, 342n6 politics, 26263, 288
WWI, rulers during, 3435 transfer, 351n35
Ottoman Freedom Committee, 410n44 Post-Nationalist Critical Narrative on 1915, 45,
Ottoman High Command, 120 4950, 290
Ottoman Investigative Narrative on 1915, Pro Armnia, 200, 202
4547, 290 pro-Kurdish policy, 16768
Ottomanism, 113, 124 property
Ottoman Liberal Peoples Party, 31011, 31213 administration of deportees, 141
Ottoman military (asker), 295 to Christian Ottomans, transfer of, 7779
British military comments on, 117 crimes against, 55
buildup in Sawuj-Bulak, 25152 demographic engineering of, 29192
Christians serving under, fteenth/sixteenth expropriation of, 298
centuries, 114 freehold, 79
execution of Christian members of, 255 Protestant clergy, 210
Irans protest over atrocities committed by, proto-nationalist seeds, 48
25354 Provincial Regulation of 1858, 71
mobilization of, xv provocation thesis, 2425, 2627, 100
modernization of, 115 after decline of Hnchaks, 27
non-Muslim participation in, 11326
non-Muslim recruitment to, opposition to, Quataert, Donald, 57
116
non-Muslim resistance to join, 12021 racial hatred, xv
Russia, operations against, 154 racism, 3034
service, 11920, 345n40 Turkish, 4
Ottoman Public Debt Administration, 263 radicalization of policy, 35, 38, 269, 275
outside agitators, 25 CUP, 260, 263, 269
Radikal, 7
Palologue, Maurice, 157 Raison dtat, 24
Pamuk, Orhan, 8 Ramgavar Party. See Liberal Democratic Party
Pan-Turanism, 4 Ras ul-Ain, 271
role of, 41 Rathenau, Walter, 2089
Pan-Turkism, 3334 rationalization, 24
Pan-Turkist escapism, 307 Rauf Orbay, Hseyin, 300, 311
Papo, David, 11718 Realpolitik, xvi
Paramaz, 1067, 112 rebellion prevention, 243
paranoia about concentrated groups of, 271 Rechtsstaat (state ruled by law), 26
Paris Peace Conference, 244 Red Apple (Kzlelma) (Gkalp), 294
Pasha, Mahmud eveket, 116, 180 Reform Act (February 8, 1914), 67, 153, 202
pastoral nomads, pacication and immigration Reform Council for the East, 301
of, 7072 Reform Plan (1925), 3012
Penses et souvenirs de lex-sultan regional governors (valis), xvii
Abdul-Hamid (Vahbi Bey), 332n41 religion. See also specic religions
Permanent Peoples Tribunal, 2324 arguments from, 2831
perpetrator ideology, 3536 conict of power and, 2930
Persian Armenians, 1013 in Ottoman Empire, 31
Peshkov, Zinovy, 167, 169, 171, 364n100 religious hatred, xv, 4
Peterson, 160 religious intolerance, 64
Picot, George, 156 religious leaders (sharifs), xvii
Plan A, 39 Renewal Party (Teceddt Frkas), 30910,
Plan B, 39 31213
Plan C, 39 Re-Ordering: Noble Rescript of the Rose
Plan D, 39 Chamber (Tanzimat: Hatt- erif of
Pokrovskii, Mikhail, 356n3 Glhane) (1839), 57
policed deportations, 38 Report on the Situation of the Armenians (July
population 1916), 214, 215
Index 429

Republican Defensive Narrative on 1915, 45, Little Armenia, control over, 157
4749, 290 mortality rates in regions controlled by, 164
Republican Peoples Party, 43, 49, 304 Ottoman military operations against, 154
resentment, 307 regarding Armenian Question, position of,
Reid, Mehmed (ahingiray), 12648, 266, 341n36
349n1 Russo-Turkish war, expansion after, 178
Abdlhamid II and, 132 as state actor, 17374
anti-Christian actions of, 13233 Transcaucasia, 27
anti-Christian discourse and justications, Van, forces arrival at, 26768
135, 14447 Russian Armenia(ns), 1013, 21112
arrest of, 146 Dashnaktsutiun in, 102
assassinations of kaymakams, 142, 144, slaughter of, 159
354n89, 354n93 Russian Caucasus Army, 155, 156, 159, 16263,
Ayvalk appeal to, 134 165, 16970
in exile, 130 Russian Foreign Ministry (MID), 153, 356n5
expulsion of Rumlar, 13335 Russian military, 356n5
Germans knowledge of, 137, 14243 in Caucasus, 15658
Holsteins demand for removal of, 143 on Caucasus front, 169, 366n112
interrogations of, 144 labor, enlisting civilians for, 17172
memoirs, 4546 Muslim villager by, murder of, 362n61
patriotic and radical personality of, 130, 132 in occupied territories of Turkey, conduct
propaganda placing blame on, 13839 of, 165
reections of, 14647 ofcial policy toward occupied regions, 171
Tlt and, 13536 refugees, evacuation of, 16970
vali, promotion to, 13536 violence of, 163
revolution, 85. See also specic revolutions and Russian-Muslims, 362n64
parties treatment of, 15961
in political history of nineteenth and Russian occupation of Armenia (1915-February
twentieth centuries, 127 1917)
Rhtor, J., 140 Armenian refugees banned return to, 168
Rza, Ahmed, 183, 184 dynamics of, 174
Rohrbach, Paul, 212 intentions, 16768
Rssler, Walter, 205 as outlined by Sazonov, principles for, 169
Rostom (Stepan Zoryan), 93 politics and practice of, 15175
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 81 portrayals of, Turkish/Armenian literature
Rum. See oppressors and, 15152
Rumelia, 60, 65, 66, 311, 329n23 Sazonov-Nikolaevich correspondences
Rumlar. See Greek-Orthodox Ottomans regarding, 15758
Russia(n), 1819, 39. See also Armenian-Russian Russian policy, 152, 356n5
ties; Assyrian-Russian ties conduct of, in face of CUP agitation, 15253
annexation, formal position on, 15557 from 1880s, 61
annexationist ambitions of, 155 vs. German policy, 152
Armenian Question within, 158 on landholding in occupied territories,
Assyrian and Armenian militia and, 249 16869
Assyrian/Armenian refugees in, 252 relocation of Armenians/Kurds and, 171
Austrian Galicia, occupation of, 153, 158, during WWI, 153
16263 Russian relocation of, 171
Christians, efforts to gain loyalty of, 247 Russo-Turkish war (18771878), 64, 95, 115
crimes against humanity, as identied by, 154 Russian expansion after, 178
dangers from, 40
humanitarian aid in Turkey from, 168 Sabahaddin (Prince), 131
Iran, relations with, 250, 25152 Sabit Bey, 142
Iran, retreat from, 252 afak, Elif, 8
Iran, victory in, 25556 Sahag II Khabayan, Catholicos, 222, 22627,
Jews, violence against, 362n67 233
Kurds, relations with, 61 Aharonian to discuss with, 227
Kurds, relocation of, 171 Cells warnings to, 243
430 Index

Said, Shaikh, 301 of provincial notables, 330n28

Said Agha, 257 religious conict of power and, 2930
Said Pasha, 119 Society for the Defense of the National Rights
Sairt, 257 of Anatolia and Rumelia, 311
akir, Bahaeddin, 126, 29596, 308, p2 Solarz, Stephen, 5
in Armenian Question, role of, 315 Solomon, Gerald, 5
assassination of, 21, 216 Somakian, Manoug J., 364n87
character of, 315 Sonyel, Salahi R., 25
escape of, 300 Sorabji, Cornelia, 272
Tlt and, relationship between, 410n44 Special Organization (Tekilat- Mahsusa), 37
Salmas, 246 external/internal branches of, 295
Sandanski, Yane, 116 mobilization of, xvxvi
von Sanders, Otto Liman, 195 role of, 24546
San Stefano Treaty, 97, 108, 340n22 secret meetings, 295
Sarkam, 26364 Speech (Nutuk) (Kemal, M.), 4344, 51
defeat at (19141915), 6, 18 St. Asduadzadzin monastery, 23031
Sassun region, 6061 attack on, 23435
Sazonov, Sergey, 154, 155 numbers in, 387n89
Nikolaevich correspondence with, 15758 status quo, 107
principles for Russian occupation as outlined armed struggle to change, 99
by, 169 oppositions to, 95
von Schellendorf, Friedrich Bronsart, 195 status reversals, xvi
von Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin, 205, 216 Stresemann, Gustav, 209, 372n79
Second Report on the Oppression of structuralists vs. internationalists, 6
Armenians, 59 subject to labor for Russian military, 17172
secular modernization, 21 Sublime Porte, 59
sedentarization, 73, 80 Su leaders, 64
socioeconomic and political impact of, kr, Mehmet, 311
58 kr, Mithat, 126, 137, 146
ekib Efendi, 71 Skti, shak, 12829
selem/selef, 60 Sleymanl, 239
separatist, 40 Sultaniye district, 236
Serop, 91 Suny, Ronald Grigor, xi, 314, 1541
Shahamirian, Shahamir, 340n22 opening of WATS statement, 4
Shakhovskoi, B. N., 167, 364nn8789 superiority, 29, 47, 64
Shakhovskoi, Dmitrii Ivanovich, 364n87 Surnian, Bab Agha, 240
sharifs, xvii srgn. See deportation
Shatakh district, 26566 Surname Law (1934), 303
Shaw, Ezel Kural, 2627 Suto Agha, 257
Shaw, Stanford, 23, 25, 2627, 320n44 Swanson, Glen W., 123
sheikhs, 59 Switzerland, 200
power of, 61 Sykes, Mark (Sir), 156, 157
Shimmon, Paul, 25859 Sykes-Picot agreement, 156
Simko, 167 Syria, 18, 68. See also specic regions
Simmel, Georg, 203 Cemal in, 18
Smith, Floyd, 14041, 353n74 deportations in, 281
torture of, 353n77 Syriac Christians, 144
Smith, Roger W., 15, 318n2 Syrian Orthodox, 245
Smyrna. See zmir
Social Darwinism, 125, 137, 146 Takvim-i Vekayi, 46
Social Democratic Party. See Hnchak Party Tlt, Mehmet (Tlt Paa), xvii, 16, 126, 205, p1
social envy, 137 on Armenian policy, 211
socialism, 9091, 96, 109 assassination of, 21, 21516
role of, 95 Assyrians, issued decree to deport, 248
social status, 2527 Assyrian tribes, eradication of, 247
analysis of, 33 authorizations of, 270
jealousy, 4 deportations, effort to disguise, 29798
Index 431

deportations to desert region and, 277 Trebizond, 156

emotions of, 1718 annexing regions of, 157
escape of, 300 Triumvirate, xvii. See also specic members of
German intervention, reaction to, 143 coup dtat of January 26, 1913 and, 16
Germany and, 177 Trotsky, Leon, 123
internal enemies, 319n32 Tsiternakaberd, 22
Khlmann on, 196 Tu, 25354
memoirs of, 4546 Tupschoefski, 122
motivations of, 16 the Turk
on Muslim refugees, 280 characteristics of, 1617
position on Armenian subject, 1920 in early twentieth century, use of, 3233
propagandizing about Armenian threat, Morgenthau, as used by, 17
274 nature of, 28
religious observance of, 319n10 Turkication, 28. See also specic places
Reid and, 13536 of Anatolia through immigration and
akir and, relationship between, 410n44 assimilation, 66, 291
to Van uprise, reaction of, 19 articulation of, 29394
on Zeytun, 242 of Cilicia, 72
Zor, on decision to deport to, 28081 dispersed settlement to ensure, 299
Tamamshev, Mikhail, 168 economy, 29697, 409n36
Tanzimat: Hatt-i erif of Glhane. See of education, 299
Re-Ordering: Noble Rescript of the Rose ethnic indeterminacy and, 293
Chamber forcible, 38
Tanzimat period, 26, 30 Gkalp on, 294
beginning of, 62 initiated from 1910, 26162
Tanzimat reforms, 33, 40, 261 of Kurds, 298
Armenian peasantry and, 6263 language, 296
TARC. See Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation of minorities by force, 3023
Commission of names/places, 296
Teceddt Frkas. See Renewal Party social, 296
Tedmir, 278 Turkish-American relations, 45
tehcirler. See deportation Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission
Tehlirian, Solomon [Soghomon], 21, 215 (TARC), 7, 317n4
Tek Byk, 224 Turkish denial, xiii, 45
Tekinalp, Moiz Kohen, 135 Turkish derebeys, 60
Tekinalp, Munis, 204 Turkish Encyclopaedia (Trk Ansiklopedisi), 126
Tell Ermen, 300 Turkish-French relations, 8
Temporary Statute on the administration of Turkish Independence Struggle, 4344
the territories of Turkey, seized by right of Turkish Irregular Forces, p6
war (June 1916), 158 Turkish-Islamic lines, mobilization along, 113
ten percent principle, 271, 282 Turkish nationalism
Ternon, Yves, 23, 317n2 Abdlhamid II, during reign of, 115
territorialization, 97, 110 demographic engineering, 29091
terror, 100101 ideology, 5051, 294
Trzian, Mardiros, 22728 political elite of, 292
Tekilat- Mahsusa. See Special Organization Turkish Republic, 304
Tewk Pasha, 179 allegiance to, 49
theocracy, 29 in anti-Communist camp, 21
Ottoman Empire and, 3031 emergence of, 41, 42, 48, 49, 289, 290
Young Turk/Kemalists and, 30 rst years of, 314
Thomas, Lewis, 21, 320n44 governing structure of present-day, 34
Thrace, 12122 inception of, and Armenian problem, 43
hostilities in, 119 nationalist violence in, 289
Tbbiyeli, 131 nation-formation in, 292
Track Two, 7 Ottoman Empire to, transition from, 46
trans-state nation, 102 Unionist leadership and, 49
treason, precautionary measures against, 121 Turkish War of Independence, 46
432 Index

Turkism, 3334 as form of resistance, 273

birth of, 127 public acceptance of, as genocide, 911
Turkoman Varjabedian, Nerses (Patriarch), 90, 97
derebeys, 71 Veragazmial, 92
tribes, 70 victims, p7
Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (Werfel), 21,
lker, Erol, 29192 217
UN. See United Nations vilayet, 67
underground networks, 413n7. See also Karakol violence. See also specic acts of violence
ngr, Uur mit, xi, 287305 ethnic, 324n96
Unionist, 31314 Islam and, 18
categories of postwar, 308 nationalist, 288, 289
denitive solution of, to Armenian Question, perpetrators of, 38
27684 of Russian military, 163
documents, 312 in struggle for liberation, 101
genocide and, 31415 study of, 37
leadership, 49 of twentieth century, nature of, 287
postwar rhetoric on Armenian Genocide, violence, Turkish, 28
30616 Morgenthaus understanding of, 17
The Unionist Factor (Zrcher), 306 source of, 31
United Nations (UN) violent killers, 38
Convention on the Prevention and Vorontsov-Dashkov, Illarion Ivanovich, 155,
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 6 16566
genocide, denition of, 910 Kurdish leaders and, 167
Genocide Convention (December 9, 1948), pro-Armenian policy, 16566
22 Vvedenskii, P. P., 254
United States. See also American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Mission; Wallerstein, Immanuel, 59
American Civil War (18611865) von Wangenheim, Hans Freiherr, 20, 142, 186,
Armenians extermination talk and, 200 374n14
Embassy, reports of killings to, 19 conclusions on genocide, 205
recognition of genocide, 45, 323n75 CUP an, 2045
talk in, 200 Halil Bey, meeting with, 194
Turkish-American relations and, 45 Kemal Bey, conversation with, 19091
Urmian district, mission in, 25455 support of Ottoman policies, 192
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 23 urge to stop abuse of Armenians, 201
United States House International Relations war. See also specic wars
Committee, 45 genocide and, xivxv
Uras, Esat, 21, 47, 49, 326n17 internal and civil, study of, 37
Urfa, 221, 283 War of Independence, 43
Urmian district, 247, 249, 25657 War of Liberation (19191923), 300
American mission in, 25455 War of Tripoli (19111912), 132
Uybadn, Cemil, 301 Warrant for Genocide (Dadrian), 29, 31
WATS. See Workshop for Armenian-Turkish
Vahbi Bey, Ali, 332n41 Studies
valis. See regional governors wealth, Armenian, 95
Van, 272 jealousy of, 4
annexing regions of, 157 Wegner, Armin T., 208, 215
Cevdet Bey and massacres in, 25557, 26566 Weimar Republic, 209
refugees from, 29899 Weiner, Amir, 288
Russian forces arrival at, 26768 Weitz, Eric D., xi, 17598
Van rebellion/uprise (1915), 5, 10, 19, 141, 192, Weitz, Paul, 206
265, 27475, 282 Weltpolitik, 178
conclusive days of, 268 Werfel, Franz, 21, 217
as contingent event, 6 Western Enlightenment, 88
deportations after, 26869 Wiesel, Elie, 23
development of, 26667 Wilhelm II (Kaiser), 175, 183
Index 433

Abdlhamid II and, 179, 368n12 rst cohort, 127

Blow to, 369n18 generation of, 305
launch of Weltpolitik, 178 Germany and, relations between, 179, 183
protest against 18951896 massacres, ideology of, xv
371n59 Milovanovi with, 118
Wilson, Woodrow, 16 nationalism, 36
Wolff-Metternich, Paul Graf, 20, 19495, 209, nation building process, 35
367n2 Plan A, 39
protestations of, on behalf of Armenians, Plan B, 39
19596 Plan C, 39
Wolff-Metternichs protestations on behalf of, Plan D, 39
19596 rulers, xv
Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Studies talk among, 200
(WATS) theocracy and, 30
in Chicago and Michigan, 34 Turkication, program of greater, 28
Internet listserv, 7 during WWI, 40
locations of meetings for, 5 Young Turk Revolution, 91, 111, 130
scholarship vs. politics of, 56 celebrations of, p5
World War I (WWI), xivxv, xvi, 16, 28, 3435, German military aid to, 17576
125, 2034. See also specic events of WWI Germany and, 183
Armenian Genocide and, development of, Yunan. See Greek city
26075 Yunda, 13435
Assyrians during, treatment of, 24659
CUP use of, 205 Zarakolu, Ragp, 8
dangers from Great Powers and Young Turks Zavriev, Hagop, 274
during, 40 Zensurbuch, 2067
eve of, 190 Zeytun, 22143
German-Ottoman relations and, 177, 195 deportees from, 267
Germanys role in, 20 Mara, relations with/reactions from, 22425,
military censors, 164 23133
opportunity structure of, 30 prison attacks, 393n151
Ottoman Empire entry into, 3435, 26263, prisoners, 22627
342n6 renaming of, 239
Russian policy during, 153 resistance in, 273
stimulus and opportunity from, 39 Tlt on, 242
talk about extermination of Armenians after WWI, 23839
during, 2045 Zeytun Armenian(s)
Turkish entry into, 18 Allies and, 24041
Young Turks during, 40 arms among, 225, 233
Zeytun Armenian-Muslim relations and, attempted rising of, 221
22122 deportations of, 23638, 24243, 267
World War II (WWII), xiv, 49 in forced labor battalions, 243
WWI. See World War I imprisonment of, 22526
WWII. See World War II in Konya province, 237, 24243
opposition to actions of rebels, 232, 23940
Yaln, Hseyin Cahit, 31516 opposition to government, 24142
Yavuz, Hakan, 306 portrayal of, 242
Yeni ehir, 239 Protestant, 234
Young Turk redeportation of, 23738
against Abdlhamid II, 12728 return to home, 240
attitudes, Dadrians portrait of, 29 on side of rebellion, 393n150
after Balkan wars, experiences of, 3839 in St. Asduadzadzin monastery, 387n89
as committed to Turkied empire, 1819 survivors, reports by, 392n135
decision-making in 19141915, 15 youth, 226
demographic engineering, phases of, 288 Zeytun Armenian-Muslim relations, 22324,
effect of Balkan Wars on, thinking, 34 239
favor toward, 116 WWI, 22122
434 Index

Zeytun bandits/deserters, 222 Der Zor, 238, 271, 283, 297, 405n19
attacks on government by, 22933 Aleppo to, road from, 279
attacks on monastery, 23435 attack of convoys on road to, 403n74
local Armenian opposition to, 232, demographics/climate condition of, 27778
23940 development efforts in, 27880
organization of, 22425, 22729 infrastructure in, 280
retreat in mountains, 22930 nomadic tribalism, 27779
St. Asduadzadzin monastery as base for, population density, 405n7
23031, 387n89 reform, 278
surrender of, 235 Tlts decision to deport to, 28081
Zimmermann, Arthur, 20, 21112 Zlf Bey, 139
Zionists, 319n32 Zrcher, Erik Jan, xi, 292, 30616, 320n41