My sophomore ELA classes are writing research reports on possible genocides. I composed the article below while modeling the process. So this is my attempt at writing a HS sophomore paper.
Introduction
In the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, as WWI raged, more than a million non-combatant Armenians died. Thousands more fled for survival. To most who pay attention to such events, this is known as the Armenian genocide and diaspora. Turkey asserts that there was no genocide, and some other governments in the world have not named it so; however, the slaughter in Turkey led directly to Raphael Lemkin coining the word “genocide,” and thus to the U.N. Convention on Genocide in 1948. By comparison to the definition of genocide and to Gregory Stanton’s eight stages of genocide, the following pages will show that Turkish actions at the time constitute genocide.
Historical Background
For six hundred years, the Ottoman Empire dominated the land area where Europe, Asia, and Africa meet. The Empire was a Caliphate, subject to Muslim rule. Pockets of ethnic Christians such as the Armenians, “allowed to maintain their religious, social and legal structures, but ... often subject to extra taxes or other measures,” (Kifner) lived precariously within the Empire. Late in the 1700’s, after decades of peace, the Ottoman Empire’s military weakened in relation to their neighbors and its territory shrank.
Millions of Muslim refugees from the Balkans entered Turkey in the twenty years before WWI. The attitude of these poverty-stricken Muslims toward middle class Armenians who had won significant rights in the Ottoman Empire, coupled with a rise of nationalist pride and fear, may have had a strong impact on what happened to the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians during WWI and after. “The Young Turk movement ... seized power in 1908, determined to modernize, strengthen and “Turkify” the empire.” (Kifner) Under pressure from Russia in the east, and having losing territory to new Balkan states in the period immediately before WWI, the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and entered the war as part of the Triple Alliance in March 1914.
What Happened
Under the Young Turks, the Ottoman army attacked east at Russia. The war zone was in the area traditionally considered Armenian. Many Armenians and other Christian populations in the area did side with Russia, contributing several volunteer battalions. Turkey was decisively defeated, losing more than half the troops committed to the campaign. Enver Pasha, one of the three leaders of the Young Turks, and the chief strategist for the campaign, blamed the Armenians. During the course of this campaign Armenian bakers were accused of poisoning troops. “Despite the fact that a group of doctors prove the charge to be false by examining the bread and even eating it” (Armenian National Institute), the bakers were beaten, and the charges stood.
All able-bodied men in the country were drafted, but by early spring Armenians had their weapons and uniforms confiscated. The Armenians were assigned to work details and essentially worked to death.
In March the Young Turks announced their intention to massacre the Armenians. In isolated areas Armenian villages were attacked by local police and militias. Looting, rape, and murders were reported. On April 24th a group of Armenian intellectuals and civic leaders were arrested in Constantinople, along with the “editors and staff of Azadamart, the leading Armenian newspaper” (Armenian National Institute). All were transported elsewhere, and later murdered. High-level government officials stated that “the government is isolating the Armenian leadership and dissolving the Armenian political organizations” (Armenian National Institute). April 24, 1915 is the date Armenians mark as the beginning of the Armenian genocide.
From 1915 to 1918 the army, local police, militias, and “a secret outfit manned by convicts and chete forces assigned the task” (Armenian National Institute) carried out an official policy of slaughtering Armenians.
Since all the able-bodied men had already been conscripted and worked to death, the Armenian communities offered little resistance. Usually the communities were evacuated in convoys or by forced marches into unpopulated and desolate areas. There they starved, or died of thirst or disease, frequently suffering rape, torture, and beatings along the way.
The New York Times reports, “ there were 2,133,190 Armenians in the empire in 1914 and only about 387,800 by 1922” (Kifner).
What is Genocide?
As mentioned above, the Turkish slaughter of Armenians directly inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the word genocide and lobby the U.N. to make it an international crime. The U.N. Convention of 1948 defines genocide:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 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 inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated 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 (United Nations).
In looking at the slaughter of the Armenians it is important to note that the word genocide did not exist at the time, that these activities were not an international crime, and that Turkey continues to deny the genocide; in fact, “in Turkey today it remains a crime — “insulting Turkishness” — to even raise the issue of what happened to the Armenians” (Kifner). Turkey continues to claim that “there was no systematic attempt to destroy the Christian Armenian people,” ("Q&A: Armenian Genocide Dispute") no premeditation, and that many Muslims suffered similarly due to conditions of war. Therefore there was no “intent to destroy” the Armenians.
Stages of Genocide
Gregory Stanton’s stages of genocide are commonly accepted among genocide scholars as defining characteristics of genocide. Existence of the stages will act as evidence of premeditation and organization, supporting the consensus among scholars.
Identification, focusing on differences, creating an “us vs. them” environment, initiates conditions leading to genocide.
In Turkey the long-standing religious differences started the process. The Armenian areas in the eastern part of the Anatolian peninsula had their own civil and religious authorities, though Armenians and Turks lived side-by-side throughout the country. The slogan “Turkey for Turks,” popularized by the Young Turks party, “placed non-Turk ethnic groups squarely outside the accepted and dominant group.” It “served to escalate violence toward ... groups perceived as being non-Turks” (Burleson 42).
A series of earlier massacres of Armenians supports the idea that they were singled out, as the massacres occurred long before the start of the war. Even at that time, the New York Times reported on an apparent “policy of extermination directed against the Christians of Asia Minor”(Kifner). Under the Young Turks the government confiscated Armenian property and weapons, and transferred Armenians in the military into labor battalions where they were worked to death. Another law allowed the deportation of anyone authorities “sensed” was a security threat. The Young Turks government clearly pursued policies exacerbating existing classification.
Stanton’s second warning stage is symbolization. The yellow star Nazis forced Jews to wear is a prime example of symbolization. Those arguing against the Armenian slaughter being called genocide point out that no equivalent symbol was used in Turkey. However, Armenians worshiped separately, socialized in different clubs, usually spoke a different language, and generally lived concentrated in their own areas. “The Turks described Armenians and other targeted minority groups as internal enemies of the nation, characterizing them as unreliable, and prone to violence in order to stir fear and mistrust among their neighbors” (Burleson) In many parts of the Empire middle-class Armenians were easily distinguished and resented by lower-class Muslim laborers and refugees.
The targeting, scapegoating, and dehumanizing extends back into the earlier era. During an 1895 massacre, a soldier wrote home: “My brother, if you want news from here we have killed 1,200 Armenians, all of them as food for the dogs” (Crimes Against Humanity and Civilization). During WWI Local Turks targeted Armenian businesses for looting and burning, and seized Armenian schools and churches for garrisoning Turkish troops,” (Burleson) justifying the discrimination by dehumanizing the victims as vermin and sources of disease, much as Nazis did with Jews later. The false poisoning accusation against bakers documented above is another example of polarizing and dehumanizing propaganda.
In March 1915 government deputies toured the country to speak in mosques, “describing the Armenians as internal enemies which must destroyed.” (Armenian National Institute). Such propaganda activities had a polarizing effect, increasing the “us vs. them” mentality. One local government official resigned in protest; others were themselves killed for supporting the Armenian position.
The critical elements of denial of the Armenian genocide address the active stages of genocide: organization, preparation, extermination. In essence, deniers claim the government did not organize or prepare means to exterminate the Armenians; instead, the deaths resulted as consequences of the circumstances of war. Certainly there was much disorganization and chaos in the early days of the war, leading to desertions among both Muslims and Christians. “Many of those deserters would either pillage villages for food, rape women, or clash with the army” (Suny) The government characterized the unrest as Armenian revolts, and did organize reprisals against all Armenians, in the war zone and throughout the country.
The Armenian National Institute argues persuasively that eruptions of violence occurring at the same time throughout a country with no mass communication system point to central coordination. The recent discovery of a telegram from a high government official, used at his trial but long thought missing, shows in concrete form that the government was aware of and involved in a multi-step process of extermination (Mandell). Talat Pasha, Minister of the Interior, controlled the telegraph and used it to communicate in code, a code that has been broken. Messages survive showing his direct involvement in ordering and controlling elements of the deportations and deaths.
High level party and government officials issued orders, police and military units carried out deportations, a government agency was created to impound and redistribute “abandoned” property, and “‘Butcher battalions’ of convicts released from prisons were organized into killer units” (Armenian National Institute).
At the time the Germans, as allies of the Ottoman Empire did not act to stop the actions, but many officers reported witnessing acts that horrified them (Kifner) For example, in May of 1915, German Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders reported that high-level officials made and approved the plans, then gave orders to “ governors-general, their subordinates, and the police” (Armenian National Institute). The evacuations often resulted in slaughters by military forces, like the Kemakh massacre. “The 86th Cavalry Brigade with its officers and the 2nd Reserve Cavalry Division of the Turkish Army participate in the slaughter” of 25,000 Armenians (Armenian National Institute). In other cases, such as in Sivas, government officials ordered deportations, then the columns were attacked by bands of chetes, the killer units of ex-convicts. In still others, the deportees died of disease and neglect in transit. This “corroborates el-Ghusein’s description of witnessing women and children lying, dead or dying, along the road between Urfa and Erzerum” (Burleson), or were relocated in inhospitable deserts or malarial marshes.
The Ottoman government restricted international press to Constantinople and censored information, but news leaked out. The New York Times reported extensively, describing “the actions against the Armenians as ‘systematic,’ ‘authorized,’ and ‘organized by the government’” (Kifner). Germany protested informally, and the U.S. organized aid. American Ambassador Henry Morganthau was particularly instrumental in communicating the atrocities to the world, both during and after the fact. In his memoirs he wrote:
When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact (quoted in Kifner).
After the war, the Three Pashas fled to Germany, where one was shot dead by an Armenian gunman. They, and other senior officials were tried in absentia in connection to the massacres, found guilty, and sentenced to death. One official was hanged.
Conclusion
Comparison of the actions of Ottoman Empire officials and the events detailed above to the definition and stages of genocide lead to the conclusion that the Armenian massacres constitute genocide. Government officials made no secret of their intent to annihilate the Armenians, contemporary accounts document it, evidence of dehumanizing and polarizing rhetoric shows the scapegoating of the Armenians, orders document the planning and organization of slaughter, and the ongoing denial is the final mark showing that the massacre of the Armenians was indeed genocide.
Works Cited
Armenian National Institute. N.p., 2017. Web. 26 Apr. 2017. . The Armenian National Institute site is dedicated to "the study, research, and affirmation of the Armenian Genocide." This will serve as the primary source of evidence.
Burleson, Shelley J., and Alberto Giordano. "Spatiality of the Stages of Genocide: The Armenian Case." Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 10.3 (2016): n. pag. International Association of Genocide Scholars. Web. 26 Apr. 2017. . Scholarly work documenting the relationship of events in time and space, thereby affirming that it was genocide. This work uses Stanton’s stages and has some specific examples.
Crimes against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians. Brookline, Mass: Facing History and Ourselves, 2004. Facing History. 2004. Web. 5 May 2017. .
Kifner, John. "Armenian Genocide of 1915: An Overview." Times Topics. New York Times, n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2017. . An overview of events of the Armenian Genocide. Written in recent times it addresses both original events and modern developments. It particularly references Times articles written during the genocidal period. This can effectively support the overview, because it is from a non-biased source, one with journalistic integrity.
Mandell, Ariane. "LOST EVIDENCE OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DISCOVERED IN JERUSALEM ARCHIVE." Jerusalem Post. N.p., 23 Apr. 2017. Web. 26 Apr. 2017. . This newspaper article details the recovery and decoding of a trove of evidence dating to the original events, and documenting actual orders pertaining to deportation and murder of Armenians. One of the stages is denial. This information may be useful in discussing that stage.
"Q&A: Armenian Genocide Dispute." BBC News. BBC, 02 June 2016. Web. 26 Apr. 2017. . Q&A offers basic background information on the Armenian Genocide, and different perspectives on it. This may serve to document the opposing view, though it shows there is very little effective counter-argument.
Stanton, Gregory. "The 8 Stages of Genocide." Genocidewatch.org. N.p., 1998. Web. 26 Apr. 2017. . Website explaining the eight stages of genocide, as originally detailed by GenocideWatch president Gregory Stanton. The paper necessarily involves explaining the stages, with examples from Armenia and the Holocaust.
Suny, Ronald G. "Eliminating an Existential Threat." Interview by Mary E. Malinkin. Wilson Center, 23 June 2015. Web. 09 May 2017. .
United Nations. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Vol. 1021. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2017. . UN Treaty on Genocide defines the crime. This eventually leads to prosecution, though not for the Armenian genocide. Useful primary document, since the paper involves determining if the events in Turkey meet the definition of genocide.
United States Military Academy. "Map of Ottoman Rail Network in World War I." n.p., n.d. Web. 2 May 2017. . This map may help readers visualize area described in the report.
Comments