Armenian Genocide

Muslim Turks vs. Armenian Christians

"The Bloody Sultan"

"I will soon settle those Armenians. I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”

Brief Note:

Lemkin’s conception of genocide was heavily influenced by the Armenian Genocide. Therefore, though it is not a Post-WWII Genocide, it is fundamental to understanding the intention of the legal definition of genocide.

The Historical Roots of Persecution:

The Armenians are an ancient Christian community from before the first century CE whose historic homeland of Armenia originally spread across most of what is now considered Turkey. The Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople (now known as Istanbul, Turkey) in 1453. The Armenians were one of multiple other ethnic minorities that made up the Ottoman Empire.

They were subordinated however as “second-class citizens” and were faced systematic discrimination through heavier taxation, and restrictions on their ability to serve in the military or other government services. They were branded as “dhimmis” or non-Muslim infidels protected by a Muslim dominated state.

Armenian intellectuals banded together to form political reform organizations. These Armenian reform groups received support from the Russian Armenians, who were the official protectors of the Armenians under the Treaty of San Stefano until it was replaced by the Treaty of Berlin, which placed the responsibility of protecting Armenians into the hands of the Sultan.

With the emergence of constitutionalism, Armenian calls for reform became stronger. As the Armenians’ protesting voices rose, the Sultan annoyance deepened. He finally squandered the Armenian’s efforts by authorizing government massacres.

The first massacre of a series killed 3,000 Armenian protestors within the district of Talori. The murdering began in the village of Semal when, under the interception of an Armenian priest, Armenians surrendered to Ottoman troops who had promised not to harm them. After the Armenians surrendered however, the Ottoman troops’ quickly dropped their peaceful act. Upon the command of their colonel, the soldiers gouged out the preacher’s eyes, clubbed him to death, and then raped the women that were also detained. The following night, the men were each clubbed to their deaths. The women’s period of suffering was outstretched as they were forced to hear the men’s final cries pierce the night.

The Hamidian Massacre, regarded as the bloodiest massacre of the era, “represented a foreshadowing of the genocide to come,” killing anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians.

Massacres were used as a tool for physical and religious extermination. Sometimes, under the Sultan, Christian Armenians were driven to either convert to Islam or face imminent death. This way, the Ottoman Empire slowly drained itself of the “polluting” Christian minority within their borders.

The Parallels between Persecuted Jews and the Armenians:

Jews and the Armenians were both regarded as second-class citizens long before the murderous rulers rose to power. They were both marginalized. They were not permitted to fight in the military and yet they were later both forced into concentration camps. Jews were, like Armenians, seen as being "sheltered" by a hosting state in which they did not originally belong.

Armenians and Jews also organized into insurgent groups in which they pushed for their rights in unity; both were suppressed through state-sponsored violence.

In their respective societies, the Armenians and Jews that protested were largely seen as "second class citizens." Their pursuit of equality was therefore treated as a nuisance.

Lastly, as Nazi propaganda equated Jews to "bloodsuckers" and "harmful bacilli," pan-Turkish society pointed to Armenians as "microbes" that had infected the pure Islamic empire. Mehmed Reshid, a Turkish doctor, once challenged, "Isn't the duty of a doctor to destroy these microbes?" Just as the Nazis deported and "cleansed" their body politic of the "infectious Jews in their attempt to make Germany Judenrein, the Armenians were exterminated, because they were perceived as a blight to a Muslim society. According to Turkish proganda writers like Gokalp, Armenians and other minorities had to be removed before Turkey could reach its true potential.

The Evolution of Mass Killing: From a Tool of Suppression to the Final Solution:

Armenians were about to be devastated by another blow with the rise of the Young Turks through a military coup in which the oppressive Sultan Abdul-Hamid’s rule was replaced with another brutal regime.

Although the Young Turks initially sought to level the power within the centralized Empire and briefly even granted new rights to Armenians and other Christian minorities, they were soon overtaken by their extremist wing, The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)

The triumvirate in charge of the insurrection was Mehmet Talaat, Ismail Enver, and Ahmed Jemel; Each retained positions of control in their newly established government, Talaat became the Minister of the Interior, Enver became the Minister of War, and Jemal became the Minister of the Marine.

The CUP wanted to transform the Ottoman Empire into a homogeneous Turkish empire and the community of Christian Armenians were a “blotch” on this picturesque vision of a “grander, unified” state, and they needed to be wiped away as a people.

The Ottoman Empire had lost a significant stake of its territories. The Turks sought to redeem their Empire from its status as the “sick man of Europe.” They planned to expand eastward to conquer Russian territory. In 1914, the Ottoman Empire allied with the Central Powers, officially waged war against Russia. With the knowledge that Russians previously supported Armenian civil rights movements within the Ottoman empire, the ruling Turks began suspecting the Armenians of favoring the Russian enemy. This pretense became the grounds that would serve to justify the “extraction of the Armenian problem.”

The Ottoman empire’s disastrous loss against the Russia only served to augment the scapegoating of Armenians.

In the early spring of 1915, under the CUP’s orders, 60,000 Armenian soldiers were disarmed under the pretext of preventing treachery. They were transferred to slave labor battalions and then executed by their commanders in the first stage of the genocidal campaign.

In the scorching summer and spring of 1915, tens of thousands of Armenian men, women, and children were either pushed into trains or forced on a death march into the Syrian Desert. Deportees were often forced to strip, “slow-walkers” were shot, and women were frequently raped. Denied any food or water, the deportees quickly starved to death. Primitive gas chambers were built in the remote desert where smoke would be blown within caves, suffocating the victims. Those that didn’t perish in the barren deserts were sentenced to work in concentration camps.

Although the convoys transporting the Armenian exiles were guarded, the victims were massacred and tortured by government’s “special organization.” These killing squads consisted of ex-convicts that were released on the Young Turk’s orders. The special organization often crucified Armenians, burned them alive, or decapitated them and tossed their bodily remains into the Euphrates.

Within the span of a few months, human corpses clogged the Euphrates and Tigris. The rotting flesh of the bodies polluted the river, eliminating another water resource for the surviving Armenians.

These killers were redeemed from being “namussuz,” or dishonorable. Through their service to the Turkish fatherland, they gained the symbolic rewards of honor as well as material riches that had been deserted by Armenian exiles.

An estimated 1.5 to one million people were killed in the Armenian genocide, leaving behind under 400,000 Armenians. The Armenian community within their historic homeland was virtually erased.

Armenians were lynched in public and massacred by common civilian ex-cons.

Parallels between the Armenian and the Jewish Final Solution:

Both the Jews and the Armenians were violently persecuted once an extremist wing overtook the government. The government was able to oppress these minorities, because of the prejudice that was already deeply embedded into the Jews' and Armenian's respective societies against those "threatening" minorities.

The Jews and the Armenians were both scapegoated for significant military losses suffered by their respective states. This blame became the justification for not just the legitimacy of a final solution, but it served to testify for the need for extermination. Just as the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were disarmed, Armenians were also stripped of their defenses, because they were told they were already covered under protection of the State and thus needed no firearms.

Jews in Nazi-controlled regions were sometimes forced to march to their deaths just as the Armenians did. More commonly, Jews were transported by trains in which the deportees were overcrowded and were forced to inhale in the filthy stench of bodily waste and death. Armenians, on the other hand were forced to walk "death marches" in the scorching desert heat while being denied any food or water. Both Armenians and Jews commonly died before even reaching a concentration camp. While being forced to walk the "death marches," some Armenians were even stripped; this served as a method of dehumanization. It also served to humiliate the victims, thus weakening their spirit and suppressing any rebellious urges.

Armenians has also experimented with technology in an attempt to invent more efficient methods of conducting mass murder. The Armenians designed primitive versions of gas chambers. Under the Nazis, gas chambers would later become one of the notorious symbols of the Holocaust. Also, as many of the people who took part in killing Jews were "ordinary Germans," the Turks who were created into a "special organization" were just opportunistic ex-convicts, seeking to loot money and claim revenge on their neighbors. The honor and the looting were informal "payments" for the organization's "services." This "payment method" corresponds to how Nazi guards were also "honored" for their service to the Fatherland and how they often pillaged Jews and seized their possessions.

Adolf Hitler

"Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

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Footnotes:

Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 34.
"A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide," October 2005, 333, accessed April 25, 2018, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-Brief-History-of-the-Armenian-Genocide.pdf.
"A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide," October 2005, 334, accessed April 25, 2018, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-Brief-History-of-the-Armenian-Genocide.pdf.
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 40.
"A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide," October 2005, 334, accessed April 25, 2018, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-Brief-History-of-the-Armenian-Genocide.pdf.
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 55.
"A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide," October 2005, 335, accessed April 25, 2018, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-Brief-History-of-the-Armenian-Genocide.pdf.
Rouben Paul Adalian, "The Armenian Genocide: Context and Legacy," Educational Resources -- The Armenian Genocide: Context and Legacy, February 1991, , accessed May 02, 2018, http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Education.56/current_category.117/resourceguide_detail.html.
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 164.
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 163.
Rouben Paul Adalian, "Armenian Genocide," Armenian Genocide, , accessed May 02, 2018, http://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocide.html.
"A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide," October 2005, 336, accessed April 25, 2018, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-Brief-History-of-the-Armenian-Genocide.pdf.
Genocide Museum | The Armenian Genocide Museum-institute, 2016, , accessed May 02, 2018, http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/armenian_genocide.php.
Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 211.
History.com Staff, "Armenian Genocide," History.com, 2010, , accessed May 02, 2018, https://www.history.com/topics/armenian-genocide.
"The Forgotten Holocaust: The Armenian Massacre That Inspired Hitler," Daily Mail Online, October 11, 2007, , accessed May 01, 2018, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-479143/The-forgotten-Holocaust-The-Armenian-massacre-inspired-Hitler.html.
"A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide," October 2005, 337, accessed April 25, 2018, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-Brief-History-of-the-Armenian-Genocide.pdf.
Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 219.
"A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide," October 2005, 337, accessed April 25, 2018, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-Brief-History-of-the-Armenian-Genocide.pdf.
Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 46.
Suny, Ronald G. 2016.“They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: Explaining the Armenian Genocide One Hundred Years Later." Juniata Voices 16, 208-229. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed May 2, 2018), 225.
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 164.

Pictures:

Genocide Museum | The Armenian Genocide Museum-institute, , accessed May 02, 2018, http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/photos_of_armenian_genocide.php.