A Great Calamity

In 1914, some two million Armenians lived in Ottoman Turkey, three-quarters of them in six provinces of eastern Anatolia, on the borders of Russia and Persia. By 1918, 90 percent of them were gone. More than one million were either murdered in their towns and villages or killed by disease, starvation, or death marches into camps in the Syrian desert, where the survivors were massacred. Hundreds of thousands of women and children were forced to convert to Islam; tens of thousands fled to the Russian Caucasus as refugees. Yet to this day, the Turkish government claims that there was no genocide and that it was the Armenians’ fault.

This year is the centenary of the Armenian Genocide; the commemoration falls on April 24. On that day in 1915, the Ottoman government arrested hundreds of prominent Armenians in Istanbul. This April 24, when memorial ceremonies are held in Armenia and in the cities of the Armenian diaspora, the Turkish government will be congratulating itself with diversionary celebrations of the Gallipoli campaign. The centenary has raised the diplomatic temperature and precipitated many books. Ronald Suny’s is the best of them: Balanced, scholarly, and harrowing, it should be read by all serious students of modern history. 

There are two schools of genocide scholarship. “Intentionalists” trace a direct path from thought to deed: The premeditated plans of the principal actors lead to genocidal events. “Functionalists” see a longer, “crooked path”; before unarmed civilians can be despoiled, raped, tortured, starved, and murdered, they must be imagined as an existential enemy. Genocidal policies emerge from the structures of mental and social life: prejudice, political improvisation, individual opportunism, and the emergencies of war. 

Suny is a functionalist. The Ottoman state inculcated in many Turks an “affective disposition” against the Armenian minority. In 1915, with the future of Turkey at stake in the First World War, this contempt curdled into hatred, and led to an intentional, state-led slaughter.

This murderous affect stemmed from the disposition of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians had always been inferior. In Ottoman law, they were a millet, a non-Muslim “nation,” regulating their own legal affairs and paying the cizye poll tax, “separate and unequal, but protected.” In the 19th century, this medieval system weakened. The sultan’s “Well-Protected Domains” were penetrated by European empires and imports, notably new ideologies of nationalism and liberalism. When the Christians of Greece and Bulgaria rebelled, the Ottomans responded with “indiscriminate massacres of largely defenseless people.” At Chios in 1822, tens of thousands of Greeks were slaughtered and enslaved. In the “Bulgarian Horrors” of 1876, dozens of Bulgarian villages were destroyed and their populations massacred with ingenious sadism. 

The Tanzimat program of European-style reforms failed to cure the Sick Man of Europe. The reforms promised equality but intensified mutual suspicions. Non-Muslims remained discriminated against in practice and continued to speculate in nationalism. Muslims resented the loss of their privileges and the prevalence of Christians and Jews among the new economic elite. After Turkey’s defeat by Russia in 1878, a multinational empire, containing more Christians and Jews than Muslims, became a “national empire,” with a Turkish Muslim majority. The new sultan, Abdul Hamid II, a sly and suspicious tyrant, adopted pan-Islamism as a strategy to unite the faithful and repress the infidels.

In eastern Anatolia, Turkey ruled through proxies, Kurdish tribes who tyrannized the Armenian majority. The loss of the Balkans intensified Turkish suspicions of the Armenians, whose leaders appealed to the European empires for protection. The Ottomans resettled Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Russian Caucasus in eastern Anatolia, and recruited Kurds into Hamidiyya, Cossack-style cavalry units who perpetrated Cossack-style outrages. As nationalism spread among young Armenians, the state responded with exemplary violence. In the Hamidian Massacres of 1894-96, around 100,000 Anatolian Armenians were murdered amid looting, torture, rape, and forced conversions. The New York Times called the slaughter a “holocaust”—the first time that term had been used to describe the annihilation of a people. When Armenian rebels seized a bank in Istanbul, Turkish mobs killed more than 5,000 Armenians in the streets of the imperial capital. 

The Armenians were no safer after the revolution of 1908 and the rise of the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The CUP restored the liberal constitution, but its leaders were Darwinian nationalists who viewed the Armenians as a racial enemy within. Further Turkish defeats in the Balkans increased the influx of Muslim refugees into eastern Anatolia and amplified CUP incitement against the Armenians. In 1909, as many as 30,000 Armenians were slaughtered in riots at Adana, on the Mediterranean coast. 

In 1913, the CUP deposed Abdul Hamid II. Turkey fell under a triumvirate of dictators: the interior minister, Mehmet Talat Pasha, a former postal clerk from Salonika; the war minister, Enver Pasha; and the minister for the navy, Djemal Pasha. The European powers were so afraid for the Armenians that they obliged Turkey to accept European observers in eastern Anatolia. Suspecting that the Europeans intended to dismember eastern Anatolia, and convinced that the Armenians were party to this plan, the “Three Pashas” led Turkey into a fatal alliance with the kaiser’s Germany, and into World War I.  

The Armenians became pawns in the 13th Russo-Turkish war. Turkey simultaneously conscripted Armenians into its army while demonizing them as traitors. Across the border, Russia’s Armenians volunteered for the czar. As the battle lines moved back and forward, Turkish troops and paramilitaries massacred Christian populations in reprisal for imagined treacheries. The “affective disposition” for genocide had formed. So, too, had its instrument: Before entering the war, the CUP had recruited the Special Organization, a mixture of Kurdish tribesmen, Circassian refugees from the Russian Caucasus, and “prisoners, criminals, and bandits.” The course of the war pushed CUP leadership along the “crooked path.” Fearing the collapse of the Ottoman state, the CUP moved towards what Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning calls “cumulative radicalization.”

In January 1915, Enver Pasha’s inept winter campaign against the Russians floundered in defeat at Sarikamis. In February, the British landed in the Dardanelles. Through March 1915, the massacres increased. At Salmas, an American missionary described how Ottoman troops shot Christian men in batches of 25. 

In late March or early April 1915, the CUP’s Central Committee decided to deport the Armenians for the sake of Turkey’s “national ideals.” Talat Pasha’s interior ministry issued the deportation order “openly and in the official fashion.” Immediately afterwards, the Central Committee circulated the order “to all parties,” including the armed gangs of the Special Organization. The governor-general of the province of Van ordered his subordinates to “exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over.” Foreign consuls and missionaries observed thousands of bodies, many mutilated, along the roads. 

In April, the CUP disarmed all Armenian soldiers and transferred them to labor battalions, where they were murdered in small groups. At Istanbul, the parliament was suspended and the entire cultural and political leadership of the Armenians arrested; after being taken east in small groups, they, too, were killed. The Armenians, deprived of their military muscle, their political brain, and the chance of parliamentary protest, were defenseless. 

Talat Pasha installed a personal telegraph office in his home so that he could direct CUP committees in Anatolia and keep count of the killings. He told the German ambassador that he planned to make a “clean sweep of internal enemies” while the war prevented diplomatic intervention from other countries. Germany, the only power that might have restrained Turkey, became a complicit partner in the genocide. After the German vice-consul at Erzurum reported that the deportations from his region had been “nothing but a massacre,” his foreign minister, Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg, ridiculed the idea of hampering the Turkish campaign against the Russians. 

When the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau protested, Talat explained that the Armenians must pay for reversing the rightful hierarchies of Turks and millet peoples, Muslims and non-Muslims. They had “enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks.” They were determined both to “domineer” over the Turks, he said, and to declare independence. They had “largely” caused Turkey’s military “failure” in Anatolia: “It is no use for you to argue,” Talat told Morgenthau, “we have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians. .  .  . The hatred between the Turks and Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.” Genocide was a blunt tool for the creation of a Turkish Muslim state.

In May 1915, as the Russians advanced into Erzurum Province, Turkish troops and militia drove the entire Armenian population into the wilderness. Kurdish gangs bayoneted the men and robbed and raped the women, some of whom threw themselves into the Euphrates. Children under 5 were adopted into Muslim families. At the end of the month, Enver Pasha wrote to Talat, reporting the verbal decision to exile Anatolian Armenians to remote locations in the south. Talat’s orders described the deportations as securing the “foundational interests of the State.”

“Burn—Demolish—Kill,” Talat ordered. The slaughter intensified throughout the summer and autumn of 1915. The men were usually led away and executed outside their towns and villages, the women and children marched southeast. In Bitlis Province, Armenians were herded into barns and burnt alive. Women were prostituted to Turkish soldiers, then poisoned when they contracted venereal disease. Children were hunted down and thrown into the Bitlis River. At Trabzon on the Black Sea, boatloads of Armenians were taken out to sea and drowned. The Armenians of Ankara were driven into the countryside and murdered with axes. 

At the walled city of Diyarbakir, Circassian gangs under the command of a CUP loyalist arrested and tortured the Christian leaders of the city by nailing horseshoes into their feet and forcing them to run. Others had their heads crushed in olive presses or were flayed alive. The Armenian bishop was dragged through the streets, doused in gasoline, and burnt. More than 600 prominent Armenian citizens were sent down the Tigris on rafts to be murdered downstream by Kurdish tribesmen. 

“The Armenian question no longer exists,” Talat told the German ambassador at the end of August. In the same month, American missionary families reported trainloads of deportees on their way to railheads in the Syrian desert: 

Talat told Morgenthau that no Armenians would remain anywhere in eastern Anatolia: “They can live in the desert, but nowhere else,” he declared. When Morgenthau warned that Turkey was making a “terrible mistake,” Talat replied, “Yes, we may make mistakes, but we never regret.” 

By late 1915, almost all of eastern Anatolia’s Armenians had been killed or displaced. Yet the Ottoman state still saw them as a demographic threat. Those women and children who did not succumb to hunger, disease, torture, or robbery were driven towards the towns of the Syrian desert on endless forced marches. These “way stations towards extermination” offered no shelter and little food or water. The end of the line was Der el Zor, deep in the desert. The toll of the final “orgy of killing” in the spring and summer of 1916 is unclear: “tens if not hundreds of thousands.” Jesse Jackson, the American consul at Aleppo, estimated that 300,000 Armenians reached Der el Zor; by September 1916, only 12,000 survived. The Turks slaughtered this remnant as well. 

Despite the denials of successive Turkish governments, Ronald Suny presents detailed and convincing documentation of the culpability of the CUP leadership and its accomplices. Foreign eyewitnesses, most of them missionaries and consuls, reported the genocide as it was taking place. All of these accounts confirm the intentionality of the CUP in Istanbul and the guiding role of its field agents, who directed the militias of the Special Organization. In May 1915, the Russians, British, and French denounced Turkish “crimes against humanity,” the first use of the phrase. Winston Churchill suggested using mustard gas against the Turkish defenses at Gallipoli, in retaliation “for the massacres of Armenians, as well as the killing of many British soldiers after they had tried to surrender.” Henry Morgenthau resigned his post in order to publicize the Armenian tragedy in the United States. Johannes Lepsius, a German missionary, printed a detailed account of the genocide, which his government did its best to suppress. 

When the war ended, Germany spirited seven of the top CUP leaders to Berlin. The postwar Ottoman government acknowledged the killings and indicted the perpetrators, but the prosecution fizzled out. The German government refused to extradite its erstwhile allies for trial, Istanbul was under British occupation, and a nationalist insurgency had begun. In 1921, Talat Pasha was murdered, shot outside his Berlin apartment by Soghomon Tehlirian, a survivor of the massacres at Erzincan. After being tried, Tehlirian was acquitted by a jury appalled by survivors’ testimonies. Armenian nationalists assassinated almost all the other major leaders, too.

Instead of a modernized Ottoman “national empire,” a modern Turkish republic emerged in the 1920s. Its leader, Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, insisted that his movement had no connection to the CUP. Yet, in many ways, the Kemalists were the CUP’s fraternal successor. Links between the CUP and the Kemalists were tight: The CUP helped to initiate the nationalist revolt in Anatolia, and many Young Turks joined the Kemalists. Like the CUP, Atatürk blamed the Armenians for their sufferings: They had pursued “separatism” in a “savage manner.” Nor is modern Turkey disposed to forgive the Armenians for their own genocide.

The “holocaust before the Holocaust,” Suny concludes, was the “foundational crime that, along with the ethnic cleansing and population exchanges of the Anatolian Greeks, made possible the formation of an ethno-national Turkish republic.” The governments of many Western democracies have defined the Armenian horrors as genocide, but the United States and Israel have not. For strategic reasons, the United States continues to indulge what Suny calls “the most reactionary and nationalist, anti-democratic forces in Turkey.” 

“I will recognize the Armenian Genocide,” Barack Obama promised during his 2008 presidential campaign. In his last years in office, he is bound to no electorate; but the president who claims that the arc of the universe “bends towards justice” persists in being bound to Turkey, and in bending to its denial of history. This month’s centenary would be the right time for Obama to correct the United States’ long and shameful refusal to recognize the state-organized murder of the Armenians for what it was: genocide. 

Dominic Green, the author of Three Empires on the Nile, teaches political science at Boston College.