Creating A Modern "Zone of Genocide": The Impact of Nation - and State-Formation On Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923

Creating a Modern "Zone of Genocide": The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923
Mark Levene University of Warwick
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The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890s through the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqi states against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communities in Eastern Anatolia, is striking. This article traces the origins of these incidents by examining emerging Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish national movements and their competition for the region's resources. It argues that the creation of this "zone of genocide" in Eastern Anatolia cannot be understood in isolation, but only in light of the role played by the Great Powers in the emergence of a Western-led international system.
This article examines patterns of genocide and ethnic hostility in Eastern Anatolia from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. This region has been described as a "natural geographic unit" of some 120,000 square miles.1 Its core is a largely steppe-like mountain plateau, with Lake Van and Mount Ararat its most significant physical features. To the north it is bounded by the Black Sea after a dramatic descent via the Pontus range; the Caucasus mountains provide a natural barrier in the northeast. To the south, it falls away in a series of steep, parallel folds descending along the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the Jazira, the great SyrianMesopotamian plain. Eastern Anatolia consists of the six Ottoman administrative vilayets that most concerned the European powers in the late nineteenth century due to "the Armenian Question," as well as the vilayet of Trabzon and a substantial part of Mosul. This would embrace historic western "Armenia," with the exception of Cilicia, but not eastern Armenia (and thus the modern independent republic of that name). It would also include the northern and central core of "Kurdistan," some of which today lies in northern Iraq. Eastern Anatolia is our focus because it is at once an arena in which competing national interests have laid claim to its territory and assets, and a geographic region that since the 1890s has been repeatedly plagued by genocidal killings. Within the
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THE ANATOLIAN REGION
framework of the Allied victory in the First World War and the extension of Western influence in the region, the political borders of new Turkish and (Iraqi) Arab states, with metropolitan centers elsewhere, divided the region at the expense of four ethnocultural groups: Armenians, Kurds, Pontic Greeks, and on a smaller scale, Assyrians. The articulation of national identity by elite elements within these societies had not conferred self-determination. The persistence of their ethnic, religious, or tribal particularisms, however, challenged the notion of Turkish or Iraqi nation-statesa notion founded upon the assumption of social cohesion and homogeneity as the necessary price (not to mention prerequisite) for genuine independence and acceptance within a Western-dominated international system. Originating in the waning decades of the Ottoman Empire, such ideas were critically espoused by Turkish regimes in the crisis years 191423, as they attempted vigorous, even revolutionary programs of "national" development. These programs, in turn, translated assumptions about national identity and nationhood into the ground-rules for modern genocide, singling out any group that espoused a separate development that might imply political autonomy. The development of modern Eastern Anatolia demonstrates how local nationalist aspirations interacted with an emerging international system of nation-states, producing the potential for, and often reality of, genocide. By limiting our coverage to the core region of the 1915-16 Armenian genocide, while extending our chronological reach both forwards and backwards, we confront not the single, isolated Armenian phenomenon, but rather a series of genocidal and near-genocidal massacres encompassing three additional national groups. It is this phenomenon which justifies our referring to Eastern Anatolia as a "zone of genocide."
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Holocaust and Genocide Studies
GenocideA Definition
Genocide occurs "where a state, perceiving the integrity of its agenda to be threatened by an aggregate populationdefined by the state in collective or communal termsseeks to remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse physical elimination of that aggregate, in toto, or until such time as it is no longer perceived to represent a threat."2 My definition concurs with aspects of those advanced by Fein3 and by Chalk and Jonassohn.4 In particular, it closely follows Fein's original proposition that genocide represents the "calculated murder of a segment or all of a group defined outside the universe of obligation . . . in response to a crisis or opportunity perceived to be caused or impeded by the victim." However, Chalk and Jonassohn s view (from which Fein demurs) that the victim group is defined by the perpetrator is also central to my reading, insofar as inflated perceptions and sometimes imaginary constructions on the perpetrator's part, with regard to a supposed communal "enemy" or "enemies," play critical roles in the drive towards a genocidal solution to a perceived "problem."5 There is, however, a conundrum here. By insisting on understanding the interrelated behavior and actions of both the perpetrator-state and communal victim group prior to genocide, one might appear to be apportioning blame equally between them. Worse still, as in the case of some pro-Turkish apologetics, there is the danger of placing the blame entirely on the victim's head, thereby claiming that, far from being genocide, the state's actions constitute legitimate self-defense. I should therefore make it clear at the outset that, even where there is a political and possibly violent dynamic between state and community, this situation can under no circumstances justify mass murder or mitigate against a charge of genocide.6 Second, it might be necessary to explore the role of external parties in the state-community dynamic, particularly if their actions aggravate or cause a deterioration of these internal relationships. Third, we might want to evaluatenot condonethe centrality of this external dimension in the state-perpetrator's self-justification for its actions. The Armenian genocide stands alongside the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwandan killings as one of the very few identifiable examples of total genocide in the twentieth century. For this reason, we seek to understand how the Ittihad Party (Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP) perceived the Armenians such that it chose to eradicate them. This might also lead us to consider why the CUP or its successors initiated attacks on other communal groups. Unlike the Armenian case, in each of these other instances the scope, scale, and intensity of the killings was limited, though this does not rule out comparison. When viewed together, these genocidal episodes represent a continuum of perpetrator responses from planned total extermination, through punitive annihilatory massacres designed to eliminate, disperse, or entirely remove all or part of a population via ethnic cleansing and mass deportation, to draconian "eliminatory" procedures, including forced resettlement and assimilation. Raphael Lemkin, originator of the term "genocide," would not have doubted that these actions all con-
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stituted forms of genocide. What is at stake here, then, is less a matter for juridical definition than of finding commonalties within a series of mass killings which link them into an overall pattern. The distinctive human geography of Eastern Anatolia is one key to our explanation. Historically, the region is an ethnographic mosaic of language, religion, and culture. Yet assuming one could delineate this diversity in terms of authentic national communities, it is noteworthy that no single, pre-1914 group constituted a majority. Armenians, arguably the most coherent, homogenous, and indigenous grouping, were particularly strong in areas around Van and Bitlis, where they made up approximately forty percent of the population.7 However, Kurds, the second major grouping, were in the nineteenth century also increasingly visible in these areas, as well as farther south. Both the Kurds and the third major Turkish grouping were Moslem, in contrast to the Christian Armenians, though religious heterodoxy and endogamy arguably distinguished Kurdish-speaking Kizilibash (Alevi) and Yezidi even further.8 Turkomans, many of whom were also Alevi, were yet another community distinct from the Turks. Additionally, there were Arabs in the region's southern areas, Lazes, Georgians, and a substantial population of Pontic Greeks, some of whom were Moslems on the Black Sea coast near Trabzon. In the Hakkari highlands there were significant pockets of ancient schismatic Christian groups, notably "Assyrians" (Nestorians) and Jacobites.9 During the mid- to late nineteenth century, the region's ethnic mix was further complicated by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Tartar, Chechen, and above all Circassian muhajirs (Moslem refugees), who themselves were victims of ethnic cleansing and, arguably, genocide at the hands of the expanding Czarist empire in the Caucasus.10 Their arrival added to the already intense inter-communal competition for land brought about by an estimated fifty percent population rise in the aftermath of cholera, bubonic plague, and typhus epidemics." In the last hundred years, four Eastern Anatolian groupsArmenians, Kurds, Assyrians, and Greekshave fallen victim to state-sponsored attempts by the Ottoman authorities or their Turkish or Iraqi successors to eradicate them. Because of space limitations, I have concentrated here on the genocidal sequence affecting Armenians and Kurds only, though my approach would also be pertinent to the Pontic Greek and Assyrian cases. During the period 189496, Armenian communities across Eastern Anatolia were devastated in a series of massacres orchestrated by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Quasi-irregular regiments, the Hamidiye (named after the Sultan and composed mostly of tribal Kurds) were the chief agents of these massacres, though they were often aided by gendarmerie, the regular army, and other elements of the local Moslem population. Though the entire Armenian community was not wiped out, estimates of the death toll range from 30,000 to 200,000, with some concentration around 80,000.l2 Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison
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with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them.13 In my formulation, however, these events would constitute partial genocide. During 1915-16, the CUP regime, which took control of the Ottoman Empire in 1908, attempted a systematic extermination of Armenians throughout Anatolia. Most of the victims were from the Eastern Anatolian heartlands, though not all of the killing took place there. The liquidation of entire communities in situ, in Mus, Diarbekir, Van, and elsewhere, was succeeded by deportations of other communities southwards towards the Syrian desert and Mesopotamia. During these transfers, tens of thousands died from negligence, starvation, and abuse.14 Out of a prewar Ottoman Armenian population of approximately two million, between 600,000 and over a million were killed. These figures exclude subsequent deaths from postwar Turkish campaigns against the remaining Armenians.15 This is a case of "total" genocide. In 1917, possibly 700,000 Kurds were forcibly deported to Western Anatolia by the CUP authorities, with considerable loss of life. These deportations constituted a program of forcible assimilation without evidence of overt genocidal motivation.16 Between 1925 and 1938, a series of Kurdish revolts against the Kemalist regime led to the military "pacification" of the entire Turkish part of the region. Repeated massacres and forced deportations from specific rebellious areas were interspersed with periods of enforced Turkification of its three million-strong Kurdish population. This policy culminated in 1937-38, with the suppression of the rebellion around Dersim. The British consul in Trabzon specifically likened the mass killings there to those of the Armenians in 1915-16. One Kurdish specialist, while cautious of calling the 1925-38 sequence "genocide," nevertheless considers Dersim a specific and proven case.17 Another has argued that "Turkey had unmistakably intended genocide of the Kurdish people," though "in practice its intentions were defeated by the sheer scale of the task."18 No reliable survey has yet succeeded in accurately estimating its casualties. The Turkish Communist Party calculates that between one and one and a half million were Kurds deported and massacred between 1925 and 1938.19 Throughout the period 1960 to the mid-1980s, a limited Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq was met by the mostly Ba'athist regimes in Baghdad with punitive or "exemplary" massacres and widespread ethnic cleansing operations. In the late 1970s, at least 600,000 Kurds were forcibly deported to "collective" resettlement camps.20 The nearly decade-long war between Iran and Iraq (the first Gulf war) that began in 1980 intensified this genocidal thrust, culminating in the spring of 1988 with a series of operations code-named Anfal, in which more than 100,000 Kurds (estimates go up to 200,000) were massacred. Assyrians and Yezidis were also targeted.21 A less coordinated Ba'athist attempt to massacre the Kurdish population after the second Gulf war in 1991 was stymied by the Allied declaration of a "safe haven" in the northern part of Kurdish Iraq.22 If the differences in state structure between a decaying Ottoman empire, an
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authoritarian nationalist Turkey, and the modern Iraqi police state need to be taken into account in this sequence of events, by the same token so do distinctions among the victim groups. In 1895 the French foreign minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, shrugged off the growing wave of anti-Armenian massacres as "one of those thousand incidents of struggle between Christians and Muslims."23 Focusing on the religious fault line in the empire between the dominant Moslem umma (community) and Christian and Jewish sects subordinate to it has, superficially, a plausible explanatory ring. Kurds on the right side of that fault line played a major part as perpetrators in attacks on Armenians in 1894-96 and 1915-16, as they had in earlier massacres of Assyrians in the 1840s, and later in the Assyrian Affair of 1933. u Indeed, Bakr Sidqi, the Iraqi general and primary instigator of the 1933 killings, was himself a Kurd.25 But if religious hatred between Moslems and Christians is a convenient formula for differentiating perpetrators and victims, how do we explain why Moslem Kurds became a target for genocide, often alongside Christian Assyrians, in both avowedly secularizing Turkey and Iraq? 26 One British observer, writing in 1919, optimistically recalled that traditional Christian-Muslim relations in Eastern Anatolia were the best between any two peoples in the Middle East.27 This overly rosy assessment at least cautions us not to locate our genocidal sequence in some timeless cycle of ethno-religious animosities. Before the mid-nineteenth century, there had been no major, inter-communal massacres in the region since the disorders that culminated in the battle of Chaldiran in 1514, when it was Alevis, not Christians, who were the primary victims.28 Significantly, these events marked the last pre-modern occasion in which Eastern Anatolia had been an arena of geo-strategic confrontation. As a major crossroads between Central Asia and Asia Minor, it had been fought over by every would-be Near Eastern imperial power since classical times. But the Ottoman victory at Chaldiran over their Persian Safavid contenders ensured that for the next four hundred years its embrace within the Ottoman fold was as a relatively minor border march, geographically removed from its power center. The most striking thing about the profound destabilization of Eastern Anatolia in its final Ottoman decades is how little this had to do with the region itself or its pre-existing ethnographic makeup. Destabilization arose out of much broader historical forces, what we might term "the inexorable rise (and dominance) of the West." On one level, these forces were quite tangible, in the form of Great Power political and economic penetration of the Ottoman edifice, bringing remote Eastern Anatolia into view as a region ripe for carve-up into spheres of influence. But if naked Westernor more exactly Great Powerinterests bear significant responsibility for the genocidal outcomes, so do the impact of secular and liberal notions derived from the Western Enlightenment. In the context of a Moslem autocracy, these were revolutionary enough. The further idea that whole populations could be unified, mobilized, and made strong by recourse to nationalism was utterly explosive.
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The arrival of nationalism in Eastern Anatolia was paradoxical on two accounts. First, Ottoman rule had an established way of dealing widi its mulriethnicity. Certainly, traditional Ottoman society was based on an implicit, unassailable assumption of Muslim supremacy. Its Muslim peoples were its full members in ways that inferior Christian and Jewish dhimmi ("tolerated subjects") could not be. The three historically recognized non-Muslim communitiesGreek Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian, and Jewishwere not only guaranteed the protection of the Sultan-Caliph and die right to practice their religion in peace, but were also recognized as corporate bodiesmilletswith the right (indeed duty) to manage their own internal affairs. Their primary function, however, was to preserve social stability in a multi-communal environment. If the Ottoman system thus allowed for non-Muslim communal groupsalbeit within strictly defined and hierarchical parametersto operate autonomously, our second paradox lies with the proposed substitution of the millet system with a fundamentally different model: Ortomanism. One could argue that this was a genuinely radical attempt to destroy the barriers between Christians and Muslims by creating a new, inclusive citizenship. Its legal enactment as the Nationality Law of 1869 promised all its peoples "equality before the law" and thus, on paper at least, the promise of a post-millet stake in a shared Ottoman future.29 Many educated Armenians and town-based Kurds considered it a good idea, and it was. The problem was that its European liberal premise was intended as an adjunct to something else: sovereignty. The French Revolution, the first modern experiment in state reformulation, had demonstrated that without sovereignty Enlightenment ideals were largely irrelevant. Tanzimat, the long-term structural overhaul based upon Western models that the Sublime Porte initiated in 1839, always aimed to shore up the empire s rapidly dwindling independence. The Nationality Law actually weakened it. The most tangible nineteenth-century European encroachments on Ottoman sovereignty had been territorial. Russian invasions interspersed with tactical withdrawals, including into Eastern Anatolia from the 1820s on, were perhaps the most persistent example. Equally predictable was the Ottoman response to regain the initiative: crushing the nominal autonomy of its powerful Kurdish emirs and quasiindependent Armenian enclaves.30 If the empire's renewed, Tanzimat-informed emphasis on the centralization of its hinterlands was directly challenged by the specter of Great Power threats to liquidate it, there were nonetheless other challenges. These might best be exemplified in a single word: "capitulations," or special privileges which, ostensibly conferred on foreign merchants by a series of Ottoman treaties with the Great Powers,31 effectively unraveled the nationality question. In addition to their promotion of Western and other unfavorable concessions, they also included provisions, especially held by Russia, France, and Britain, to "protect" Christian minority communities against "unjust" treatment. This outside protection cut directly across the Ottoman understanding of its own role as "protector" of the dhimmi, while
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allowing a flood of Western missionary groups to concentrate their evangelizing efforts on Ottoman Christians. These developments also worked in the opposite direction. Not only did Armenians, in particular, flock to American or British Protestant schools and colleges;32 the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish entrepreneurs who largely monopolized the internationally-oriented sector of the Ottoman economy found it to their commercial advantage to apply to foreign consulates for protection. The capitulations system carried with it immunity from fiscal exaction. Thus, at the very moment Tanzimat was attempting to reassert the empire's dwindling fiscal and social control in the teeth of Western neo-colonialism,33 the historically "subject" communities or, more accurately, their most influential or avant-garde elements, became closely identified with its most egregious failures. Consequently, the 1869 Nationality Law, far from creating the ground-rules for a common Ottoman identity, actually underscored the inequalities between umma and millets. From a majority Muslim viewpoint, these seemed to favor the minority groups, thereby overturning a centuries-old, religiously-sanctioned understanding of who was dominant and who subordinate. From the minority perspective, in the face of a state "protection" which increasingly appeared illusory, encroachment on what communal and individual rights they did possess had to be resisted at all costs. The ideal of Ottoman citizenship technically should have dispensed with the need for millets. Instead of blurring the distinction between Christians and Muslims, the period of Tanzimat actually saw the dividing line harden, as the millets themselves metamorphosed from confessional into national bodies.34 Benedict Anderson has linked the emergence of the "national" idea to the creation of a shared and secularized vernacular literature.35 Through novels, plays, poetry, folklore, and especially newspapers, an "imagined community" can be created before or even without achieving concrete political form. Through these media, remote places become significant to individuals who themselves live far from one another and have never met. What is notable about the intensification of national passions for Eastern Anatolia is that they largely emanated from outside the region, in cosmopolitan Constantinople, Smyrna, and Salonika, or even as far away as Tiflis, Geneva, and Cairo. Further, they were initially and most intensely expressed by an intelligentsia who generally were not from and probably would never go to Eastern Anatolia. Only with time did these national passions penetrate the peoples in the region itself. An embryonic idea of Eastern Anatolia as an authentic Turkish national homeland directly collided with the emergence of national groups that had an equal, if not more profound stake in it. Armenian nationalism was already well advanced, whereas Kurdish nationalism progressed slowly and with marked ambivalence. Whether one can even speak of an Assyrian nationalism is perhaps a moot point. Nevertheless, that these groups, along with the Pontic Greeks,36 were transformed into contenders for all or part of the region requires some understanding of their own internal social
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structure, interaction with the West, and above all interaction with each other. The following analysis will concentrate on the emergence of national consciousness among three of these groups: Armenians, Turks, and Kurds.
Armenians
If Armenians come closest to this nationalist trajectory, this may be because, in Ottoman terms, they were exceptional both in the breadth and depth of their modernization. Indeed it was this very exceptionality which was to excite so much bitterness and anger against them. Armenian national consciousness emerged out of an early to mid-nineteenth century cultural renaissance, the Zartonk.zl It was closely related to and grounded in an accelerating Armenian occupational and social mobility within the cosmopolitan parts of the empire penetrated by Western-orientated commerce. Armenian skills in trading and foreign languages proved highly successful, with European companies vying for agents and trading partners in Constantinople and Smyrna. In banking and industry, the urban amira class found itself not simply competing with, but displacing formerly well-entrenched Greek plutocrats. Their real success, however, was a much more broadly-based communal embourgeoiseinent. Moreover, emphasis on a European-style education, with thousands of young Armenians studying abroad,38 resulted in a large, literate, and sophisticated constituency with an ever increasing appetite for printed matter (both in European languages and, more importantly, a recently modernized Armenian vernacular), as well as in a veritable communal revolution. Oligarchic control by the amira-supported Gregorian Patriarchate found itself in retreat before a wave of Catholic and Protestant converts who founded their own separate millets, while demands from the intelligentsia and esnaf (guilds) for greater democratization and secularization of overall communal affairs was partly realized in the grandiosely, if rather ineptly-named Armenian National Constitution of 1862.39 Ottoman state sponsorship of new confessional millets and an Armenian constitution leads one to question what caused so many educated Armenians to turn towards political, even overtly revolutionary nationalism. First, as the rapid modernization of city-based Armenians improved their socio-economic status, success invited increasingly hostile reactions from Turks upset by the erosion of the old order and their own superior status within it. On the Armenian side, "the discrepancy between what 'is' and what 'ought to be'"40 was most keenly felt by the intelligentsia. Their disenchantment led a significant proportion to reject the Ottomanism espoused by their communal elders, and support a national project of self-emancipation, the locus of which was the authentic Armenian homeland in Eastern Anatolia. Political-cummystical identification with land and people, moreover, led to early efforts to bridge the gap between city acolytes and the rural hinterland. Such identification, however, could only intensify as the entire Armenian population found itself increasingly lumped together by a state-led reaction against the western-inspired reform move-
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ment. Catalyzed by overt Russian aggression on behalf of "Christian" Balkan secessionists in 1877, the new sultan, Abdul Hamid, reinvoked the bonds of Islamic solidaritythe gel that would hold together the Ottoman edifice in the face of the "infidel." Everything associated with Russia, the West, or modernity became suspect. Metropolitan Armenians, applauded by Westerners as "Europeans of the East," were obvious scapegoats.41 So too in the wake of the Russian military advance into Eastern Anatolia were rural Armenians, who took the brunt of Turkish army "reprisals," particularly around Van and Bayazit.42 The accusations of Armenian association with the very forces that seemed intent upon destroying the empire, paradoxically provide the second part of our explanation for Armenian national radicalization. The emergence of the Hunchak and Dashnak revolutionary parties in the 1880s and early '90s,43 organizations which dedicated themselves to overthrowing the Hamidian yoke in Eastern Anatolia and more generally, was motivated by the assumption that the Great Powers could be convinced to intervene on their behalf. They had done so for the Bulgarians, confirming their independence at the Congress of Berlin. And the Russians, in their attempt to form a separate peace with the Ottomans at the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, had invoked the Armenian right to self-government in the region under their own protective aegis. Though the Berlin Congress eliminated these provisions, the contours of a Russian, or better still Great Power protectorate (in which a European governorgeneral would preside over a gendarmerie and judiciary that favored the Armenians, while keeping Kurds, Circassians, and others at bay), was now firmly fixed in the minds of leading Armenian spokesmen like Bishop Khrimian.44The Great Power suggestion to the Porte, for instance, that it consider an ethnographic division of the regions population to provide for "as homogeneous a character as possible in the different administrative districts" fed these hopes.45 The idea of an ethnic readjustment, as taken up by the Turks, was to have ultimately disastrous consequences for the Armenians. From the time of the Berlin Congress, however, ostensible Great Power interest encouraged Armenian radicals to move beyond diplomacy to political mobilization and direct armed action. The strength of the mostly Russian-based Armenian revolutionary parties and the degree to which they genuinely posed a threat to Ottoman control is controversial.46 Likewise is the extent to which Armenians in Eastern Anatolia who took up arms, most notably in the Sassun insurrection of 1894, were responding to their own revolutionary agenda, or rather reacting to Kurdish depredations or Ottoman encroachments, as in previous localized rebellions.47 Dashnaksutiun, which was to become the most important of the Armenian parties, was founded in 1890 in Russiancontrolled Tiflis. It was partially inspired by Russian revolutionary ideas associated with Narodnaya Volya,48 which was notable for using terrorism in order to incite draconian counter-measures and thereby precipitate a general revolt. With hindsight we can say that this Armenian revolutionary strategy of calculated terror was based on a
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naive understanding that it would generate Western intervention in their support, while giving scant regard to the dangers this presented to the rest of their community.49 The activities of Armenian insurgents in Eastern Anatolia proved fatal on two additional accounts. By entering into an armed dynamic with the state while projecting themselves as a national movement, they provided an open invitation for Abdul Hamid to portray all Armenians as a monolithic fifth column, thereby providing a pretext to unleash in the 189496 massacres a form of "total war" against them.50 Second, by peaking at this juncture without any genuine military capability to carry out their agenda, they not only stymied their own mobilization, but left the Armenian population weakened and almost entirely defenseless when, in 1915, the postHamidian state decided on a more systematic onslaught. There is another irony here. While the various manifestos of the revolutionary parties had attempted to enunciate their national agendas (ranging from a free Armenia to self-rule or even full political independence),51 these goals remained vague and conflicting, largely circumventing the issue of what future relationships would be with the other non-Armenian peoples and communities of Eastern Anatolia. By leaving these issues in abeyance, they not only underscored their total dependence on the Great Powers, but also inadvertently energized a competing nationalism for which the issue of sovereignty was central, and which ultimately was prepared to resolve it in the fullest and most deadly fashion. Turks Turkish and Armenian nationalisms had much in common. Both CUP and Dashnaksutiun began as radical responses to the failure of earlier, more moderate programs. Both too were modernizers, seeking to find formulae by which their peoples and societies could be successfully wrenched out of obscurant torpor and into the light of a Western-informed and -dominated international system. Both were thus committed to some form of liberal constitutionalism and, in particular, to a reinstatement of the frozen 1876 Ottoman constitution. They pursued these goals through secret central committees that relied upon terror for revolutionary-style struggle.52 These facets made them, in principle, good partners, and in the early 1900s Dashnaksutiun and the CUP cooperated against the Hamidian regime.53 This cooperation continued during the early years of CUP rule. As the radical agenda of the CUP more fully crystallized, however, the alliance deteriorated. The reasons for this have much to do with an emerging Turkish national ideology.54 This, in turn, was intimately related to the abject failure of both Ottomanist ideal and Hamidian leadership to stem the European neo-colonial tide and reassert Ottoman independence. Significantly, among the most militant vectors of the new doctrine were cadres at the Harbiye military academy and the closely linked Tibbiye military medical school. Pre-1914 Turkish society lacked the sort of business and edu-
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cational opportunities available to its young Armenians or Greeks, and as a result was largely bereft of a bourgeoisie. Social mobility for those with aspirations was closely linked to and dependent upon a burgeoning state sector. It was thus ambitious young men from distinctly petty bourgeois, small town backgrounds, more often than not in Macedonia or Rumelia rather than Anatolia, who came to the capital, attained an academy-based secular education, and most fervently expected a stake in the system. Implicitly these "Young Turks" were statists, all the more so because they were social arrivistes without connections to an historic Ottoman ruling class.55 They read Turkish-language newspapers such as Ikdam (Effort) and Sabah (Morning) that were beginning to have a substantial circulation in the capital and to espouse an overt, sometimes aggressive nationalism.56 They read daily about or saw with their own eyes Europeans who behaved as if they owned the place. They were confronted by an increasing number of educated Ottoman Greeks and Armenians who, with their general savoir-faire and entrepreneurial edge over the rest of the population, made them appear as key agents in this European takeover. Their frustration and resentment made them naturally receptive to a compensatory Turcocentrism.57 Their predilection for pan-Turana vast state that would link all Turkishspeaking peoples both in and outside the Ottoman Empirewas a mirror image of pan-Germanism or pan-Slavism.5S In returning to a mythical Turkish tribal genesis, they proposed to strip themselves of all the elements which had diluted the unique nature of the historic Turkish mission. By recovering the nation, made up of authentic, warrior Turks, one also rediscovered the ingredients with which to transform the empire into an entity which could truly compete with the West on military, political, and technological terms. No wonder so many of these young Turcophiles also looked to Japan and Germany as their models par excellence, as later revolutionary elites in colonial or neo-colonial societies would look to the Soviet Union or Red China. No wonder too that so many joined the revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress, dedicated less to the overthrow of the Ottoman state than to its revitalization. Having seized power in 1908, the CUP leadership was not initially in a strong position. They lacked a mass constituency or broad social base; the Sultan was technically still in power; their reopening of an Ottoman parliament pitted them against other elite factions with entirely different agendas, not the least of which were from the remaining, autonomy-seeking non-Turkish parts of the empire; while finally they were challenged on the streets of Constantinople and elsewhere by fundamentalist Moslem clerics and softas espousing pan-Islam, as well as by liberals who accused them of subverting the empires fragile democracy. Only in 1913 did the well-known CUP triumverate of Talat, Enver, and Djemal emerge bloodily, but triumphantly, from these internal conflicts to take public office. Even then they merely represented a narrow stratum of society.60 Responsibility for the Empire s 1914 descent into war and genocide can undoubtedly be leveled against them, the CUP central committee, and its acolytes within the administrative and military apparatus.61 But their conscious
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radicalization in this direction may have been less the result of ideology than of pragmatic, if increasingly desperate attempts to combat, outmaneuver, and ultimately transcend the outsideand to their mind entirely malevolentforces which seemed intent on finally liquidating their imperial trust.62 Initially these CUP efforts focused on the arena where pressure was greatest: the Balkans. No sooner had they come to power, but Bosnia was annexed by AustriaHungary. Rumelia and Macedonia, historic and crucially productive heartlands of the Ottoman economy and society, were soon also lost as the ex-Ottoman states of the region asserted their maximal territorial agendas, culminating in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.63 The Italians had already wrenched the Empires remaining North African provinces, while in 1912 historically loyal Muslim Albania seceded in its own national revolution.64 These losses underscored questions about the bonds that held the Empire together. If Muslim Albanians could quit, why not also Muslim Arabs and Kurds? But if they left, would there be a viable Ottoman construct at all? As invasion and secession in the Balkans drove the CUP further down the national route, it also began increasingly to consider its national assets (to borrow a term from turn-of-the-century middle European discourse). And as it did so, its attentionand anxietiesfastened on Eastern Anatolia. The intensifying and apparently unstoppable economic and commercial encroachments of the Great Powers in the region were clearly one critical factor in this equation. The discovery of oil in the vilayet of Mosul, where the British had interests, coincided with fierce Great Power rivalries over who would build a railway linking both Constantinople and Europe with Mesopotamia and the Indian Ocean at Basra. The fact that the Germans won the major part of the contract, and their plans for building the Anatolian and Jazira sections of what was now the Berlin-Baghdad railway included stipulations for oil exploration and control over areas on either side of it,65 confirmed that that the resulting socio-economic impact on this formerly selfcontained region would be massive. Moreover, it indicated that the area might become, as in former times, a theater of conflict in which the primary protagonists would be foreign powers. But the dangers from the growing Anglo-German rivalry were dwarfed by renewed Russian interest in the area. As on previous occasions, the 1912 Russian calls for a European-supervised local autonomy in the six vilayets and Trabzon were intended as little more than a pretext for their ultimate takeover.66 Whereas Great Power suspicion of the Russians had formerly prevented implementation of this agenda, on this occasion backing from Russia's French and British allies seemed, in light of Ottoman weakness, to give it a fair chance of success. Moreover, despite the fact that these proposals seemed specifically designed to inflame Armenian-Kurdish relations67 (only the sedentary population was to be enfranchised, the Hamidiye regiments were to be disbanded and refugee Moslem immigrants removed from the area), the overall scheme was enthusiastically supported not only by the Armenian
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spiritual leadership, but also by Armenian delegates to the Ottoman National Assembly. In CUP eyes, this made them willing tools of Russian designs, proof of Armenian perfidy.68 Worse still, implementation of the scheme, argued the CUP paper Tanin (Echo), inevitably would fragment the remaining empire into a decentralized confederation of Arab, Greek, Armenian, and other parts.69 Great Power interference, however, highlighted the question of national assets in terms of the number of people inhabiting the land and their language. In Bohemia, German and Czech nationalists were busily toting up the linguistic identifications of the population in order to stake out their respective national rights.70 In Eastern Anatolia, pre-First World War censuses did the same, but with their own peculiar rules. The Armenian Patriarchate emphasized the demographic weight of the one millionstrong Armenian population in the six vilayets, claiming that this represented some thirty-nine percent of the population. While it distinguished between the Turks and Kurds, it severely played down their numbers, which was interesting in the light of the subsequent Ottoman census that did not distinguish between the various Muslim elements and put the Armenian population at no more than 600,000, a mere seventeen percent of the total.71 As the discrepancy suggests, this issue had become one of "majorities and minorities, with the relative position of each, one to another, being decided on the basis of numerical strength."72 By the time Turkey entered the Great War, the fate of the Armenians had become intimately connected with, and indeed integral to the CUP's national agenda of rapid secularization, economic modernization, and the creation of a genuine state infrastructure. It was not simply a question of the majority of Ottoman Armenians finding themselves in a theater of war with Eastern Anatolia, the intended mis-enscene for the Turks proposed showdown with the Russians. Nor was the largely fabricated charge that the Armenian population was in cahoots with the Czar's plans to conquer the region much more than a smoke screen for the CUP's extensive antiArmenian preparations.73 Ottoman Armenian volunteers did fight in the ranks of opposing Russian armies, as in the crushing defeat inflicted on Enver Pashas Third Ottoman Army as it attempted to cross into the Caucasus at Sarakamish in the winter of 191415.74 But in the wider war, this limited involvement on behalf of an opposing side was neither exceptional nor particularly unusual. Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Ottoman Arab, and even Jewish national elites, or more usually dissident or outspoken elements within them, were aware that political advantage might be wrested by a military involvement or collaboration of this nature, and sometimes acted accordingly.75 Of course, in so doing they made their communities more visible and put them at risk of retaliatory or retributive punishment. The irony is that the Ottoman Armenian national leadership, whether in the form of the Patriarchate or Dashnaksutiun, had emphasized in the immediate pre-war period their passive opposition to CUP rule. Accordingly, at the onset of war they strove to counsel caution, encourage
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their constituencies to do their duty to the Porte, including service in the armed forces, and to resist any attempt at provocation.76 If the CUP thus focused on those Armenians who ignored their leaders' advice in order to make blanket treason charges against the entire Ottoman Armenian population, then it is likely that more was at stake for the CUP than simply retaliation against an available scapegoat for the defeat at Sarakamish. Even long-term ideological and cultural hatred, which undoubtedly helped fuel popular Moslem participation in the killings, fails to explain it. At stake was a clear developmental logic. On an economic level, this involved the realization of "national assets" in the form of expropriated Armenian capital, businesses, and properties which, so sequestered, would facilitate the creation of an authentic Turkish middle class. The physical destruction of Ottoman Armenians throughout Anatolia in this sense represented the intent to remove a communal group perceived to represent a domestic obstacle in the CUP's race for modernisation.77 Yet the Armenians were not the only perceived internal economic competitor blocking the Turks' autarkic agenda. There were also the Greeks. Significantly, a Greek challenge to the political integrity of a would-be Turkish state was more plausible than anything the Armenians could muster. Greece, after all, had seceded from the empire almost a century earlier, expanding at the Ottomanist expense in the western Mediterranean and Thrace, and was to attempt, in the aftermath of CUP defeat in the First World War, a full-scaleand initially successfulinvasion of the Anatolian mainland.78 It could thus be argued that the CUP had real grounds for concern over the existence of a large Ottoman Greek fifth column, especially in the Turkish-held Mediterranean and Aegean islands and coastline, as well as by their supremacy in the western-orientated trade out of Smyrna. Interestingly too, during the Balkan wars the CUP not only responded with an economic boycott of Greek businesses, but with a series of anti-Greek massacres and atrocities around Smyrna which seem to have been specifically designed not to kill all Greeks in these areas, but to "encourage" them to flee. The fact that their villages and towns were then resettled with Muslim refugees from Macedonia, who themselves had been ethnically cleansed by the Greeks and other Balkan adversaries, suggests the beginnings of a conscious policy of demographic restructuring and ethnic homogenization.79 Fear of Greek retaliation against remaining Turkish populations on its own soil, or even direct military intervention on the side of the Allies, may in part explain why the CUP did not attempt to exterminate its Ottoman Greeks. But there is no evidence that they had ever considered it. By contrast, the crisis engendered by the Allied landings at Gallipoli in April 1915 does seem to have catalyzed plans, already finalized in mid-February or earlier by the CUP central committee, for the extermination of the Armenian national elite in the cities, as well as the entire eastern Armenian population.80 Of course, a Russian offensive from the Caucasus timed to coincide with the
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Dardanelles campaign underscored for the CUP the life and death struggle in which they were engaged in Eastern Anatolia. But the Armenians did not figure on this in any direct military sense. On the contrary, they proved entirely unprepared to defend themselves against Turkish attacks, round-ups, and deportations throughout the summer of 1915.81 The CUP extermination of the Armenians was linked, of course, to the Russian military presence in the region; indeed it was intended as a signal to all the Great Powers that the sort of interference that had characterized their behavior towards the Ottoman Empire in the past, would not be tolerated in the future. But the expunging of a whole population was not simply the CUP's means for restructuring geo-strategic and inter-governmental relationships. It was first and foremost a weapon against the Armenians themselvesa case of realizing one's territorial and demographic assets for the future, by eliminating a population that had the potential not just to create a political autonomy, but a political (as well as social, cultural, and economic) alternative to the whole thrust of the CUP's Turkifying, homogenizing agenda. So long as the CUP remained in power, this agenda remained closely tied to their pan-Turanic ambitions. And as long as the Armenians continued to exist as a physical obstacle to this agenda, they would be massacred by the CUP-inspired Turkish military, or in pogroms they directly instigated or abetted, as in their brief 1918 capture of Baku.82 But even after the CUP leadership had fled, taking their pan-Turanic dreams with them, the post-Ottoman regrouping of forces around the leadership of Mustafa Kemal did not flinch from killing Armenians at every opportunity, if not by direct genocide then by other means including blockade, war, and military massacre.83 This was a conscious corollary to the reassertion of Turkeys territorial sovereignty on Anatolian soil. Indeed, it is significant that one of the first acts in the reformulated Kemalist drive towards a specifically Turkish nation-state was a meeting in Erzerum of a body calling itself "The Society to Defend the Rights of Eastern Anatolia." Erzerum had always been closely associated with the Armenian interest and had been the venue, in the summer of 1914, for the last pre-war Dashnak conference. Yet in the summer of 1919, the Society's declaration of the inviolability of the six vilayets and Trabzon within Ottoman territory became a core ingredient in the National Pact of January 1920, in effect Turkey's charter of national sovereignty. Refugees, or rather displaced Armenians currently beyond Eastern Anatolia, were strictly forbidden to return without the express permission of its representative committee.84 If this was ambiguous, the statement that "not an inch of land, of our vilayets" would be ceded "to Armenia or any other country" was clear warning against a belated May 1919 declaration, made on the Russian side of the border in Erevan, of Armenian independence.85 Moreover, in case any foreign power had failed to understand its significance, Mustafa Kemal reiterated it to a U.S. fact-finding mission under General J.G. Harbord in September. No foreign mandate would be allowed for the region.86 The non-negotiability of Eastern Anatolia for the Turkish government came out even
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more forcefully the following year, during talks held in Moscow for a possible SovietTurkish friendship pact. "No Armenian provinces have ever existed in Turkey," a delegate told Georgi Chicherin, the Soviet Commisar for Foreign Affairs.87 The latter's inquiry as to whether areas jointly inhabited by Turks, Arabs, Kurds, and Armenians might possibly determine their own fate received a further sharp retort from General Kiazim Karabekir, Kemal's strong-man deputy for the region. "In Turkey there has been neither an Armenia nor territory inhabited by Armenians. 'Those (Armenians) living in Turkey committed murders and massacres.' How is it possible to call back these murderers and give them the right to vote?"88
Kurds Karakebir s reference to massacres perpetrated by Armenians was largely a figment of his imagination. As a putative Armenian state struggled for existence on both sides of the Russo-Turkish border following the Mudros armistice between the Allies and Ottomans in October 1918, some of its armed units committed atrocities against Turkish and Kurdish villages.89 In terms of scope and scale, the Armenian ability to commit mass murder, even supposing this was their intention, could hardly compete with the conscious and systematic massacres perpetrated by Karakebir himself. In propaganda terms, however, the Armenian killings served the Kemalists well. At home, they were reported, magnified, and exaggerated to incite Kurds who, since the 1915-16 genocide of their Armenian neighbors, were the predominant ethnic community on the plateau. The idea that Kurds might be affrighted by Armenians seems to run counter to received historical wisdom. It was Kurds, after all, who were known for raping, looting, and killing Armenians, not vice-versa. But the image itself is telling. Bedr Khan, a leading exponent of the Kurdish nation, noted that "it was primarily the Kurd who was denounced before civilization as a marauder and murderer."90 It was, in other words, convenient to portray Kurds as wild men, barbarous nomads, even the Ottoman equivalent of tribal savages, because then they could be one-dimensionally categorized, blamed and, when necessary, eliminated. In 1927, two years after the first major Kurdish anti-Kemalist revolt, Turkeys foreign minister, Tewfiq Rushdi, was explicit on the matter: "their cultural level is so low, their mentality so backward, that they cannot be simply assimilated in the general Turkish body politic . . . they will die out, economically unfit for the struggle for life in competition with the more advanced and cultured Turks . . . as many as able will emigrate into Persia and Iraq, while the rest will simply undergo the elimination of the unfit."91 If the alleged Armenian danger to Turkish state-building lay in their being too advanced and thus too much of a competitive risk for the CUP or Kemalists, it appears that Kurds were also vulnerable to extermination, though in their case for not being "advanced" enough. If Rushdi's comments display prejudice and Social Darwinism, they may also provide insight into the nature of our unfolding Eastern Anatolian tragedy. In contrast with the Arme-
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nians, Turks, or even Arabs, the Kurds, notes McDowall, were "fatally disadvantaged because they lacked both a civic culture and an established literature."92 In the increasingly competitive national stakes, the Kurdish awakening was too little developed when, at the end of the First World War, outside forces thrust the future of Eastern Anatolia to the breaking point. Kurdish society was extremely diverse and complex. Traditional nomadism militated against a fixed notion of Kurdish "national" boundaries, just as lineage and tribal allegiances obscured ethnic commonality or common political headship. Where tribal Kurds subscribed to an identity beyond family and clan, it was mostly that of Sunni Islam, though even here the existence of minority heterodox Alevis and Yezidis confounded a uniform religious picture. Language was another problem, as major dialect groupings were often unintelligible to one another. Additionally, Kurds in Eastern Anatolia were interspersed with, and sometimes even shaded off into other communities, including Armenians.93 None of this plurality precluded the "construction" of a Kurdish nation. Linguistically and culturally, Kurds were distinct from Arabs and Turks. They had a long, continuous history in the region, which until the midnineteenth century included a high degree of diffused political autonomy from direct Ottoman rule. Further, in the 1840s Bedr Khan's emirate of Botan, until extirpated by Ottoman force majeure, seemed to be creating a proto-national coherence. Even with its demise, Kurdish aghas continued to have economic control, backed by their self-regulated military power over Assyrian, Armenian, and Kurdish peasants.94 By our own period, most Kurds were settled, rather than nomadic, though often on land directly expropriated from Armenians.95 The Kurdish dilemma in the late nineteenth century was such that while everything around them was changing, Kurdish society was standing still, or perhaps more accurately, not changing fast enough. There was little to suggest an emerging bourgeoisie or intelligentsia, certainly not in the Eastern Anatolian heartlands. Those town Kurds that there were, either in the region or in the larger cities outside of it, generally preferred to identify themselves not as Kurds, which they understood as a synonym for "backward" and "boorish," but as patriotic Osmanli.96 Kurdish elites who did identify themselves in national terms, notably those linked to Bedr Khan, were exiles in Europe or Egypt. Despite the publication of their journal Kurdistan at the turn of the century, they were too removed from the scene and too few in number to operate as a genuinely embryonic national nucleus.97 Denied their historic autonomy by the penetration of Ottoman officialdom, and without the conceptual tools for an alternative course of action, Kurds found themselves thrown back on their own devices. Many turned to the shaikh-led sufi Naqshbandi order for guidance or, in the case of Kurdish tribal chiefs, became prey to the blandishments and bribes of greater powers.98 An overtly Kurdish movement that lagged behind its competitors thus tended to take its cue from the CUP. Only with the latter's takeover of power in 1908 did small Kurdish clubs and societies, such as the Teavun ve Teraqqi Jamiyati (Society
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for Mutual Aid and Progress) and the Hiva-ya Kurd Jamiyati (Kurdish Hope Society), emerge in Constantinople. Ottomanized urban notables or the sons of tribal chiefs, who were sent to the metropolis for a formal education, served as their founders and constituency. Following both the Armenian and Turkish experiences, a modern Kurdish identity developed among an educated elite as a cultural and educational revival, rather than as a political or secessionist movement, and in an environment which, if not exactly stable, was nevertheless detached from the potential arena of intra-national conflict." The subsequent behavior of Kurds here, as well as in Eastern Anatolia, thus tended to be determined by circumstances and the actions of others. The social and communal deterioration, disorder, and lawlessness which had characterized conditions in the region since the 1870s, and in which so many Kurds had acted as agents of a waning Turkish power, now culminated in a major crisis. As the CUP plunged the empire into the First World War and the region "into greater disorder than at any time since Chaldiran,"100 Kurdish bands and tribal regiments participated extensively in the CUP's program to eliminate Armenians and Assyrians from the plateau. As a result, the Kurds found themselves increasingly drawn into direct confrontation with their supposed patrons. "Cynical as it may sound, it was the massacres that made a Kurdish state feasible,"101 notes van Bruinessen of the Armenian genocide. As CUP power waned in early 1917 and it seemed the Czarist empire would win control of Eastern Anatolia, Russian-backed Kurdish insurgents, swelled by mass Kurdish desertions from Ottoman armies, attempted to fill the vacuum left by the Armenians. Despite the massive demographic losses Kurds had sustained in a famine-ridden, constantly shifting theater of war, the specter of an Albanian-style Kurdish secession now galvanized the CUP to implement plans for mass deportation from the plateau to dispersed locations throughout Western Anatolia.102 It is ironic that the chaos that helped prevent a partial implementation of these deportation orders also prevented the Kurds from recognizing the true nature of a crystallizing Turkish national policy towards them. The demise of the CUP, combined with the apparent restoration of the Ottoman Sultan and Caliphate, made many Kurdish notables believe that the old ties of Islamic solidarity would reemerge triumphant. Furthermore, fears that an Armenian state backed by the Great Powers would finally be founded in the region, plus a renewed threat to the integrity of the residual Ottoman polity presented by Greek landings at Smyrna in May 1919, had Kurds, who previously had been toying with the idea of independence, queuing up behind the Kemalist standard. The Kemalists, in turn, played these fears and hopes for all they were worth. In particular, they discriminated in their National Pact between Muslims, who were the state's "natural compatriots," and non-Muslims, who by omission were not, insisting that the Kurds were their "equal partners and allies," and even setting up "Committees for Turco-Kurdish Independence."103 It was all a sham, of course, yet this time with the proviso that all promises would be jettisoned once the external danger was past. There would be no room for Kurds, at least not qua Kurds, in the
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new national Turkey of Kemal Atatiirk, and certainly not once, in 1925, he had abolished the Caliphate in favor of a secular republic. In the summer of 1920, the Allies assumed that the Ottoman Empire was defeated and moribund, and that their role in any peace treaty was essentially a question of how to share out the spoils equitably. There remained, however, the matter of the Kemalists and their ability to wreck these plans, particularly by making their own defensive pact with the "pariah," but emerging Soviet state. Playing to the Kurds thus became for the Allies as significant a matter as for the Kemalists themselves. The Peace Treaty at Sevres, while parceling out lumps of Western Anatolia to the Italians and Greeks, sought to create buffer states in the east which would check a KemalistSoviet link-up. The prospect of a small Kurdish state in a southern portion of the Eastern Anatolian plateau, coterminous with a larger Armenian state to its north, was presented to a select, divided, and largely unrepresentative group of Kurdish notables.'04 Its full independence would be subject to the agreement of its inhabitants. The Sevres arrangement, however, was based upon the erroneous assumption that the Kemalists would not be able to fight back effectively. Not only did they, but they were able to carry many of the Kurds with them. Kurdish lack of unity in the face of the Sevres window of opportunity proved, quite literally, to be fatal. At the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, there was no mention of Kurdistan. Rather, Ottoman Kurds were divided between Turkey and the British mandate of Iraq. The idea of a Kurdish nation-state 'constructed' by the British had also been taken away by them. With no second chance, the Turkey that Kurds found themselves in was an internationally recognized and sovereign polity, where their very existence as a people had legally ceased, and where the only alternatives were complete linguistic and cultural assimilation, or to resist and thus risk genocide. Only their demographic weight saved them from either fate. Some thirteen and a half million Turkish Kurds today languish in identity limbo, in a state to which they owe little or no allegiance, and which views them with unqualified mistrust, treating their regionthe Eastern Anatolian plateauas one vast, closed military area."15 Their southern brethren, who found themselves after the First World War in a British-created and initially controlled Iraq, should have fared better. Five out of every eight people in Mosul vilayet were Kurdish and thus entitled, under the terms of the League of Nations mandate, to the protection of their national and cultural rights. By 1932, however, when Britain decided it was time to negotiate a treaty protecting its interests with Baghdad's Arab nationalist leaders, there was no mention of the Kurds.106
Conclusions
The emergence of competing nationalisms in Eastern Anatolia has been inextricably linked to the parallel emergence of a modern international political and economic system dominated by the Western powers. The neo-imperialism of 1878 became the
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overt imperialism of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (in which the Ottoman Middle East was parceled up by the British and French into territories earmarked for either direct annexation or de facto control), before it was to transmute itself, at Lausanne in 1923, into a new structure integrating indigenous, ostensibly sovereign, and independent entities within a Western-sponsored system of nation-states. But what of the peoples of the area denied self-determination? Were the Great Powers at all interested in protecting their "minority" status? On paper the answer is yes, at least with regard to the scraps they offered for public consumption. Championship of the Armenian national cause had been pursued passionately and publicly, if not always consistently, by Western leaders since the 1870s. The first news of the widespread deportations and killings in May 1915, moreover, provoked a combined Entente declaration that those responsible would be brought to justice at wars end for "crimes . . . against humanity and civilization."107 The warnings, reiterated at the outset of the Paris peace conference in 1919, the text of the Sevres protocol, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, appeared to be leading to genuine, international judicial proceedings.108 Moreover, liberal sentiment on behalf of the Armenians was matched, in 1918, by ostensibly far-reaching Allied declarations that augured selfdetermination for all the Empire's peoples. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson quite unambiguously proposed "an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development" for both the Turks and non-Turkish nationalities as Point Twelve of his Fourteen Points.109 The British and French, not to be outdone, produced their own formula later that year, claiming their intent to establish "national governments . . . drawing their authority from the initiative and free choice of indigenous populations."110 Whatever the intention, the wide publicity given to this Declaration "encouraged aspirations amongst the Armenians and Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syrian Christians, as well as among the Kurds."1" Vahakn Dadrian has recently depicted the Armenian genocide as developing out a situation in which the Great Powers repeatedly promised "humanitarian intervention," and then failed to keep their word when the Armenians most desperately needed it.112 If Dadrian seems to indict the Great Powers for a form of criminal irresponsibility, it is not for intervening on the victims' behalf, but rather for not intervening enough. Or to put it another way, his argument posits that insofar as the Great Powers were to some extent responsible for the genocidal outcome, this was a matter of negligent omission, not conscious commission. Yet Dadrian also offers plenty of information to show that the involvement of the Great Powers with Armenians and Kurds was closely linked to their own realpolitik interests.113 This was particularly true of Britain at the end of the war. With the collapse of Russia, no French forces in the area, and the Ottomans neutralized by the Mudros armistice, Britain rushed troops from Mesopotamia to the Mosul oil fields. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks or a post-Ottoman Turkey, particularly if they acted in consort, might still have presented a challenge to British ambition, as might less pow-
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erful polities in the area such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Persia, all of whom had claims to at least part of the plateau.114 Perhaps more important, budget cuts ensured that the British on their own would not have sufficient forces with which to secure and defend the Mosul gains. To whom thus did they turn to enable and legitimize their control of the region: Armenians, Kurds, and Assyrians. Though expunged from the plateau, Dashnaks and other Armenians attempted to cobble together an independent entity around Erevan in the wake of Russia's separate March 1918 peace with Germany at Brest-Litovskdespite an almost total lack of resources, the continued attacks of superior Turkish forces, and famine conditions among the largely refugee population. But they persevered because they were assured by the likes of Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau that the Allies would come to their rescue. Indeed, buoyed by Allied victory, they not only declared the unity and independence of all (formerly Russian and Ottoman) Armenia on May 28, 1919, the day the Allies signed their uncompromising peace terms with Germany, but did so despite the fact that no government had recognized Erevan's sovereignty to make territorial claims to the whole of Eastern Anatolia and Cilicia.115 The majority population in this potential Armenian entity would, in fact, be Kurdish, thus contradicting Wilsonian terms of reference. Nevertheless, a year later the largely Britishdetermined treaty of Sevres seemed willing, at least with reference to a considerable part of Eastern Anatolia, to support it, albeit with the offer of a small state for the Kurds. Armenians and Kurds were thus used at Sevres as temporary props to bolster Allied interests, particularly the British interest in Mosul.116 But the real tragedy lies in the degree to which they and others fell into the trap. Their nationalism had been inspired, encouraged, and in part created by the Great Powers in order, Arnold Toynbee believed, "to salvage something from the wreck of their own grand schemes." He continues: "The victims . . . caught in order to be exploited . . . could not resist the bait . . . they did not suspect how quickly pawns in distress become an embarrassment, or how little the players care if they disappear from the board."117 Once the ephemeral props of Sevres had been unceremoniously removed, a post-Ottoman genocidal order underwritten by the West was, in effect, confirmed. At Lausanne, Allied promises to the Armenian "little Ally" were not simply set aside in order to make peace with the Kemalist state, but as Richard Hovannisian argues: "The absolute Turkish triumph was reflected in the fact that in the final version . . . neither the word Armenia, nor the word Armenian, was to be found. It was as if the Armenian Question or the Armenian people themselves had ceased to exist."1 ls Armenian nation-state aspirations had been bloodily repressed, as had those of Pontic Greeks. With respect to the latter, some one hundred thousand were evacuated to Greece proper, itself already reeling and in near-collapse from its own catastrophic but Western-encouraged Anatolian adventure.119 At least, one might argue, Armenian and Greek survivors had somewhere to go. Complete Armenian liquidation had been
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thwarted by a Red Army whose timely intervention in the autumn of 1920 expunged the independence of the Erevan republic in favor of Soviet tutelage, while saving the idea for its post-1991 resurrection. By contrast, only at Sevres had the notion of an internationally-endorsed sovereign Kurdish state ever even existed. Yet if the Great Powers treated the victims of genocide as no more than pawns in their geopolitical stratagems, what of their behavior towards the perpetrators? And what indeed did the perpetrators leam in return? Kemalist Turkey's punishment at Lausanne for her and her predecessors atrocities was "reentry into the concert of nations."120 That had always been the single, most consistent focus of Turkish nationalism since its protean conception: the consolidation of a genuine self-determination within the modern international system. The challenge, until now, had been how to achieve it. Throwing off the shackles of the empire's neo-colonial status by simply declaring one's independence and commitment to modernization had invited derision when the CUP attempted it in 1908, and led to a further round of imperial and Balkan state expropriations. Achieving the nationalist goal, therefore, involved obtaining the support of at least one Great Power, while preventing it from foreclosing on the ulterior motive. Wartime alliance with Germany was thus both a radical departure and an enormous, if calculated, risk. The Germans, no less than the other Great Powers, became incensed when the CUP attempted both to repudiate capitulations during the war, as well as the nineteenth-century treaty-imposed limitations on Ottoman sovereignty.121 But although Germany in its military defense of the Ottoman construct thereby became involved in the Armenian genocide,122 it is difficult to state unequivocally that Germany was ultimately more responsible or culpable for this outcome than its imperial competitors. By ridding themselves of the Armenians, Greeks, or any other group that stood in their way, Turkish nationalists were attempting to prove how they could clarify, purify, and ultimately unify a polity and society so that it could succeed on its own, albeit Western-orientated terms. This, of course, was the ultimate paradox: the CUP committed genocide in order to transform the residual empire into a streamlined, homogeneous nation-state on the European model. Once the CUP had started the process, the Kemalists, freed from any direct European pressure by the 1918 defeat and capitulation of Germany, went on to complete it, achieving what nobody believed possible: the reassertion of independence and sovereignty via an exterminatory war of national liberation. Yet Kemal's mass murders, as those of his predecessors, were soon ignored, excused, or even justified. As early as 1926, Americans could write that Turkey "is now a homogeneous nation, but to achieve this homogeneity it was necessary for her to drive out the Armenians and the Greeks... . Whether it was right or wrong .. . peace now reigns within her borders."123 At this very juncture, Turkey was reeling from its first major genocidal assault on the Kurdsthe extirpation of the Shaikh Said revolt, which would later be characterized as "the forces of reaction" resisting "the progress of Westernization."124 While the French gave overt assistance by placing
Creating a Modem "Zone of Genocide"
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their Northern Syrian rail line at Kemal's disposal, allowing him to speed his troops to the scene,125 the former British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, could only opaquely protest the loss of Kurdish rights by recalling that "oil weighs more than Armenian blood."126 Meanwhile, the primary lesson grasped from these developments by an emerging Arab national elite in neighboring Iraq was that the route from neo-colonial dependency to independence was one of strong, authoritarian leadership, independent military capability, and utter ruthlessness directed at domestic communal obstacles. One might argue that nobody in the 1920s could have second-guessed a Saddam Hussein or his genocide against the Kurds. Yet the ground-rules for this had already been set, indeed sanctioned, when the British, in creating Iraq, insisted on the absorption and integration of Mosul into it. In so doing, they ensured that the new state's Arab leaders would look upon the region's Kurdish population as a thorn in the side of the national project, not least because of the circumstances in which their nationalism had "taken off" under Western sponsorship, and the degree to which, like Armenians to the CUP, they could set an example for the state's other ethnic, religious, and tribal communities. Yet there is another paradox here. If Armenians in 191415 presented an obstacle to the realization of Turkish national goals because they sat astride the CUP's route to oil-rich Baku, the Kurds in Mosul were sitting on, or adjacent to, the oil itself. A genuinely sovereign Iraq would want full control of this resource base to realize its national assets. If Iraq would later look to a strong, ruthless leadera Qasim, Aref, or Saddamto achieve this goal, this was because the Ottoman and Turkish experience suggested that there was no alternative. But that in itself questions the degree to which these genocidal tendencies were already embedded in the Ottoman construct. Could, for instance, a reformist, democratic Ottoman leadership have channeled the incipient national competition for Eastern Anatolia into a different, gentler trajectory, while still keeping the imperial powers at bay? Before 1914, the idea of a loose federation or confederation of nationalities was favored by an important section of the "Young Turk" movement around Prince Sabaheddin. Largely aristocratic and cosmopolitan compared with the career professionals of the CUP, Sabaheddin s reformist group Itilaf (the Entente Liberal Party) worked closely with the Armenian parties (one historian has charged it with being dominated by them),127 and provided the main parliamentary opposition to the CUP's increasing Turcocentrism. For a moment, in the crisis months of 1912-13, Itilaf was in power. However, had the CUP not stormed back, there is little evidence that the Itilaf program could have thwarted Ottoman disintegration. The grouping has been described as one of Europeanizers, not modernizers.128 As such, their control may have led to a more Western orientation, geared towards further absorption in the world market and a trickle-down industrialization at home. The result would likely still have been a Western carve-up, if not through Sykes-Picot, then something similar.
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The Itilaf scenario as it affected Eastern Anatolia was, of course, an essentially Constantinople-based one, as had been, too, the pan-Islamist one favored by the discredited sultan, Abdul Hamid. But there was another possibility: an Eastern Anatolian autonomy based on cooperation and confederation between its Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and other peoples. The idea is not as absurd as it may sound. Traditional cross-communal relationships, if hierarchical and ordered, were nevertheless close and symbiotic; alliances, allegiances, and loyalties often cutting across so-called "national boundaries."129 When problems arose, the more astute recognized who was to blame. At the turn of the century, Kurdistan was denouncing the Hamidiye regiments not only because they were terrorizing settled Kurds, but also since they allowed themselves to be used by the Porte in its suppression of the Armenian national movement. 13 Kurdistan's riposte was to urge that Armenians and Kurds "should walk hand in hand," an idea that would be mirrored when Naqshbandi shaikhs and Armenian revolutionaries met in a fraternal congress in the wake of the CUP takeover of power, and in an even more daring and confrontational pre-war plan on the part of the Bedr Khans to create a common anti-Porte front that would include the Assyrian patriarch the Mar Shamun and Yezidi leaders.131 These possibilities came to naught, as did the joint Armenian-Kurdish declaration at the end of the Paris peace conference to work for the others' interests.132 Still, Ottoman authorities feared a genuine KurdoArmenian understanding. When the idea began to take root in the late 1920s for a major anti-Kemalist insurrection, it was already too late.133 With the Armenians dead or gone, and the now predominant Kurdish population firmly divided between Turkey and Iraq, even a joint well-planned, guerrilla-style operation had no long-term chance of success. Whether under different conditions these indigenous forces could have cooperated to create some type of political entity remains speculative. Whether they could have done so without Western support and, by implication, interference, seems wholly doubtful. What relevance, then, does studying the specific circumstances pertaining to the impact of nation- and state-building in Eastern Anatolia have for genocide studies in general? Three particular themes are embedded in this study. First is the nature of victim-perpetrator relationships, in particular those between their "national" elites and leaderships. The Armenian genocide highlights this problem, not least because some scholars have appeared anxious to play down the vitality of pre-1914 Armenian nationalism for fear that it will detract from their case and play into the hands of present-day Turkish government polemics. Robert Melson, for instance, has recently objected to drawing parallels between emerging Turkish and Armenian nationalism.134 On one level, Melson is correct. The CUP, once in power, could draw upon the full administrative and military apparatus of the empire's territorial resources and population base. Ottoman Armenians, by contrast, were a demographically weak, dispersed, mostly unarmed communal group without a resource base or compact terri-
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tory. But to suggest that such available "national assets" favored one side is not the same as arguing that there was no Turkish-Armenian dynamic. If as Melson has noted, the "national" Armenians were not united, nor, by any stretch of the imagination, were the "national" Turks. If neither had a strong social base, Roderic Davison would still argue that pre-war Dashnaksutiun was more successful at mass recruitment than its CUP adversary.135 Similarly, if the former trailed the latter in adopting an exclusivist, nation-state building program, this does not mean it was incapable of adopting one. At the Paris peace conference, the Armenian delegation was uncompromising in its demand that a large national state encompassing most of Eastern Anatolia and Cilicia be repopulated with Armenians at the expense of Turkish and Kurdish "incomers" who would be expelled, and also in offering any remaining "indigenous" Kurds only the opportunity of domicile "protected by its laws."136 Of course, this hardening of the Armenian position came after war and genocide had been visited upon it. But recognizing that they were responding to victimhood does not require us to view all Armenians as innocents or plaster-cast saints. Iraqi Kurdish parties had engaged in dissent, opposition, and outright insurrection against Saddam's Ba'athist regime before the latter turned on their community in a series of premeditated genocidal acts. The fact that some Kurds had been rebels, however, cannot negate, excuse, or qualify the charge of genocide against Saddam. In most cases of modern genocide, there is a genuine state-community contest.137 The Turkish argument that all Armenians were insurrectionists, and the counter-argument that none or very few were, if not exactly irrelevant does not materially bring us any closer to the essential question: why did it have to result in genocide? One answer might be that a potential for genocide has developed where different ethno-national movements have competed for the same territory, populations, and resources.13" What happened in the case of Eastern Anatolia is, therefore, unsurprising. With its late-Ottoman human geography not obviously favoring one particular group over others, yet with each retaining elements of their historic ethno-religious or political autonomy, the demand to reformulate that autonomy in terms of modern national identity, including seizure of one's alleged national assets, seemed to develop inversely to the decay of the old, all-encompassing imperial framework. Similar situations in other parts of what was the Ottoman empire, notably the northern Balkans, the Transcaucasian, and western borderlands of the defunct Czarist empire, the eastern extremities of the equally defunct Manchu empire, and in the Great Lakes region of Africa, have also evinced this toxieity. In each case, the creation of these zones of genocide has been associated with the decline, collapse, or destruction of historically strong states in a multi-ethnic region, and their replacement by one or more new polities which have attempted to impose either a national or even an avowedly antinational uniformity upon them, often at the expense of other competitors. But while the second theme emphasizes the importance of the relationship between human geography and ethnic conflict, it proves insufficient in explaining the phenomenon,
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or indeed rising frequency, of modern genocide. Many examples, moreover, do not even take place in either ethnically plural environments or appear to be the product of ethnic conflict at all. What is clear, however, is that zones of genocide are created when traditional, multi-ethnic societies are subject to outside pressures in ways that impede and ultimately cancel out paths of pluralist accommodation. The faction at the Young Turk Liberal Congress of 1902 that rejected the idea of a decentralized Empire, including some element of ethnic autonomy, and went on to become the kernel of the CUP, did so because they perceived that if they were to build an independent modern state which could effectively reassert sovereignty throughout its entire area, this could be achieved only in a zero-sum fashion that excluded any alternatives. The linkage between the social and ethnic composition of the empire and the realities of an emerging global, but Western-dominated economic and political system, could be said to have been made at this decisive point. One could, as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party was doing almost simultaneously, set political and societal ground rules with which to repudiate and thereby transcend the system altogether.139 Or, one could find a "nationalist" formula with which to tackle the system directly. In both Turkish and Russian cases, an implicit if paradoxical goal was to cancel out the disparity between themselves and the dominant global players. In both instances, their achievement was predicated on transforming society into a homogeneous and streamlined instrument. Turkish nationalists, like Russian Bolshevists, already had a mental conception of their model human being for this purpose. What they did not yet have was a modus operandi for dealing with those who could not be assimilated to it, particularly those considered extraneous by dint of their religious, ethnic, or tribal identity, or their own "national" project. In 1902 the "problem" remained theoretical. Only once in power, seized by revolution under crisis conditions and, in the Turkish case, pursued through war with the realization that defeat might at any time deny the opportunity for a second chance, did the genocidal "solution" present itself. The integrality of that solution to Turkish state- and nation-building in turn provided a potent symbol to aspiring third-world elites; a model for how to overcome colonial or neo-colonial dependency, harness national assets, and catch up with the West via rapid modernization and infrastructural overhaul. For neighboring Iraq, geared under the revolutionary Ba'ath towards a high-speed Arab "renaissance" and renewal implicit in its name, Turkeys example critically informed its own developmental program. Modern genocide, in conclusion, is developmental. United States Ambassador Henry Morgenthau and his consular officials in this region were mistaken when they argued that the CUP's extermination of the Ottoman Armenians would return the country to the Middle Ages.140 On the contrary, the party's seizure of the commercial and industrial assets of murdered Armenians was part of a conscious effort to facilitate
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Turkey's drive to modern nation-statehood. As a result, its present-day leaders can view with equanimity the probable installation of a pipeline, jointly developed by the Turkish state and Western companies, that will transport oil from the rich Tengiz fields around Azeri Baku, via Erzerum, to terminals on the western Mediterranean.141 And behind their huge, state-financed damsthe largest appropriately named the Atatiirkwhich harness and control the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, they can once again assert Turkish regional power.142 So, Eastern Anatolia today is not just important for its geo-strategic position. Yet when Turkey or Iraq have exploited its key assets in the form of oil and water, at the expense of its remaining indigenous peoples, the West has neither castigated them nor intervened to challenge them. True, in the early 1970s the United States ostensibly came to the assistance of Kurdish peshmerga struggling against Iraq. However the proof that this action, consistent with other Great Power interventions in earlier decades, was only for their own realpolitik purpose, crystallized when the Kurds were abandoned to wholesale massacre.143 Again, in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the United States and its allies appeared to come to the Kurds' rescue, initiating a security zone in northern Iraq after a Kurdish uprising incited by them had collapsed into a wholesale Ba'athist massacre. Once the dust had settled, however, it became clear that behind the facade of humanitarianism, the primary political aim of "Operation Provide Comfort" was to save America's Turkish ally from being overwhelmed by two million Kurdish refugees.144 While the Kurdish security zone experiment withered, the West got on with its normal business of upholding and defending those nation-states it had previously accepted as members of the international community. Even the crime and current pariah status of Saddam's Iraq was not for the deportations and depopulations of its Kurds from the Kirkuk oilfields; or for the Anfal campaigns of genocide; or for its atrocities against the Shi'a and Marsh Arabs in the south; but rather for invading oilrich neighboring, Western-sponsored Kuwait. As for Turkey, its continued appalling human rights record, exemplified in the destruction of more than two thousand Kurdish villages in Eastern Anatolia; the dislocation of some two million of its inhabitants;145 its quasi-genocidal attacks on Kurds and Alevis,'4fito say nothing of its massive, cross-border military raids into the supposed Western-protected safe haven to gun down its own separatists from the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (the PKK),147 have failed to dent Western support. And so it should be no surprise that Professor Lewis Thomas, an American scholar writing in the early 1950s, could celebrate the inception and development of the modem Turkish state as follows: By 1918 with the definitive excision of the total Armenian Christian population from Anatolia and the Straits area. . the hitherto largely peaceful process of Tnrkification and Moslemization had been advanced in one great surge by the use of force. How else can one assess the final blame except to say that this was a tragic consequence of the impact of western European nationalism upon Anatolia? Had Turkification and Moslem-
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ization not been accelerated by the use of force, there certainly would not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, a state which is now a valued associate of the United States.148
Never mind the laughable reference to the "peaceful process" before 1914, nor the absurd euphemism regarding what happened to the Armenians, nor even the falsehood about Turkish "homogeneity" at the expense of its huge Kurdish population; Professor Thomas did, inadvertently, get it right. By adopting a Western formula of nationalism, the leaders of post-Ottoman Turkey punched their way towards modern nation-statehood and sovereign independence. Western states reciprocated not only by recognizing the state, but by entering into national political arrangements with it which, in turn, were cemented by economic ones. The fact that Turkey had torn up the official rules in the process and taken a series of "accelerated" shortcuts, including genocide, were conveniently ignored. Iraq's own bloody drive towards genuine independence followed a similar route. Again, war, revolution, and genocide proved no barrier to international acceptance, provided the state did not directly challenge western interests. As Leo Kuper has remarked, "For all practical purposes," even the United Nations will defend the right of "the sovereign territorial state . . . to commit genocide" within its own territorial boundaries.149 If scholars of the Armenian genocide continue to agonize at the failure of not simply Turkey, but also academic colleagues and western governments to acknowledge the facts, they might remember Voltaire's Panglossian maxim that, after all, "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
Notes
1. Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties Through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 2. 2. Mark Levene, "Is the Holocaust Simply Another Example of Genocide?" Patterns of Prejudice 28:2 (1994), p. 10. 3. Helen Fein, "Scenarios of Genocide: Models of Genocide and Critical Responses" in Israel W. Charny, ed. Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide (Boulder, CO and London: Westview, 1984), pp. 4-^5. 4. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 23. 5. Levene, "Is the Holocaust," p. 12; Roger W. Smith, "Fantasy, Purity, Destruction: Norman Cohn's Complex Witness to the Holocaust" in Alan L. Berger, ed. Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, 1939-1989 (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampter: Edward Mellen, 1990), pp. 116-23. 6. Thus Israel Chamy's ultra-inclusive definition of genocide"Unless clear-cut self-defense can be reasonably proven, whenever a large number of people are put to death by other people,
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it constitutes genocide" [Genocide, A Critical Bibliographical Review (London: Mansell, 1988), vol. 1, xiii.]plays into the hands of practically every genocidal practitioner, or apologist, all of whom plead mitigating circumstances. Patrick Brogan, World Conflicts (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), p. 604, notes of the 1915 events: "Though countless Armenians were massacred by Turkish troops, Turkey's object was its own security, not genocide. There were no gas chambers." Similarly, Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and Comparative History," The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 37 (1993), p. 9, "Operating within the confines of this dominant political logic, the invocation of communal "self-defense" against Armenian sedition, actual and possible, explains nearly all that needs to be explained about Turkish behavior during this critical moment of potential national dissolution." 7. David Marshall Lang and Christopher J. Walker, The Armenians (London: The Minority Rights Group Report No. 32, revised edition, 1987), pp. 3-5, for a short introduction to premodern Armenian history. 8. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds (Washington: Taylor and Francis, 1992), pp. 1-21, 137-53, for comprehensive coverage, including maps, of the physical, human, and religious geography of the Kurds and related groups; Martin van Bruinessen, Aghas, Shaiks and State: The Social and Political Structure of Kurdistan (London: Zed, 1990); David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997). 9. C. J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks, and Arabs: Politics, Travel, and Research in Northeastern Iraq, 1919-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957); John Joseph, The Nestorians and their Muslim Neighbors: A Study of Western Influences on their Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Izady, pp. 126-28, provides further details on southern ethnic groups; Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: Birthplace of Civilization and Barbarism (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 176-209, on diverse northern communities. 10. Stephen D. Shenfield, "The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?" in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, eds. The Massacre in History (Oxford: Berghahn, forthcoming); Richard G. Hovannisian, Armenia- On the Road to Independence, 1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 35, suggests that muhajirs from the Caucasus and Balkans were specifically directed to the plateau in order to change the respective weights of its ethnic composition. 11. Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia at the End of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 2. 12. The careful, contemporary account of Johannes Lepsius, Armenia and Europe, An Indictment (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897), pp. 330-31, opts for a figure of 88,000 "based on incomplete and preliminary statistical compilations derived from authentic sources." Richard G. Hovannisian, "Historical Dimensions of the Armenian Question, 1878-1923" in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed. Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1986), p. 25, considers the losses to be 100,000-200,000. 13. For instance, Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide. On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 43-49, carefully refrains from using the term here even though he offers a case for Ottoman state organization and responsibility for the massacres.
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14. For a contemporary description, see Arnold J. Toynbee, ed. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Falloden, Misc. No. 31, Command 8325 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1916). 15. Melson, pp. 145-47, has concluded that one million, or around half of the Armenian prewar population, perished. Yves Ternon, The Armenians: From Genocide to Resistance (London: Zed, 1983), p. 18, suggests an upper figure of 1,200,000. 16. The key problem with this case is evidence, with insufficient documentation or analysis to date. See McDowall, pp. 105-06; Kamal Madhar Ahmad, Kurdistan During the First World War (London: Saqi, 1994), pp. 130-31; Tessa Hoffman and Gerayer Koutcharian, "The History of Armenian-Kurdish Relations in the Ottoman Empire," Armenian Review 39:4 (1986), p. 26; McCarthy, p. 138, argues for 3.5 million Muslim deaths, or more than one in five in all of Anatolia from 1914 through 1922, but does not delineate (partly because the Ottoman censuses themselves made no distinction) between Kurdish and Turkish deaths. 17. Martin van Bruinessen, "Genocide in Kurdistan? The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937-38) and the Chemical War Against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)" in George J. Andreopoulos, ed. Genocide Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 141-70. See also his chapter, "Shaikh Said's Revolt" in Aghas, pp. 265-305; McDowall, pp. 194-211; Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Revolt, 1880-1925 (Austin: University of Texas, 1989); Hamit Bozarslan, "Les Revokes Kurdes en Turquie Kemaliste (Quelques Aspects)," Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains 38:151 (1988), pp. 121-36. 18. McDowall, p. 210. 19. Cited in Kendal, "Kurdistan in Turkey" in Gerard Chaliand, ed. People Without a Country, The Kurds and Kurdistan (London: Zed, 1980), p. 68. This would need further corroboration and a fuller breakdown as to how many were killed as opposed to deported. 20. McDowall, p. 339; Ismet Sherrif Vanly, "Kurdistan in Iraq" in People, pp. 171-72,192-202. 21. The best known feature of this campaign was the use of chemical weapons against Halabja and other Kurdish villages. Peter Galbreath and Christopher van Hollen, Sr, Chemical Weapons Use in Kurdistan: Iraq's Final Offensive, staff report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, September 21, 1988. The major thrust of the program of systematic genocide, involving deportation to execution sites, is less known or understood. Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq. The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993). Figures for deaths in Anfal campaigns remain rudimentary. Genocide in Iraq, p. 345, estimates at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000 deaths; Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), p. 56, estimates at least 100,000 non-combatants; Martin van Bruinessen, "Genocide of the Kurds" in Israel W. Charny, ed. The Widening Circle of Genocide, A Critical Bibliographical Review (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994) vol. 3, p. 174, cites a Kurdish party's figure of 182,000. McDowall, p. 339, thinks Anfal "probably accounted for 150,000-200,000 lives." Vera Beaudin Saeedpour, "Establishing State Motives for Genocide: Iraq and the Kurds" in Helen Fein, ed. Genocide Watch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 59-69, for an overall critical analysis. 22. There was also a genocidal response to the Shi'a uprising in southern Iraq, outside the immediate scope of this study. Makiya, pp. 57-104.
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23. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Oxford: Berghahn, 1995), p. 78. 24. On the 1840s massacres, see Joseph, pp. 62-64; van Bruinessen, Aghas, pp. 25, 180. On the Assyrian affair, see Joseph, pp. 195-206; R.S. Stafford, The Tragedy of the Assyrians (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935), pp. 164-71; Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, The Inside Story of Saddam's Iraq (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), pp. 166-75. Mark Levene, "A Moving Target, The Usual Suspects and [maybe] a Smoking Gun: A Case-Study in the Problem of Pinning Blame in Modern Genocide," Patterns of Prejudice, forthcoming. Also, Khaldun S. Husri, "The Assyrian Affair of 1933," International Journal of the Middle East 5 (1974), pp. 161-76, 344-60, for a remarkable revisionist account attempting to exonerate the Iraqi military. 25. Al-Khalil, pp. 174-76. 26. Or, for that matter, why some Kurds, the so-called Jahsh, were also involved on the Iraqi government side as perpetrators against their fellow Kurds? Or why Assyrians, on occasion, attacked Armenians? Or Armenians, Kurds? Or why Jews were not a particular target? Though the simplest answer here is that religious or even ethnic identification by itself cannot explain state-community or inter-community hostility, the full spectrum of these conflicts remains outside of this study. 27. Major Mason speaking to the Royal Geographical Society in London, 1919. Cited in Ahmad, Kurdistan, p. 156. 28. van Bruinessen, Aghas, pp. 136-46; McDowall, p. 26. 29. Kemal H. Karpat, "Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman State" in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, ed. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire- The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 163-64; Stephen Astourian, "Genocidal Process: Reflections on the Armeno-Turkish Polarization" in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed. The Armenian Genocide, History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St Martins, 1992), pp. 56-58. 30. See van Bruinessen, "Tribes and State" in Aghas, pp. 133-204, for the semi-independent character of the early nineteenth-century Kurdish emirates; Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 5, on the semi-independence of the Armenians of Sassun and Zeitun (the latter was not in the six vilayets, but adjoining Cilicia), often described as a "miniature Montenegro" until its garrisoning in 1878 by Turkish troops; Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 95. 31. Simon Bromley, Rethinking Middle East Politics, State Formation, and Development (Oxford: Polity, 1994), pp. 52-54. 32. Jeremy Salt, Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896 (London: Frank Cass, 1993), pp. 30-43. 33. Bromley, p. 54, notes that by 1875 one-third to one-half of all Ottoman public revenues went to servicing its debt, thus forcing a bankrupt government to accept Western control of its finances, from 1881, in the form of the Ottoman Public Debt Commission; Roger Owen, "The Ottoman Road to Bankruptcy and the Anatolian Economy 1850-1881" in his The Middle East in the World Economy 1800-1914 (London: Methuen, 1981). 34. Karpat, pp. 163-64.
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35. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). 36. Space precludes the inclusion of more detailed reference to Pontic Greek nationalism. It closely paralleled the Armenian cultural and economic take-off in our period and was also heavily influenced by the West. See Ascherson, pp. 185-87. For more on the emergence of Assyrian national identity, see Joseph; Stafford; and Levene, "Moving Target." 37. Harry Jewel Sarkiss, "The Armenian Renaissance 1500-1863," Journal of Modern History 9:4 (1937), pp. 433-48; Walker, pp. 49-56, 97-98; Vahe Oshagen, "The Impact of Genocide on West Armenian Letters" in Hovannisian, ed. Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 167,175, specifically on the nineteenth-century explosion of Armenian schools, libraries, and newspapers in Constantinople.
38. Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate. A Memoir (New York: Basic, 1997), pp. 226-35, vividly portrays his grandfadier's student days in Europe. 39. Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 12. 40. Astourian, p. 60, is actually referring to Turks here, though it could equally be applied to Armenians. 41. Ibid., notes how Armenians were vilified by conservative defenders of the regime as "allies of the much-hated West," not to mention as a "cipher for modernity." 42. Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 20; James J. Reid, "Total War: The Annihilation Ethic and the Armenian Genocide, 1870-1918" in Hovannisian, ed. The Armenian Genocide, History, Politics, Ethics, pp. 35, 43. 43. Nalbandian, chs. 5 and 7; Anaide Ter Minassian, Nationalism and Socialism in the Armenian Revolutionary Movement (Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute, 1983). 44. For differing perspectives on 1878, see Hovannisian, "Historical Dimensions," pp. 21-22, and Salt, p. 84. On the day the Berlin treaty was signed, Bishop Khrimian retorted "that the Armenian people will never cease from crying out until Europe gives its legitimate demands satisfaction." Quoted in Walker, p. 117. 45. Salt, p. 84. 46. Astourian, pp. 58-59, blames "Armenian political mythology" for an "ex-post facto" overstatement of their activities. 47. Nalbandian, pp. 120-21, for instance, treats the Sassun uprising as a major Hunchak action directed against both the Turkish government and Kurds, while one of the readers of this article remains adamant that it was a local response to Kurdish depredations. Also Walker, pp. 135-39. 48. Nalbadian, ch. 7, for further details of Hai Heghapokhakan Dashnaksutiun (the Armenian Revolutionary Federation) and pp. 113, 152-53, for Narodnaya Volya influences. 49. Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, volume 2: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 203-04. This work takes the position that the Armenian revolutionary parties were intent on creating a pretext to precipitate an overreaction by Abdul Hamid, thereby forcing Great Power intervention; Ernest E. Ramsaur, Jr., The Young Turks (Princeton: Princeton
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University Press, 1957), p. 9, argues that the 1894 uprisings show that they "were prepared to sacrifice their own people in order to attract the attention of the European powers to their desires." Nor are all those writing from an Armenian standpoint always in sympathy with their actions. Walker, p. 135, and Nalbandian, p. 160, portray them as essentially opportunists responding to an apparently disintegrating empire, while Hovannisian, On the Road, p. 23, highlights their lack of political comprehension, naivete, and weakness. The important point, according to Melson, pp. 6465, is that the Armenian parties were perceived by the Porte as a "powerful" threat, leading it to react in a totally "disproportionate" way. Yet Melson also concedes that the alternative, i.e. concession to the Armenians, would have undermined the empire: "Something had to give." 50. See Reid, pp. 21-52.
51. Nalbandian, pp. 109-10, 167-68. 52. Reid, p. 37. The intrusion of terrorism and political violence into general Ottoman life is developed in George W. Gawrych, "The Culture and Politics of Violence in Turkish Society, 1903-13," Middle Eastern Studies 22:3 (1985), pp. 307-30. 53. Ramsaur, pp. 65-76,124-29. 54. This article lacks space with which to develop the theme of Turkish national emergence. For more on the critical role of theoreticians in its genesis, see Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism, The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gokalp (London: Luzac, 1950), pp. 11252; Francois Georgeon, Aux origines du nationalisms turc: Yusuf Akciira, 1876-1935 (Paris: Editions ADPF, 1980). 55. Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks The CUP in Turkish Politics, 1908-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 166-81, for its social composition; R. Hrair Dekmejian, "Determinants of Genocide: Armenians and Jews as Case Studies" in Hovannisian, ed. Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 85-96; Gawrych, p. 313. 56. David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876-1908 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), pp. 29-38; Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 190. 57. The extent of compensatory turcocentrism can be gauged by the way in which Turkish education in the 1920s considered the Turks neither borrowers nor even transmitters of civilization, but its actual creators. See Clive Foss, "The Turkish View of Armenian History: A Vanishing Nation" in Hovannisian, ed. Armenian Genocide, History, Politics, Ethics, pp. 250-79. 58. Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism in Turkey (London: C. Hurst, 1981); George Georgiades Amakis, "Turanism, an Aspect of Turkish Nationalism," Balkan Studies 1 (1960), pp. 19-32. 59. Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 6. 60. A revealing statement on this score comes from the German naval attache Humann, who argued to U.S. Ambassador Morgenthau that CUP actions against the Armenians in 1915 were justified because CUP control was limited to the big cities, while everywhere else "the old fanatic Turks" were in the majority. See Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1918), p. 376. Morgenthau's evidence suggesting that the triumvirate really were terrified of a better organized Armenian movement itself poses probing
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questions as to whether genocide is perpetrated by strong, unfettered states, or states that ultimately are weak and vulnerable. 61. Dekmejian, pp. 85-96. 62. This is certainly the view of F. Ahmad, Young Turks, pp. 21,154-58; Gawrych, pp. 307-15, also highlights the pervading sense of crisis; Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Role of the Turkish Military in the Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: A Study in Historical Continuities," Journal of Political and Military Sociology 20:2 (1992), p. 269, agrees that the Balkan wars marked one of the major "turning-points" for the CUP (and for modern Turkish history), fuelling their search for desperate remedies. Though emphasis on their reactive behavior alone should not be overplayed, comparisons can be drawn with other untried, radical groups, such as the French Jacobins in 1793-94, or the Bolsheviks from 1918 who, finding themselves in power yet stymied in their transformative ambitions, responded with attacks on political and social groupings who opposed or challenged their agendas. While Melson places ideology in the forefront of his analysis and explanation for the CUP onslaught against the Armenians, I would emphasize its latent ideological tendencies, crystallized by the crisis or emergency practice of power. 63. F. Ahmad, Young Turks, pp. 154-58. 64. Ibid., p. 137; Shaw, pp. 297-98; Gawrych, pp. 31415, emphasizes the criticality of Albanian secession; Stavro Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) for full details of this development. 65. K. Ahmad, Kurdistan, pp. 18-30, and the older study of Edward Mead Earle, Turkey, the Great Powers and the Baghdad Railway (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966 <1923>). 66. See Roderic H. Davison, "The Armenian Crisis 1912-1914," The American Historical Review 53:3 (1948), pp. 481-505. 67. Hovannisian, On the Road, p. 33. 68. Hovannisian, "Historical Dimensions," p. 28. Hovannisian argues that these were "the most comprehensive and promising of all the proposals put forth since the internationalization of the Armenian Question in 1878." Feroz Ahmad, "Unionist Relations with Greek, Armenian and Jewish Communities of the Ottoman Empire 1908-1914" in Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews, p. 424, states that "in Turkish eyes," Armenian willingness to bite on Russian intervention in favor of their own liberation made them "instruments of Russian policy." 69. F. Ahmad, Young Turks, p. 144. 70. See Z. A. B. Zeman, The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe (London: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 28-29. 71. Hovannisian, On the Road, p. 37; McCarthy, pp. 50-59. 72. Karpat, p. 163. 73. Vahakn N. Dadrian, 'The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7:2 (1993), pp. 173-201. Dadrian has proposed that high-level planning for the killings predates Turkey's entry into war, with the CUP Political Section leader, Dr. Behaeddin Sakir, setting up the Erzerum headquarters for the Special Organization in late August 1914. Quite extensive "ethnic cleans-
427
ing" type massacres by these forces in the Lake Van area, in December 1914, at the onset of the Ottoman Sarakamish offensive, further suggest a premeditated policy of genocide. See also Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Role of the Special Organization in the Armenian Genocide during the First World War" in Panikos Panayi, ed. Minorities in Wartime (Leamington: Berg, 1993), pp. 61-63. 74. See W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 276-85. 75. See Z. A. B. Zeman, Diplomatic History of the First World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 237-38; Mark Levene, "The Balfour Declaration, A Case of Mistaken Identity," English Historical Review CVIL422 (1992), pp. 54-77, on Zionist utilization of the British idee fixe with an alleged collective Jewish alignment to the German interest.
76. Dadrian, "Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist Conference," pp. 187-88, cites the efforts of Armenian elites to avoid confrontation and mobilize the community financially, organizationally, and through recruitment for the Ottoman war effort, even though "most Armenians privately hoped for Turkish defeat and the end to Turkish domination." Dashnaksutiun, in particular, seems to have gone out if its way to turn down incitement to organize an Armenian insurrection against Russia in the Caucasus, in return for alleged promises of autonomy from Dr. Sakir at its summer 1914 conference in Erzerum (Dadrian, "Role of the Special Organization," pp. 50-82). By contrast, Shaw, p. 315, takes the one-dimensional view that the Ottoman Armenians launched an "open" revolt against the Porte in the wake of Sarakamish, in order to assist a Russian drive into eastern Anatolia. 77. Astourian, pp. 65-72; Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, "Die Okonomie der Endlosung: Menschenvernichtung und Wirtschaftliche Neuordnung" in Beitrdge zur Nationahozialistischen Gesundheits und Sozialpolitik, volume V Sozialpolitik und Judenvemichtung: Gibt es eine Okonomie der Endldsung? (Berlin, 1987), for obvious Holocaust parallels. 78. Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1914-1922 (New York: St. Martin's, 1973). 79. Rouben Paul Adalian, "Comparative Policy and Differential Practice in the Treatment of Minorities in Wartime: The United States Archival Evidence on the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire," unpublished paper given to Institute of Balkan Studies Conference, Aristotle University, October-November 1994. 80. The coincidence of the Dardanelles landings and the onset of the Armenian killings raise questions akin to those regarding the implementation of the Nazi Final Solution. As with the Armenian genocide, Nazi genocide plans may have already existed in principlein the heads, conversations, and public pronouncements of Hitler, Himmler et al., if not necessarily on paperprior to Operation Barbarossa. But the trigger to their actual wholesale implementation, beginning in the late summer or early autumn 1941, could be seen as contingent to the realization that their ultimate transformative agendaby way of Operation Barbarossahad not only failed, but would lead to their own complete self-destruction. Though there is something contradictory here, the contradiction itself maybe critical to understanding the precipitation of full-blown genocide in both Armenian and Jewish cases. It may also be the point at which intentionalist and functionalist narratives fuse. See Mark Levene, "Frontiers of Genocide: Jews in the Eastern War Zones, 191420 and 1941" in Panayi, ed. Minorities in Wartime, pp. 83-117.
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81. The desperate defense of Van and a handful of other communities, including the Cilician community of Musa Dagh, proved the exceptions to a general rule of liquidation without opposition. See Walker, pp. 216-25. 82. Hovannisian, On the Road, p. 227. Reliable estimates suggest that in this single massacre, though half the city's 70,000 Armenians escaped across the Caspian on September 15, 1918, between 9,000 and 20,000 were killed, while a further 10,000 refugees subsequently died of epidemic and hunger. The pleas of German and neutral consuls to stop the killings were ignored. 83. Ibid.; Richard G. Hovannisian, Republic of Armenia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982 <1971>), discusses the entire saga; Dadrian, "Role of the Turkish Military," p. 282, specifically cites the top-secret cipher from Kemal to Karabekir, on November 8,1920, instructing him to execute by "deceptive" means "the intent of the government," namely "the political and physical extermination of Armenia." 84. Shaw, p. 344; Walker, p 275. On the strategic significance of Erzerum, "situated in the center of the most pronounced Armenian region," see Davison, p. 488; Paul C. Heimreich, From Paris to Sevres. The Partition of the Ottoman Empire at the Peace Conference of 19191920 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1974), pp. 296-99. 85. Quoted in Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 38. 86. Shaw, p. 346 87. Walker, p. 305. 88. Ibid. 89. Pro-Armenian authors note some of these atrocities: Hovannisian, On the Road, p. 194; K. Ahmad, Kurdistan, p. 170; Walker, p. 279. 90. Quoted in Joseph, p. 119. For more on the Kurdish bad press, see Charles Glass, "How the Kurds were Betrayed," Times Literary Supplement, September 6, 1996, pp. 14-15; Shenfield, "The Circassians," for a comparative case-history. 91. Quoted in McDowall, p. 200. 92. Ibid., p. 2. 93. One significant Armenian grouping, the Balikli, had been Kurdified and Islamicized. For these and other possible shadings, see Hoffman and Koutcharian, pp. 6-10. For other aspects of Kurdish social anthropology and religion, see van Bruinessen, Aghas, pp. 109-13; Izady, pp. 131-66; McDowall, pp. 8-17. 94. van Bruinessen, Aghas, pp. 177-82; Hoffman and Koutcharian, pp. 7-10. 95. As many as 100,000 Kurds migrated into the areas of Mus, Van, and Erzerum in the period 1878-1914. The 1912 Armenian census gave figures of 242,000 settled as compared with 182,000 nomadic Kurds in the region overall. Hoffman and Koutcharian, pp. 12, 33. 96. van Bruinessen, Aghas, p. 268. 97. McDowall, p. 90; Kendal, "The Kurds under the Ottoman Empire" in People, p. 35. 98. van Bruinessen, Aghas, pp. 210-13.
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99. McDowall, pp. 87-96; van Bruinessen, Aghas, pp. 275-76; K. Ahmad, Kurdistan, pp. 6062; Kendal, "The Kurds under tlie Ottoman Empire," pp. 3437; Wadie Jwaideh, "The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development," Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1960. 100. McDowall, p. 103. 101. van Bruinessen, Aghas, p. 269. 102. Ahmed, Kurdistan, pp. 130-31; Hoffman and Koutcharian, pp. 26-27; McDowall, p. 105; by contrast, McCarthy, pp. 133-38, does not seem to have taken these Kurdish deportations into account as an additional factor in the dramatic Muslim population losses in 191418 Anatolia.
103. McDowall, p. 124; Kendal, "Kurdistan in Turkey," p. 60; van Bruinesssen, Aghas, p. 279; Shaw, p. 344. 104. Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 38, note that the Ottomanized Kurdish notable, Sherif Pasha, petitioned that the Paris Peace Conference "represented neither tribal leaders nor Kurdish intellectuals." Nor did he possess any "clear idea about the independent and future borders of Kurdistan." 105. On the post-1930s situation, see Kendal, "Kurdistan in Turkey," pp. 72-102; McDowall, pp. 395-444. According to Izady, p. 119, the 1990 Kurdish population of Turkey stood at 13.7 million, or 24.1% of the total. 106. Ismet Sherrif Vanly, "Kurdistan in Iraq" in People, pp. 158-63; Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 1914-1932 (London: Ithaca, 1976). A League of Nations commission investigating the status of Mosul province in 1925 argued that in ethnic terms a Kurdish majority would assume the creation of an independent Kurdish state. Van Bruinessen, Aghas, pp. 274-75. 107. Quoted in Hovannisian, "Historical Dimensions," p. 31. 108. Melson, p. 149; Dadrian, The History, pp. 303-16. 109. Quoted in K. Ahmad, Kurdistan, p. 192. 110. Quoted in M. E. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East 1792-1923 (London and New York: Longman, 1987), p. 293. 111. Quoted in Joseph, p. 149. 112. Dadrian, "The Dysfunctions of Humanitarian Intervention in the Rise and Treatment of the Armenian Question" in The History; also, pp. 312-13, 379-81, 420-23. 113. See W. W. Gottlieb, "The Great Powers over Turkey" in Studies in Secret Diplomacy During the First World War (London: George AJlen and Unwin, 1957); Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire 1914-1921 (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978); Marian Kent, ed. The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire (London: Frank Cass, 1995, second edition); David Fromkin, A Peace to End Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989). 114. Shaw, p. 331; McDowall, p. 121. 115. Walker, pp. 272-73.
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116. No one has much positive to say about Sevres. Kendal, "Kurds under the Ottoman Empire," pp. 41-46; K. Ahmad, Kurdistan, pp. 201-05; Shaw, p. 356; Heimreich, pp. 314-37; Theodore Richard Nash, 'The Effect of International Oil Interests upon the Fate of an Autonomous Kurdish Territory. A Perspective on the Conference of Sevres. August 20 1920," International Problems (Tel Aviv) 15:1-2 (1976), pp. 119-33. Allied realpolitik with regard to Eastem Anatolia closely mirrors their actions elsewhere [Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1968)]. 117. Arnold J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970 <1922>), p. 100. 118. Hovannisian, "Historical Dimensions," p. 37; Othman Ali, "The Kurds and the Lausanne Negotiations, 1922-23," Middle Eastern Studies 33:3 (1997), pp. 521-34. 119. Housepian, Smyrna 1922, The Destruction of a City (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 21419; Toynbee, Western Question, chapter vii., "The War of Extermination," in which he notes that extensive, systematic atrocities and ethnic cleansing were carried out by both Greeks and Turks in this struggle; Stephanie Yerasimos, "La Question du Pont Euxin, 191923," Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains 39:153 (1989), pp. 9-34. 120. Shaw, p. 377. 121. Yapp, p. 271. 122. Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide, A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Cambridge, MA: Blue Crane Books, 1997). 123. Council on Turkish-American Relations, The Treaty with Turkey: Why It Should Be Ratified (New York, 1926). Quoted in Adalian, "Armenian Genocide," p. 97. 124. Lewis, p. 262. 125. McDowall, p. 195; Kendal, "Kurdistan in Turkey," p. 62. 126. Quoted in Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 42. Curzons support of the Kurds, however, was always rather tenuous since he himself inclined towards returning largely Kurdish Mosul to the Turks. See McDowall, pp. 142-43; Ali, "The Kurds," p. 524; Kendal, "Kurdistan in Turkey," p. 59. 127. Ramsaur, p. 129. 128. F. Ahmad, Young Turks, p. 161. 129. Hoffman and Koutcharian, pp. 5-7, 11, provide considerable evidence of these patronclient relationships. Nevertheless, Armenian and Assyrian mountain people, despite their inferior status, were sometimes considered members of Kurdish tribes and in the nineteenth and early twentieth century frequently called upon to assist Kurdish uprisings against Ottoman rule; van Bruinessen, Aghas, p. 98. 130. K. Ahmad, Kurdistan, pp. 55-56. 131. McDowall, pp. 89, 97-99. 132. K. Ahmad, Kurdistan, p. 174; Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 38.
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133. Kendal, "Kurdistan in Turkey," pp. 64-65; McDowall, pp. 202-07. 134. Melson, p. 154, his particular target being Lewis's Emergence of Modem Turkey. 135. Davison, p. 484, notes that Dashnaksutiun's claim of 165,000 in 1907 made it easily the leading society, but adds that, because the Armenian political societies were organized, they "had more influence than mere membership warranted." 136. Quoted in Hoffman and Koutcharian, p. 37. 137. See the research findings of Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, most recently in "Victims of the State: Genocides, Politicides, and Group Repression from 1945 to 1995" in Albert J. Jongman, ed. Contemporary Genocides: Causes, Cases, Consequences (Den Haag: PIOOM, 1996), pp. 33-58; also their Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview, 1994), especially pp. 27-44, on the Kurds. 138. Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 17-18, 57-83, for the primary exposition of the relationship between ethnic conflict and modem genocide; also his The Pity of It All- Polarization of Racial and Ethnic Relations (London: Duckworth, 1977); Helen Fein, "Accounting for Genocide after 1945: Theories and Some Findings," International Journal on Group Rights 1 (1993), pp. 79106, especially pp. 88-92. 139. Theodore Dan, "Bolshevism and Menshevism" in The Origins of Bolshevism (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1964). 140. Ambassador Morgenthau's Diary, pp. 342, 386; Davis (Harput) to Morgenthau, 30 June 1916, in Ara Sarafian, ed., United States Official Documents, vol. Ill, The Central Lands (Watertown, MA: Armenian Review, 1995), p. 7. 141. See Andrew Higgins, "Russia's Pipe Dreams Fuel Oil Rush on Caspian Sea," The Independent, May 18, 1995; Suha Bolukbasi, "Ankara's Baku-Centred Transcaucasia Policy: Has It Failed?" Middle East journal 51:1 (1997), pp. 80-94. 142. Quoted in the BBC-2 series Water Wars Part 2: "To the Last Drop," broadcast May 8, 1991. 143. As a consequence, the Kurds suffered an estimated 35,000 deaths and 200,000 refugees. David Pallister, "US abandoned Kurds to Iraq," The Guardian, October 26, 1990; McDowall, pp. 330-40. 144. Katherine A. Wilkens, "How we lost the Kurdish game," Washington Post, September 15, 1996. 145. McDowall, ch. 20; Henri J. Barkey and Grahame E. Fuller, "Turkey's Kurdish Question: Critical Turning Points and Missed Opportunities," Middle East journal 51:1 (1997), pp. 59-79. 146. Nergis Canefe, "Reinventing Politics: Genocidal Tendencies and the Tribalist Dictum of Ultranationalism in Turkey," unpublished paper for second conference, Association of Genocide Scholars, Concordia University, June 1997, for the growing wave of attacks on Alevis. 147. This does not mean the PKK is itself a part)' of "innocents." See Martin van Bruinessen, "Between Guerilla War and Political Murder: The Workers" Party of Kurdistan" MERIP,
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Middle East Report No. 153 (July-August 1988), pp. 14-27; Michael M. Gunter, "The Kurdish Insurgency in Turkey," Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 13 (1990), pp. 5781. Nevertheless, U.S. or Western protest at the Turkish invasion of its security zone has been slight to non-existent. See Katerina von Waldersee, "Turks Refuse to Leave Iraq," The Guardian, April 4,1995; Chris Morris, "Kurdish Factions Return to Open War," The Guardian, October 25, 1997. 148. Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 61. 149. Kuper, Genocide, p. 161.
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Creating A Modern "Zone of Genocide": The Impact of Nation - and State-Formation On Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923

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Creating a Modern "Zone of Genocide": The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923

Mark Levene University of Warwick

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Holocaust and Genocide Studies

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