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-Formationon Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923

Mark LeveneUniversity of Warwick

The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890sthrough the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqistates against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communitiesin Eastern Anatolia, is striking. This article traces the origins of these inci-dents by examining emerging Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish nationalmovements and their competition for the region's resources. It argues thatthe creation of this "zone of genocide" in Eastern Anatolia cannot be un-derstood in isolation, but only in light of the role played by the GreatPowers in the emergence of a Western-led international system.

This article examines patterns of genocide and ethnic hostility in Eastern Anatoliafrom the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. This region has been de-scribed as a "natural geographic unit" of some 120,000 square miles.1 Its core is alargely steppe-like mountain plateau, with Lake Van and Mount Ararat its most sig-nificant physical features. To the north it is bounded by the Black Sea after a dramaticdescent via the Pontus range; the Caucasus mountains provide a natural barrier inthe northeast. To the south, it falls away in a series of steep, parallel folds descendingalong the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the Jazira, the great Syrian-Mesopotamian plain.

Eastern Anatolia consists of the six Ottoman administrative vilayets that mostconcerned the European powers in the late nineteenth century due to "the ArmenianQuestion," as well as the vilayet of Trabzon and a substantial part of Mosul. Thiswould embrace historic western "Armenia," with the exception of Cilicia, but noteastern Armenia (and thus the modern independent republic of that name). It wouldalso include the northern and central core of "Kurdistan," some of which today liesin northern Iraq.

Eastern Anatolia is our focus because it is at once an arena in which competingnational interests have laid claim to its territory and assets, and a geographic regionthat since the 1890s has been repeatedly plagued by genocidal killings. Within the

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, V12 N3, Winter 1998, pp. 393-4i3 393

at Ecole Norm

ale Suprieure Paris on April 2, 2014http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/

Dow

nloaded from

THE ANATOLIAN REGION

framework of the Allied victory in the First World War and the extension of Westerninfluence 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 ethno-cultural groups: Armenians, Kurds, Pontic Greeks, and on a smaller scale, Assyrians.The articulation of national identity by elite elements within these societies had notconferred self-determination. The persistence of their ethnic, religious, or tribal par-ticularisms, however, challenged the notion of Turkish or Iraqi nation-statesa notionfounded upon the assumption of social cohesion and homogeneity as the necessaryprice (not to mention prerequisite) for genuine independence and acceptance withina Western-dominated international system. Originating in the waning decades of theOttoman Empire, such ideas were critically espoused by Turkish regimes in the crisisyears 191423, as they attempted vigorous, even revolutionary programs of "national"development. These programs, in turn, translated assumptions about national identityand nationhood into the ground-rules for modern genocide, singling out any groupthat espoused a separate development that might imply political autonomy.

The development of modern Eastern Anatolia demonstrates how local national-ist aspirations interacted with an emerging international system of nation-states, pro-ducing the potential for, and often reality of, genocide. By limiting our coverage tothe core region of the 1915-16 Armenian genocide, while extending our chronologi-cal reach both forwards and backwards, we confront not the single, isolated Armenianphenomenon, but rather a series of genocidal and near-genocidal massacres encom-passing three additional national groups. It is this phenomenon which justifies ourreferring to Eastern Anatolia as a "zone of genocide."

394 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

GenocideA DefinitionGenocide occurs "where a state, perceiving the integrity of its agenda to be threat-ened by an aggregate populationdefined by the state in collective or communaltermsseeks to remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse physical elimina-tion of that aggregate, in toto, or until such time as it is no longer perceived to repre-sent a threat."2 My definition concurs with aspects of those advanced by Fein3 and byChalk and Jonassohn.4 In particular, it closely follows Fein's original proposition thatgenocide represents the "calculated murder of a segment or all of a group definedoutside the universe of obligation . . . in response to a crisis or opportunity perceivedto be caused or impeded by the victim." However, Chalk and Jonassohn s view (fromwhich Fein demurs) that the victim group is defined by the perpetrator is also centralto my reading, insofar as inflated perceptions and sometimes imaginary constructionson 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 inter-related behavior and actions of both the perpetrator-state and communal victimgroup prior to genocide, one might appear to be apportioning blame equally betweenthem. Worse still, as in the case of some pro-Turkish apologetics, there is the dangerof placing the blame entirely on the victim's head, thereby claiming that, far frombeing genocide, the state's actions constitute legitimate self-defense. I should there-fore make it clear at the outset that, even where there is a political and possibly violentdynamic between state and community, this situation can under no circumstancesjustify mass murder or mitigate against a charge of genocide.6 Second, it might benecessary to explore the role of external parties in the state-community dynamic,particularly if their actions aggravate or cause a deterioration of these internal rela-tionships. Third, we might want to evaluatenot condonethe centrality of thisexternal dimension in the state-perpetrator's self-justification for its actions.

The Armenian genocide stands alongside the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwandankillings as one of the very few identifiable examples of total genocide in the twentiethcentury. For this reason, we seek to understand how the Ittihad Party (Committee ofUnion and Progress, or CUP) perceived the Armenians such that it chose to eradicatethem. This might also lead us to consider why the CUP or its successors initiatedattacks on other communal groups. Unlike the Armenian case, in each of these otherinstances the scope, scale, and intensity of the killings was limited, though this doesnot rule out comparison. When viewed together, these genocidal episodes representa continuum of perpetrator responses from planned total extermination, through pu-nitive annihilatory massacres designed to eliminate, disperse, or entirely remove allor part of a population via ethnic cleansing and mass deportation, to draconian "elimi-natory" procedures, including forced resettlement and assimilation. Raphael Lemkin,originator of the term "genocide," would not have doubted that these actions all con-

Creating a Modern "Zone of Genocide" 395

at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

stituted forms of genocide. What is at stake here, then, is less a matter for juridicaldefinition than of finding commonalties within a series of mass killings which linkthem into an overall pattern.

The distinctive human geography of Eastern Anatolia is one key to our explana-tion. Historically, the region is an ethnographic mosaic of language, religion, and cul-ture. Yet assuming one could delineate this diversity in terms of authentic nationalcommunities, it is noteworthy that no single, pre-1914 group constituted a majority.Armenians, arguably the most coherent, homogenous, and indigenous grouping, wereparticularly strong in areas around Van and Bitlis, where they made up approximatelyforty percent of the population.7 However, Kurds, the second major grouping, werein the nineteenth century also increasingly visible in these areas, as well as farthersouth. Both the Kurds and the third major Turkish grouping were Moslem, in contrastto the Christian Armenians, though religious heterodoxy and endogamy arguably dis-tinguished 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, anda substantial population of Pontic Greeks, some of whom were Moslems on the BlackSea coast near Trabzon. In the Hakkari highlands there were significant pockets ofancient schismatic Christian groups, notably "Assyrians" (Nestorians) and Jacobites.9During the mid- to late nineteenth century, the region's ethnic mix was furthercomplicated by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Tartar, Chechen, and aboveall Circassian muhajirs (Moslem refugees), who themselves were victims of ethniccleansing and, arguably, genocide at the hands of the expanding Czarist empire in theCaucasus.10 Their arrival added to the already intense inter-communal competitionfor land brought about by an estimated fifty percent population rise in the aftermathof 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 Otto-man authorities or their Turkish or Iraqi successors to eradicate them. Because ofspace limitations, I have concentrated here on the genocidal sequence affecting Ar-menians and Kurds only, though my approach would also be pertinent to the PonticGreek and Assyrian cases.

During the period 189496, Armenian communities across Eastern Anatoliawere devastated in a series of massacres orchestrated by the Ottoman Sultan AbdulHamid II. Quasi-irregular regiments, the Hamidiye (named after the Sultan and com-posed mostly of tribal Kurds) were the chief agents of these massacres, though theywere often aided by gendarmerie, the regular army, and other elements of the localMoslem population. Though the entire Armenian community was not wiped out, esti-mates of the death toll range from 30,000 to 200,000, with some concentration around80,000.l2 Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them.13 In myformulation, however, these events would constitute partial genocide.

During 1915-16, the CUP regime, which took control of the Ottoman Empirein 1908, attempted a systematic extermination of Armenians throughout Anatolia.Most of the victims were from the Eastern Anatolian heartlands, though not all of thekilling took place there. The liquidation of entire communities in situ, in Mus, Diar-bekir, Van, and elsewhere, was succeeded by deportations of other communitiessouthwards towards the Syrian desert and Mesopotamia. During these transfers, tensof thousands died from negligence, starvation, and abuse.14 Out of a prewar OttomanArmenian population of approximately two million, between 600,000 and over a mil-lion were killed. These figures exclude subsequent deaths from postwar Turkish cam-paigns against the remaining Armenians.15 This is a case of "total" genocide.

In 1917, possibly 700,000 Kurds were forcibly deported to Western Anatolia bythe CUP authorities, with considerable loss of life. These deportations constituted aprogram of forcible assimilation without evidence of overt genocidal motivation.16

Between 1925 and 1938, a series of Kurdish revolts against the Kemalist regimeled to the military "pacification" of the entire Turkish part of the region. Repeatedmassacres and forced deportations from specific rebellious areas were interspersedwith periods of enforced Turkification of its three million-strong Kurdish population.This policy culminated in 1937-38, with the suppression of the rebellion around Der-sim. The British consul in Trabzon specifically likened the mass killings there to thoseof the Armenians in 1915-16. One Kurdish specialist, while cautious of calling the1925-38 sequence "genocide," nevertheless considers Dersim a specific and provencase.17 Another has argued that "Turkey had unmistakably intended genocide of theKurdish people," though "in practice its intentions were defeated by the sheer scaleof the task."18 No reliable survey has yet succeeded in accurately estimating its casual-ties. The Turkish Communist Party calculates that between one and one and a halfmillion were Kurds deported and massacred between 1925 and 1938.19

Throughout the period 1960 to the mid-1980s, a limited Kurdish rebellion innorthern 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 in1980 intensified this genocidal thrust, culminating in the spring of 1988 with a seriesof operations code-named Anfal, in which more than 100,000 Kurds (estimates goup to 200,000) were massacred. Assyrians and Yezidis were also targeted.21 A lesscoordinated Ba'athist attempt to massacre the Kurdish population after the secondGulf war in 1991 was stymied by the Allied declaration of a "safe haven" in the north-ern part of Kurdish Iraq.22

If the differences in state structure between a decaying Ottoman empire, an


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

authoritarian nationalist Turkey, and the modern Iraqi police state need to be takeninto account in this sequence of events, by the same token so do distinctions amongthe victim groups. In 1895 the French foreign minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, shruggedoff the growing wave of anti-Armenian massacres as "one of those thousand incidentsof struggle between Christians and Muslims."23 Focusing on the religious fault line inthe empire between the dominant Moslem umma (community) and Christian andJewish sects subordinate to it has, superficially, a plausible explanatory ring. Kurds onthe right side of that fault line played a major part as perpetrators in attacks on Arme-nians in 1894-96 and 1915-16, as they had in earlier massacres of Assyrians in the1840s, and later in the Assyrian Affair of 1933.u Indeed, Bakr Sidqi, the Iraqi generaland primary instigator of the 1933 killings, was himself a Kurd.25 But if religious ha-tred between Moslems and Christians is a convenient formula for differentiating per-petrators and victims, how do we explain why Moslem Kurds became a target forgenocide, often alongside Christian Assyrians, in both avowedly secularizing Turkeyand Iraq? 26

One British observer, writing in 1919, optimistically recalled that traditionalChristian-Muslim relations in Eastern Anatolia were the best between any twopeoples in the Middle East.27 This overly rosy assessment at least cautions us not tolocate our genocidal sequence in some timeless cycle of ethno-religious animosities.Before the mid-nineteenth century, there had been no major, inter-communal mas-sacres in the region since the disorders that culminated in the battle of Chaldiran in1514, 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 hadbeen an arena of geo-strategic confrontation. As a major crossroads between CentralAsia and Asia Minor, it had been fought over by every would-be Near Eastern im-perial power since classical times. But the Ottoman victory at Chaldiran over theirPersian Safavid contenders ensured that for the next four hundred years its embracewithin the Ottoman fold was as a relatively minor border march, geographically re-moved from its power center.

The most striking thing about the profound destabilization of Eastern Anatoliain its final Ottoman decades is how little this had to do with the region itself or itspre-existing ethnographic makeup. Destabilization arose out of much broader histori-cal 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 politicaland economic penetration of the Ottoman edifice, bringing remote Eastern Anatoliainto view as a region ripe for carve-up into spheres of influence. But if naked West-ernor more exactly Great Powerinterests bear significant responsibility for thegenocidal outcomes, so do the impact of secular and liberal notions derived from theWestern Enlightenment. In the context of a Moslem autocracy, these were revolu-tionary enough. The further idea that whole populations could be unified, mobilized,and made strong by recourse to nationalism was utterly explosive.


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

The arrival of nationalism in Eastern Anatolia was paradoxical on two accounts.First, Ottoman rule had an established way of dealing widi its mulriethnicity. Cer-tainly, traditional Ottoman society was based on an implicit, unassailable assumptionof Muslim supremacy. Its Muslim peoples were its full members in ways that inferiorChristian and Jewish dhimmi ("tolerated subjects") could not be. The three histori-cally recognized non-Muslim communitiesGreek Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian,and Jewishwere not only guaranteed the protection of the Sultan-Caliph and dieright to practice their religion in peace, but were also recognized as corporate bod-iesmilletswith the right (indeed duty) to manage their own internal affairs. Theirprimary function, however, was to preserve social stability in a multi-communal envi-ronment.

If the Ottoman system thus allowed for non-Muslim communal groupsalbeitwithin strictly defined and hierarchical parametersto operate autonomously, oursecond paradox lies with the proposed substitution of the millet system with a funda-mentally different model: Ortomanism. One could argue that this was a genuinelyradical attempt to destroy the barriers between Christians and Muslims by creatinga new, inclusive citizenship. Its legal enactment as the Nationality Law of 1869 prom-ised all its peoples "equality before the law" and thus, on paper at least, the promiseof a post-millet stake in a shared Ottoman future.29 Many educated Armenians andtown-based Kurds considered it a good idea, and it was. The problem was that itsEuropean liberal premise was intended as an adjunct to something else: sovereignty.The French Revolution, the first modern experiment in state reformulation, haddemonstrated that without sovereignty Enlightenment ideals were largely irrelevant.Tanzimat, the long-term structural overhaul based upon Western models that theSublime Porte initiated in 1839, always aimed to shore up the empire s rapidly dwin-dling independence. The Nationality Law actually weakened it.

The most tangible nineteenth-century European encroachments on Ottomansovereignty had been territorial. Russian invasions interspersed with tactical with-drawals, including into Eastern Anatolia from the 1820s on, were perhaps the mostpersistent example. Equally predictable was the Ottoman response to regain the ini-tiative: crushing the nominal autonomy of its powerful Kurdish emirs and quasi-independent Armenian enclaves.30 If the empire's renewed, Tanzimat-informed em-phasis on the centralization of its hinterlands was directly challenged by the specterof Great Power threats to liquidate it, there were nonetheless other challenges. Thesemight best be exemplified in a single word: "capitulations," or special privilegeswhich, ostensibly conferred on foreign merchants by a series of Ottoman treaties withthe Great Powers,31 effectively unraveled the nationality question. In addition to theirpromotion of Western and other unfavorable concessions, they also included provi-sions, especially held by Russia, France, and Britain, to "protect" Christian minoritycommunities against "unjust" treatment. This outside protection cut directly acrossthe Ottoman understanding of its own role as "protector" of the dhimmi, while


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

allowing a flood of Western missionary groups to concentrate their evangelizing ef-forts on Ottoman Christians.

These developments also worked in the opposite direction. Not only did Arme-nians, in particular, flock to American or British Protestant schools and colleges;32 theGreek, Armenian, and Jewish entrepreneurs who largely monopolized the interna-tionally-oriented sector of the Ottoman economy found it to their commercial advan-tage to apply to foreign consulates for protection. The capitulations system carriedwith it immunity from fiscal exaction. Thus, at the very moment Tanzimat was at-tempting to reassert the empire's dwindling fiscal and social control in the teeth ofWestern neo-colonialism,33 the historically "subject" communities or, more accurately,their most influential or avant-garde elements, became closely identified with its mostegregious failures. Consequently, the 1869 Nationality Law, far from creating theground-rules for a common Ottoman identity, actually underscored the inequalitiesbetween umma and millets. From a majority Muslim viewpoint, these seemed tofavor the minority groups, thereby overturning a centuries-old, religiously-sanctionedunderstanding of who was dominant and who subordinate. From the minority per-spective, in the face of a state "protection" which increasingly appeared illusory, en-croachment on what communal and individual rights they did possess had to be re-sisted at all costs. The ideal of Ottoman citizenship technically should have dispensedwith the need for millets. Instead of blurring the distinction between Christians andMuslims, the period of Tanzimat actually saw the dividing line harden, as the milletsthemselves metamorphosed from confessional into national bodies.34

Benedict Anderson has linked the emergence of the "national" idea to the cre-ation of a shared and secularized vernacular literature.35 Through novels, plays, po-etry, folklore, and especially newspapers, an "imagined community" can be createdbefore or even without achieving concrete political form. Through these media, re-mote places become significant to individuals who themselves live far from one an-other and have never met. What is notable about the intensification of national pas-sions for Eastern Anatolia is that they largely emanated from outside the region, incosmopolitan Constantinople, Smyrna, and Salonika, or even as far away as Tiflis,Geneva, and Cairo. Further, they were initially and most intensely expressed by anintelligentsia who generally were not from and probably would never go to EasternAnatolia. Only with time did these national passions penetrate the peoples in theregion itself.

An embryonic idea of Eastern Anatolia as an authentic Turkish national home-land directly collided with the emergence of national groups that had an equal, if notmore profound stake in it. Armenian nationalism was already well advanced, whereasKurdish nationalism progressed slowly and with marked ambivalence. Whether onecan even speak of an Assyrian nationalism is perhaps a moot point. Nevertheless, thatthese groups, along with the Pontic Greeks,36 were transformed into contenders forall or part of the region requires some understanding of their own internal social


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

structure, interaction with the West, and above all interaction with each other. Thefollowing analysis will concentrate on the emergence of national consciousness amongthree of these groups: Armenians, Turks, and Kurds.

ArmeniansIf Armenians come closest to this nationalist trajectory, this may be because, in Otto-man terms, they were exceptional both in the breadth and depth of their moderniza-tion. Indeed it was this very exceptionality which was to excite so much bitternessand anger against them. Armenian national consciousness emerged out of an early tomid-nineteenth century cultural renaissance, the Zartonk.zl It was closely related toand grounded in an accelerating Armenian occupational and social mobility withinthe cosmopolitan parts of the empire penetrated by Western-orientated commerce.Armenian skills in trading and foreign languages proved highly successful, with Euro-pean companies vying for agents and trading partners in Constantinople and Smyrna.In banking and industry, the urban amira class found itself not simply competingwith, but displacing formerly well-entrenched Greek plutocrats.

Their real success, however, was a much more broadly-based communal em-bourgeoiseinent. Moreover, emphasis on a European-style education, with thousandsof young Armenians studying abroad,38 resulted in a large, literate, and sophisticatedconstituency with an ever increasing appetite for printed matter (both in Europeanlanguages and, more importantly, a recently modernized Armenian vernacular), aswell as in a veritable communal revolution. Oligarchic control by the amira-supportedGregorian Patriarchate found itself in retreat before a wave of Catholic and Protes-tant converts who founded their own separate millets, while demands from the intelli-gentsia and esnaf (guilds) for greater democratization and secularization of overallcommunal affairs was partly realized in the grandiosely, if rather ineptly-named Ar-menian National Constitution of 1862.39

Ottoman state sponsorship of new confessional millets and an Armenian consti-tution leads one to question what caused so many educated Armenians to turn to-wards political, even overtly revolutionary nationalism. First, as the rapid moderniza-tion of city-based Armenians improved their socio-economic status, success invitedincreasingly hostile reactions from Turks upset by the erosion of the old order andtheir own superior status within it. On the Armenian side, "the discrepancy betweenwhat 'is' and what 'ought to be'"40 was most keenly felt by the intelligentsia. Theirdisenchantment led a significant proportion to reject the Ottomanism espoused bytheir communal elders, and support a national project of self-emancipation, the locusof which was the authentic Armenian homeland in Eastern Anatolia. Political-cum-mystical identification with land and people, moreover, led to early efforts to bridgethe gap between city acolytes and the rural hinterland. Such identification, however,could only intensify as the entire Armenian population found itself increasinglylumped together by a state-led reaction against the western-inspired reform move-


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

ment. Catalyzed by overt Russian aggression on behalf of "Christian" Balkan seces-sionists in 1877, the new sultan, Abdul Hamid, reinvoked the bonds of Islamic solidar-itythe gel that would hold together the Ottoman edifice in the face of the "infidel."Everything associated with Russia, the West, or modernity became suspect. Metro-politan Armenians, applauded by Westerners as "Europeans of the East," were obvi-ous scapegoats.41 So too in the wake of the Russian military advance into EasternAnatolia were rural Armenians, who took the brunt of Turkish army "reprisals," par-ticularly around Van and Bayazit.42

The accusations of Armenian association with the very forces that seemed in-tent upon destroying the empire, paradoxically provide the second part of our expla-nation for Armenian national radicalization. The emergence of the Hunchak andDashnak revolutionary parties in the 1880s and early '90s,43 organizations which dedi-cated themselves to overthrowing the Hamidian yoke in Eastern Anatolia and moregenerally, was motivated by the assumption that the Great Powers could be convincedto intervene on their behalf. They had done so for the Bulgarians, confirming theirindependence at the Congress of Berlin. And the Russians, in their attempt to forma separate peace with the Ottomans at the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, hadinvoked the Armenian right to self-government in the region under their own protec-tive aegis. Though the Berlin Congress eliminated these provisions, the contours ofa Russian, or better still Great Power protectorate (in which a European governor-general would preside over a gendarmerie and judiciary that favored the Armenians,while keeping Kurds, Circassians, and others at bay), was now firmly fixed in theminds of leading Armenian spokesmen like Bishop Khrimian.44The Great Power sug-gestion to the Porte, for instance, that it consider an ethnographic division of theregions population to provide for "as homogeneous a character as possible in thedifferent administrative districts" fed these hopes.45 The idea of an ethnic readjust-ment, as taken up by the Turks, was to have ultimately disastrous consequences forthe Armenians. From the time of the Berlin Congress, however, ostensible GreatPower interest encouraged Armenian radicals to move beyond diplomacy to politicalmobilization and direct armed action.

The strength of the mostly Russian-based Armenian revolutionary parties andthe degree to which they genuinely posed a threat to Ottoman control is controver-sial.46 Likewise is the extent to which Armenians in Eastern Anatolia who took uparms, most notably in the Sassun insurrection of 1894, were responding to their ownrevolutionary agenda, or rather reacting to Kurdish depredations or Ottoman en-croachments, as in previous localized rebellions.47 Dashnaksutiun, which was to be-come the most important of the Armenian parties, was founded in 1890 in Russian-controlled Tiflis. It was partially inspired by Russian revolutionary ideas associatedwith Narodnaya Volya,48 which was notable for using terrorism in order to incite dra-conian counter-measures and thereby precipitate a general revolt. With hindsight wecan say that this Armenian revolutionary strategy of calculated terror was based on a


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

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 com-munity.49

The activities of Armenian insurgents in Eastern Anatolia proved fatal on twoadditional accounts. By entering into an armed dynamic with the state while pro-jecting themselves as a national movement, they provided an open invitation forAbdul Hamid to portray all Armenians as a monolithic fifth column, thereby provid-ing 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 carryout their agenda, they not only stymied their own mobilization, but left the Armenianpopulation weakened and almost entirely defenseless when, in 1915, the post-Hamidian state decided on a more systematic onslaught.

There is another irony here. While the various manifestos of the revolutionaryparties had attempted to enunciate their national agendas (ranging from a free Arme-nia to self-rule or even full political independence),51 these goals remained vague andconflicting, largely circumventing the issue of what future relationships would be withthe other non-Armenian peoples and communities of Eastern Anatolia. By leavingthese issues in abeyance, they not only underscored their total dependence on theGreat Powers, but also inadvertently energized a competing nationalism for whichthe issue of sovereignty was central, and which ultimately was prepared to resolve itin the fullest and most deadly fashion.

TurksTurkish and Armenian nationalisms had much in common. Both CUP and Dashnak-sutiun began as radical responses to the failure of earlier, more moderate programs.Both too were modernizers, seeking to find formulae by which their peoples andsocieties could be successfully wrenched out of obscurant torpor and into the light ofa Western-informed and -dominated international system. Both were thus committedto some form of liberal constitutionalism and, in particular, to a reinstatement of thefrozen 1876 Ottoman constitution. They pursued these goals through secret centralcommittees that relied upon terror for revolutionary-style struggle.52 These facetsmade them, in principle, good partners, and in the early 1900s Dashnaksutiun andthe CUP cooperated against the Hamidian regime.53 This cooperation continued dur-ing the early years of CUP rule. As the radical agenda of the CUP more fully crystal-lized, however, the alliance deteriorated.

The reasons for this have much to do with an emerging Turkish national ide-ology.54 This, in turn, was intimately related to the abject failure of both Ottomanistideal and Hamidian leadership to stem the European neo-colonial tide and reassertOttoman independence. Significantly, among the most militant vectors of the newdoctrine were cadres at the Harbiye military academy and the closely linked Tibbiyemilitary medical school. Pre-1914 Turkish society lacked the sort of business and edu-


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

cational opportunities available to its young Armenians or Greeks, and as a result waslargely bereft of a bourgeoisie. Social mobility for those with aspirations was closelylinked to and dependent upon a burgeoning state sector. It was thus ambitious youngmen from distinctly petty bourgeois, small town backgrounds, more often than not inMacedonia or Rumelia rather than Anatolia, who came to the capital, attained anacademy-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 socialarrivistes without connections to an historic Ottoman ruling class.55 They read Turk-ish-language newspapers such as Ikdam (Effort) and Sabah (Morning) that were be-ginning to have a substantial circulation in the capital and to espouse an overt, some-times aggressive nationalism.56 They read daily about or saw with their own eyesEuropeans who behaved as if they owned the place. They were confronted by anincreasing number of educated Ottoman Greeks and Armenians who, with their gen-eral savoir-faire and entrepreneurial edge over the rest of the population, made themappear as key agents in this European takeover. Their frustration and resentmentmade them naturally receptive to a compensatory Turcocentrism.57

Their predilection for pan-Turana vast state that would link all Turkish-speaking peoples both in and outside the Ottoman Empirewas a mirror image ofpan-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 uniquenature of the historic Turkish mission. By recovering the nation, made up of authen-tic, warrior Turks, one also rediscovered the ingredients with which to transform theempire 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 lookedto Japan and Germany as their models par excellence, as later revolutionary elites incolonial or neo-colonial societies would look to the Soviet Union or Red China. Nowonder 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 strongposition. They lacked a mass constituency or broad social base; the Sultan was techni-cally still in power; their reopening of an Ottoman parliament pitted them againstother elite factions with entirely different agendas, not the least of which were fromthe remaining, autonomy-seeking non-Turkish parts of the empire; while finally theywere challenged on the streets of Constantinople and elsewhere by fundamentalistMoslem clerics and softas espousing pan-Islam, as well as by liberals who accusedthem of subverting the empires fragile democracy. Only in 1913 did the well-knownCUP triumverate of Talat, Enver, and Djemal emerge bloodily, but triumphantly,from these internal conflicts to take public office. Even then they merely representeda narrow stratum of society.60 Responsibility for the Empire s 1914 descent into warand genocide can undoubtedly be leveled against them, the CUP central committee,and its acolytes within the administrative and military apparatus.61 But their conscious


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

radicalization in this direction may have been less the result of ideology than of prag-matic, if increasingly desperate attempts to combat, outmaneuver, and ultimatelytranscend the outsideand to their mind entirely malevolentforces which seemedintent 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 Austria-Hungary. Rumelia and Macedonia, historic and crucially productive heartlands of theOttoman economy and society, were soon also lost as the ex-Ottoman states of theregion asserted their maximal territorial agendas, culminating in the Balkan Wars of1912-13.63 The Italians had already wrenched the Empires remaining North Africanprovinces, while in 1912 historically loyal Muslim Albania seceded in its own nationalrevolution.64 These losses underscored questions about the bonds that held the Em-pire 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 andsecession in the Balkans drove the CUP further down the national route, it also beganincreasingly to consider its national assets (to borrow a term from turn-of-the-centurymiddle European discourse). And as it did so, its attentionand anxietiesfastenedon Eastern Anatolia.

The intensifying and apparently unstoppable economic and commercial en-croachments of the Great Powers in the region were clearly one critical factor in thisequation. 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 linkingboth 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 forbuilding the Anatolian and Jazira sections of what was now the Berlin-Baghdad rail-way included stipulations for oil exploration and control over areas on either side ofit,65 confirmed that that the resulting socio-economic impact on this formerly self-contained region would be massive. Moreover, it indicated that the area might be-come, as in former times, a theater of conflict in which the primary protagonistswould be foreign powers.

But the dangers from the growing Anglo-German rivalry were dwarfed by re-newed Russian interest in the area. As on previous occasions, the 1912 Russian callsfor a European-supervised local autonomy in the six vilayets and Trabzon were in-tended as little more than a pretext for their ultimate takeover.66 Whereas GreatPower suspicion of the Russians had formerly prevented implementation of thisagenda, on this occasion backing from Russia's French and British allies seemed, inlight of Ottoman weakness, to give it a fair chance of success. Moreover, despite thefact that these proposals seemed specifically designed to inflame Armenian-Kurdishrelations67 (only the sedentary population was to be enfranchised, the Hamidiye regi-ments were to be disbanded and refugee Moslem immigrants removed from thearea), the overall scheme was enthusiastically supported not only by the Armenian


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

spiritual leadership, but also by Armenian delegates to the Ottoman National Assem-bly. In CUP eyes, this made them willing tools of Russian designs, proof of Armenianperfidy.68 Worse still, implementation of the scheme, argued the CUP paper Tanin(Echo), inevitably would fragment the remaining empire into a decentralized confed-eration of Arab, Greek, Armenian, and other parts.69

Great Power interference, however, highlighted the question of national assetsin 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 ofthe population in order to stake out their respective national rights.70 In Eastern Ana-tolia, pre-First World War censuses did the same, but with their own peculiar rules.The Armenian Patriarchate emphasized the demographic weight of the one million-strong Armenian population in the six vilayets, claiming that this represented somethirty-nine percent of the population. While it distinguished between the Turks andKurds, it severely played down their numbers, which was interesting in the light ofthe subsequent Ottoman census that did not distinguish between the various Muslimelements and put the Armenian population at no more than 600,000, a mere seven-teen 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, beingdecided on the basis of numerical strength."72

By the time Turkey entered the Great War, the fate of the Armenians had be-come intimately connected with, and indeed integral to the CUP's national agenda ofrapid secularization, economic modernization, and the creation of a genuine stateinfrastructure. It was not simply a question of the majority of Ottoman Armeniansfinding themselves in a theater of war with Eastern Anatolia, the intended mis-en-scene for the Turks proposed showdown with the Russians. Nor was the largely fabri-cated charge that the Armenian population was in cahoots with the Czar's plans toconquer the region much more than a smoke screen for the CUP's extensive anti-Armenian preparations.73 Ottoman Armenian volunteers did fight in the ranks of op-posing Russian armies, as in the crushing defeat inflicted on Enver Pashas ThirdOttoman Army as it attempted to cross into the Caucasus at Sarakamish in the winterof 191415.74 But in the wider war, this limited involvement on behalf of an opposingside was neither exceptional nor particularly unusual. Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Otto-man Arab, and even Jewish national elites, or more usually dissident or outspokenelements within them, were aware that political advantage might be wrested by amilitary involvement or collaboration of this nature, and sometimes acted accord-ingly.75 Of course, in so doing they made their communities more visible and putthem at risk of retaliatory or retributive punishment. The irony is that the OttomanArmenian national leadership, whether in the form of the Patriarchate or Dashnak-sutiun, had emphasized in the immediate pre-war period their passive opposition toCUP rule. Accordingly, at the onset of war they strove to counsel caution, encourage


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

their constituencies to do their duty to the Porte, including service in the armedforces, and to resist any attempt at provocation.76

If the CUP thus focused on those Armenians who ignored their leaders' advicein order to make blanket treason charges against the entire Ottoman Armenian popu-lation, then it is likely that more was at stake for the CUP than simply retaliationagainst an available scapegoat for the defeat at Sarakamish. Even long-term ideologi-cal and cultural hatred, which undoubtedly helped fuel popular Moslem participationin the killings, fails to explain it. At stake was a clear developmental logic. On aneconomic level, this involved the realization of "national assets" in the form of expro-priated Armenian capital, businesses, and properties which, so sequestered, wouldfacilitate the creation of an authentic Turkish middle class. The physical destructionof Ottoman Armenians throughout Anatolia in this sense represented the intent toremove a communal group perceived to represent a domestic obstacle in the CUP'srace for modernisation.77 Yet the Armenians were not the only perceived internal eco-nomic competitor blocking the Turks' autarkic agenda. There were also the Greeks.

Significantly, a Greek challenge to the political integrity of a would-be Turkishstate was more plausible than anything the Armenians could muster. Greece, afterall, had seceded from the empire almost a century earlier, expanding at the Otto-manist expense in the western Mediterranean and Thrace, and was to attempt, in theaftermath of CUP defeat in the First World War, a full-scaleand initially success-fulinvasion of the Anatolian mainland.78 It could thus be argued that the CUP hadreal grounds for concern over the existence of a large Ottoman Greek fifth column,especially in the Turkish-held Mediterranean and Aegean islands and coastline, aswell as by their supremacy in the western-orientated trade out of Smyrna. Interest-ingly too, during the Balkan wars the CUP not only responded with an economicboycott of Greek businesses, but with a series of anti-Greek massacres and atrocitiesaround Smyrna which seem to have been specifically designed not to kill all Greeksin these areas, but to "encourage" them to flee. The fact that their villages and townswere then resettled with Muslim refugees from Macedonia, who themselves hadbeen ethnically cleansed by the Greeks and other Balkan adversaries, suggests thebeginnings of a conscious policy of demographic restructuring and ethnic homogeni-zation.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 whythe CUP did not attempt to exterminate its Ottoman Greeks. But there is no evidencethat they had ever considered it. By contrast, the crisis engendered by the Alliedlandings at Gallipoli in April 1915 does seem to have catalyzed plans, already finalizedin mid-February or earlier by the CUP central committee, for the extermination ofthe Armenian national elite in the cities, as well as the entire eastern Armenian popu-lation.80 Of course, a Russian offensive from the Caucasus timed to coincide with the


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

Dardanelles campaign underscored for the CUP the life and death struggle in whichthey were engaged in Eastern Anatolia. But the Armenians did not figure on this inany direct military sense. On the contrary, they proved entirely unprepared to defendthemselves against Turkish attacks, round-ups, and deportations throughout the sum-mer of 1915.81

The CUP extermination of the Armenians was linked, of course, to the Russianmilitary presence in the region; indeed it was intended as a signal to all the GreatPowers that the sort of interference that had characterized their behavior towards theOttoman Empire in the past, would not be tolerated in the future. But the expungingof a whole population was not simply the CUP's means for restructuring geo-strategicand inter-governmental relationships. It was first and foremost a weapon against theArmenians themselvesa case of realizing one's territorial and demographic assetsfor the future, by eliminating a population that had the potential not just to create apolitical autonomy, but a political (as well as social, cultural, and economic) alterna-tive to the whole thrust of the CUP's Turkifying, homogenizing agenda. So long asthe CUP remained in power, this agenda remained closely tied to their pan-Turanicambitions. And as long as the Armenians continued to exist as a physical obstacle tothis agenda, they would be massacred by the CUP-inspired Turkish military, or inpogroms 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 withthem, the post-Ottoman regrouping of forces around the leadership of MustafaKemal did not flinch from killing Armenians at every opportunity, if not by directgenocide then by other means including blockade, war, and military massacre.83 Thiswas a conscious corollary to the reassertion of Turkeys territorial sovereignty on Ana-tolian soil. Indeed, it is significant that one of the first acts in the reformulated Kema-list drive towards a specifically Turkish nation-state was a meeting in Erzerum of abody calling itself "The Society to Defend the Rights of Eastern Anatolia."

Erzerum had always been closely associated with the Armenian interest andhad 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 sixvilayets and Trabzon within Ottoman territory became a core ingredient in the Na-tional Pact of January 1920, in effect Turkey's charter of national sovereignty. Refu-gees, or rather displaced Armenians currently beyond Eastern Anatolia, were strictlyforbidden 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" wouldbe ceded "to Armenia or any other country" was clear warning against a belated May1919 declaration, made on the Russian side of the border in Erevan, of Armenianindependence.85 Moreover, in case any foreign power had failed to understand itssignificance, Mustafa Kemal reiterated it to a U.S. fact-finding mission under GeneralJ.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


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

more forcefully the following year, during talks held in Moscow for a possible Soviet-Turkish friendship pact. "No Armenian provinces have ever existed in Turkey," a dele-gate told Georgi Chicherin, the Soviet Commisar for Foreign Affairs.87 The latter'sinquiry as to whether areas jointly inhabited by Turks, Arabs, Kurds, and Armeniansmight possibly determine their own fate received a further sharp retort from GeneralKiazim Karabekir, Kemal's strong-man deputy for the region. "In Turkey there hasbeen neither an Armenia nor territory inhabited by Armenians. 'Those (Armenians)living in Turkey committed murders and massacres.' How is it possible to call backthese murderers and give them the right to vote?"88

KurdsKarakebir s reference to massacres perpetrated by Armenians was largely a figmentof his imagination. As a putative Armenian state struggled for existence on both sidesof the Russo-Turkish border following the Mudros armistice between the Allies andOttomans in October 1918, some of its armed units committed atrocities againstTurkish and Kurdish villages.89 In terms of scope and scale, the Armenian ability tocommit mass murder, even supposing this was their intention, could hardly competewith the conscious and systematic massacres perpetrated by Karakebir himself. Inpropaganda terms, however, the Armenian killings served the Kemalists well. Athome, they were reported, magnified, and exaggerated to incite Kurds who, sincethe 1915-16 genocide of their Armenian neighbors, were the predominant ethniccommunity on the plateau.

The idea that Kurds might be affrighted by Armenians seems to run counter toreceived historical wisdom. It was Kurds, after all, who were known for raping, loot-ing, 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 whowas denounced before civilization as a marauder and murderer."90 It was, in otherwords, convenient to portray Kurds as wild men, barbarous nomads, even the Otto-man equivalent of tribal savages, because then they could be one-dimensionally cate-gorized, blamed and, when necessary, eliminated. In 1927, two years after the firstmajor Kurdish anti-Kemalist revolt, Turkeys foreign minister, Tewfiq Rushdi, wasexplicit on the matter: "their cultural level is so low, their mentality so backward, thatthey cannot be simply assimilated in the general Turkish body politic . . . they will dieout, economically unfit for the struggle for life in competition with the more advancedand cultured Turks . . . as many as able will emigrate into Persia and Iraq, while therest will simply undergo the elimination of the unfit."91 If the alleged Armenian dan-ger to Turkish state-building lay in their being too advanced and thus too much of acompetitive risk for the CUP or Kemalists, it appears that Kurds were also vulnerableto extermination, though in their case for not being "advanced" enough. If Rushdi'scomments display prejudice and Social Darwinism, they may also provide insight intothe nature of our unfolding Eastern Anatolian tragedy. In contrast with the Arme-


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

nians, Turks, or even Arabs, the Kurds, notes McDowall, were "fatally disadvantagedbecause they lacked both a civic culture and an established literature."92 In the in-creasingly competitive national stakes, the Kurdish awakening was too little devel-oped when, at the end of the First World War, outside forces thrust the future ofEastern Anatolia to the breaking point.

Kurdish society was extremely diverse and complex. Traditional nomadism mili-tated against a fixed notion of Kurdish "national" boundaries, just as lineage and tribalallegiances obscured ethnic commonality or common political headship. Where tribalKurds subscribed to an identity beyond family and clan, it was mostly that of SunniIslam, though even here the existence of minority heterodox Alevis and Yezidis con-founded a uniform religious picture. Language was another problem, as major dialectgroupings were often unintelligible to one another. Additionally, Kurds in EasternAnatolia were interspersed with, and sometimes even shaded off into other communi-ties, including Armenians.93 None of this plurality precluded the "construction" of aKurdish nation. Linguistically and culturally, Kurds were distinct from Arabs andTurks. They had a long, continuous history in the region, which until the mid-nineteenth century included a high degree of diffused political autonomy from directOttoman rule. Further, in the 1840s Bedr Khan's emirate of Botan, until extirpatedby Ottoman force majeure, seemed to be creating a proto-national coherence. Evenwith its demise, Kurdish aghas continued to have economic control, backed by theirself-regulated military power over Assyrian, Armenian, and Kurdish peasants.94 Byour own period, most Kurds were settled, rather than nomadic, though often on landdirectly expropriated from Armenians.95

The Kurdish dilemma in the late nineteenth century was such that while every-thing around them was changing, Kurdish society was standing still, or perhaps moreaccurately, not changing fast enough. There was little to suggest an emerging bour-geoisie or intelligentsia, certainly not in the Eastern Anatolian heartlands. Those townKurds that there were, either in the region or in the larger cities outside of it, gener-ally preferred to identify themselves not as Kurds, which they understood as a syn-onym for "backward" and "boorish," but as patriotic Osmanli.96 Kurdish elites whodid identify themselves in national terms, notably those linked to Bedr Khan, wereexiles in Europe or Egypt. Despite the publication of their journal Kurdistan at theturn of the century, they were too removed from the scene and too few in number tooperate as a genuinely embryonic national nucleus.97 Denied their historic autonomyby the penetration of Ottoman officialdom, and without the conceptual tools for analternative course of action, Kurds found themselves thrown back on their own de-vices. Many turned to the shaikh-led sufi Naqshbandi order for guidance or, in thecase of Kurdish tribal chiefs, became prey to the blandishments and bribes ofgreater powers.98

An overtly Kurdish movement that lagged behind its competitors thus tendedto take its cue from the CUP. Only with the latter's takeover of power in 1908 didsmall Kurdish clubs and societies, such as the Teavun ve Teraqqi Jamiyati (Society


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

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 foundersand constituency. Following both the Armenian and Turkish experiences, a modernKurdish identity developed among an educated elite as a cultural and educationalrevival, rather than as a political or secessionist movement, and in an environmentwhich, if not exactly stable, was nevertheless detached from the potential arena ofintra-national conflict."

The subsequent behavior of Kurds here, as well as in Eastern Anatolia, thustended to be determined by circumstances and the actions of others. The social andcommunal deterioration, disorder, and lawlessness which had characterized condi-tions in the region since the 1870s, and in which so many Kurds had acted as agentsof a waning Turkish power, now culminated in a major crisis. As the CUP plungedthe empire into the First World War and the region "into greater disorder than at anytime since Chaldiran,"100 Kurdish bands and tribal regiments participated extensivelyin the CUP's program to eliminate Armenians and Assyrians from the plateau. As aresult, the Kurds found themselves increasingly drawn into direct confrontation withtheir supposed patrons. "Cynical as it may sound, it was the massacres that made aKurdish state feasible,"101 notes van Bruinessen of the Armenian genocide. As CUPpower waned in early 1917 and it seemed the Czarist empire would win control ofEastern Anatolia, Russian-backed Kurdish insurgents, swelled by mass Kurdish de-sertions 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 secessionnow galvanized the CUP to implement plans for mass deportation from the plateauto dispersed locations throughout Western Anatolia.102

It is ironic that the chaos that helped prevent a partial implementation of thesedeportation orders also prevented the Kurds from recognizing the true nature of acrystallizing Turkish national policy towards them. The demise of the CUP, combinedwith the apparent restoration of the Ottoman Sultan and Caliphate, made manyKurdish notables believe that the old ties of Islamic solidarity would reemerge trium-phant. Furthermore, fears that an Armenian state backed by the Great Powers wouldfinally be founded in the region, plus a renewed threat to the integrity of the residualOttoman polity presented by Greek landings at Smyrna in May 1919, had Kurds, whopreviously had been toying with the idea of independence, queuing up behind theKemalist standard. The Kemalists, in turn, played these fears and hopes for all theywere worth. In particular, they discriminated in their National Pact between Muslims,who were the state's "natural compatriots," and non-Muslims, who by omission werenot, insisting that the Kurds were their "equal partners and allies," and even settingup "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 externaldanger was past. There would be no room for Kurds, at least not qua Kurds, in the


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

new national Turkey of Kemal Atatiirk, and certainly not once, in 1925, he had abol-ished the Caliphate in favor of a secular republic.

In the summer of 1920, the Allies assumed that the Ottoman Empire was de-feated and moribund, and that their role in any peace treaty was essentially a questionof how to share out the spoils equitably. There remained, however, the matter of theKemalists and their ability to wreck these plans, particularly by making their owndefensive pact with the "pariah," but emerging Soviet state. Playing to the Kurds thusbecame for the Allies as significant a matter as for the Kemalists themselves. ThePeace Treaty at Sevres, while parceling out lumps of Western Anatolia to the Italiansand Greeks, sought to create buffer states in the east which would check a Kemalist-Soviet link-up. The prospect of a small Kurdish state in a southern portion of theEastern Anatolian plateau, coterminous with a larger Armenian state to its north,was presented to a select, divided, and largely unrepresentative group of Kurdishnotables.'04 Its full independence would be subject to the agreement of its inhabi-tants. The Sevres arrangement, however, was based upon the erroneous assumptionthat the Kemalists would not be able to fight back effectively. Not only did they, butthey were able to carry many of the Kurds with them. Kurdish lack of unity in theface of the Sevres window of opportunity proved, quite literally, to be fatal. At theTreaty of Lausanne in 1923, there was no mention of Kurdistan. Rather, OttomanKurds were divided between Turkey and the British mandate of Iraq. The idea of aKurdish 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 interna-tionally recognized and sovereign polity, where their very existence as a people hadlegally ceased, and where the only alternatives were complete linguistic and culturalassimilation, or to resist and thus risk genocide. Only their demographic weight savedthem from either fate. Some thirteen and a half million Turkish Kurds today languishin identity limbo, in a state to which they owe little or no allegiance, and which viewsthem with unqualified mistrust, treating their regionthe Eastern Anatolian pla-teauas one vast, closed military area."15

Their southern brethren, who found themselves after the First World War in aBritish-created and initially controlled Iraq, should have fared better. Five out of ev-ery eight people in Mosul vilayet were Kurdish and thus entitled, under the terms ofthe 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 protectingits interests with Baghdad's Arab nationalist leaders, there was no mention of theKurds.106

ConclusionsThe emergence of competing nationalisms in Eastern Anatolia has been inextricablylinked to the parallel emergence of a modern international political and economicsystem dominated by the Western powers. The neo-imperialism of 1878 became the


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

overt imperialism of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (in which the OttomanMiddle East was parceled up by the British and French into territories earmarkedfor either direct annexation or de facto control), before it was to transmute itself, atLausanne 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 GreatPowers at all interested in protecting their "minority" status? On paper the answer isyes, at least with regard to the scraps they offered for public consumption. Champion-ship of the Armenian national cause had been pursued passionately and publicly, ifnot always consistently, by Western leaders since the 1870s. The first news of thewidespread deportations and killings in May 1915, moreover, provoked a combinedEntente declaration that those responsible would be brought to justice at wars endfor "crimes . . . against humanity and civilization."107 The warnings, reiterated at theoutset of the Paris peace conference in 1919, the text of the Sevres protocol, and inthe immediate aftermath of the war, appeared to be leading to genuine, internationaljudicial proceedings.108 Moreover, liberal sentiment on behalf of the Armenians wasmatched, in 1918, by ostensibly far-reaching Allied declarations that augured self-determination for all the Empire's peoples. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson quiteunambiguously proposed "an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous de-velopment" for both the Turks and non-Turkish nationalities as Point Twelve of hisFourteen Points.109 The British and French, not to be outdone, produced their ownformula later that year, claiming their intent to establish "national governments . . .drawing their authority from the initiative and free choice of indigenous popula-tions."110 Whatever the intention, the wide publicity given to this Declaration "en-couraged aspirations amongst the Armenians and Assyrians, Chaldeans and SyrianChristians, as well as among the Kurds."1"

Vahakn Dadrian has recently depicted the Armenian genocide as developingout a situation in which the Great Powers repeatedly promised "humanitarian inter-vention," and then failed to keep their word when the Armenians most desperatelyneeded it.112 If Dadrian seems to indict the Great Powers for a form of criminal irre-sponsibility, it is not for intervening on the victims' behalf, but rather for not interven-ing enough. Or to put it another way, his argument posits that insofar as the GreatPowers were to some extent responsible for the genocidal outcome, this was a matterof negligent omission, not conscious commission.

Yet Dadrian also offers plenty of information to show that the involvement ofthe Great Powers with Armenians and Kurds was closely linked to their own realpoli-tik interests.113 This was particularly true of Britain at the end of the war. With thecollapse of Russia, no French forces in the area, and the Ottomans neutralized by theMudros armistice, Britain rushed troops from Mesopotamia to the Mosul oil fields.Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks or a post-Ottoman Turkey, particularly if they acted inconsort, might still have presented a challenge to British ambition, as might less pow-


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

erful polities in the area such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Persia, all of whom hadclaims to at least part of the plateau.114 Perhaps more important, budget cuts ensuredthat the British on their own would not have sufficient forces with which to secureand defend the Mosul gains. To whom thus did they turn to enable and legitimizetheir control of the region: Armenians, Kurds, and Assyrians.

Though expunged from the plateau, Dashnaks and other Armenians attemptedto cobble together an independent entity around Erevan in the wake of Russia's sepa-rate March 1918 peace with Germany at Brest-Litovskdespite an almost total lackof resources, the continued attacks of superior Turkish forces, and famine conditionsamong the largely refugee population. But they persevered because they were as-sured by the likes of Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau that the Allies wouldcome to their rescue. Indeed, buoyed by Allied victory, they not only declared theunity and independence of all (formerly Russian and Ottoman) Armenia on May 28,1919, the day the Allies signed their uncompromising peace terms with Germany, butdid so despite the fact that no government had recognized Erevan's sovereignty tomake territorial claims to the whole of Eastern Anatolia and Cilicia.115 The majoritypopulation in this potential Armenian entity would, in fact, be Kurdish, thus contra-dicting Wilsonian terms of reference. Nevertheless, a year later the largely British-determined treaty of Sevres seemed willing, at least with reference to a considerablepart of Eastern Anatolia, to support it, albeit with the offer of a small state for theKurds.

Armenians and Kurds were thus used at Sevres as temporary props to bolsterAllied interests, particularly the British interest in Mosul.116 But the real tragedylies in the degree to which they and others fell into the trap. Their nationalism hadbeen inspired, encouraged, and in part created by the Great Powers in order, Ar-nold Toynbee believed, "to salvage something from the wreck of their own grandschemes." He continues: "The victims . . . caught in order to be exploited . . . couldnot resist the bait . . . they did not suspect how quickly pawns in distress become anembarrassment, or how little the players care if they disappear from the board."117

Once the ephemeral props of Sevres had been unceremoniously removed, apost-Ottoman genocidal order underwritten by the West was, in effect, confirmed.At Lausanne, Allied promises to the Armenian "little Ally" were not simply set asidein 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 ifthe Armenian Question or the Armenian people themselves had ceased to exist."1 lsArmenian nation-state aspirations had been bloodily repressed, as had those of PonticGreeks. With respect to the latter, some one hundred thousand were evacuated toGreece proper, itself already reeling and in near-collapse from its own catastrophicbut Western-encouraged Anatolian adventure.119 At least, one might argue, Armenianand Greek survivors had somewhere to go. Complete Armenian liquidation had been


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

thwarted by a Red Army whose timely intervention in the autumn of 1920 expungedthe independence of the Erevan republic in favor of Soviet tutelage, while saving theidea for its post-1991 resurrection. By contrast, only at Sevres had the notion of aninternationally-endorsed sovereign Kurdish state ever even existed.

Yet if the Great Powers treated the victims of genocide as no more than pawnsin their geopolitical stratagems, what of their behavior towards the perpetrators? Andwhat indeed did the perpetrators leam in return? Kemalist Turkey's punishment atLausanne for her and her predecessors atrocities was "reentry into the concert ofnations."120 That had always been the single, most consistent focus of Turkish nation-alism since its protean conception: the consolidation of a genuine self-determinationwithin the modern international system. The challenge, until now, had been how toachieve it. Throwing off the shackles of the empire's neo-colonial status by simplydeclaring one's independence and commitment to modernization had invited derisionwhen the CUP attempted it in 1908, and led to a further round of imperial and Balkanstate expropriations. Achieving the nationalist goal, therefore, involved obtaining thesupport of at least one Great Power, while preventing it from foreclosing on the ulte-rior motive. Wartime alliance with Germany was thus both a radical departure andan enormous, if calculated, risk. The Germans, no less than the other Great Powers,became incensed when the CUP attempted both to repudiate capitulations duringthe war, as well as the nineteenth-century treaty-imposed limitations on Ottomansovereignty.121 But although Germany in its military defense of the Ottoman constructthereby became involved in the Armenian genocide,122 it is difficult to state unequivo-cally that Germany was ultimately more responsible or culpable for this outcome thanits imperial competitors. By ridding themselves of the Armenians, Greeks, or anyother group that stood in their way, Turkish nationalists were attempting to provehow they could clarify, purify, and ultimately unify a polity and society so that it couldsucceed on its own, albeit Western-orientated terms. This, of course, was the ultimateparadox: the CUP committed genocide in order to transform the residual empire intoa streamlined, homogeneous nation-state on the European model. Once the CUPhad started the process, the Kemalists, freed from any direct European pressure bythe 1918 defeat and capitulation of Germany, went on to complete it, achieving whatnobody believed possible: the reassertion of independence and sovereignty via anexterminatory 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 "isnow a homogeneous nation, but to achieve this homogeneity it was necessary for herto 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 reelingfrom its first major genocidal assault on the Kurdsthe extirpation of the ShaikhSaid 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" 415

at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

their Northern Syrian rail line at Kemal's disposal, allowing him to speed his troopsto the scene,125 the former British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, could onlyopaquely protest the loss of Kurdish rights by recalling that "oil weighs more thanArmenian blood."126

Meanwhile, the primary lesson grasped from these developments by an emerg-ing Arab national elite in neighboring Iraq was that the route from neo-colonial de-pendency to independence was one of strong, authoritarian leadership, independentmilitary capability, and utter ruthlessness directed at domestic communal obstacles.One might argue that nobody in the 1920s could have second-guessed a SaddamHussein or his genocide against the Kurds. Yet the ground-rules for this had alreadybeen set, indeed sanctioned, when the British, in creating Iraq, insisted on the ab-sorption and integration of Mosul into it. In so doing, they ensured that the newstate's Arab leaders would look upon the region's Kurdish population as a thorn in theside of the national project, not least because of the circumstances in which theirnationalism 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 in191415 presented an obstacle to the realization of Turkish national goals becausethey 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 ofthis 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 becausethe Ottoman and Turkish experience suggested that there was no alternative.

But that in itself questions the degree to which these genocidal tendencies werealready embedded in the Ottoman construct. Could, for instance, a reformist, demo-cratic Ottoman leadership have channeled the incipient national competition forEastern Anatolia into a different, gentler trajectory, while still keeping the imperialpowers at bay? Before 1914, the idea of a loose federation or confederation of nation-alities was favored by an important section of the "Young Turk" movement aroundPrince Sabaheddin. Largely aristocratic and cosmopolitan compared with the careerprofessionals of the CUP, Sabaheddin s reformist group Itilaf (the Entente LiberalParty) worked closely with the Armenian parties (one historian has charged it withbeing dominated by them),127 and provided the main parliamentary opposition to theCUP'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 evidencethat the Itilaf program could have thwarted Ottoman disintegration. The groupinghas been described as one of Europeanizers, not modernizers.128 As such, their con-trol may have led to a more Western orientation, geared towards further absorptionin the world market and a trickle-down industrialization at home. The result wouldlikely still have been a Western carve-up, if not through Sykes-Picot, then some-thing similar.


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

The Itilaf scenario as it affected Eastern Anatolia was, of course, an essentiallyConstantinople-based one, as had been, too, the pan-Islamist one favored by the dis-credited sultan, Abdul Hamid. But there was another possibility: an Eastern Anatol-ian autonomy based on cooperation and confederation between its Armenian, Kurd-ish, Assyrian, and other peoples. The idea is not as absurd as it may sound. Traditionalcross-communal relationships, if hierarchical and ordered, were nevertheless closeand symbiotic; alliances, allegiances, and loyalties often cutting across so-called "na-tional boundaries."129 When problems arose, the more astute recognized who was toblame. At the turn of the century, Kurdistan was denouncing the Hamidiye regimentsnot only because they were terrorizing settled Kurds, but also since they allowedthemselves to be used by the Porte in its suppression of the Armenian national move-ment. 13 Kurdistan's riposte was to urge that Armenians and Kurds "should walk handin hand," an idea that would be mirrored when Naqshbandi shaikhs and Armenianrevolutionaries 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 BedrKhans to create a common anti-Porte front that would include the Assyrian patriarchthe Mar Shamun and Yezidi leaders.131 These possibilities came to naught, as did thejoint Armenian-Kurdish declaration at the end of the Paris peace conference to workfor the others' interests.132 Still, Ottoman authorities feared a genuine Kurdo-Armenian understanding. When the idea began to take root in the late 1920s for amajor anti-Kemalist insurrection, it was already too late.133 With the Armenians deador gone, and the now predominant Kurdish population firmly divided between Tur-key and Iraq, even a joint well-planned, guerrilla-style operation had no long-termchance of success. Whether under different conditions these indigenous forces couldhave cooperated to create some type of political entity remains speculative. Whetherthey could have done so without Western support and, by implication, interference,seems wholly doubtful.

What relevance, then, does studying the specific circumstances pertaining tothe impact of nation- and state-building in Eastern Anatolia have for genocide studiesin general? Three particular themes are embedded in this study. First is the natureof victim-perpetrator relationships, in particular those between their "national" elitesand leaderships. The Armenian genocide highlights this problem, not least becausesome scholars have appeared anxious to play down the vitality of pre-1914 Armeniannationalism for fear that it will detract from their case and play into the hands ofpresent-day Turkish government polemics. Robert Melson, for instance, has recentlyobjected to drawing parallels between emerging Turkish and Armenian nation-alism.134

On one level, Melson is correct. The CUP, once in power, could draw upon thefull administrative and military apparatus of the empire's territorial resources andpopulation base. Ottoman Armenians, by contrast, were a demographically weak, dis-persed, mostly unarmed communal group without a resource base or compact terri-

Creating a Modem "Zone of Genocide" 417

at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

tory. But to suggest that such available "national assets" favored one side is not thesame 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 wouldstill argue that pre-war Dashnaksutiun was more successful at mass recruitment thanits CUP adversary.135 Similarly, if the former trailed the latter in adopting an exclusi-vist, nation-state building program, this does not mean it was incapable of adoptingone. At the Paris peace conference, the Armenian delegation was uncompromisingin its demand that a large national state encompassing most of Eastern Anatolia andCilicia be repopulated with Armenians at the expense of Turkish and Kurdish "in-comers" 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 hard-ening of the Armenian position came after war and genocide had been visited uponit. But recognizing that they were responding to victimhood does not require us toview all Armenians as innocents or plaster-cast saints. Iraqi Kurdish parties had en-gaged in dissent, opposition, and outright insurrection against Saddam's Ba'athist re-gime before the latter turned on their community in a series of premeditated geno-cidal 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 Arme-nians were insurrectionists, and the counter-argument that none or very few were, ifnot 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 differ-ent ethno-national movements have competed for the same territory, populations,and resources.13" What happened in the case of Eastern Anatolia is, therefore, unsur-prising. With its late-Ottoman human geography not obviously favoring one particulargroup over others, yet with each retaining elements of their historic ethno-religiousor political autonomy, the demand to reformulate that autonomy in terms of modernnational identity, including seizure of one's alleged national assets, seemed to developinversely to the decay of the old, all-encompassing imperial framework. Similar situa-tions in other parts of what was the Ottoman empire, notably the northern Balkans,the Transcaucasian, and western borderlands of the defunct Czarist empire, the east-ern extremities of the equally defunct Manchu empire, and in the Great Lakes regionof Africa, have also evinced this toxieity. In each case, the creation of these zones ofgenocide has been associated with the decline, collapse, or destruction of historicallystrong states in a multi-ethnic region, and their replacement by one or more newpolities which have attempted to impose either a national or even an avowedly anti-national uniformity upon them, often at the expense of other competitors. But whilethe second theme emphasizes the importance of the relationship between humangeography and ethnic conflict, it proves insufficient in explaining the phenomenon,


at Ecole Norm


Dow

nloaded from

or indeed rising frequency, of modern genocide. Many examples, moreover, do noteven take place in either ethnically plural environments or appear to be the productof 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 ulti-mately cancel out paths of pluralist accommodation. The faction at the Young TurkLiberal Congress of 1902 that rejected the idea of a decentralized Empire, includingsome 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 statewhich could effectively reassert sovereignty throughout its entire area, this could beachieved only in a zero-sum fashion that excluded any alternatives. The linkage be-tween the social and ethnic composition of the empire and the realities of an emerg-ing global, but Western-dominated economic and political system, could be said tohave been made at this decisive point. One could, as the Bolshevik faction of theRussian Social Democratic Party was doing almost simultaneously, set political andsocietal ground rules with which to repudiate and thereby transcend the system alto-gether.139 Or, one could find a "nationalist" formula with which to tackle the systemdirectly. In both Turkish and Russian cases, an implicit if paradoxical goal was tocancel out the disparity between themselves and the dominant global players. In bothinstances, their achievement was predicated on transforming society into a homoge-neous and streamlined instrument. Turkish nationalists, like Russian Bolshevists, al-ready had a mental conception of their model human being for this purpose. Whatthey did not yet have was a modus operandi for dealing with those who could not beassimilated to it, particularly those considered extraneous by dint of their religious,ethnic, or tribal identity, or their own "national" project. In 1902 the "problem" re-mained theoretical. Only once in power, seized by revolution under crisis conditionsand, in the Turkish case, pursued through war with the realization that defeat mightat 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 turnprovided a potent symbol to aspiring third-world elites; a model for how to overcomecolonial or neo-colonial dependency, harness national assets, and catch up with theWest via rapid modernization and infrastructural overhaul. For neighboring Iraq,geared under the revolutionary Ba'ath towards a high-speed Arab "renaissance" andrenewal implicit in its name, Turkeys example critically informed its own develop-mental program.

Modern genocide, in conclusion, is developmental. United States AmbassadorHenry Morgenthau and his consular officials in this region were mistaken when theyargued that the CUP's

Documents

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