THE OTTOMAN ARMENIAN TRAGEDY IS A GENUINE HISTORIC CONTROVERSY, MANY REPUTABLE SCHOLARS CHALLENGE THE CONVENTIONAL, ONE-SIDED ANTI-TURKISH NARRATIVE AND/OR REFRAIN FROM ALLEGING THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE

[rick murphy]

http://www.tc-america.org/scholar/salt.html

THE OTTOMAN ARMENIAN TRAGEDY IS A GENUINE HISTORIC CONTROVERSY

MANY REPUTABLE SCHOLARS CHALLENGE THE CONVENTIONAL, ONE-SIDED ANTI-
TURKISH NARRATIVE AND/OR REFRAIN FROM ALLEGING THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE

THESE ARE THEIR WORDS

Jeremy Salt

Visiting Associate Professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics,
Bilkent University

Ph.D., Middle Eastern History, Melbourne University, 1980. Middle
Eastern Studies.

relevant publications

•Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896,
Routledge Press, 1993
•The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in
Arab Lands, University of California Press, 2008.

Source: The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder
in Arab Lands, University of California Press, 2008.

"In 1909, agitated by “greatly exaggerated” stories of the activities
of Armenian revolutionaries, Muslims turned on Armenians living in and
around Adana. Perhaps eighteen thousand Armenians and two thousand
Muslims died in this rekindling of the hatred and fanaticism that had
torn the eastern provinces apart in 1894-96." P. 50

"Over almost a century the long Ottoman peace had been ruptured by
ethno-religious nationalist uprisings, often backed by outside powers
and often ending in war. In the two decades before 1914, Greece and
the Ottoman state had gone to war over Crete (1897-98), where Muslims
and Christians had massacred each other; in 1894-96 the Armenians were
the chief victims of a complete breakdown of order across the eastern
provinces of the empire and in Istanbul itself as the volatile
“Armenian question” finally burst into flames; finally, in 1912-13,
the attack on the Ottoman state by the four Christian Balkan states
injected further toxins into the relationship between Christians and
Muslims, just ahead of a great war in which battlefield defeats,
uprisings, and the suspicion of disloyalty would lead to the
dislocation of millions of people. Many were Muslims, fleeing or
driven out of conquered territory, or in some cases moved away from
the war zone (along with Jews) by the government for their own safety;
a large number were Christians (Greeks and Armenians) “relocated”
after acts of treachery and sabotage behind the lines.

The overriding aim of most Christian civilians was probably to keep
out of harm’s way, but uprisings and rebellions by a minority threw a
pall of suspicion over all. Of the numerous Armenian groups that took
up arms against the state, the Tiflis-based Federation of Armenian
Revolutionaries (the Dashnaks) was the best organized and most
dangerous from an Ottoman point of view. Founded in 1890, the Dashnaks
advocated extreme violence (against Armenian “traitors” as well as
Turks and Kurds) with the aim of establishing an Armenian state that
would stretch from the Caucasus into the eastern Ottoman lands. …

When the Ottoman Empire entered the war alongside the central powers
at the end of October 1914, the Dashnaks and other Armenian political
organizations were still operating freely in Istanbul and across the
eastern provinces, but armed uprisings from behind the lines made
their suppression in 1915 inevitable. Many young Armenians who had
been drafted into the military deserted, joining insurgent bands
engaged in general acts of sabotage or crossing a porous eastern
border to join forces with Caucasian Armenians fighting in the Russian
army or in the volunteer units formed alongside it for the specific
purpose of “liberating” the “Armenian provinces” of the Ottoman Empire
in the name of a common Christianity. Uprising, desertions, and
reports of Armenian collusion with the Russians prompted the military
command to issue orders in February 1915 that Armenian conscripts
should be removed from the ranks of the military and paramilitary
forces and formed into labor battalions instead. …

In the first half of 1915 the Armenian insurrection across the eastern
provinces intensified. By April Van, Bitlis, Erzurum and Sivas
provinces were sliding into complete chaos, confirmed daily in reports
coming in from the military command and provincial authorities of
pitched battles, attacks on jandarma (gendarmerie) posts, the ambush
of supply convoys and convoys of wounded soldiers, and the cutting of
telegraph lines. What was happening could no longer be described as
disparate uprisings; it was rather a general rebellion, orchestrated
principally by the Dashnaks and encouraged by Russia. The victims
included not just soldiers or jandarma or officials but the Muslim and
Christian villagers who were the victims of massacre and
countermassacre. …

At this critical juncture, between April 13 and 20, thousands of
Armenians inside the walled city of Van rose up against the governor
and the small number of regular and irregular forces garrisoned in the
city. The extent to which the rebellion was coordinated with the
Russians remains an open question, to which the answer must lie buried
somewhere in the Russian state archives, but the effect was to weaken
the Ottoman campaign in eastern Anatolia and Persia. …

The weapons in the hands of the rebels, including the latest machine
pistols, rifles, bombs and large stocks ammunition, plus the digging
of tunnels between houses, were the proof that preparations for
conflict had been made over a long period of time and that the
uprising was not simply a spontaneous defensive response to Ottoman
“repression” (through the murder of two Dashnak leaders as the result
of the governor’s “brutal and illegal” policy) or harassment of
Armenian women, as claimed by the missionaries. Indeed, the Armenian
charge of Ottoman repression and the Ottoman charge of Armenian
rebellion (treachery, as the Ottoman government regarded it) were
equally true. The government, the Armenian committees, and Muslim and
Christian civilians sucked into the conflict as active participants or
as innocent victims were now all fully caught up in a Darwinian
struggle for the survival of a stricken empire on one hand and the
birth of an Armenian state stretching from the Caucasus into eastern
Anatolia on the other." Pp. 58-61

"Armenian bands consisting of local Armenians and armed Armenian
“volunteers” from across the eastern borders were by now moving from
one village to the next, slaughtering and destroying. The men of Zeve
took up defensive positions to prevent the village from being overrun
but after a morning of fighting were overwhelmed. A general massacre
followed. Almost all the Muslims –men, women and children- were
killed. The only survivors were six women and a boy of eleven who was
saved by the intervention of an Armenian friend of his father’s. … No
records were kept, but the evidence of survivors indicates that in all
the villages attacked by the Armenians “the slaughter was nearly
complete”.

The Ottomans managed to recapture Van in early August before being
forced to retreat at the end of the month. Retribution and revenge
killings followed, but this time the Armenians were the victims as
their Russian protectors retreated. Tens of thousands of Russian and
Armenian soldiers and Armenian civilians streaming out of the province
in the direction of the Persian border were harassed by Kurdish tribes
as they struggled over mountain passes. Thousands were killed. …

The uprising in Van precipitated a series of decisions taken by the
government in Istanbul. The first was put into effect on April 24,
when the offices of the Armenian political committees in the capital
were closed down, documents were seized, and more than 230 Armenians
were arrested. The second decision developed in stages. On May 2, as
fighting continued in an around the city of Van, Enver Pasa proposed
that “this nest of rebellion be broken up” by “relocating” the
Armenian population across the border into the Caucasus (from which
large numbers of Muslims had fled or had been driven out) or into
other parts of Anatolia. On May 26 the military high command informed
the Ministry of the Interior that it had started to remove Armenians
from Van, Bitlis and Erzurum and a number of villages and towns in the
southeast. They were to be resettled south of Diyarbakir, but only up
to the point where they would constitute no more than 10 percent of
the local population. The same day Talat Pasa, the minister of the
interior, informed the grand vizier of the decision to move the
Armenian population from the Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum vilayets
(provinces) and from areas in the southeast corner of Anatolia around
the cities of Maras, Mersin, Adana, Iskanderun, and Antakya.

The following day the cabinet adopted a Provisional Law Concerning the
Measures to be Taken by the Military Authorities Against Those Who
Oppose the Operations of the Government during Wartime. This law,
ratified by the parliament when it reconvened on September 15,
authorized the military to arrest Armenians suspected of treachery and
to move populations. On May 30 the government issued a series of
regulations dealing with the practicalities of the “resettlement”. It
was to be organized by local authorities; the Armenians could take
movable property and animals with them; they were to be protected en
route and provided with food and medical care; on arrival they were to
be housed in villages built with proper concern for local conditions
but at a distance of at least twenty-five kilometers from railway
lines, and only up to the point where they constituted no more than 10
percent of the local population.

It soon provided impossible to move the Armenians in accordance with
these instructions. The army had first claim on food, medicine and all
means of transport; it is doubtful whether the government would have
been organizationally and administratively capable of shifting so many
people in any circumstances, let alone at such short notice; and the
Armenians would be passing through regions where Kurdish tribes and
other ethno-religious groups badly affected by the war would not
hesitate to take surrogate revenge for the crimes committed against
Muslims. On the grounds of military necessity, however, a directive
had come from the military command that the bulk of the Armenian
population had to be moved. What could not be done had to be done. The
outcome was calamitous. In the coming months hundreds of thousands of
Armenian men, women and children were wrenched from their homes, from
the Black Sea region and the western provinces as well as the eastern,
and moved southwards toward Syria. Thousands died before they reached
their destination, dropping dead by the roadside, succumbing to
starvation, exposure and disease (typhoid and dysentery being two of
the chief killers), or massacred in attacks on their convoys; the
desperate scenes in and around the transit camps, of starving and
dying people, of filth and stench, were described by American, German
and Austrian officials.

The survivors of the relocation reached the Arab provinces in a state
of complete distress. They were resettled in various parts of Syria.
Large numbers were moved to camps set up near Ras al Ain, to the
northeast of Aleppo, or along the Euphrates River valley to the
southeast. The famine that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians
during the war was at its height when they arrived. By the summer of
1916, between fifty-five thousand and sixty thousand people were said
(by a German consul and an American oil company employee distributing
relief) to have been buried around the camp at Meskene after being
“carried off by hunger, by privations of all sorts, by intestinal
diseases and typhus which is the result”. Thousands more were
massacred. How many it is not possible to say with any precision: even
if the estimates of foreign aid workers, consuls, missionaries,
survivors, and local people were not blown up for propaganda purposes,
they are not reliable enough for historians to be able to arrive at
anything like firm figures. Many were reported killed by Circassians
or Kurdish jandarma at the Ras al Ain camp, in the desert northeast of
Aleppo, in the spring of 1916. A German missionary visiting the region
the following year thought the motive was greed.

In 1916 a large number of Armenians who were being moved onward to
Mosul from Deir al Zor because they had reached the 10 percent limit
of the local population set by the central government died from heat
and exposure or were murdered near the River Khabur. Survivors said
the killers were Kurdish jandarma, Circassians, Chechens, and Arabs.
Whether the local governor was complicit in these killings or whether
the Circassians and Chechens living along the Khabur River, who had a
reputation for religious intolerance and no doubt had bitter memories
of Christian mistreatment of Muslims in the Caucasus, had acted “on
their initiative” is something that has never been resolved. …

More than one hundred thousand other Armenians were moved southwards
through central Syria to Damascus and points farther south in the
Hawran region. Many settled in the towns. Some (even at Meskene) found
work as agricultural laborers or artisans or with the railway. At
Raqqa (along the Euphrates) thousands of Armenians were living in
houses “which the kindness of the governor has procured for the most
poor”, while others squatted in a camp on the opposite bank of the
river. Within months the situation had worsened because of lack of
food and the outbreak of a typhus epidemic. …

Of the numbers of Armenians who were moved southwards through central
Syria, an estimated 20,000 out of 132,000 still died, but there were
no massacres. Overall, it is impossible to separate the numbers of
Armenians who were massacred from those who died of other causes, but
on the accumulated evidence of foreign consuls and aid workers there
is no doubt that the death toll from starvation and disease was
enormous. Given that the Armenians were in a much worse situation than
the large number of Syrians who were already dying from the famine
gripping the entire region, this was inevitable.

As news reached Istanbul that Armenians were being massacred on the
way south, the government ordered the provincial authorities to catch
and punish those responsible, “but the fact that these orders were
repeated on numerous occasions would seem to indicate that they had
little effect on the killing.” On September 28, 1915, continuing
reports of attacks on the convoys by Kurdish tribesmen, along with
shortages of medicine and food and transport problems, compelled Talat
Pasa to seek a full government inquiry. The following day the Council
of Ministers set up a special investigative council, involving the
Ministries of the Interior, Justice and War, which it directed to work
together in investigating the crimes that had been committed. The
Finance Ministry was ordered to fund their work. Hearings were held
across the eastern provinces, followed by court-martials, at which
more than one thousand civilian officials or military personnel were
found guilty “of organizing or failing to prevent the attacks” on the
Armenians or of stealing their property. Muslims were also put on
trial for crimes against Muslims. The sentences included imprisonment
and some executions.

Estimates of the numbers of Armenians who were “relocated” between May
1915 and February 1916 range from just under half a million (the
figure counted from Ottoman archival statistics) to just over seven
hundred thousand. Estimates of the number who died during the entire
war (not just in 1915-16) that were made when it was over, even by
sources hostile to the Turks and the Ottoman government, ranged from
six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand. In recent decades,
Armenian writers have based their arguments on figures of one million
or 1.5 million dead. The differences in estimates illustrate a general
problem with statistics dating back to the late nineteenth century,
when the number of Armenians who lived in the Ottoman Empire (or who
died there) were often exaggerated for political purposes. Muslims
were undercounted for the same reason. Only the Ottoman government
actually counted the population, but even its figures stand in need of
adjustment. Justin McCarthy, a specialist in Ottoman demographics, has
put the Armenian population of the whole empire in 1912 at 1,698,301
of which number 1,465,000 lived in Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands of
Armenians survived the war. Herbert Hoover’s estimate of 450,000 to
500,000 Armenians fleeing from “Turkish Armenia” into “Russian
Armenia” is consistent with other figures. Many settled in Syria, and
others managed to leave the region altogether, emigrating to the
United States and many other countries. Taking all of these factors
into account, McCarthy has arrived at a total wartime Ottoman Armenian
death toll from all causes of 584,000 or 41 percent of the Ottoman
Armenian population. If the Armenian patriarchate population estimate
of about two million is to be accepted over the official census
figures, the number of dead would be increased by about 250,000, on
McCarthy’s calculations, bringing the total Ottoman Armenian death
toll from all causes for the entire war to a maximum of slightly more
than 800,000. It will be noted that these figures are in line with the
estimates made at the end of the war. Other computations put the
number of Armenian dead at no more than 300,000, but the fluctuations
remain enormous, even between historians who share the same basic
point of view about what happened.

… Captain C. L. Wooley, a British officer traveling through
“Kurdistan” after the war, was told by tribal leaders that four
hundred thousand Kurds had been massacred by Armenians in the Van-
Bitlis region alone. Two volumes of recently published Ottoman
documents –mostly the reports of refugees, police, jandarma, and
provincial officials- covering the period from 1914 to 1921 indicate
that this Kurdish estimate of Kurdish dead through massacre by the
Russians and/or their Armenian protégées is probably fairly accurate.
Counted on a village-by-village or town-by-town basis, with the names
of the killers often being given, the number of Muslims who were
massacred across the region is put at 518,105. Hundreds of thousands
of others died from the same starvation, disease and exposure that
were killing the Armenians. The killing of civilians began well before
the “relocation” was ordered and clearly had a powerful influence on
the decisions that were taken by the government in Istanbul. In
November 1914, Armenian bands operating in the Saray and Baskale
regions near the Persian border raped, slaughtered and plundered and
in at least one village drove the villagers into a mosque and burnt
them alive. This individual episode is fully consistent with the
documentary evidence of atrocities committed by Armenians over a
period of years and recorded in gruesome detail in the documents
coming out of the Ottoman archives. Even allowing for the possibility
of lies or exaggeration, the evidence is both consistent and
overwhelming. There is too much of it, coming from too many places
over too long a period of time, to be credibly denied. …

The suffering of the Muslims was “special” in its own terrible way:
there certainly was a holocaust in the eastern Ottoman lands, but it
devoured Muslim Kurds and Turks just as greedily and cruelly as
Christian Armenians.

The Muslims suffered tremendous loss of life (the Muslim population of
Van province fell by 62 percent, of Bitlis by 42 percent, and Erzurum
by 31 percent) but could survive the ravages of war because they were
an overwhelming majority (more than 80 percent of overall) in the
territory that the Armenian national committees wanted to incorporate
into an independent Armenian state. The Ottoman Armenians were a small
minority and could not survive losses of such magnitude. The wartime
suffering of the Muslims in this region, against the historical
background of Russian expulsion of Muslims from the Caucasus since
early in the nineteenth century, suggests that had Russia stayed in
the war their future would have been bleak in the extreme. The entire
region and its civilian population were devastated by the big war and
the secondary ethno-religious conflicts fought out across the length
and breadth of eastern Anatolia, from the Black Sea down to the
Mediterranean, spilling over into northwest Persia and the Caucasus
across to Baku and continuing for years after 1918. …

The withdrawal of Russia from the war and the renunciation by the
Bolsheviks of all territorial claims abruptly ended Armenian hopes for
a state that would include the eastern lands of the Ottoman Empire.
The Dashnak gamble on a Tsarist victory had failed. The withdrawal of
Russian troops and the return of the Ottomans precipitated the flight
of thousands of Armenians into the Caucasus, where fighting between
Turks and Armenians was to continue for two more years. By the end of
the war the ancient Armenian presence in eastern Ottoman lands had
virtually come to an end.

The numbers of Armenians who died during and after the relocation, the
causes of death, the identity of those who killed them (bandit gangs,
tribal Kurds or Circassian refugees out for revenge, and the jandarma
or soldiers who were supposed to be protecting them) or plundered the
convoys as they moved south into Syria and Mosul, the culpability of
senior officials, the role of the special operations force known as
Teskilat-i Mahsusa, and the intentions of the Ottoman government
remain subjects of acrimonious debate to this day. A few months before
the end of the war, and his flight to Berlin, where in 1921 he was
assassinated by a young Armenian, Talat admitted to a friend that the
relocation had turned into a complete disaster. Given that he remains
at the center of continuing accusations by Armenian historians and
propagandists and those who support their case that the Ottoman
government met at some point in 1915 and decided not just to relocate
the Armenians but to wipe them out, his voice should perhaps be given
a posthumous hearing:

… At a time when our armies were in a life or death struggle with
enemies who were vastly superior in both numbers and equipment the
Armenians, who were our fellow countrymen, had armed themselves and
revolted all over the country and were cooperating with the enemy for
the purpose of striking us in the rear. What other choice was there
but to remove this race away from the war zones? There was absolutely
no other solution. This was not at all an easy task. For that reason,
therefore, while this policy was being carried out, some instances of
bad management and evil deeds took place. But one cannot blame members
of the government like myself for such instances which took place in
far away provinces and of which we had no knowledge." Pp. 62-69