Amid controversy over a bill accepted last month in the French National Assembly that penalized denial of the “Armenian genocide,” a circle of academics have suggested that the Ottoman Empire’s acts against the Armenian community in Eastern Anatolia cannot be considered “genocide” due to a lack of intention on the part of the Ottoman Empire to destroy the community.
After the lower house of the French parliament accepted the bill despite strong protests from Turkey, debates over Armenian claims of genocide were sparked in a number of countries, including Israel, a country that was formed after millions of European Jews were killed during the Holocaust at the hands of Nazi Germany in the lead up to and during World War II. The Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee held a public debate on the genocide claims days after the French move but no decision was made in the end.
The Holocaust was the first internationally accepted case of genocide, on the basis of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. The definition of genocide used in the convention was the one that was first coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Whether what happened to the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia during the final years of the Ottoman Empire was an act of “genocide,” like the Holocaust, has been a matter of debate for decades. Middle East Critique, a US-based journal that publishes historical and contemporary political, social and historical research every four months, devoted the last issue of 2011 to this debate.
Tal Buenos, one of the contributors and an Israeli PhD candidate studying genocide issues at the University of Utah, refutes any similarity between the Holocaust and the Ottoman Empire’s actions against the Armenian community, which he says were carried out as a self-defense measure under conditions of war, although this does not mean these actions did not have catastrophic results, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Nevertheless he admitted that the death of so many Armenians was not the result of deliberate killings by the Ottoman administration, but a consequence of the circumstances of war or unlawful attacks by groups that were not under the direct control of Ottoman administration; such as armed Kurdish units that “wanted to keep Armenians in their subservient political position,” as well as brigands and irregulars.The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which was then ruling the Ottoman Empire, organized the deportation of Armenians to Russia and remote areas of eastern Anatolia after an Armenian rebellion broke out in Van province, playing into hands of Russian army which was then invading eastern Anatolia. Saying that Ottomans lacked the intention to destroy the Armenian community, Buenos wrote in the journal that in that the Ottoman Empire’s territorial integrity was at stake and that the deportation was taken as a military measure for the country’s survival, which sets it apart from the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, which systematically killed the Jewish community for the sake of racial purity.
Armenian populated provinces including Erzurum, Elazığ, Urfa, Van and Diyarbakır, were situated on lines of communications that were vital to the Ottoman armies fighting the Russians on the Caucasian frontier of the empire and the British in Mesopotamia and Palestine. Ottoman armies on these three fronts were self-sufficient in neither food, ammunition or medical supplies and were therefore dependent on the roads leading to western Turkey for these supplies. Armed Armenian revolutionary committees, Dashnaks and Hunchaks, established in the late nineteenth century, which were in control of these cities, began to attack and cut these lines of communications in 1915, taking financial help and weapons from Russia, France and the United Kingdom, all invaders of Ottoman territories during World War I. The Ottoman decision to relocate Armenians in those cities was a counterinsurgency policy developed in response to attacks by Armenian groups that were committed to violent action in order to establish an independent Armenian state, carving out eastern Anatolia from the Ottoman Empire. “As long as the Ottomans had military forces available, they were never forced to use the strategies of population removal...” asserted Edward Jay Erickson, another writer in the special edition of the journal, who is a former regular US Army officer at the Marine Corps University and is an eminent and leading authority on the Ottoman Army during World War I. He claims that deportation was employed for the first time in 1915 by the Ottomans, who he says dealt with many rebellions of minorities aspiring for independence between 1890 and 1914. Claiming that sending large armies to subdue the rebels was impossible in 1915, “as the interior of the empire had been stripped of regular forces and the gendarmerie.” He argues that relocation was an effective strategy borne of military weakness rather than strength. In addition, Erickson states that the important precedents of relocation as a counterinsurgency strategy came from the Western world, including Spain in Cuba in 1893, the United States in the Philippines in 1900-1902 and Britain in South Africa in 1899-1901, which included a subjugation of guerillas by separating them from friendly civilian populations. Maintaining that relocation strategy is the only option for Ottoman leaders given the contemporary conditions of war, they adopted this low-cost strategy that had successfully worked for their Spanish, American and British counterparts. “With respect to the question of whether the relocation was necessary for Ottoman imperial security in World War I, the answer is clearly yes,” Erickson wrote. However, he goes on to argue that military necessity cannot be accepted as an excuse for crimes committed during these deportations.
Historical sources show that arbitrary killings of Armenians by bandits attacking deportation convoys took place, as well as the usurpation of properties belonging to the community, as cited by academics contributing to the edition. However, Yusuf Sarınay, Director General of the Office of the State Archives, documents some official decrees ruling against abuses during the relocations by a Cabinet Resolution from the government of the CUP on May 1915, stating that “…the lives and property of the relocated Armenians were to be protected during the relocation and if there were any instance of abuse, the civil servants and gendarmes who were responsible for the mishandling of the relocated were to be dismissed immediately from public service and referred to courts martial.” He proved, agreeing with two other writers, a lack of ‘intention’ by the state to destroy the Armenian community, an aspect of aggressive action which must exist in order to name an act “genocide,” according to the commonly accepted definition of the term.The fact that the Holocaust was motivated by racial hatred against the Jews and included preplanned mass killings, while the Armenian deportation is considered by some to be a national security measure, sets the two cases apart from each other, while other genocide scholars focus on similarities between the two events, particularly in terms of their consequences. Hakan Yavuz, an assistant professor in the political science department of the University of Utah and the chief guest editor of the edition, criticized the approach of defining genocide only in terms of the outcome as being “constantly searching for a victim and victimizer” and ignoring the diversities between the contexts in which catastrophic events are realized. As a result, he calls for a “humanizing” approach that evaluates the incidents in their historical contexts.
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