Politics - Turkish/Armenian Conflict

“He declares himself guilty who justifies himself before accusation.” Thomas Fuller 1732

During the twilight of the First World War, the valleys of Eastern Anatolia, the Southern Caucasus and Upper Mesopotamia were drenched in blood. Turks, Armenians, Kurds and Russians, as well as the British Indian Army fought and killed regular soldiers, militias, warbands and civilians in the anarchy of The Great War. One of the most tragic elements of this foggy chapter in the war’s dark chronicle is the fate of the Armenians populace. The official line of the Turkish government is to call this the “Armenian Issue,” but most academics and laymen would just as easily use the more accurate term of genocide.

We hear the word “Genocide” and our thoughts go immediately to the mechanized horrors of Auchwitz or the primal savagery of Rwanda. These are uncontroversial horrors where offenders and victims are easily identified. The Armenian experience is a tad difference, as it has to be placed in the context of the Russian-Ottoman Wars.

As Russia expanded southwards through the 19th Century into Central Asia and the Caucasus, they expropriated large portions of the Muslim populations and settled ethnic Russians in their place. There are fewer Crimean Khans, Tatar Imams, or Muslim villages, except in isolated communities on Russia’s southern frontiers today, then called the region home in centuries past. When the Russians came into Anatolia from the Caucasus Mountains at the beginning of the war, many ethnic Armenian militias began to form, hoping to knock of the yoke of the Muslim Turks and exchange it for the independent yoke of Christian-Russian imperialism. The Ottoman government of the Young-Turks faction saw the rebellion and the presence of the Christian population as an existential threat to the Ottoman Empire, and they ordered the pacification of the area by means of what we today would call ethnic cleansing.

The population was put to the sword, the rifle, the cannon and the chain. Those that weren’t killed (the majority – for what that’s worth) were exported across the Syrian Desert, to the backwoods provinces of the empire, where they still have large populations in Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

All of this to say that the Armenian Genocide was different from the Holocaust, both in terms of Great Power supporters and of military armaments. It still happened, and attempts by the Turkish government to minimize the laborious accounts of thousands of historians as “an Armenian version of history,” ring false; an arrogant attempt to imply nationalist controversies where none exist.

France did a strange thing in 2007 and criminalized the act of denying the Armenian Genocide, the way they have with the Holocaust. It’s punishable with fines and potentially time in prison. If I claim that in 1492, Christopher Columbus fell of the edge of the world and died, then any educated person should accost this foolish assertion and belittle the opinion. If I voice it in a job-interview, it should go without saying that I’ll still be looking for employment at the end. The truth should be the only limiter on opinions. The opinion that the Armenian Genocide is a false propaganda myth created by the Armenian Diaspora to libel the Turks has been successfully disproved a hundred times over and it shouldn’t require the state to validate what reason has already justified.

What is it to France what happened in a foreign land almost a century prior? Does the government of France need an opinion of Assyrian/Babylonian relations? How do they feel of Burmese/Thai border wars in the Twelfth Century? This was a ludicrous policy, inspired by domestic pandering to the Armenian community. Ironically in Germany, where the Turkish constituency is more vocal than the Armenian one, they decided to leave the subject as a topic for historians and not lawmakers. Both governments are pandering to domestic pressures. The historical record has nothing to do with the matter.

Turkey retaliated against France by condemning what it called the “Cezayir Soykirimi – The Algerian Genocide” to commemorate French atrocities in North Africa. When the American House of Representatives voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish Grand National Assembly condemned the “Kizildere Soykirimi – The Redskin (presumably meaning First-Nation Groups) Genocide.” They extended this northwards when Canada followed the American lead.

It seems odd to point out that the Turkish line of “We didn’t do this, if we did it was because they were rebelling and deserved it and other countries did it too!” is hardly a vindication of international justice. Denouncing the French in Algeria is not a counter-thrust, but a legitimate gripe against the French record. Imperial Russia’s Southern Policy of ethnic cleansing was villainous. The genocide of the Indian Tribes of North America was indeed a crime against humanity. Mutual recrimination and name calling do not, under any circumstances, wash blood away.

There are lofty issues at play, such as national dignity and the quest for truth, but in reality the conflict is about land and money. Armenia wants both and Turkey wants to surrender neither. Acknowledging that a crime happened is all fine and good, but should there not be proper punishment and restitution handed out to restore the equilibrium of justice? This sounds fair to me. But that raises the issue of who is the victim and who is the offender.

The Ottoman Empire was the offender. The Young Turks government recruited prisoner battalions out of the jails of Constantinople and Smyrna, and then paired them with Kurdish tribes in order to terrorize and displace the Armenians. Many Armenians were killed, many fled to the Russian side of the front until 1917, and many more were deported to Syria Province. There were some that managed to flee in the direction of the advancing British Army as refugees and from there to establish themselves in countries outside of South-West Asia.

Armenia was a republic in the Soviet Union by 1921 and the Ottoman Empire was deposed and relegated to the dustbin of history by 1923. What had been the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1918 (the years of the genocide) was then divided into the Republic of Turkey, parts of the Soviet Union, the French mandated territories of Syria and Lebanon, the British mandated territories of Iraq and Palestine, and Italian and Greek concessions in the Aegean.

So the wronged party is the collectivity of the Armenian people, and the offender is the Ottoman Empire. The problem is that there no longer exists any Ottoman Empire (a problem for nobody, really) to pay compensation to the Armenians. The individuals and institutions who committed this crime are gone from this earth, so argument put forth by the Armenian community is that the Republic of Turkey bears the weight of guilt because the masters of this state, as with the Ottoman Empire, were and are of the Turkish race.

The Ottoman Empire was a wholly undemocratic institution. The government was not responsible to the will of the people, and the people cannot be held responsible for the acts of the government. No person can be held responsible for the sins of her ancestors and the idea of a race crime dragging guilt through generations like Cain in the Land of Nod is a slap in the face to liberal democratic ideals. The Turkish race owes the Armenian race nothing but a polite apology.

In 2007, a congress of Kurdish Kaymakams in Iraqi Kurdistan adopted a resolution to apologize for their part in the genocide. No dollars or land changed hands, due in large part to Kurdish control of neither.

As for the offended party, that is the Armenian people, not the Republic of Armenia, which is pursuing both restitution and concessions from the Republic of Turkey. Modern Armenia is a former Soviet Republic, mired in corruption, land-locked and involved in perennial fighting and feuding with neighboring Azerbaijan. They want concessions of vast swaths of Eastern Turkey to remake the ‘Wilsonian Armenia’ promised to them by Woodrow Wilson in his largely ignored fourteen points for a just peace after World War One. They also want a financial tithe from Turkey which does not appear to be forthcoming.

Upon earning its independence from the Soviet Union, the 141st largest country in the world (Smaller than Lesotho but larger than the Solomon Islands) ethnically purified itself to 97% ethnic Armenians, relegating Russians and Yazdi Kurds to single percentage populations; Turkic Azeris were forced as refugees into Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran. Armenia is a habitual abuser of human rights, along the lines of most other former Soviet republics. The Republic of Armenia is cynically trying to use the leverage of the Armenian people in Diaspora to its own political gain in the mountainous politics of the Caucasus. This state crying for restitution in the name of justice and human rights rings as true as a used-car-salesman urging someone to patriotically buy American, hoping to cash in on someone else’s ideals.

The truth be told, Turkey must admit as to what happened a century ago on her soil. It alienates ethnic Armenians in Turkey. It criminalizes open discussion in her universities and censors academics. The only way Turkey will ever do that is if she knows full well that there can be no possible blow-back from a tiny eastern neighbor with delusions of grandeur.