Genocide? Oh, yes, definitely!
Sections of the Armenian diaspora are preparing now to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the events of April 1915. Such occasions - even the assassinations of Turkish diplomats in the mid-1970s and the 1980s – have created opportunities for the exhibition of one-sided but deeply entrenched views about the Turkish past. Whether or not there was an “Armenian genocide” in 1915, or before and after, is the topic of my article in the next issue of this magazine. I shall dwell presently on the extermination (some 5.5 million people) and forcible expulsion (another 5.5 million people) of the vast Muslim population, mostly Turkish, which once lived in a region stretching from the shore of the Adriatic to the north of the Caucasian mountains.
There existed a colossal Muslim world in the whole of the Balkans, in the almost-adjoining Crimea and its vast hinterland, and on both sides of the majestic Caucasus which extends towards solidly Muslim Central Asia and beyond. Across this extensive domain, the Muslims constituted here the majority of the population, there a plurality among different peoples or at least a sizeable minority. That uninterrupted body is no more. It was eliminated over the course of one hundred years, starting with the Greek revolt in 1821. That piece of European - and world - history is a tragic tale of repetitive mass murders and waves of great migrations. What is left are small pockets of Muslims in Bulgaria, Greece and parts of former Yugoslavia. The bloodshed in Bosnia, which terrified the present-day generation of Europeans, may be described as one of the most recent links at the end of a long chain of similar events.
Nation of immigrants
European history cannot be written and understood without due consideration of the Muslim dead and the Muslim refugees. The Ottoman archives contain abundant material on these double traumas. Some Turkish historians are therefore informed about the successive sanguinary events and about the migrations of those fortunate enough to save their lives. These survivors fled to Anatolia, the heartland of the state, leaving behind their lands, their homes, their occupations - and their dead. The new Turkish Republic was a nation of immigrants, to a great extent. The ordinary citizens of the Republican period, however, know very little or nothing about the recent past of their forefathers. Western textbooks describe the “massacre” of the Christian Balkan peoples, but not that of the Muslims or Turks. Some contemporary Turkish citizens learned in their family circles that their grandfathers came from Sarajevo, Crete, Sofia, Constanza, Tirana, Bahçesaray, Erevan or Chechnya, from as far away as Tripolitania, or from any other town or village in this formerly wide Muslim world.
It is very important to acknowledge that the founding fathers of the Turkish Republic downplayed this suffering, so that the citizens of the new regime would not seek revenge or tend to irredentism but would look to the future rather than the past. Even the birthplace of the founder, Salonica, was now in Greece. But it was none other than a prominent Greek, Prime Minister E. Venizelos, who proposed the great Atatürk for the Nobel Peace Prize.
On the other hand, not only the Ottoman archives, but also the records of some other states - the British Foreign Office files, for instance – provide more than adequate documentation of the drama of the murdered and the uprooted Muslims. Professor Justin McCarthy, an American scholar and an outstanding Turcologist, must be recognized as the leading Western historian to have brought out the most convincing long monograph on the subject.
Founded on suffering
One can persuasively argue that some new states in the formerly Muslim world were founded on the suffering of the former occupants, either slaughtered or coerced to leave. Can American history be told without reference to the Native Americans - that is, to their annihilation? This is what happened to the Turks and to the other Muslims in the Balkans, the Crimea and the Caucasus. But apparently, the Turks cannot be victims, but only “victimizers” – this is the image attributed to the Turks (and the Muslims in general) by Nicholas II and Lawrence of Arabia in the past, by the Armenian terrorist organization ASALA and by some aspiring European politicians of the present. Can one write a history of the world without proper references to the Belgians in the Congo, the French in the Maghrib and in Indo-China, the United States in the Philippines, European fascism in Africa or just about all of them in China? Similarly, one cannot tell a true story of Europe in the 19th century without full references to the Muslim sufferings.
The Ottomans received little credit for their long tradition of religious tolerance. On the contrary, they paid a heavy price for it. The non-Muslims, who thanks to Turkish policy maintained their identity, were told by the missionaries that they, as Christians, were superior to the rest. The Greek revolution set a pattern for others to follow. The massacre of Muslims were repeated almost everywhere. The archives of the Western powers recount that the whole Turkish populations of cities were taken out of the towns and murdered en masse. The Turks stood in the way of the new nation-states, designed to be formed purely of the members of this or that non-Muslim community. When new states were established, they were the kingdoms of the Christian population only, devoid of the Turks or other Muslims who had lived and worked there for hundreds of years. Some Christian states attained a national identity and a majority only after their declarations of independence.
Attempt on Anatolia
Murder and expulsion was a policy repeated everywhere. It was also attempted by the Armenians in Anatolia. The sons and daughters of the Muslim refugees well knew what had happened to their forefathers - be they the butchered Muslims of Kalavryta and Kalamata, the fleeing Crimean Tatars or the various Caucasian Muslim communities under threat of Russification. This was set to repeat itself in Anatolia as well. The policy of the European powers was to replace the demographic domination of the Muslims in the Balkans, the Crimea and the Caucasus with Christian preponderance. They were successful. Only the final war, the Turkish War of Independence, led by M. Kemal Atatürk, was won by the Muslim Turks.
But by then total casualties had reached about 5.5 million dead, with another 5.5 million displaced. Let us ask the following question at this appropriate date: Was this a genocide or not?
(DIPLOMAT – March 2005)