Sections of the Armenian diaspora are preparing to commemorate the events of 1915 in war-time Anatolia with additional zeal on 24 April 2005, to mark their 90th year. The assertion of these groups has always been that there was a genocide - a state plan or operation to exterminate a people. The objective reply, based on reliable and pertinent documentation should be: There was no genocide committed against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before, during or after the First World War.
This general statement does not mean that nothing happened in 1915. Many things did occur – among them Armenian armed revolt, cooperation between Armenians and the invading Russians, attacks on defenseless Muslim villages, towns and quarters, the participation of the Armenians in about a dozen wars, the Ottoman decision to relocate them, the safe arrival of the overwhelming majority at their destinations, assaults on some Armenian groups by Muslim civilians seeking booty or revenge, casualties among all citizens because of the adverse war conditions and the spread of contagious diseases, and the Ottoman decision, taken within less than a year, to halt the relocation and ask the Armenians to come back.
Ottoman tolerance
The allegation that the Ottoman Turks misruled the non-Muslim citizens of their state is a gross denial of historical facts. “Tolerance” should be the first word used in describing the six centuries of Ottoman policy towards the minorities of the Empire. Thanks to the “millet” system, a cornerstone of Muslim law, all of these minorities – among them the Greeks, other Orthodox peoples like the Bulgarians and the Serbs, the Gregorian Armenians, the Sephardic Jews who had escaped from Europe and found a haven among the Turks, Catholics like the Croats, Levantines and some Lebanese, and the Protestants - were left to govern themselves, use their own languages, worship in their own way, maintain their cultures, preserve their traditions, and run their schools and courts.
The Turks opened their doors to the persecuted Jews, the Russian Old Believers and to Polish and other refugees fleeing after the 1848 Revolution. This practice was remarkably “modern” considering that during the same period in Europe Catholics were ill-treated by Cromwell’s soldiers, the Huguenots were slaughtered by the French and Calvinists were oppressed variously. While Europe and North America sent missionaries all over the world to convert others to Christianity, the Ottomans had guaranteed religious freedom to all subject peoples. This is also what the Arabs had done during their long stay in Spain. Had the Ottomans converted their subjects to Islam by force, there would have been a band of Turkish-speaking Muslims from the Adriatic to Basra
As long ago as 1461, the Turks had been the first to recognize independently the Gregorian Armenian Church, disowned by other Christians for its Monophysite beliefs ever since the Calcedon Council’s decision of the year 451. The Ottoman Empire had 29 Armenian civilian generals, 22 Cabinet members, 23 parliamentarians, seven ambassadors, 11 consuls, 11 university teachers, and hundreds of other Armenians in various posts. Far from being discriminated against, they enjoyed a favored status relative to their weight in the population. In 1913, even the Ottoman Foreign Minister was an Armenian – Gabriel Nouradoungian.
Armenian revolt
The Armenian subjects suffered not from Ottoman rule, but at times from the misrule of their own leaders. At the time when they understandably focused their criticisms on the central government, beginning with the end of the 19th century, Muslim intellectuals were also seeking change, But with the rise of nationalism in the Balkans and elsewhere, the goal of reforms and modernization for all was overshadowed, and minorities came to exploit their autonomy, eventually demanding territories much more extensive than they had ever ruled at any single moment of time.
In Eastern Anatolia, which the Armenian diaspora frequently opts to call “Armenia”, the Armenians, whose original homeland was in the Caucasus, were everywhere a small minority. They had been dispersed by Byzantine rule before the Turks appeared on the scene one-thousand years ago. The Turks acquired territory in the region not from Armenians but from the declining Byzantine Empire. For more than 900 years, their relations with the Turks were friendly, peaceful, even brotherly.
Much later, like the non-Muslim Balkan peoples, Armenians hoped and endeavored to kill or drive out the Turks and other Muslims so as to pave the way for a territorial claim. Their so-called political parties, the Hunchaks and the Dashnaks – “terrorist” organizations by today’s standards - resorted to large-scale propaganda and bloodshed from the late 19th century onwards in the hope of stimulating strife between the two communities and obliging the Europeans to intervene militarily. They hurled bombs, assassinated officials, attacked public places and villages and caused much destruction and bloodshed. All of this has been recorded in the archives of many governments and the reports of many foreign observers. As Armenian writers (like L. Nalbantian) confess, “the most opportune time was to institute the general rebellion...when Turkey was engaged in war.”
When war came, the Armenian residents of Van attacked the Muslim quarters of the area, welcomed the invading Czarist Russian armies and declared their own independent state. Their heavily armed fighting force consisted of close to 160.000 soldiers, according to the admissions of a number of Armenian sources. Many Armenian commanders later published memoirs admitting their belligerency, and a host of Armenian and foreign sources refer to them as “combatants”. Their barbarity at times reached such proportions that some Russian officers on the Eastern Front and later some French commanders in the Adana region on the Southern Front tried to withdraw them to the rear lines.
Wars and relocation
Armenian battalions participated in about a dozen conventional wars, civil wars and similar serious armed encounters between 1914 and 1922: guerilla warfare against the Ottoman army and the Muslim villages and towns; acts carried out in cooperation with the regular Russian forces; overpowering the civilians of the Eastern region after the Bolshevik Revolution; battles with Turkish General Kazým Karabekir’s 15th Army-Corps; encounters with the detachments of the newly-formed Ankara Government; wars with the neighbouring Georgians and the Azerbaijanis; the armed suppression of Armenia’s own Azeri minority; joint bloody military exploits with the occupying French troops in the Adana region and with the invading Greeks in the Aegean region. In all these combats, both sides, certainly including the Armenians, suffered tremendous casualties. Let us ask the militant Armenians, their associates and disinterested third parties whether its is justifiable to consider such losses as the result of a genocide.
The terribly detrimental war conditions that caused the death of many Turks and Armenians are not a matter of propaganda or an excuse for the losses suffered. In all wars fought everywhere throughout the world up to the 20th century, more men died of disease than in actual combat at the fronts. The freezing winter on the Sarýkamýþ slopes, for instance, caused the extinction of about 70.000 Turkish soldiers in one night. Soldiers perished on account of contagious diseases such as cholera, dysentry, typhus, typhoid and malaria, in addition to pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, and enteric fever. These afflictions affected all forces and civilians, whether Turkish or Armenian. No less than 1,175,000 Turkish soldiers were admitted to hospitals, and many did not survive. Even the top Turkish, German and British commanders could not be saved. Although the number of civilian Armenian casualties caused by sickness cannot be documented, their number should not be added to the column of those deliberately misconstrued to have been “massacred”.
After the revolt and the Armenian assault on the Muslims of Van, the Ottoman Government aimed to remove the Armenians and relocate them away from the war zones. Militant Armenian circles conveniently consider the “24th of April” - when 235 Armenians in Istanbul were put under custody - as the beginning of the controversy. This is an attempt to cover up the crucial episode in the crisis: the immediate motive behind the relocation order was the armed revolt in Van, which occurred earlier, and the need to maintain the security of the border.
Counting the losses
The replacement orders may be found in the rich Ottoman archives and in foreign files such as those in the Public Record Office in London (for instance, FO, 371/4241/170751), They are very clear that the voyages should not cause any killings, that they should exclude Protestant, Catholic, handicapped and orphan Armenians – as well as Armenians of certain professions - and their families, that the relocated persons should be protected and fed during the journey, and that they should be given homes and proper utensils to work in their new surroundings.
Some marauding brigands nevertheless attacked the caravans. Orders were issued that the culprits should be punished and that three local investigation committees be set up. According to Bogos Nubar, the head of the Armenian Delegation at Versailles (1918-19), 6-700.000 Armenians were transferred, 390,000 of whom reached their destinations. But according to Prof. Yusuf Halacoðlu, the director of the Turkish Historical Society, the number of the relocated people is a little less than 450,000. If 390,000 reached their destinations, then the number who went missing works out at either 260,000 (on the basis of the Bogos Nubar document) or 60,000 (in the Halacoðlu estimate). One cannot be certain how many of the losses were due to recurrent arms, diseases, war conditions or the attacks of brigands. Although the British had to free the 144 Ottoman leaders imprisoned in Malta, it was the Turkish courts that put 1,397 persons on trial, resulting in many guilty verdicts and some executions.
The Armenian losses were much lower than the figures of 3.5 million, 2 million, 1 million or just under a million variously put forward by militant Armenians. The total population of the Armenians in the whole of the Ottoman Empire was barely 1.3 million. The Ottomans counted their peoples in accordance with modern methods under the direction of the statistics bureau, which was headed successively by a Jew, an Armenian and an American.
Inventing the myth
Then how did such terribly invented figures and falsehoods emerge? It was the duty of Masterman’s propaganda bureau at Wellington House to disseminate such information. Ambassador H. Morgenthau’s book, written collectively for war purposes, and the works of missionaries like Dr. J. Lepsius presented entirely one-sided stories. In addition, a number of Armenians printed forged “documents”, even presenting the picture of an old (1871) oil painting as a photograph of Armenian skulls. Novels like Forty Days of Musa Dagh and movies like Ararat captured the Western imagination. Many “learn” from such biased sources rather than study first-hand archive material. Now, “1915” has become a part of the Armenian identity, transferred from generation to generation, with little connection to what actually happened in history.
(DIPLOMAT – April 2005 – Ankara)