A history lesson about a much forgotten (and ignored) genocide and how it was avenged. Also a very informative book about the geopolitics of Armenia, USSR, Ottoman empire and Germany in the World War I era.
To the million and a half Armenians who perished at the hands of Ottoman Turks during the First World War, and to their countless descendants, the actions of Operation Nemesis shouted, “You existed. You are memorable. We remember you.”
Nemesis was about pride as much as it was about vengeance.
Only a few years earlier, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Picasso, and Duchamp had tossed realism out the window; now reality itself had become surreal.
How could anyone from back home ever smile again?
Tehlirian removed every aspect of himself that in any way hampered his mission. His personal needs were the last thing on his mind. Unlike Garo, Natali, Shiragian, and the others, Tehlirian seems to have been almost egoless. In this respect, Tehlirian was unique.
“Pan-Turania” was a nationalist dream, a chain of revived Turkic/Muslim khanates extending from the Mediterranean to China. In the pan-Turanist scenario, Turkey would link up with Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan to establish an Islamic/Turkic empire running along the entire southern flank of Russia. The pan-Turanist ambition was a variant of the “pan-Islamic” dream in which every Muslim-majority nation would unify to form a vast multinational Islamic empire. That scenario had never been popular with Turkish leaders because they viewed Arabs as subordinates and adversaries, not confederates.
Talat, Enver, and the former CUP leadership needed Mustapha Kemal, but with every passing month of conflict, Kemal needed them less. If he succeeded in chasing the Greeks, French, and British out of Asia Minor, he wouldn’t need them at all. “The Young Turks, anxious for restoration of their power, were the rivals of Kemal, and he prudently kept them from gaining control of his movement.”
“Life was so hard that, if one had to fear death also, the burden would be too heavy to bear.”
The man had seen his mother beheaded right before his eyes! For this reason the killing seemed to exist outside the bounds of established law, in another legal dimension altogether. And his mother had not been the only victim, nor only his immediate family, but an entire nation! The man had not simply pursued a personal vendetta; he had avenged the murder of his people.
The implications of the case before Judge Lehmberg strained the rule of law, went beyond strict legal concepts of guilt and innocence, generating moral, philosophical, even existential questions.
TEHLIRIAN: I consider myself not guilty because my conscience is clear. LEHMBERG: Why is your conscience clear? TEHLIRIAN: I have killed a man. But I wasn’t a murderer.
Tehlirian’s job was to effect the man’s death, not satisfy some personal emotional need.
“What I’ve told is still far less than the reality. It was much worse.”
Approximately one million four hundred thousand Armenians were deported. What did this deportation mean? In a decree signed by Talat, we find the statement, “The goal of the deportation is nothingness.”
Germany did intercede when doing so served its needs. The ongoing construction of the Berlin–Baghdad railway line underwritten by Deutsche Bank employed many Armenian railroad workers, who were protected.)
It is true that the Kaiser had lavished praise on the Ottomans when visiting Constantinople fifteen years earlier. But for all his speeches about friendship between the countries and his love of Islam, the real relationship between Germany and Turkey was economic, and was secured by military men like Liman von Sanders. The Ottoman Empire was a client state of Germany and, as such, subordinate.
The Germans assisted the Turkish army in destroying Armenian “strongholds” with Krupp heavy artillery. These operations focused on leveling Armenian neighborhoods and towns. The German leadership decided to ignore the deportations, despite their brutality. If the Turks wanted the Armenians out of the way, the Germans would not interfere. Although Germany’s leaders denied responsibility for assisting the Young Turks in their destruction of the Armenians, new evidence proves otherwise, and the parallels between the murder of one million Armenians and six million Jews thirty years later are numerous. Two ancient peoples, primarily identified by their religion, were methodically exterminated in what would be defined as “genocide.”
Germany had set a precedent for deportation massacre earlier in the century in German South-West Africa (Namibia), where General Lothar von Trotha successfully pursued an eradication of the Herero by forcing the defenseless indigenous people into the desert, where they died.
Adolph Hitler has been quoted as declaring, “Who remembers the Armenians?” He was saying that there would be no significant reaction to an attack on Jewry in Europe because there had been no real punitive consequences following the destruction of the Armenians.
Both the Ittihad and the Nazis employed deception to eject victim populations easily from their villages and towns, telling them that they were being “moved.” Once dislocated from the familiarity and safety of their home region, they became disoriented and more vulnerable to the killing machine. Both the Nazis and the Ittihad enslaved their minority victims. Both performed medical experiments on their victims. And in both cases, it was religion that identified the target group. (In a sad irony, male circumcision was proof of faith. The majority Muslims on the one hand and the minority Jews on the other underwent ritual circumcision, unlike their neighbors, the Christian Armenians and Germans. So in Turkey, if you were circumcised, you might survive. In Germany, if you were circumcised, you were condemned.)
Not only in its execution but in its theory and economics as well, the Armenian Genocide was instructive for prosecutors of the Jewish Holocaust.
In the words of a New York Times headline, “They Simply Had To Let Him Go.” The opinion piece that followed was prescient: “The court before which the case was tried practically has given, not only to this young man, but to the many others like him and with like grievances, a license to kill at discretion any Turkish official whom they can find in Germany.”
“An acquittal on the ground of insanity, the usual device of jurors who do not want to punish a killing of which they approve, would have been more than ordinarily absurd in the case of a man as obviously sane as this Armenian is, and to have hanged him, or even to have sent him to prison, would have been intolerably to overlook his provocation.”
Naval officers on board British ships at anchor in Smyrna’s magnificent harbor calmly observed the carnage through binoculars as hordes of terrified Christians crowded the quay, jumping into the water to escape the fires raging behind them. Most drowned. The guns of the warships stood silent as sailors onboard snapped pictures of the great city dying. Kemal’s Turkish republican army had successfully pushed the Greeks, the Armenians, the French, and the Italians out of Asia Minor. In the end, the Allies did nothing to intervene. A decision had been made: Europe would no longer directly interfere in Turkey. In the United States, Congress drifted toward isolationism. In the Caucasus, border fighting between the Russians and the Turks came to a standstill as the Soviets turned their attention on their immediate neighbors. New alliances were being struck: Italy would sell arms to Kemal’s nationalists; the Soviets would lend Kemal gold with which to buy those arms. Britain would find ways to reach out to the Kemalists as it prepared for the pumping of mineral wealth out from under the sands of Mesopotamia and Arabia. General Mustapha Kemal had become a national hero in Turkey. He and his generals had succeeded in preventing Britain, France, and their allies from parceling out and consuming their vatan (homeland). The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres (which had conceded territory to the Armenians and distributed the rest of Anatolia to the Greeks and Kurds) was scrapped. From his position of strength, Kemal negotiated new terms. The Lausanne Treaty signed in Paris in 1923 would establish the new Republic of Turkey. As part of this treaty, a massive and harsh population exchange of Christian (Greek) Turks for Muslims living in Greece was sanctioned and put into motion, further “purifying” the Turkish homeland.
The missionary organizations owned a great deal of property in Turkey. They didn’t want it taken from them.
The new men in power in Washington were savvy enough to allow bygones to be bygones as far as the crimes committed by the CUP during the war were concerned. Colby Chester’s characterization of the Armenian deportations was breathtaking in its deliberate ignorance: “There are no prejudices against Christians in Turkey, let alone killings of Christians. Massacres of the past were enormously exaggerated by prejudiced writers and speakers.” Referring to the deportations that killed hundreds of thousands of people, Chester made the case that the Turkish government had done the Armenians a favor by deporting them to the desert: “Those [Armenians] from the mountains were taken into Mesopotamia, where the climate is as benign as in Florida and California, whither New York millionaires journey every year for health and recreation. All this was done at great expense of money and effort.”
Behind each decision made in and around the region, the United States and its allies had always had oil in mind.
It has often been argued that Armenia was “sold out” for oil. The loudest voice here belonged to Vahan Cardashian, who made it his personal crusade to let the world know how Standard Oil and the Harding administration had colluded to abandon the Armenian cause in their drive to acquire a foothold in the Middle East. And as it became more and more clear that Turkey was digging in its heels and would fight to keep its last territories (namely, eastern Asia Minor, what many Armenians call “western Armenia”), all parties understood implicitly that what was important was Iraq. To sum up, by 1923, the Armenians didn’t have anything that the West desired, but the Republic of Turkey did. Iraq, particularly northern Iraq, home to hundreds of thousands of Kurds, was wild country. It was land that over the centuries had been ruled by Ottomans, Arabs, Mongols, and Persians. What made it so very valuable now was oil. Not that the British would ever admit that fact. Speaking in 1922, the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, couldn’t have made it more clear that Britain’s seizure of Mesopotamia/Iraq was not about oil: “I do not know how much oil there may be in the neighborhood of Mosul or whether it can be worked at a profit, or whether it may turn out after all to have been a fraud.” It is doubtful that Curzon was unaware of the value of northern Iraq. Perhaps no direct connection can be made between the loss of the “Armenian mandate,” or the genocide itself, and the world’s appetite for oil and other mineral rights. But once the war was over, once the territories of the former Ottoman Empire were divvied up to everyone’s satisfaction, any lingering outrage and the impetus on the part of the West to defend and fight for Armenian rights simply evaporated. Now that the exploitation of Turkey was a fait accompli and access to oil (guaranteed by international agreements) enriched all the parties involved, the tragedy of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire became a footnote of history, one that many would work hard to erase altogether.
Governments were moving on, but the abandonment of the Armenians was felt far beyond the borders of Turkey. Only a few years after the war, Armenians and other “ethnics” from southern Europe found that the welcome mat so invitingly laid before America’s front door at the end of the nineteenth century had been suddenly whisked away. When there had been a crying need for factory workers, thousands upon thousands of immigrants were allowed to flow into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of “Mediterranean types” (Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews) had settled in the United States between the late 1800s and the end of World War I. Who were these people? Were they trustworthy? Or were they a corrupting influence? After the war, Americans began to lose their fondness for these swarthy immigrants who fried their food in olive oil and seasoned it with garlic. The newcomers were “dirty.” They often had darker skin than most Americans of northern European descent, many of whom wrongly suspected that these “unclean” immigrants were the ones responsible for the devastating “Spanish flu” that killed tens of millions of people after the war. Perhaps worst of all, these immigrants were stealing scarce jobs away from “real” Americans struggling in the postwar recession. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan expanded its war on minorities to include persecution of the new arrivals. Though the Klan originated as a hate group focused on black Americans, it vigorously attacked Italians, Jews, and Catholics in the 1920s.
Were Armenians “white”? As absurd as this question sounds, it was widely discussed in the early twentieth century. Since Armenians came from lands east of the Bosphorus (the cartographical dividing line between Europe and Asia), they could have been considered “Asians.” But after World War I, the United States began to close off immigration from Asia, as a strict quota was set with the aim of limiting the flow of Chinese entering the country; so establishing the racial differentiation of Armenians from other Asians would help preserve their right to immigrate. Thus the story of how Armenian “whiteness” entered the annals of American jurisprudence in 1924 in a federal court in Seattle, in the case of United States v. Cartozian.
“Scientific evidence” proved that Armenians were white. Nevertheless, attorney John S. Coke argued, “It is the contention of the government that it makes no difference whether a man is a Caucasian or not or what the racial and language history of his people may be if the man on the street does not recognize him as white.” In other words, Armenians are not white because they don’t look white. The court supported the earlier ruling. The deciding factor seemed to be that Armenians practiced a “Western” religion, Christianity, and thus they were white. In this way, Christian identity came to help define race.
In Turkey, identity was also on Mustapha Kemal’s mind. In 1927 Kemal gave a speech that, with intermissions, took three days to deliver. This speech, presented at a political party convention, is so famous in Turkey that it is simply called “Nutuk” (The Speech). In this marathon exposition of his ideas, Kemal defined his nation and outlined his plans. He systematically ironed out any problematic historical wrinkles by expunging or avoiding facts like the CUP’s destruction of the Armenians or the existence of a Kurdish people in the east. He also took all the credit for establishing the new republic, giving none to his peers and comrades. Taking on the role of the great paternal leader, Kemal explained to the Turkish people where they had come from and where he saw them going. He outlined a blueprint for the future of the nation. The speech was delivered in the midst of the cultural revolution Kemal had initiated after establishing the new Republic of Turkey in 1923. Once the Lausanne Treaty was signed, Turkey was recognized by the major powers and international relationships were normalized, Kemal began his program of modernization. He abolished the six-hundred-year-old sultanate and, not long after that, the caliphate itself, a major symbol of Islam for millions. Kemal enacted suffrage for women, modernized the alphabet, and imposed European-style clothing for all Turkish citizens (replacing the fez with the hat). He negotiated and validated the borders of the new nation, borders that have endured up to this day. He initiated the rewriting of the official history of the country, placing the Turks squarely in the center of world civilizations. In 1935 Kemal ordered the people of Turkey to adopt first and last names. He himself took the name Ataturk, or “Father of the Turks.” The charismatic Kemal Ataturk never missed an opportunity to share his ideas with his nation and the world, becoming one of the most quoted men in history. He sought to instill in his countrymen a sense of national identity, repeatedly reminding them that they were “Turks,” a term that before this time was mainly used by Ottomans to refer to country bumpkins. He explained to his audience that they were an illustrious people who had established one of the greatest empires in the history of the world. They were conquerors, ghazi. (Kemal himself was hailed as “Ghazi” early in his career. The word means “holy warrior.”) They were a people, a nation, a powerful force of history. They were more than just Muslims. They were the inheritors of a great legacy: Ottoman-Turkish culture, strength, and enterprise. To maintain their vitality, it was imperative that they remain pure and proud.
Kurds are Muslim but not Turkic, and so presented a conundrum for the Kemalists. The solution was that Kurds would no longer officially be considered a separate people. In Ataturk’s republic, Kurds were simply Turks who had lost their way; they were “mountain Turks.”
Greeks who lived in western Anatolia (most of whom were Turkish-speaking) continued to present an entirely different quandary for the nationalists. Although the 1922 debacle in Smyrna had erased a major Christian population center and terrorized those who had managed to survive, there were still hundreds of thousands of Greek Christians living in Turkey. As part of the Lausanne Treaty, a massive population swap was negotiated. For outsiders watching from Europe, such a swap seemed logical. The plan was simple: all the “Greeks” in Turkey would “return” to Greece and all the “Turks” in Greece “return” to Turkey. Sadly, these “Greeks” and “Turks” were defined by religion only. Often the Muslim “Turks” in Greece did not speak Turkish and the Christian “Greeks” in Turkey did not speak Greek. As a result, the deportees faced discrimination when they were “returned” and eventually, like the Kurds in the east, were forced to live as less than full citizens.
Kemal’s revision of the historical narrative was formalized in 1932 at a Turkish Historical Congress in Ankara. From this convention was born a three-year project resulting in a spurious “Outline of Turkish History.” The “thesis” on which it was based was complete fantasy, proclaiming that Turkey was the “original” civilization giving birth to all other civilizations, including Greek, Egyptian, and Roman. This “history” was backed up with a pseudoscientific language analysis called “the Sun Language theory” (gunes-dil teorisi), which claimed that all world languages had evolved from a Turkic root language. With their radical distortion of the truth, these theories never gained much traction, and were mostly abandoned after Kemal’s death.
If you fly Turkish Airlines from one area of Turkey to another, the in-flight magazine will feature a map of the region. Although all adjacent countries are labeled on the map, only an empty unlabeled outline of the modern country of Armenia can be found.
Even when visiting Turkey today, it is impossible to venture very far without seeing Ataturk’s ruggedly handsome face gazing down upon you. His portrait hangs behind the counter in nearly every shop, on the wall of every office. His image is printed on all currency. He is omnipresent. In this secular state, Ataturk has replaced God as the ultimate authority. It is true that Islam discourages naturalistic representation in religious art and architecture, and for that reason Ataturk’s image stands out even more. But in some respects Ataturk transcends even Islam, because he symbolizes Turkey itself.
Schoolchildren would begin each day pledging, “O Ataturk the great! I swear that I will enduringly walk through the path you opened and to the target you showed. May my personal being be sacrificed to the being of the Turkish nation. How happy is the one who says: ‘I am a Turk.’ ” To this day, Law 5816 makes disparaging Ataturk a criminal act. This law has been used against journalists. To be the father of a people, there has to be “a people.” This is an essential element of nationalism. “A people” can be defined culturally, linguistically, religiously. But there is usually an underlying notion of “pure blood.”
Perhaps people with “pure blood” do exist in the most northern reaches above the Arctic Circle or on some isolated Pacific island. But the last place on earth where genetic “purity” could ever exist would be in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire. Not only was this region an enormous melting pot, but also the very nature of Turkish society and its institutions guaranteed that non-Turkic “blood” would be continuously intermixed with the genetic repository of the original invaders from the Far East. Ataturk himself, with his blue eyes and light skin, appears to have been descended from Slavic Europeans, not Turkic invaders.
In 1991, in the midst of a war with neighboring Azerbaijan, the Republic of Armenia broke free from the defunct Soviet Union.
Turkish historians with few or no scholarly credentials wrote long tracts “proving” that there was no such thing as an Armenian people, let alone a genocide against them
Newspapers ran political cartoons featuring scowling hook-nosed Jews and Armenians licking their chops over obscene profits extracted from poor Muslims. Later, when middle-aged businessmen were sent to the labor camps, they were depicted in cartoons boasting of their skill at stacking rocks because they were so good at stacking gold.
As Russia massed its troops along the Turkish-Armenian SSR border, preparing to reoccupy the “Armenian homelands” of Turkey, President Harry S. Truman interceded in a way that would fundamentally alter the world’s political landscape. Fearing that a Russian invasion of Turkey would destabilize the Middle East (read: threaten the oil supply) while furthering the spread of communism, Truman announced that any attack on Turkey would be seen as an attack on the United States and would receive the appropriate response. Russia backed down.
The era of the “Truman Doctrine” had begun. It bound Turkey and the United States into a strategic partnership. Though this bond has been strained at times, it has served the United States well and provided Turkey with a vast source of arms and funding. Not long after the doctrine was initiated, the United States began to pump money into the Republic of Turkey, with totals eventually rising to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. (Combined economic and military aid to Turkey since the inception of the Truman Doctrine has reached almost $30 billion.) This money not only assisted Turkey economically but also announced to the world that Turkey was now a member of the postwar “family of nations” headed by the United States. In addition to direct aid, Turkey received millions more as a participant in the postwar Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe—this despite the fact that Turkey sat out most of the war and no Turkish troops ever faced combat in World War II. As a member of NATO, Turkey maintains the organization’s largest standing army outside the United States.
Yet for many Armenians living in the West, the Republic of Armenia was on the wrong side of what would soon be labeled the “iron curtain.”
While securing the new SSR, Stalin broke off Armenian territories and “gave” them to Azerbaijan (also an SSR). This move would preserve a violent enmity between the nations which endures to this day.
An equal number of Armenians lived in the United States, France, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria (former possessions of the Ottoman Empire) as lived in Armenia proper.
Appealing to the nationalistic feelings of many diasporans, Stalin had invited the scattered Armenians to return to the homeland, and many had accepted the invitation. Unfortunately, this invitation was as much a trap as an opportunity. As he would do so often, Stalin gathered up his imagined enemies so he could more easily dispose of them. The secret police worked relentlessly to root out anyone with even the slightest inclination toward independent thought or self-determination, and thousands of these Armenian returnees were exiled to Siberia.
In the period between the wars, the Armenian communities in the United States centered on the church. Virtually every Armenian attended church, through which most social events were organized.
In the United States, Tashnags and moderate Armenians fought openly.
The diaspora in the United States would be split into clearly defined Tashnag and non-Tashnag camps.
He noted that other victimized peoples had had “their Nuremberg” but the Armenians had not.
Memory lies at the center of the Nemesis story. It is the engine of an intense bloodlust. We remember, but we remember differently. Our respective narratives lead to different actions. Thus the conundrum of history. Were you there? Did you actually see it? Who told you about it? How can you be sure?
And so memory and retribution are linked. But why? Why is it so important to remember what happened? All people who live will die someday, and in a few generations most of us will be forgotten altogether, so why does it make any difference whether the details of our particular deaths are remembered, violent or not? Perhaps the answer lies in the very fact that we do all die, that no one cheats death. We come into this world with nothing and we leave with nothing. We all know, either implicitly or explicitly, that all we really have is our place in the memories of others. We exist to the degree that we know and remember one another. Even the most isolated among us. We share a collective understanding that we are all part of a greater whole.