Shocked by friend's email about the Armenian Genocide

[rhys gethin]

Pro-Turkish people on this issue do sound incredibly like zionists. Who were the Armenians in a postion to massacre, how?

 

[waverunner]

There's a reason I never venture into P&P and thats cos I know pretty much sod all about history, politics and the like. But from what I can gather re the Armenians vs. Turks saga it goes a little something like this:
1. War between Armenians and Turks, both sides killing each other
2. Turks win the war
3. Turks carry out bigger massacre

Correct me if I'm wrong.
Up to point 2 it's war. But if the third point is correct, surely that is some form of genocide/ethnic cleansing/your word of choice insert here?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Bloody twitchy bulletin board!

 

[Idris2002]

An excellent point - the Turks had a modern (ish) state and a modern army.

Did the Armenians?

 

[Random]

"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Phil - you dey that there was a attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, the Armenians? Maybe you're just using an idiosyncratic definition of genocide, prompted by Turkish sensitivity on this issue.

 

[Louloubelle]

I just wanted to thank everyone (well almost eveyone ) for the very thoughtful and considered posts

I found this a useful resource too
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Histories__Narratives__Documen/Armenian_Genocide/armenian_genocide.html

I suppose one could argue that cases like the American Indians or the Australian aborigines were genocides, because those popoulations had nowehere else to go.

I think there are other reasons that you could call the native american and australian genocides because of things like, just for starters, blankets infected with smallpox being given as gifts to the native americans in a knowing and conscious attempt to murder as many people as possible (1st ever example of germ warfare), complete denial of land and human rights, countless massacres (including an especially nasty one committed on native australians in which the men and women were rounded up like animals into seperate enclosures and forced to watch as europeans buried their children up to the neck in sand and that had comptitions to see who could kick the children's heads the furthest). The women were raped and then murdered by being stabbed to death with spears in their anuses and vaginas. The men were then murdered by having their private parts cut off and being left to bleed to death.

Native people were forbidden to wear their chosen clothes, practice their religions, speak their own languages and horrifically their children were taken away from their loved ones and forcibly educated in abusive boarding schools in an attempt at cultural genocide, resulting, understandably, in a multi-generational trauma leading to high rates of suicide, acoholism, mental illness, etc.

resources here
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Histories__...merican_G/documents_on_native_american_g.html

http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/

I must get some work done, but thanks again for the helpful posts

 

[Idris2002]

One of the few cases of a completely successful genocide is the one perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of Argentina in the 1890s.

They were wiped out to the last man, woman and child.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Also the British in Tasmania. Completely wiped out the indiginous group that I believe was different to the mainland aborigines.

 

[tangentlama]

see my later post

 

[A Dashing Blade]

. . .
However, it was deliberate the slaughter of the Armenians but that it was the actins of the old Ottoman empire and fuck all to do wtih Turkey - Attaturk didn't do it was the last be-Turbanned one, Mehmet the whatever
. . .

Can't believe it took a page and a half of posts before someone pointed this out.

 

[phildwyer]

There's a reason I never venture into P&P and thats cos I know pretty much sod all about history, politics and the like. But from what I can gather re the Armenians vs. Turks saga it goes a little something like this:
1. War between Armenians and Turks, both sides killing each other
2. Turks win the war
3. Turks carry out bigger massacre

Correct me if I'm wrong.
Up to point 2 it's war. But if the third point is correct, surely that is some form of genocide/ethnic cleansing/your word of choice insert here?

Your sequence of events is correct, but you gloss over the choice of words very lightly. It seems to me that there is a vital difference between "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," both with regard to the event itself and also with regard to how the modern Turkish state is treated (and as it has been pointed out this is *not* the state that carried out the massacre). And it is important to remember that the first "ethnic cleansings" in this conflict were carried out by the Armenians.

 

[ViolentPanda]

An excellent point - the Turks had a modern (ish) state and a modern army.

Did the Armenians?

From what I've read in general Ottoman histories over the years they had a small standing army mostly equipped with mid-19th century kit, used to protect their southern border from Persian interference and their northern border from Russian. As with most states of the time in the early stages of formation, they relied more on local militias for defensive necessities, whereas (as you say) the Turks had a well-equipped modern army. David and Goliath.

IIRC the Turks had grabbed the western portion of historic Armenia during the collapse of the Ottoman empire, leaving Armenia without any access to the Black sea (of course Armenia is now landlocked, having lost it's Caspian coast to Azerbaijan). Given how important access to the Black sea would have been to Armenian trade (with the ability to circumvent the two main powers of the region, and their tariffs) it's loss was probably a factor in the to-and-fro violence between the two which eventually escalated into state aggression.

 

[Idris2002]

Your sequence of events is correct, but you gloss over the choice of words very lightly. It seems to me that there is a vital difference between "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," both with regard to the event itself and also with regard to how the modern Turkish state is treated (and as it has been pointed out this is *not* the state that carried out the massacre). And it is important to remember that the first "ethnic cleansings" in this conflict were carried out by the Armenians.

I get the strong feeling that you're trying to imply an equivalency that doesn't actually exist.

If the third phase of killings in that list happened after Armenian resistance had been suppressed, and if it also involved the killings of very large numbers of Armenians, then there would, I submit be a qualitative difference between the first two phases of that process and the third phase.

In the third phase, the killings would have moved up a gear, to the point where it constituted genocide (according to some definitions) and it would have been a phase for which the then Turkish government would have been clearly responsible.

And if the present-day Turkish state is not the same as the state that carried out the genocide of the Armenians, why is it so touchy about the subject?

 

[rhys gethin]

I hope I'm not being entirely dim, but I'm getting a notion that some posters think there was some sort of equivalence between Armenians and Turks, even that there was an Armenian State back then. There wasn't, surely? Armenia was a territory of the Ottoman Empire desiring independence but wanted by the Russians too, and about as capable of massacres as the population of Ireland at the same time.

 

[tangentlama]

phildwyer
There was no "Armenian genocide." There was a war between Armenians and Turks, and there were horrible massacres of civilians commited by both sides. The Turks won the war, and were therefore able to carry out an absolutely massive massacre. Which they did.

There was both a genocide in Armenia and an Armenian genocide.

Not only was there war between Ottoman Empire and the Russian Tsarist Empire, but there was Armenians fighting for their own State within these two superpowers. There were many many massacres from 1722 onwards and it all began long before the 'Ottomans' turned upon and deported the exiled Ottoman Armenian Christian population in Turkey in April 1915.

At this point, to get a picture of the ethnic make up of this region and of Tsarist Russian military involvement, and of foreign investment and the problems in Armenia and it's people, read 'Fire and Sword in the Caucasus, pub. 1906, which is available to read on the web. I chose this chapter, about Armenians Christians and Muslims (Tartars) and Tsarist Russia's influence in the region and this chapter, about the troubles in Baku (now in Azerbaijan). Bear in mind this was one report from one outsider.

At the outbreak of WWI in 1914, there had begun the systematic massacre of 2.5 million ethnic Armenian Muslim civilians in Armenia at the hands of a Armenian/Tsarist Russian forces, against a mainly unarmed populace. 'Tartars' were among those massacred and were the ethnic Muslim population of an older Armenia and belonged to that region (from were referred to at that time by reference to the language (Tati) that they had once spoken. Armenian Muslim Tartars were systematically and intentionally massacred as well as Kurds and Turks.

There were around 2 million Armenian Christians living in Ottoman Turkey (in Western Armenia & Constantinople) . The other 2-3 million must have been living in Eastern Armenia and Georgia and most able bodied men fought alongside the Tsarist Russians in Eastern Armenia, else they were 'abroad' in other Russian States, or in Baku (now Azerbaijan, but once part of the Armenian Empire), being entrepreneurial (Oil), else already dead in prior butchery and battles.

In April 1915, the 'Ottoman Army' (made up of several ethnic groups) then rounded together up to 1.5 million Ottoman Armenian Christians who had been living in Turkey, and "deported them to the Syrian desert where it was reported that they were massacred by tens of thousands, slain by the 'Ottoman army and it's irregulars', or left to die of hunger and maltreatment."

With 2.5 million Armenian Muslims slain in Armenia by Armenians/Tsarist Russians from 1914 onwards, and at least 1.5 million Ottoman Armenian Christians who had lived in Ottoman Turkey (Western Armenia) who had then been marched out and massacred and left to die in the desert by the 'Ottoman Army' from 1915 onwards, plus around 500,000 or so who had been killed prior to 1914 (various accounts of how this came about), and you get a picture of Armenia as a country torn apart by war, religion, ethnic cleansing, genocide and exile.

But to compare this to the holocaust of European Jewry, a delibetarely planned extermination of an unarmed population, is absolute insulting bollocks.

It's not 'absolute insulting' -
Rachel Bortnick wrote in The Jewish Times, 1990 that:

''An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the independent republic of Armenia which consisted of at least 30-40 percent of the population of that republic. The memoirs of an Armenian army officer who participated in and eye-witnessed these atrocities was published in the U.S. in 1926 with the title 'Men Are Like That.' Other references abound.''
Rachel A. Bortnick - The Jewish Times - June 21, 1990.

If an Armenian genocide was to be recognised, then it would have to include all Armenians, wouldn't it?

After a bit of digging around, it appears that there was no Ottoman Empire policy of exterminating it's Armenian population. It also appears that despite the Turkish government giving asylum to many German Jews who were fleeing from Hitler, there are now modern attempts to 'Nazify' Turkish involvement and intention, (ie. liken them to Nazis).

There are many many questions I have about this. I'd like to know is who was on the "Supreme Council of the Allies" by name and country, and why this Supreme Council pulled the Brits out before the slaughtering in Eastern Armenia began, and of Armenian Danshak party revenge attacks in Ottoman Turkey after the massacres of the late 19th Century and what brought the Ottomans to kill Armenians (who were not unarmed). Where could I find more of this kind of information? How can we know for sure the number of Ottoman Armenians and other ethnic groups of the Ottoman empire?(found it: http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/yayinlar/yayin1/4-McCarty(65-85).pdf) pre-1915 figures for hostilities (found it: http://www.hyeetch.nareg.com.au/genocide/oppres_p5.html) and on reading more about it on wikipedia (which I'm becoming increasingly wary of, due to the widely differing reports I've been reading) I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Armenian_casualties and it's quite wide ranging, but gives infos of 'Allies'. But none of the wiki figures or the american figures include the genocide of the Armenian Tartars. Why is that? Does anyone know?

And read Fire and Sword in the Caucasus (1906). It was fascinating - about Oil, conflict, and history of Armenia and Armenians both Christian and Muslim.

With drilling for Gas and Oil about to begin again in Armenia, perhaps it's always been about oil and the fight for who controls it and makes money from it.Does Russia need a strong Armenia? 05/10/2006

 

[guinnessdrinker]

Over the years I've got to learn quite a bit about the Armenia Genocide.
I first heard about if from one of my school friends, who was Armenian and whos family had lost countless members back in the bad old days.


This morning I received the following email from her:

Dear Friends,

French Parliament voted to accept law which is punishesand treat as criminal who refuse allegation of Armenian genocide and will a so-called “accepting Armenian Genocide”. This decision had been made today (12th of October2006) with no doubt, this decision had been made deliberately by the Socialist Party in France as a nice gesture to the Armenian people and accordingly to re-elect by them This decision even has been rejected by Armenian Turkish Nationalities in Turkey .. There fore I would like take your attention to look at the website

just to correct one point, the socialists are not currently in power in france, the right wing is.

 

[phildwyer]

And if the present-day Turkish state is not the same as the state that carried out the genocide of the Armenians, why is it so touchy about the subject?

Because Turks believe that there is a systematic disinformation campaign being waged against them in the Western media and academy. Turkey was a superpower for four hundred years, and they have still not fully come to terms with their reduced status. They blame that status on Western mistreatment, pointing out quite reasonably that they were dealt with atrociously after WWI, when the Western powers tried to abolish the state of Turkey altogether. Only after bitter wars against various other ethnic groups were the Turks able to hold any land at all. That's why they absolutely won't countenance the possibility of losing any more, to the Kurds for instance.

I'll admit that there's an element of paranoia in all this, but they do have a point. Think for example of the way the film "Midnight Express" was received with reverance and credence in the West, despite being a blatantly racist piece of propaganda.

 

[exosculate]

Great thread - really interesting to read peoples thoughts on this.

Midnight express is of course a great film.

I think one of the other motivations France has for its negative attitude towards Turkey is to encourage a pan EU view that will never let Turkey join the other states. A position I happen to agree with for current reasons ( relating to human rights abuses +neo liberal agenda issues) rather than historical ones - so i think the French are being very unfair in this respect.

p.s - loulou I think your second email was definitely the right one, i thought this before the response you posted, and it does appear to have got a good response.

 

[newbie]

Perhaps they do have a point, in as much as it's what they've been taught. But we've not been taught as Turks. When we see authors put on trial for insulting Ataturk's reputation- no national hero could ever dress as a woman, oh no- why would we believe a word the Turkish state says?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/06/wturk06.xml
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=55851

 

[tangentlama]

Because Turks believe that there is a systematic disinformation campaign being waged against them in the Western media and academy.

As much as it pains me to be seen to agree with you, phildwyer, I think you might have a point here.

BTW, 'Absolute insulting' would be to compare the Danshak resistance, the Ottoman massacres, the Danshak revenge attacks, and the ousting and subsequent murderous treatment of Ottoman Armenia's Christian populace (the struggle between the Armenian Danshak with the Ottoman Empire) with the plight of unarmed European Jews, Roma (&co) in the face of Nazi Germany's systematic deportations and extermination of 'social undesirables' as synonymous with the Jewish Shoah or the entire European Holocausts from 1821-1945.

Is this what Armenians are doing?

 

[phildwyer]

As much as it pains me to be seen to agree with you, phildwyer, I think you might have a point here.

BTW, 'Absolute insulting' would be to compare the massacres, the ousting and subsequent murderous treatment of Ottoman Armenia's Christian populace at the hands of the Ottoman Empire's Army with the plight of unarmed European Jews, Roma (&co) in the face of Nazi Germany's systematic deportations and extermination of 'social undesirables' as synonymous with the Shoah and the entire European Holocaust from 1821-1945.

Is this what Armenian's are doing?

Many Armenians do it, yes. But at present it seems to be what the *French* are doing by making it illegal to deny that there was an Armenian genocide. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you why France of all countries, is deciding to make this gesture now, of all times.

 

[tangentlama]

If the third phase of killings in that list happened after Armenian resistance had been suppressed, and if it also involved the killings of very large numbers of Armenians, then there would, I submit be a qualitative difference between the first two phases of that process and the third phase.

In the third phase, the killings would have moved up a gear, to the point where it constituted genocide (according to some definitions) and it would have been a phase for which the then Turkish government would have been clearly responsible.

I tend to agree, but it's a government that doesn't even exist anymore, and those acts were carried out by a variety of ethnicities, not 'Turkey' today per se.

Also, there's no accounting for the involvement of the Armenian Danshak and of their involvement with the Russians, or of the Russian Empire's wars with Ottoman Turkey which the Armenians joined with from ealy 18th Century onwards but by the 20th Century. There doesn't seem to be much written about the threat to the Armenian Gregorian Church from Russification, or of the Armenian formulation independence Tsarist Russia or Ottoman Empire. There's a great deal of focus on Ottoman Turk atrocities against the Armenian Nationalists, but not much on Tsarist Russian atrocities. It all looks very muddy from here.

There appears to be a suppression of facts and acts on the Armenian side which can't help to make relations with modern day Turkey very easy, diplomatically speaking.

And if the present-day Turkish state is not the same as the state that carried out the genocide of the Armenians, why is it so touchy about the subject?

I think that has to do with modern day geo-politics, yes? The Armenians want the land formerly known as 'Western Armenia' back, don't they?

 

[nino_savatte]

IIRC, even the Kurds were induced to participate in the massacres.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I hope I'm not being entirely dim, but I'm getting a notion that some posters think there was some sort of equivalence between Armenians and Turks, even that there was an Armenian State back then. There wasn't, surely? Armenia was a territory of the Ottoman Empire desiring independence but wanted by the Russians too, and about as capable of massacres as the population of Ireland at the same time.

Armenia, in relation to it's place in the Ottoman empire as the empire dissolved, was in an equivalent position to one of the smaller "nations" that made up Yugoslavia as Yugoslavia dissolved. It had militias, and those elements of the state military forces that derived from that particular nation, but that was about it. It was a "proto-state" with little of the infrastructure and institutions that Turkey (as the centre of the empire) retained.

I've absolutely no doubt that ethnicly Turkish Muslims (and ethnicly Persian Azeris etc etc) were killed in Armenia, but there's very little evidence of the Armenians undertaking the kind of planned and prolonged strategy of clearance through slaughter that there is evidence of the Turks conducting.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I think that has to do with modern day geo-politics, yes? The Armenians want the land formerly known as 'Western Armenia' back, don't they?

They have done since the day the Turks took it, and given that in Ottoman times the south-east corner of the Black sea coast and the territory south and east of it was aknowledgedly part of Armenia (as was what is now Azerbaijan), then the Armenian claim is arguably stronger than the Turkish, especially as the Turks already possessed much of the southern coast of the Black sea.

 

[tangentlama]

I've absolutely no doubt that ethnicly Turkish Muslims (and ethnicly Persian Azeris etc etc) were killed in Armenia, but there's very little evidence of the Armenians undertaking the kind of planned and prolonged strategy of clearance through slaughter that there is evidence of the Turks conducting.

There is evidence of a prolonged strategey of ethnic cleansing of any Muslim they found in 'their land' by Armenia's Dashnaks between 1918 to 1920. Also there is evidence of the Armenian Dashnak/Cossack massacres of ethnic Muslims between 1914 and 1918. (And 1918-1920)

By ethnic Muslim, I mean Kurd, Turk, and Tartar (Azeri). I'm told that Tartar, when used by Russians or some Westerners writing of that time, used it in an incorrect and often disparaging way, a bit like the reference to Native Americans as 'savages', because they didn't understand or approve of their cultural structures.

 

[phildwyer]

IIRC, even the Kurds were induced to participate in the massacres.

What do you mean "even" the Kurds? The Kurds were the main perpetrators.

 

[phildwyer]

I've absolutely no doubt that ethnicly Turkish Muslims (and ethnicly Persian Azeris etc etc) were killed in Armenia, but there's very little evidence of the Armenians undertaking the kind of planned and prolonged strategy of clearance through slaughter that there is evidence of the Turks conducting.

Rubbish. There are entire museums dedicated to the memory of the Turks systematically slaughtered by Armenians in a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing.

 

[nino_savatte]

What the fuck is the arrogant, pompous idiot blethering about now?

Wait, don't tell me...he's saying "You fool"! What a prize prick.

 

[zoltan]

Bottom line - no one tribe/ nation/ people etc can hold up their hands and say they are been lovely at all points in their past and never caused anyone any bother.I am niot reposnisble for what MY Grandad did in WW2 or My Great great Grandad did in the Boer War.

Its a bit sad that this kind of stuff has to be dredged up over and over again