Akcam, Taner. The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and
Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2012.
"The purpose of sending away certain people is to safeguard the welfare of our fatherland for the future, for wherever they may live they will never abandon their seditious ideas, so we must try to reduce their numbers as much as possible." Ottoman Interior Ministry, quoted in Aram Andonian, Memoirs of Naim Bey, (Akcam, p. 254)
The typical Turkish historian will claim that World War I, and its struggle between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, made the mass killing of the Armenians an unfortunate exigency. The Armenians were all Dashnaks and revolutionaries--too dangerous to merit anything but extermination.
The real reality is that the Ottoman Empire entered World War I when it did not need to, specifically so that it had a pretext to enforce its racial homogeneity notions. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), also known as the "Young Turks," were liberal young Ottoman Muslims, who were usually educated in France. The Young Turks wished to create a modern European-style state. While democratic, capitalist and secular, this new Turkish state would be Islamic in character.
TemessÜl, or "assimilation," was the buzz-word for the Young Turks. Even non-Turkish Muslims, such as the Arabs and Kurds, were seen as backwards. As such, they needed to be molded into the form of westernized Turks (Akcam, p. 45-47).
The background that led the CUP to crave entry into World War I is important to understand. In the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the Ottoman Empire lost eighty percent of its European territory (Akcam, xiv). Enver Pasha blamed Ottoman Christians for this calamity, which led to hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Albania and Bosnia needing resettlement in Anatolia.
In addition, a constellation of pressures from France and Russia made the CUP fear the encroachment on Anatolian territory. The Baghdad Treaty (March 1914) saw the Ottomans agree with Russia, France, Britain and Italy to create zones that were superintended by these powers; France wished to create Syrian, Armenian and Arabian states (Akcam, p. 130). The Yeniköy Accord with Russia in February 1914 endangered seven provinces (Erzurum, Van, ManÜretülaziz,Diyarbkir, Sivas, Bitlis and Trebizond) by creating inspectors from abroad with authority to enforce reform benefiting Armenians, or, again, even create an Armenian state! This mirrors the way the Sick Man of Europe lost the Balkans (Akcam, p. 131). The Armenian Reform Agreement explains why Cemal Pasha and the CUP were eager to join the Austrians and Germans in World War I (Akcam, p. xvii). The war would be the means for ending the Armenian issue (Akcam, p. 132). Enver, Cemal and the rest of the CUP Central Committee were anxious that the presence of Armenians in these seven provinces would enable the creation of an Armenian state (Akcam, p. 132). The systematic use of claims of Armenian disloyalty and rebellion were how Enver, Cemal and the rest of the CUP Central Committe would avoid this (Akcam, p. 133).
Lastly, the Young Turk desire was to replace the successful Armenian businessmen with Muslim businessmen. Thus, when Armenians were deported (which was the legal phase of Ottoman action), all their possessions were accounted for. The three characteristics that show the intention of Enver Pasha was plunder are that 1) Armenians had no legal right for recovery; 2) Armenians could not use, purchase, or sell their abandoned property, and; 3) Trusts were not accessible to Armenians (Akcam, p. 343). Thus, reallocation to Muslims or the Army/government was the intention; perversely, the value of Armenian property was often used to fund their destruction (Akcam, pgs. 344, 354-56).
Official Turkish history suggests justice was meted out to the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. Most executions after the war were for stealing Armenian property, not acts of murder against Armenians (Akcam, p. 384). Others were killed for anti-CUP politics, or to destroy potential witnesses (e.g. Cerkez Ahmed, Yakup Cemil) (Akcam, p. 396-97).
The methods by which the CUP executed the Armenian Genocide were a mixture of official and unofficial acts. The official acts were done by government bodies like the Interior Ministry or Army. These consisted of population exchanges, deportation, and the reallocation of Armenian property.
The unofficial acts relied on the Special Organization, also known as bashi-bazouks. Created by Dr. Bahaeddin Sakir Bey, bashi-bazouks were Kurdish tribesmen of released prisoners. The command structure for bashi-bazouks bypassed the Ottoman government; many orders came from Talat Pasha's telegraph in his home, while others passed to regional CUP functionaries. Secrecy and deniability were key characteristics of these unofficial acts. Orders were either oral or came with instructions to burn after reading. Necati Bey showed the order of annihilation to Cemet Bey, but would not give him a copy (Akcam, p. 195). An emphasis was placed upon hiding Armenian corpses, especially from foreigners (Akcam, p. 200).
The mathematics of dilution mandated the number of Armenians who needed to die. For example, the Aleppo area was home to two million Muslims. To adhere to the CUP policy that Armenians could only constitute 5% of the population, out of 1.3 million Armenians deported from Anatolia, 1.1 million Armenians had to be exterminated. This would be accomplished through violence, disease, or dehydration/hunger (Akcam, p. 258) After military setbacks like Galipoli and the Battle of Sarikamis (Jan. 1915), the CUP accelerated its efforts to punish Armenians for the success of the Entente powers (Akcam, pgs. 157-58). Armenians in the Ottoman Army were disarmed and murdered (Akcam, p. 96, p. 155). The Turkish government still adheres to the story that Armenians were acting as chetes on behalf of Russia--a testament to the Ottoman government's official arm to its extermination efforts. It is remarkable how the same government that preserves records of Armenian guerrillas cannot produce any evidence of compensation to transported Armenians for abandoned property (Akcam, pgs. 354-56).
The earlier process of removing Ottoman Greeks used this same combination of official acts and unofficial violence. The main difference was that expulsion rather than extermination was the aim, to be achieved by boycotts and punitive taxation as well as bashi-bazouk violence (Akcam, p. 83). The Greeks had the advantage of a neighboring state that could punish CUP killing with war or similar abuse of Muslims living in Greece (Akcam, p. 86, p. 100). In both the Greek expulsion and the Armenian Genocide, Bahaeddin Sakir was the common architect (Akcam, p. 183).
The Armenian Genocide was the inspiration for the Shoah. It also was the template for the Yugoslav Civil Wars of the 40s and 90s. Why cooperate with other ethnic groups when you can just get rid of them?
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