Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Twenty

      

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?

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Eleven

       "Dr. Boghosian described similar scenes.  His group of deportees was led out of the Chankiri prison, he recorded, on Assumption Sunday in August 1915.  Marched out of town, tied to each other by ropes, and joined with a group of several hundred more men, they were sent out into the 'bright moonlit night,' with three carts filled with 'spades, hoes, pick-axes, and shovels.'  Along the way more than two dozen of them were killed by the gendarmes, who bludgeoned them to death with their rifles.  They were spared for the moment when a Turkish captain redirected their caravan south to Kayseri.  Along that route more than 200 died of starvation and dysentary--familiar ways of dying in the extermination process.  Most of them would die in the coming months, but Dr. Boghosian, like Krikoris Balakian, was among the lucky survivors.

       What happened to these deported Armenian cultural leaders happened to Armenian intellectuals all over Turkey.  In this calculated way the CUP destroyed a vital part of Armenia's cultural infrastructure, and succeeded in practically silencing a whole generation of Armenian writers.  The death toll shows that at least eighty-two writers are known to have been murdered, in addition to the thousands of teachers and cultural and religious leaders.  It was an apocalypse for Armenian literature, which was in its own moment of a modernist flowering.  Daniel Varoujian, Siamanto (Adam Yarjanian), Krikor Zohrab, Levon Shant, Gomidas (Soghomon Soghomonian), and many others had taken Armenian poetry, fiction, drama, and music into a new era.  Fortunately many of the poems, novels, plays, and essays survived and are an important part of the Armenian literary tradition today.  But it may nevertheless be that the Young Turk government's extermination of Armenian intellectuals in 1915 was the most extensive episode of its kind in the twentieth century.  In many ways it became a paradigm for the silencing of writers by totalitarian governments in the ensuing decades of the century.  After April 24 it would be easier to carry out the genocide program, for many of the most gifted voices of resistance were gone.

       When Morgenthau first settled into his new post in Constantinople, he was alarmed by the recent accession to power of the CUP triumverate--Enver, Talaat, and Jemal.  Morgenthau called the new Committee of Union and Progress 'an irresponsible party, a kind of secret society' that ruled by 'intrigue, intimidation, and assassination.' 
       Then, as the Ottoman Empire joined Germany in World War I in November 1914, Morgenthau witnessed the Ottoman declaration of war that was issued simultaneously with a declaration of jihad had 'started passions' that would fuel the extermination program against the Armenians.  By the spring of 1915, Morgenthau began receiving detailed dispatches and telegrams about the deportations and massacres of the Armenians from his consular staff in the interior of Turkey.  Those reports would soon be heard around the world, and they would become essential to Morgenthau's new sense of conscience and responsibility. 

       In every city, town, and village a significant part of the Armenian population was financially stable, or even wealthy, and this caused great resentment and envy among their Muslim neighbors.  A disproportionate number of Armenians were successful in small business, trade, and commerce;  they were artisans, craftsmen, and farmers as well as teachers, clergy, and physicians.  Armenian culture was steeped in what later came to be called the Protestant work ethic.  With the coming of the missionaries, a new class of educated and intellectual Armenians had emerged as an academic elite throughout the empire.  By 1914, there were 1,996 schools and 451 monateries stretching from Constantinople to Van."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs215-16, 223-24, and 233.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Ten

        "Balakian described 'the terror of death' that hung in the air of the bus, especially as they passed the rocky coast where in previous decades the sultan's military police had thrown to their deaths hundreds of Armenian and Turkish intellectuals and political activists.  The group was then put on a steamship that normally held about 65 people, but was now loaded down with about 250 Armenians and dozens of military police--young soldiers, commisars, army spies, and police officials of various ranks.
        They sailed out on the rough waters of the Sea of Marmara and finally landed at Haydar Pasha's wharf, where they were marched out of the steamship in pairs to a huge embarkation station.  As the ornate process continued, the Armenian leaders were then taken to a special train, which was, as Balakian put it,'waiting and ready to take us all to the depths of Asia Minor, where,except for a few rare cases, we would all meet out deaths.  With the lights out,' Balakian wrote, ' the doors of the cars shut, and with police and police soldiers posted everywhere, the train started.  And so we began to move further and further away form the places of our lives, each of us leaving behind grieving and unprotected mothers, sisters, wives, children, possessions, wealth, and everything else.  We headed out to a region unnamed and unfamiliar.  To be buried forever.'
        Sometime past midnight an official on the train, who happened to be Armenian, whispered in Balakian's ear: 'Reverend Father, please write down the names of your arrested friends on this piece of paper and give it back to me.'  The man then 'slid a piece of paper and a pencil into my hand, and leaving the lamp by me, he went off to the busy policemen who were in charge of us. . . my heart was pounding and in haste I wrote, in the flickering dim light, the names I could remember, and slid the list back to the Armenian official.'  It was at this point that Balakian began to bear witness in a more formal way, and perhaps the writing down of the names was part of the process that led him to write his memoir.
        The train proceeded south along the coastline of the Sea of Marmara and by dawn they were passing through Nicomedia (Izmit) and Bardizag.  At dusk they came to the town of Eskishehir, where the Ankara and Konia railway lines separate, and then, after some delay and much apprehension among the prisoners, the train veered off toward Ankara.  Around midday on Tuesday they arrived at the Sinjan Koy railway station, near Ankara.  At the station Ibrahim, the chief of the central prison, who had been with them since Constantinople, stood up and began to read off the list of names:  'Silvio Ricci, Agnuni, Zartarian, Khazhag, Sharigian, Jihangiulian, Dr. Daghavarian, Sarkis Minasian,' the names were shouted out.  They were all progressive intellectuals, nonpolitical party people, conservatives, Balakian recalled, 'some seventy-five in all.  We were riveted on each name as it was called,' he wrote,' and then we kissed those who were leaving us.  In that instant, we began to weep, and as one person wept, others began to weep too, and we had this feeling that we were being separated from each other forever.'
         The first group was taken to Ayash, northwest of Ankara, while Balakian's group would be taken to Chankiri, to the northwest of Ankara.  In both places the men were imprisoned, tortured, and most of them killed in the subsequent few months in the desolate countryside of the region.  Balakian describes many of their deaths, among them the murders of the famous poet Daniel Varoujian and the novelist and Ottoman parliament membor Krikor Zohrab.  Varoujan and four colleagues had been with Balakian in prison in Chankiri, and on Thursday August 12, Jemal Oguz, the CUP responsible secretary, telegraphed the police guard office on the Chankiri-Kaylajek road, they were ambushed by four Kurdish chetes.  'The whole thing,' Balakian wrote, 'had been arranged in advance, and in secret.'
        The chetes then took the five Armenians to a nearby creek, undressed them, and folded up their clothing for themselves.  Then 'they began to stab them to death, slashing their arms and legs and genitals, and ripping apart their bodies.'  Only the thirty-three-year old Daniel Varoujian tried to defend himself, and this provoked the killers further;  they not only 'tore out his entrails, but dug out the eyes of this great Armenian poet.'  The killers then divided the pillage among themselves, taking more than 450 Ottoman gold pieces that were sewn into the clothing of Dr. Chillingerian and Onnig Maghazadijian.  They paid off the police, and after dividing up the belongings, left in the carriages.
         Balakian learned the details of the killings from one of the Turkish carriage drivers--the twenty-one-year-old son of the local bathhouse keeper--who returned to Chankiri depressed and shaken.  Sobbing as he spoke, he said to the Armenian priest, 'I don't want to be in this trade anymore.  I'm going to sell my horse and carriage and get out of this town.  I don't want this kind of profit.'  When the carriages returned to Chankiri without Varoujian and the others on Friday, the news of their murders spread terror among the deportees and the Armenian families of the town.  The interim governor, who had guaranteed that the men would reach Ankara safely, went immediately to Tuney (the town were they were killed) with the chief of police from Kastamouni and an investigative team.  There, they 'found the five dead men in unrecognizable condition in the creek.'"
The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs.213-215.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Five

        "But the chetes were only part of a killing operation that involved military police and the provincial police, known as gendarmes.  They were the ones who carried out the rigorous process of arrest and deportation city by city, town by town, village by village.  Staff officers were assigned to the Ottoman army corps and became chiefs of staff in the interior, where they were put in command of their respective killing units in order to assist in 'the liquidation of the Christian elements.'  One reserve officer put it bluntly when he said the aim of the whole process 'was to destroy the Armenians and thereby to do away with the Armenian question.'
        Because Germany was the Ottoman Empire's closest wartime ally, there is a large body of extraordinary German testimony about the Armenian Genocide.  For example, Colonel Stange, the highest-ranking German guerrilla commander in the Russian-Turkish border region, referred to the chetes as 'scum' (Gesindel), who 'in the area of Tercan killed without exception all the Armenians of the convoy coming from Erzurum.'  This 'incontestable fact,' he wrote, was carried out 'with the assistance of the military escort.'  Similarly, German consul Scheubner-RIchter, reporting on the massacres from Harput to Erzinjan, also referred to the killing squads as 'the scum.'  The German consul in Aleppo, Dr. Walter Roessler, in a July 27, 1915 report, noted that the killing squads were created by 'the Turkish government which released convicts from the prisons, put them in soldiers' uniforms and sent them to areas through which the deportees are to pass.'
       While the killing squads and provincial gendarmerie were consumed with massacring and deporting the civilian Armenian population, they also aided the Ottoman army in its scheme to dispose of all able-bodied Armenian men.  Christians had first been conscripted into the Ottoman army in 1909, after the implementation of new constitutional reforms, and so, at the outbreak of World War I, Armenian men between the ages of twenty and forty-five were drafted into the Ottoman army.  It was an army with numerous problems, among them severe ethnic discrimination.  Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and others were subjected to brutal treatment.  Arab soldiers, for example, were often sent to the front lines shackled in chains and escorted by Turks at gunpoint.
       After Enver's humiliating defeat by the Russians at Sarikamish in December 1914-January 1915, Enver and his ruling elite, looking for a scapegoat, blamed the Armenians, claiming they were in sympathy with the Russians.  Within a month, by February 25, 1915, all the Armenian men in the Ottoman army were officially disarmed and thrown into labor battalions.  Almost immediately thereafter, the army began an organized plan of massacring the Armenian men in the labor battalions.  These killings preceded the beginning of the deportations and massacres of the later part of the spring.  As the historian Erik Zurcher has noted, 'Once the massacres started, the unarmed recruits in the labor battalions were sitting ducks.'  Under the guard of armed soldiers, the Armenian soldiers were taken out into secluded areas where they were killed by gunshot or with bayonets by Turkish soldiers, often with the aid of the gendarmes and the chetes.'  In this manner tens of thousands of Armenian men were disposed of.
        If the able-bodied Armenian men were not massacred in the labor batallions of the Ottoman army, they were most often taken out and shot in groups in the first stage of the deportation.  As the Armenians were forced from their homes and organized into caravans to be marched out of town, the men were separated from the women and children and taken out into the fields outside their towns and villages and shot en masse.  By killing the men quickly in these ways, the Turks rendered the rest of the Armenian community increasingly helpless without those who could best resist massacre and offer protection.
       Much like the hierarchical relationship between the Sonderkommandos, who carried out the executive orders in the Nazi bureaucracy, and the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, the CUP created a hierarchical administration to carry out the Armenian killing operations.  Three levels of bureaucrats were given a supreme authority that superseded the traditional government structure in the provinces, and through this network the details of the deportations and mass killings were carried out.  The hierarchy consisisted of Katibi Mesul 'Responsible Secretaries';  Murahhas, 'Delegates';  and Umumi Muefettish, 'General Inspectors.'  Most of the men who held these positions were former army officers;  as loyal party members their job was to maintain the chain of command in the provinces so that the orders for arrests, deportations, and massacre were implemented strictly, and to do this they worked closely with the local CUP clubs, known as Ittihad Clubs.
       In his report of July 28, 1915, from Erzurum, Vice-Consul Schuebner-Richter actually referred to this operation as a 'shadow, or a parallel government' (Nebenregierung) assuming power over the provincial government.  He attributed the severity of the deportations to the party administrators, who vetoed the governor-general's decree exempting the sick, families without men, and women living alone.  The Responsible Secretaries, Delegates, and Inspectors admitted, Scheubner-RIchter reported, that their job was to see the total obliteration (die ganzliche Ausrottung) of the Armenians.  Colonel Stange reported that in Trebizond Province, Dr. Shakir and Gen.  Mahmud Kamil 'ruthlessly and constantly pushed for the expediting of the deportations' with the knowledge that the convoys were being massacred on order.  From Adana, German consul Eugen Buge reported to his embassy in Constantinople that the local party chief (der hiesige Komiteefuhrer) promised to massacre all the Armenians of Adana if any of them were spared deportation.
       Perhaps nobody put it more comprehensively than German ambassador Count Paul von Wolff-Metternich.  Reporting back to the chancellor in Berlin, he expressed his exasperation at the power held by the CUP's Central Committee, hence the SO, in the process of the Armenian massacres:
        Nobody has any more power to restrain the multi-headed hydra of the Com
        -ittee, and the attendant chauvinism and fanaticism.  The Committee demands
         the extirpation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the government
          must yield.  The authority of the Committee is not limited to the Ottoman
          capital where Ittihad {CUP} is organized and functions as a party in power.
          That authority of the Committee reaches into all the provinces.  A Committee
          representative is assigned to each of the provincial administrations, from
          vali down to kaymakam, for purposes of assistance or supervision. . . .
           Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything that is
           not Turkish, and to violently take possession of the goods of others. . . ."
The Burning Tigris, by Peter Balakian pgs. 183-186.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Four

     "The plan to exterminate the Armenians was accelerated and shaped by the rapid rise of military officers to crucial positions of power.  This new military authority remained free from the restraints of the Ottoman legislature.  With the proclamation of the Temporary Law of Deportation of May 27, 1915, which ordered the forcible deportation of the Armenians, Ottoman officers were given the power to take charge of the wholesale removal of the Armenian population, and the Ministry of War under Enver was authorized to administer the details.
         In creating an efficient killing process the Special Organization systematically recruited, organized, and deployed tens of thousands of convicted criminals for the purpose of massacring the Armenian population.  In this astonishing use of the nation's criminal manpower, the military authorities were given autonomy to authorize the release of thousands of convicts from the prisons.  While the Ottoman government had deployed convicts in small numbers in the Balkan War of 1913, and the sultan had also emptied some prisons for the sake of killing Armenians in the 1890s, the harnessing of the criminal element of Ottoman society was brought to an entirely new threshold in 1915.
       The organization of the chetes--the ex-convict killer bands--was similar to the Reich Security Main Office's einsatzgruppen,or mobile killing units.  While Raul Hilberg claims that the Reich Security Main Office conducted 'for the first time in modern history. . . a massive killing operation,' it appears in fact that the CUP's Special Organization was the first state bureaucracy to implement mass killing for the purpose of race extermination.  Arnold Toynbee was among the first to assess the role of these killing squads when he wrote that:' Turkish "political" chetes. . .made their debut on the western littoral, and in 1915, after being reinforced by convicts released for the purpose from the public prisons, they carried out the designs of the Union and Progress Government against the Armenians in every province of Anatolia except the vilayet of Aidin.'
       The CUP's killing program also involved a hierarchy of command.  At the top of this chain, Dr. Shakir played a role not unlike that of Nazi Reich Security Head, Reinhard Heydrich.  The miltary hierarchy was essential to the operation, and accordingly the Special Organization units were mostly directed by active or reserve officers.  The small detachments were commanded by lieutenants and captains, the larger ones by majors.  In order to ensure that the officers would lead the killing efficiently, they were given incentives of Armenian booty and spoils.  The killing squads and their leaders were motivated by both the ideology of jihad , with its Islamic roots, and pan-Turkism influenced by European nationalism.  The confession made by a Turkish gendarmerie captain named Shukru to the Armenian priest Krikoris Balakian in Yozgat in 1916 dramatizes the role of jihad in the killing process.  Captain Shukru admitted to Balakian, a deportee he assumed would soon be dead, that he had been ordered to massacre all the Armenians of Yozgat because it was a 'holy war.'  When it was over, he told the priest, he 'would say a prayer and his soul would be absolved.'
       The killer bands, or chetes, who played such a significant role in the killing process, were estimated to be about thirty to thirty-four thousand in number.  While Talaat, Shakir, Enver, Gokalp, Nazim, and the others found the idea of using ex-convicts to be an effective means of carrying out genocide, there was another hidden agenda.  Using ex-convicts, they believed, would enable the government to deflect responsibility.  For as the death tolls rose, they could always say that 'things got out of control,' and it was the result of 'groups of brigands.'"  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs. 182-183

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Three

       "On November 14, less than two weeks after the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the sheikh-ul-Islam (the chief Sunni Muslim religious authority in the Ottoman world), Mustafa Hayri Bey--who was a CUP appointment and not, as it was traditionally, the sultan's choice--made a formal declaration of jihad in Constantinople, followed by well-organized demonstrations in the streets.  Even though the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians were the only Christians exempt from the jihad, they were uneasy about this aspect of the Ottoman religious war cry.  Wagenheim wired the Wilhelmstrasse (Foreign Ministry) that the unleashing of religious passions among the Turks was liable to do more harm than good.  He noted that there had already been anti-Armenian violence and other disorder in the city, and he assured the kaiser that he was doing everything 'to prevent further troubles for which we would be held responsible.'  The Entente governments were alarmed about the jihad, and the Italians, for example, now bolstered their armies in Libya, where they feared trouble.
       To promote the idea of jihad, the sheikh-ul-Islam's published proclamation summoned the Muslim world to arise and massacre its Christian oppressors.  'Oh Moslems,' the document read, 'Ye who are smitten with happiness and are on the verge of sacrificing your life and your good for the cause of right, and of braving perils, gather now around the Imperial throne.'  In the Ikdam,the Turkish newspaper that had just passed into German ownership, the idea of jihad was underscored:  'The deeds of our enemies have brought down the wrath of God.  A gleam of hope has appeared.  All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women, and children must fulfill their duty. . . . If we do it, the deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured.'  Jihad pamphlets appealed to the need to exterminate all the Christians--except those of German nationality.  'He who kills even one unbeliever,' one pamphlet read, 'of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or openly, shall be rewarded by God.'  In the worldwide Islamic revolution that was coming, 'India' would be 'for the Indian Moslems, the Caucasus for the Caucasian Moslems, and the Ottoman Empire for the Ottoman Turks and Arabs.'
       At the American embassy the day after the jihad proclamation, over tea and cakes, Enver assured Ambassador Morganthau that jihad proclamations would not mean any harm to Americans, nor would there be any massacres.  In the midst of his assurances, Morgenthau's secretary came into the room to report that a mob was demonstrating 'against certain foreign establishments,' and already had attacked an Austrian shop that was advertising 'English clothes' for sale.  Enver brushed off this news as nothing to worry about, but shortly after he left, a report came to Morgenthau that a mob had looted a French dry goods store, the Bon Marche, and was heading toward the British embassy.  A few minutes later the mob marched to 'Tokatlian's, the most important restaurant in Constantinople, ' as Morgenthau called it.  Then Turks broke the mirrors and windows and smashed the marble table tops;  within minutes the restaurant was 'completely gutted.'
        If the jihad failed to incite a worldwide call for three hundred million Muslims to take arms against Christians, it did fan the flames of Turkish nationalism and continued to escalate what Jay Winter has called 'the culture preparation of hatred.'  As the American ambassador put it, the jihad 'started passions aflame that afterward spent themselves in the massacres of the Armenians and other subject peoples.' "The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian Pgs. 169-170

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade) Part Two

       "In ways that were similar and anticipated the Nazi race-hygeine ideology of the 1930s, which depicted the Jew as a 'harmful bacillus' and 'bloodsucker' infecting the German nation from within (Hitler called the Jew 'a maggot in a rotting corpse' and 'a germ carrier of the worst sort'), pan-Turkist ideology envisioned the Armenian as an invasive infection in Muslim Turkish society.  One Turkish physician, Mehmed Reshid, a staunch party member who was appointed governor of Diyarbekir in 1915--and would be responsible for the deaths and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians--likened the Armenians to 'dangerous microbes,' asking rhetorically, 'Isn't it the duty of a doctor to destroy these microbes?'  Known as the 'executioner governor,' Dr. Mehmed Reshid tortured Armenians by nailing horseshoes to their feet and marching them through the streets, and by crucifying them on makeshift crosses.  After the Genocide Reshid confessed 'My Turkishness prevailed over my medical calling.'  Other physicians, like Dr. Behaeddin Shakir and Dr. Mehmed Nazim, both CUP leaders, also believed that Armenians were gavurs who had become 'tubercular microbes' infecting the state.
        {Ziya} Gokalp's pan-Turkism was bound up in grandiose romantic nationalism and a 'mystical vision of blood and race,' and was influenced by the German nationalism of Herder and Wagner, who were also key influences on Nazi Aryan ideology.  Gokalp believed that for Turkey to revitalize itself, it had to reclaim a golden age, which he defined as a pre-Islamic era of Turkic warriors such as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.  It is ironic that Hitler also extolled Genghis Khan in his speech about the future of German world domination and his immediate plan to invade Poland.  Speaking to his elite generals eight days before invading Poland in 1939, Hitler praised the virtues of power and brutality, referring to how easy it had been to dispense of defenseless people like the Armenians.  'Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter--with premeditation and a happy heart.  History sees him solely as the founder of a state.  It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me.'  And then the fuhrer asked rhetorically:  'Who today, after all, speaks of the annhilation of the Armenians?'
        For Turkey to be strong again, Gokalp believed, it had to emulate this great military past, and it had to be a pure, homogenous nation.  A nation, Gokalp wrote, must be 'a society consisting of people who speak the same language, have had the same education and are united in their religious and aesthetic ideals--in short those who have a common culture and religion.'
       Gokalp declared with passion that nationalism was the new religion in the twentieth century, and that loyalty to the nation must be, for the healthy state, unqualified and total.  'I am a soldier, it [the nation] is my commander/I obey without question all its orders.  With closed eyes/I carry out my duty,' his doggerel went.  Like Mehmet Reshid, he espoused the idea that non-Turks were invasive germs that threatened the health of the state.  'Greeks, Armenians, and Jews' were 'a foreign body in the national Turkish state.'  Believing the Armenians and Greeks to be parasites, Gokalp and the other pan-Turkists strove to rid their society of this Christian bourgeois element.  Gokalp's theory of national economy advocated a homogenous Turkish bourgeoisie, and during the Balkan Wars, a Turkish boycott of Greek and Armenian businesses was a major manifestation of the new xenophobia.  As Tekinalp put it, 'The rigorous boycott' created 'a feeling of brotherhood. . . in the hearts of people all over the empire.'   It was only a beginning, for as U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau put it, the boycott with its attack on Christians, especially the Greeks in this case, foreshadowed what would happen to the Armenians later.  Turkish rage at the gavur bourgeosie would explode in more extreme ways when the wholesale theft and pillaging of Armenian wealth became institutionalized during the Genocide.
        The Young Turk leaders, especially Enver Pasha, went beyond pan-Turkism and became obsessed with the idea of pan-Turanism, an ideology based on the hope of reclaiming the Caucasus and central Asia--an idea laced with some of the occultlike fantasy characterized by the Nazi belief about ruling the world for a thousand years.  For Enver it fueled his desire to wipe out the Armenians, whom he saw as an obstacle to Turkish expansion into the Russian Caucasus and then into central Asia, and it dictated some of his military strategy.  The pan-Turanist part of Gokalp's ideology made a special appeal to Turkish fantasies.  It was predicated on an irridentist idea that the Ottoman Empire could revive itself by achieving some sort of union among 'all peoples of proven or alleged Turkic origins,' both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire.'
       The idea encapsulated a dream of creating an empire among the Turkic peoples from Albania through Anatolia, into the Caucuses and then into central and east-central Asia.  As the Turks drove east, Gokalp believed, they would find the mythical origin of their culture,' a Shangri-La-like area in the steppes of Central Asia.'  By 1910, as the idea of Turkification became increasingly popular, the CUP decided to make the Turkish language compulsory in all schools throughout the empire, and it reiterated this at annual meetings in the ensuing years leading up to World War I.
       By 1914, as Turkey positioned itself to join Germany in the war, the Young Turk leadership was embracing various elements of pan-Turkism, pan-Turanism, and Turkification.  Obsessed with their mortal enemy, Russia, and angry about Russian rule of the Turkic peoples of central Asia, the Young Turks used pan-Turkic goals as a rationale for entering the war.  Throughout the press from Tasvir-i Efkar and Sabah to government organs such as Tanin, and opposition papers like Ikdam and Zaman, pan-Turkist propaganda was very much part of the zeitgeist.

       Turkey's new alliance with Germany and partnership in World War I accelerated the empire's militarization program.  By March 1914 the Germans had become an entrenched presence in the empire and in the Ottoman military.  High-ranking German officers now found themselves holding commanding positions in the Ottoman army and navy.  Gen.  Liman von Sanders had arrived in Constantinople in December 1913 and was to become commander of the First Ottoman Army Corps, and also inspector-general of the Ottoman army, while Maj. Gen. Fritz Bronssart von der Goltz, Maj. Gen. Freidrich Kress von Kressenstein, Gen. Eric von Falkenhayn, Maj. Gen. Hans von Seekt all assumed positions of power in the Ottoman army.  The German rear admiral Wilhelm Souchon became commander of the Ottoman navy, as did his successor Vice-Adm. Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz.
       To the new American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, the aggressive presence of the German army in Turkey seemed nothing less than evidence of the kaiser's plan 'to annex the Turkish army to his own.'  It was certainly no coincidence that Enver Pasha had been trained in Berlin, where he was military attache in 1909.  He worshipped German kultur, and in Morgenthau's view, was little more than ' a cog in the Prussian system.'  With the new German leadership, Morgenthau found himself witnessing changes in the Ottoman army.  'What. . . had been an undisciplined, ragged rabble was now parading with the goose step, the men were clad in German field gray, and they even wore a casque-shaped head covering, which slightly suggested the German Pickelhaube [spiked helmet].'  Of this the 'German officers were immensely proud,' for they felt they had transformed 'the wretched Turkish soldiers of January into these neatly dressed, smartly stepping, splendidly maneuvering troops.'
       By the summer of 1914, Morgenthau described the German officers as 'rushing through the streets every day in huge automobiles,' and filling 'all the restaurants and amusement places at night, consuming large quantities of champagne.'  In particular, General von der Goltz, who had accrued the title of pasha, drove through the streets in a flashy car 'on both sides of which flaring German eagles were painted,' and a 'trumpeter on the front seat' announced them as they barreled down the boulevards.
       Although the Ottoman Empire signed a secret treaty with Germany on August 2, 1914, many high-ranking Turks were still pro-British, including Yussuf Izzedin, the heir apparant to the sultanate, and Grand Vizier Said Halim.  Jemal Pasha was a Francophile, the majority of the cabinet were not pro-German, and public opinion was more pro-English than pro-German.  But Enver and Talaat had succeeded in engineering the German ascendancy, and this struck Morgenthau as ironic because England, not Germany, had been 'Turkey's historic friend.'
       By the summer of 1914, an aggressive German public relations campaign had coopted the Turkish press and fueled the new Turkish-German alliance.  German ambassador Hans von Wangenheim purchased the Ikdam, one of Turkey's largest newspapers, and began vigorously promoting Germany at the expense of France and Great Britain.  The Osmanischer Lloyd, one of Turkey's largest newspapers, and became an organ of the German embassy, and a new wave of censorship followed, in which the Turkish press was ordered to publish only pro-German sentiment.  Russia was portrayed as Turkey's chief enemy, responsible for Turkey's recent losses, and Germany as its ally.  As Morgenthau put it:  'The Kaiser suddenly became 'Hadji Wilhelm.''
       Trainloads of Germans from Berlin--some 3,800 of them--began landing in Constantinople.  Most of them were mechanics sent by the kaiser to work in ammunition plants and to repair Turkish destroyers for war.  Like the military officers, this new crew of Germans also filled the cafes at night and paraded through the streets 'in the small hours of the morning, howling and singing German patriotic songs.'  It was a movement in which the gradual erosion of British dominance seemed to have given way fully to German hegemony in Turkey.  To the close-up diplomatic eye of the American ambassador, it seemed that the British had not played the game properly.  British ambassador Sir Louis Mallet 'had not purchased Turkish officials with money, as had Wagenheim;  he had not corrupted the Turkish press, trampled on every remaining vestige of international law, fraternized with a gang of political desperadoes, and conducted a ceaseless campaign of misrepresentations and lies against his enemy.'  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 164-166, 167-169.
        

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade) Part One

      
"The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it;  because the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense;  and because when we now refuse to war with Turkey we show that our announcement that we meant 'to make the world safe for democracy' was insincere claptrap."  Theodore Roosevelt to Cleve Dodge 1917

         "The British consul Henry Barnham, who oversaw Aintab and Birecik in Aleppo Province, made it clear in his account how powerfully the killing of Armenians was motivated by Islamic fanaticism and a jihad mentality:
                   The butchers and the tanners, with sleeves tucked up to the shoulders,
                    armed with clubs and cleavers, cut down the Christians, with cries of
                     'Allahu Akbar!'  broke down the doors of the houses with pickaxes
                     and levers, or scaled the walls with ladders.  Then when mid-day came
                     they knelt down and said their prayers, and then jumped up and resumed
                     the dreadful work, carrying on far into the night.  Whenever they were
                      unable to break down the doors they fired the houses with petroleum,
                      and the fact that at the end of November petroleum was almost
                      unpurchaseable in Aleppo suggests that enormous quantities were bought
                       up and sent north for this purpose.
       Muslim clerics played a perpetual role in the massacring of Armenians;  imams and softas would often rally the mob by chanting prayers;  and mosques would often rally the mob by chanting prayers;  and mosques were often used as places to mobilize crowds, especially during Friday prayers.  Christians were murdered in the name of Allah.  One survivor, Abraham Hartunian, described the desecration of two Armenian churches (one Gregorian--Armenian Apostolic--and the other Protestant) in the town of Severek in Diyarbekir Province:
                     The mob had plundered the Gregorian church, desecrated it, murdered all
                      who had sought shelter there, and, as a sacrifice, beheaded the sexton on
                      the stone threshold.  Now it filled our yard.  The blows of an axe crashed
                       in the church doors.  The attackers rushed in, tore the Bibles and
                       hymnbooks to pieces, broke and shattered whatever they could,
                        blasphemed the cross, and, as a sign of victory, chanted the Mohammedan
                         prayer:  'La ilaha ill-Allah, Muhammedin Rasula-llah' (There is no other
                        God but one God, and Mohammed is His prophet). . . . The leader
                         of the mob cried:'Muhammede salavat!' Believe in Mohammed and deny
                         your religion.  No one answered. . . . The leader gave the order to
                         massacre.   The first attack was on our pastor.  The blow of an axe dec-
                         apitated him.  His blood, spurting in all directions, spattered the walls
                        and ceiling.
         Two letters from a Turkish soldier on duty in Erzurum with the Fourth Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-fifth Regiment, written to his parents and brother in Harput, also lend insights into Turkish attitudes about killing Armenians.  The letters came into the hands of a British consul after the massacres in that city and were put into the consular file marked 'Confidential.'
                   My brother, if you want news from here we have killed 1,200 Armenians, all
                   of them as food for the dogs. . . .Mother, I am safe and sound.  Father, 20
                    days ago we made war on the Armenian unbelievers.  Through God's grace
                    no harm befell us.  There is a rumor afoot that our Battalion will be order-
                    ed to your part of the world--if so, we will kill all the Armenians there. 
                     Besides, 511 Armenians were wounded, one or two perish every day.  If
                     you ask after the soldiers and Bashi Bozouks, not one of their noses has
                     bled. . . .May God bless you.
        In these letters, massacring Armenians is seen as a commonplace occurence sanctioned by Islam as well as by the government.  As Dadrian put it:  'Here is a regimental unit of the standing army engaged in broad daylight in peacetime killing operations against unarmed civilian populations.'
       Among the most ghoulish scenes recorded was the extermination of the Armenians of Urfa.  Urfa, once ancient Edessa (the city to which Christ's disciples brought Christianity, in this dry region of southeastern Anatolia), had been the site of massacre in October 1895 during the wave of autumn killings of that year, and the Armenians remained under siege in their quarter of the town for the following two months.  Then, on December 28th at midday, a bugle sounded and Turkish soldiers and civilians invaded the Armenian quarter.  Doors of houses and shops were smashed open with axes and clubs, and people were shot on the spot.  Their material goods and valueables were stolen, and kerosene was poured on the rest.  At sunset, when the bugle sounded again, the killers retreated, and the Armenians who had survived sought refuge in their cathedral.  (Traditionally synagogues and churches were to be respected as places of refuge under Islamic law.)
       The next morning the Turkish troops fired through the church windows and broke down the iron door, mockingly calling on 'Christ now to prove himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.'  They began killing everyone on the floor of the church by hand or with pistols.  From the altar they gunned down the women and children in the gallery.  Finally the Turks gathered bedding and straw, on which 'they poured some thirty cans of kerosene'  and set the church ablaze.  British Consul G.H. Fitzmaurice's careful description reveals something about the religious ethos underpinning the killings:
                 The gallery beams and wooden framework soon caught fire, whereupon,
                  blocking up the staircases leading to the gallery with similar inflammable
                  materials, they left the mass of struggling human beings to become the prey
                  of the flames.
                            During several hours the sickening odour of roasting flesh pervaded the
                  town, and even to-day, two months and a half after the massacre, the smell
                  of putrescent and charred remains in the church is unbearable. . . . I believe
                  that close on 8,000 Armenians perished in the two days' massacre of the 28th
                  and 29th December. . . . I should, however, not be at all surprised if the
                  figure of 9,000 or 10,000 were subsequently found to be nearer the mark.
      The massacres of the 1890s fully inaugurated the modern fate of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.  Abdul Hamid's policy of massacre began in what the social psychologist Irvin Staub has called a 'continuum of destruction.'  As Staub notes, 'A progression of changes in a culture and individuals is usually required for mass killing or genocide.  In certain instances--the Armenian Genocide, for example--the progression takes place over decades or even centuries and creates a readiness in the culture.'
       The Hamidian massacres also initiated the idea that massacre could be committed with impunity.  While the European powers set up an investigative commission after Sasun and Van, and asked the sultan for reforms, there was no forceful intervention to halt the massacres, nor was there any punishment in the aftermath.  There was, to be sure, worldwide coverage of the events and attendant outrage, and there was an outpouring of humanitarian relief and philantropy for the surviving victims.  The sultan was vilified in the European and the U.S. press as the "Bloody Sultan,"  and depicted as a paranoid despot and a defiler of human freedom.  Yet in the face of such world opinion, Abdul Hamid remained unrepentant, continuing to deny his actions and blame the victims.
       By the end of the 1890s, the lack of political recourse or punishment let the sultan off the hook, and left Turkish society engaged in a culture of massacre that permanently dehumanized Armenians in an evolutionary process that would culminate in genocide in 1915.  As Christian infidels, Armenians had already been marginalized.  Now they became fair game.

        On the night of April 12 {1909}, some units of soldiers in the First Army Corps in Constantinople revolted.  As dawn broke on the morning of April 13, there was an astonishing sight:  Regiments of soldiers marched in the morning mist across the bridges from the suburbs to the Golden Horn, shooting their rifles into the sky to announce their advent.  Several hundred filled the courtyard outside the parliament in Saint Sophia Square, while others poured into the old Byzantine plaza known as the Augusteon.
        As the mullahs, hojas (religious teachers), and softas in their white turbans and robes joined the soldiers, cries of 'Down with the Constitution!' and 'Long live the shari'a !' resounded in the plaza and throughout the streets of the city.  The presence of the Muslim zealots created such tension that the chief of the Constantinople police was soon in the streets confronting them as they demanded the dismissal of the minister of war and the president of the chamber.  The softas and their religious colleagues were also protesting the sight of women in public, a complaint that had become commonplace after the revolution.  As the day went on, riots broke out in the streets and the soldiers and the softas sacked and looted the CUP's {Committee of Union and Progress} newspaper offices, sending many CUP members into hiding.
        In the chaos Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha resigned, as did other cabinet members.  Although the sultan issued an order that the shari'a would be protected, for the moment the government was in disarray.  By telegraph, the news of the counterevolution reached the army in Salonika, and within days an 'Army of Deliverance' was mobilized and sent to the capital.  Enver Bey, who was in Berlin at the Turkish embassy, rushed back to join his army, and on April 23 the Young Turk troops entered Constantinople.  After some clashes with the softas and soldiers, which were over by about five o'clock in the afternoon, the Deliverance Army quashed the counterrevolution.  The CUP was now in a position to increase its influence over the next few years, in what would be an unstable and transitional time for the Ottoman government.

       During that span of about five hundred years, the Christians of the Balkans, the majority of whom were Slavs, lived under Ottoman Muslim rule, and were accorded the traditional Ottoman treatment of those of infidel status.  The Balkan Christians, like the Arminians, were subjected to heavy taxation, arbitrary violence, political disenfranchisement, and cultural oppression;  some of them converted to Islam.  There were constant rebellions and uprisings against the Turks, which were put down by the Ottoman army.  Finally, by 1828, Greece had successfully fought its war for independence.  In 1876 the Bulgarians staged a rebellion, only to be brutally massacred by Ottoman forces in what quickly became known as 'the Bulgarian horrors.'  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Balkan states petitioned continually for reform.  After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, article 23 of the Treaty of Berlin promised reforms for the Armenians.  With the Treaty of Berlin the Bulgarians had achieved partial autonomy, and the process of Balkan secession had begun.
       By 1912, as new Balkan alliance were formed in opposition to Ottoman rule, the Turks again responded with massacre.  In the summer of 1912 the Ottoman army carried out two massacres, one in Ishtib, east of Skopje, and another in Kocani, southeast of Skopje, the capital city of Kosovo.  In October 1912, the tiny state of Montenegro began a war of rebellion against Ottoman rule.  Five days later the other Balkan states demanded reforms and mobilized their armies.  On October 17 the Ottoman Empire had declared war on Bulgaria and Serbia, and the next day Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire.  What ensued was astonishing.  Within a day Turkey suffered heavy losses to the combined fronts of the Balkan armies, and was forced to stage an eleventh-hour defense near Constantinople.  By October 26 the Serbs had won at Skopje in Kosovo, by November 8 the Greeks had taken Salonika, and by November 29 Albania had declared its independence.
       Throughout the period of the Balkan crisis, Turkish sentiment was marked by rage.  In the streets of Constantinople on the eve of the war students and CUP members shouted:'We want war!', 'To Sofia, to Sofia!', 'Down with Greece!  Greeks, bow your heads!' and the hatred of European intervention was clear as they chanted 'Down with article 23, down with it!', 'Down with equality!', 'The Balkan dogs are trampling on Islam.'
        An editorial in the newspaper Tanin, a quasi-official voice of the CUP, declared: 'Europe's intervention and Europe's desire to control our internal affairs is a warning to us to ponder the fate not only of Rumelia [Macedonia], but also eastern Turkey, for it will be impossible to spare eastern Turkey the fate awaiting Rumelia.'  In the Turkish mind, the struggle to keep the Balkans was never far from the Armenian Question."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 112-115, 146-147,160-161, and 308