Armenian question: how "dangerous microbes" were made of "potential rebels"
Genocide, concentration camps, experiments on humans, the "national question" - all these horrors in the public mind are most often associated with the Second World War, although, in fact, their inventors were by no means the Nazis. Whole nations - Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks - were brought to the brink of complete annihilation at the beginning of the 20th century, during the Great War. And back in 1915, the leaders of England, France and Russia, in connection with these events, for the first time in history, voiced the wording "crimes against humanity."
Today's Armenia is only a small part of the territory where millions of Armenians have lived for centuries. In 1915, they - mostly unarmed civilians - were driven out of their homes, deported to concentration camps in the desert, and killed in every possible way. In most of the civilized countries of the world, this is officially recognized as genocide, and to this day those tragic events continue to poison the relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan with Armenia.
Armenian question
The Armenian people formed on the territory of the South Caucasus and modern Eastern Turkey many centuries earlier than the Turkish: already in the second century BC, the kingdom of Great Armenia existed on the shores of Lake Van, around the sacred Mount Ararat. In the best years, the possessions of this "empire" covered almost the entire mountainous "triangle" between the Black, Caspian and Mediterranean seas.
In 301, Armenia became the first country to officially adopt Christianity as a state religion. Later, over the centuries, the Armenians defended themselves against the attacks of Muslims (Arabs, Persians and Turks). This led to the loss of a number of territories, a decrease in the number of people, and their dispersal throughout the world. By the beginning of modern times, only a small part of Armenia with the city of Erivan (Yerevan) became part of the Russian Empire, where the Armenians found protection and patronage. Most of the Armenians fell under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and Muslims began to actively settle on their lands - Turks, Kurds, refugees from the North Caucasus.
Not being Muslims, Armenians, like the Balkan peoples, were considered representatives of a "second-class" community - "dhimmi". Until 1908, they were forbidden to carry weapons, they had to pay higher taxes, often could not even live in houses higher than one floor, build new churches without permission from the authorities, and so on.
But, as often happens, the persecution of Eastern Christians only increased the disclosure of the talents of an entrepreneur, merchant, artisan, capable of working in the most difficult conditions. By the twentieth century, an impressive stratum of the Armenian intelligentsia was formed, and the first national parties and public organizations began to emerge. The literacy rate among Armenians and other Christians in the Ottoman Empire was higher than among Muslims.
70% of Armenians, nevertheless, remained simple peasants, but among the Muslim population there was a stereotype of a cunning and wealthy Armenian, a "trader from the market", whose successes an ordinary Turk envied. The situation was somewhat reminiscent of the position of Jews in Europe, their discrimination and, as a consequence, the emergence of a powerful stratum of wealthy Jews, who do not succumb under the harshest conditions, due to the tough "natural defense". However, in the case of the Armenians, the situation was aggravated by the presence in Turkey of a huge number of poor Muslim refugees from the North Caucasus, Crimea and the Balkans (the so-called muhajirs).
The scale of this phenomenon is evidenced by the fact that refugees and their descendants by the time of the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 accounted for up to 20% of the population, and the entire era from the 1870s to 1913 is known in Turkish historical memory as "sekyumu" - "disaster" … The last wave of Turks driven out by Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks swept just on the eve of the First World War - they were refugees from the Balkan Wars. They often transferred hatred from the European Christians who had expelled them to the Christians of the Ottoman Empire. They were ready, roughly speaking, to "take revenge" by robbing and killing defenseless Armenians, although in the Balkan wars up to 8 thousand Armenian soldiers fought in the ranks of the Turkish army against the Bulgarians and Serbs.
The first pogroms
The first waves of Armenian pogroms swept through the Ottoman Empire back in the 19th century. This was the so-called Erzurum massacre of 1895, massacres in Istanbul, Van, Sasun and other cities. According to the American researcher Robert Andersen, even then at least 60 thousand Christians were killed, who were "crushed like grapes", which even provoked protests from the ambassadors of the European powers. The German Lutheran missionary Johannes Lepsius collected evidence of the extermination of at least 88,243 Armenians in 1894-96 alone and the robbery of more than half a million. In response, desperate Armenian socialists-Dashnaks staged a terrorist attack - on August 26, 1896, they took hostages in a bank building in Istanbul and, threatening to explode, demanded that the Turkish government carry out reforms.
Erzurum massacre. Image: The Graphic dated December 7, 1895
But the coming to power of the Young Turks, who announced a course of reforms, did not improve the situation. In 1907, a new wave of Armenian pogroms swept through the cities of the Mediterranean. Thousands of people died again. In addition, it was the Young Turks who encouraged the resettlement of refugees from the Balkans to the Armenian lands (about 400 thousand people were settled there), banned public organizations with "non-Turkish" goals.
In response, the Armenian political parties turned to the European powers for support, and with their active support (primarily from Russia) the weakened Ottoman Empire, a plan was imposed, according to which the creation of two autonomies from six Armenian regions and the city of Trebizond was finally imposed. They, in agreement with the Ottomans, were to be ruled by representatives of the European powers. In Constantinople, of course, they perceived such a solution to the "Armenian question" as a national humiliation, which later played a role in the decision to enter the war on the side of Germany.
Potential rebels
In the First World War, all the belligerent countries actively used (or at least sought to use) "potentially rebellious" ethnic communities on the territory of the enemy - national minorities, one way or another suffering from discrimination and oppression. The Germans supported the struggle for their rights of the British Irish, the British - the Arabs, the Austro-Hungarians - the Ukrainians, and so on. Well, the Russian Empire actively supported the Armenians, for whom, in comparison with the Turks, as a predominantly Christian country, it was at least "the lesser of evils". With the participation and assistance of Russia, at the end of 1914, an allied Armenian militia was formed, commanded by the legendary General Andranik Ozanyan.
The Armenian battalions rendered immense assistance to the Russians in the defense of northwestern Persia, where the Turks also invaded during the battles on the Caucasian front. Through them, weapons and groups of saboteurs were delivered to the Ottoman rear, where they managed to carry out, for example, sabotage on telegraph lines near Van, attacks on Turkish units in Bitlis.
Also in December 1914 - January 1915, on the border of the Russian and Ottoman empires, the Sarykamysh battle took place, in which the Turks suffered a crushing defeat, having lost 78 thousand soldiers killed, wounded and frostbitten out of 80 thousand who participated in the battles. Russian troops captured the Bayazet border fortress, expelled the Turks from Persia and advanced deep into Turkish territory with the help of the Armenians from the border regions, which caused another flurry of speculations from the leaders of the Young Turkish Ittikhat party "about the betrayal of Armenians in general."
Enver Pasha. Photo: Library of Congress
Subsequently, critics of the concept of genocide against the entire Armenian people will cite these arguments as the main ones: the Armenians were not even “potential”, but real rebels, they were “the first to start”, they killed Muslims. However, in the winter of 1914-1915, most Armenians still lived a peaceful life, many men were even drafted into the Turkish army and honestly served their, as it seemed to them, country. The leader of the Young Turks, Enver Pasha, even publicly thanked the Armenians for their loyalty during the Sarykamysh operation by sending a letter to the archbishop of Konya province.
However, the moment of enlightenment was brief. The "first swallow" of a new round of repression was the disarmament in February 1915 of about 100 thousand soldiers of Armenian (and at the same time - Assyrian and Greek origin) and their transfer to rear work. Many Armenian historians claim that some of the conscripts were immediately killed. The confiscation of weapons from the Armenian civilian population began, which alerted (and, as it soon became clear, rightly so) people: many Armenians began to hide pistols and rifles.
Black day April 24
US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau later called this disarmament "a prelude to the annihilation of Armenians." In some cities, the Turkish authorities took hundreds of hostages until the Armenians surrender their "arsenals". The collected weapons were often photographed and sent to Istanbul as evidence of "betrayal." This became a pretext for further whipping up hysteria.
In Armenia, April 24 is celebrated as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Genocide. This is a non-working day: every year hundreds of thousands of people climb the hill to the memorial complex in memory of the victims of the First World War, lay flowers at the eternal flame. The memorial itself was built in Soviet times, in the 1960s, which was an exception to all the rules: in the USSR, they did not like to remember the First World War.
The date of April 24 was not chosen by chance: it was on this day in 1915 that mass arrests of representatives of the Armenian elite took place in Istanbul. In total, more than 5, 5 thousand people were arrested, including 235 of the most famous and respected people - businessmen, journalists, scientists, those whose voice could be heard in the world, who could lead the resistance.
A month later, on May 26, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ottoman Empire, Talaat Pasha, presented a whole "Law on Deportation" dedicated to "the fight against those who oppose the government." Four days later, it was approved by the Majlis (parliament). Although the Armenians were not mentioned there, it was clear that the law was written primarily “according to their soul”, as well as for the Assyrians, Pontic Greeks and other “infidels”. As researcher Fuat Dundar writes, Talaat stated that "the deportation was carried out for the final solution of the Armenian issue." So, even in the term itself, later used by the Nazis, there is nothing new.
Biological justification was used as one of the justifications for the deportation and murder of Armenians. Some Ottoman chauvinists called them "dangerous microbes". The main propagandist of this policy was the governor of the district and the city of Diyarbakir, Doctor Mehmet Reshid, who, among other things, was “having fun” by nailing horseshoes to the feet of the deportees. US Ambassador Morgenthau, in a telegram to the State Department on July 16, 1915, described the extermination of Armenians as a "campaign of racial eradication."
Medical experiments were also put on the Armenians. On the orders of another "doctor" - the doctor of the 3rd army Teftik Salim - experiments were carried out on disarmed soldiers in the Erzincan hospital to develop a vaccine against typhus, most of whom died. The experiments were carried out by a professor at the Istanbul Medical School, Hamdi Suat, who injected the test subjects with blood infected with typhus. By the way, he was later recognized as the founder of Turkish bacteriology. After the end of the war, during the consideration of the case by the Special Military Tribunal, he said that he "worked only with convicted criminals."
In the phase of "ethnic cleansing"
But even simple deportation was not limited to just one sending people in railway cattle cars to concentration camps in the desert surrounded by barbed wire (the most famous is Deir ez-Zor in the east of modern Syria), where most died of hunger, unsanitary conditions or thirst. It was often accompanied by massacres, which took the most heinous character in the Black Sea city of Trebizond.
Camp for Armenian refugees. Photo: Library of Congress
Official Said Ahmed described what was happening in an interview with British diplomat Mark Sykes: “At first, the Ottoman officials took away the children, some of them were tried to be saved by the American consul. The Muslims of Trebizond were warned of the death penalty for protecting the Armenians. Then the adult men were separated, stating that they should take part in the work. The women and children were sent to the side of Mosul, after which the men were shot near dug ditches. Chettes (released from prisons in exchange for the cooperation of criminals - RP) attacked women and children, robbing and raping women and then killing them. The military had strict orders not to interfere with the actions of the Chettes.
As a result of the investigation, carried out by the tribunal in 1919, facts of poisoning of Armenian children (right in schools) and pregnant women by the head of the Trebizond Health Department Ali Seib became known. Mobile steam baths were also used, in which children were killed with superheated steam.
The killings were accompanied by robberies. According to the testimony of the merchant Mehmet Ali, the governor of Trebizond, Cemal Azmi and Ali Seib, embezzled jewelry in the amount of 300,000 to 400,000 Turkish gold pounds. The American consul in Trebizond reported that he watched every day as "a crowd of Turkish women and children followed the police like vultures and captured everything they could carry," and the house of Commissioner Ittihat in Trebizond is full of gold.
Beautiful girls were publicly raped and then killed, including by local officials. In 1919, at a tribunal, the chief of the Trebizond police said that he had sent young Armenian women to Istanbul as a gift from the governor to the leaders of the Young Turk party. Armenian women and children from another Black Sea town of Ordu were loaded onto barges and then taken out to sea and thrown overboard.
Historian Ruben Adalyan in his book “The Armenian Genocide” recounts the memories of the miraculously surviving Takuya Levonyan: “During the march we did not have water and food. We walked for 15 days. There were no more shoes on my feet. Finally we reached Tigranakert. There we washed by the water, soaked some dry bread and ate. There was a rumor that the governor was demanding a very beautiful 12-year-old girl … At night they came with lanterns and were looking for one. They found, took away from the sobbing mother and said that they would return her later. They later returned the child, almost dead, in a terrible state. The mother sobbed loudly, and of course the child, unable to bear what had happened, died. The women could not calm her down. Finally, the women dug a hole and buried the girl. There was a big wall and my mother wrote on it "Shushan is buried here."
Public executions of Armenians in the streets of Constantinople. Photo: Armin Wegner / armenian-genocide.org
An important role in the persecution of Armenians was played by the "Teshkilat-i-Mahusa" organization (translated from Turkish as the Special Organization), headquartered in Erzurum, subordinate to Turkish counterintelligence and staffed with tens of thousands of "Chettes". The leader of the organization was the prominent Young Turk Behaeddin Shakir. At the end of April 1915, he organized a rally in Erzurum, at which the Armenians were accused of treason. After that, attacks began on the Armenians of the Erzurum region, and in mid-May there was a massacre in the city of Khynys, where 19 thousand people were killed. The villagers from the outskirts of Erzurum were deported to the city, where some of them died of hunger, and some were thrown into the river in the Kemakh gorge. Only 100 "useful Armenians" were left in Erzurum, who worked at important military installations.
As the American historian Richard Hovhannisyan, who grew up in a family of Armenian refugees, writes, 15,000 Armenians were also killed in the town of Bitlis near Van. Most were thrown into a mountain river, and their homes were handed over to Turkish refugees from the Balkans. In the vicinity of Mush, Armenian women and children were burned alive in boarded up sheds.
The destruction of the population was accompanied by a campaign to destroy the cultural heritage. Architectural monuments and churches were blown up, cemeteries were plowed open for fields, the Armenian quarters of cities were occupied by the Muslim population and were renamed.
Resistance
On April 27, 1915, the Armenian Catholicos called on the United States and Italy, which were still neutral in the war, to intervene and prevent the killings. The Allied powers of the Entente countries publicly condemned the massacre, but in the conditions of war there was little they could do to alleviate their fate. In the joint Declaration of May 24, 1915, Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire first spoke of "crimes against humanity": "In view of new crimes, the governments of the Allied States publicly declare to the Sublime Porte that all members of the Ottoman government are personally responsible for these crimes." In Europe and the United States, fundraising has begun to help Armenian refugees.
Even among the Turks themselves there were those who opposed repressions against the Armenian population. The courage of these people is worth noting, because in a war, such a position could easily be paid with their lives. Dr. Jemal Haydar, who witnessed medical experiments on humans, in an open letter to the Minister of Internal Affairs described them as "barbaric" and "scientific crimes." Haidar was supported by the chief physician of the Erzincan Red Crescent Hospital, Dr. Salaheddin.
There are known cases of rescuing Armenian children by Turkish families, as well as statements by officials who refused to take part in the killings. Thus, the head of the city of Aleppo, Jalal-bey, spoke out against the deportation of Armenians, saying that "the Armenians are protected" and that "the right to live is the natural right of any person." In June 1915, he was removed from office and replaced by a more "nationally oriented" official.
The governor of Adrianople, Haji Adil-bey, and even the first head of the Deir ez-Zor concentration camp, Ali Suad Bey, tried to alleviate the fate of the Armenians as much as they could (he was also soon removed from his post). But the most firm was the position of the governor of the city of Smyrna (now Izmir) Rahmi Bey, who managed to defend the right of Armenians and Greeks to live in their hometown. He provided convincing calculations for official Istanbul that the expulsion of Christians would deal a fatal blow to trade, and therefore most local Armenians lived relatively calmly until the end of the war. True, about 200 thousand citizens died already in 1922, during another, Greek-Turkish war. Only a few managed to escape, among whom, by the way, was the future Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis.
The German ambassador to Constantinople, Count von Wolf-Metternich, also protested against the inhuman actions of the Allies. German doctor Armin Wegner collected a large photo archive - his photograph of an Armenian woman walking under a Turkish escort became one of the symbols of 1915. Martin Nipage, a German lecturer at a technical school in Aleppo, has written an entire book about the barbaric massacres of Armenians. Missionary Johannes Lepsius managed to visit Constantinople again, but his requests to the leader of the Young Turks Enver Pasha for the protection of the Armenians remained unanswered. Upon his return to Germany, Lepsius, without much success, tried to draw public attention to the situation in a country allied to the Germans. Rafael de Nogales Mendes, a Venezuelan officer who served in the Ottoman army, described numerous facts of the murders of Armenians in his book.
But above all, of course, the Armenians themselves resisted. After the start of the deportations, uprisings broke out throughout the country. From April 19 to May 16, the inhabitants of the city of Van, who had only 1,300 "fighters" - partly from among the elderly, women and children, heroically held the defense. Having lost hundreds of soldiers, and failed to take the city, the Turks ravaged the surrounding Armenian villages, killing thousands of civilians. But up to 70 thousand Armenians hiding in Van eventually escaped - they waited for the advancing Russian army.
The second case of a successful rescue was the defense of the Musa-Dag mountain by the Mediterranean Armenians from July 21 to September 12, 1915. 600 militias held back the onslaught of several thousand soldiers for almost two months. On September 12, an Allied cruiser noticed posters hanging on the trees with calls for help. Soon an Anglo-French squadron approached the foot of the mountain overlooking the sea and evacuated more than 4,000 Armenians. Almost all other Armenian uprisings - in Sasun, Mush, Urfa and other cities of Turkey - ended with their suppression and the death of their defenders.
Soghomon Tehlirian. Photo: orgarmeniaonline.ru
After the war, at the congress of the Armenian party "Dashnaktsutyun", a decision was made to start an "operation of revenge" - the elimination of war criminals. The operation was named after the ancient Greek goddess "Nemesis". Most of the performers were Armenians who escaped the genocide and were determined to avenge the death of their loved ones.
The most famous victim of the operation was the former Minister of Internal Affairs and Grand Vizier (Chief Minister) Talaat Pasha. Together with other Young Turk leaders, he fled to Germany in 1918, went into hiding, but was tracked down and shot in March 1921. The German court acquitted his murderer, Soghomon Tehlirian, with the formulation “temporary loss of reason arising from the suffering he experienced,” especially since Talaat Pasha had already been sentenced to death at home by a military tribunal. The Armenians also found and destroyed several more ideologues of the massacres, including the already mentioned Governor of Trebizond Jemal Azmi, the leader of the Young Turks Behaeddin Shakir and another former Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha.
Genocide controversy
Whether what happened in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 can be called genocide, there is still no consensus in the world, mainly because of the position of Turkey itself. Israeli-American sociologist, one of the leading experts in the history of genocides, founder and executive director of the Institute for the Holocaust and Genocide, Israel Cerny, noted that “the Armenian genocide is remarkable because in the bloody XX century it was an early example of mass genocide, which many recognize as rehearsal of the Holocaust”.
One of the most controversial issues is the number of victims - an accurate calculation of the death toll is impossible, because the very statistics on the number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War were very sly, deliberately distorted. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, citing the calculations of the famous historian Arnold Toynbee, about 600 thousand Armenians were killed in 1915, and the American political scientist and historian Rudolf Rummel speaks of 2 102 000 Armenians (of which, however, 258 thousand lived in the territories of today's Iran, Georgia and Armenia).
Modern Turkey, as well as Azerbaijan at the state level do not recognize what happened as genocide. They believe that the death of Armenians was due to negligence from hunger and disease during the expulsion from the war zone, was essentially a consequence of the civil war, as a result of which many Turks themselves were also killed.
The founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, said in 1919: “Whatever happens to non-Muslims in our country, this is a consequence of their barbaric adherence to the policy of separatism, when they became an instrument of foreign intrigue and abused their rights. These events are far from the scale of those forms of oppression, which were committed without any justification in the countries of Europe."
Already in 1994, the doctrine of denial was formulated by the then Prime Minister of Turkey Tansu Ciller: “It is not true that the Turkish authorities do not want to state their position on the so-called“Armenian issue”. Our position is very clear. Today it is obvious that in the light of historical facts, Armenian claims are unfounded and illusory. Armenians were not subjected to genocide in any case”.
The current President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, noted: “We did not commit this crime, we have nothing to apologize for. Whoever is to blame can apologize. However, the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish nation has no such problems. " True, on April 23, 2014, speaking in parliament, Erdogan for the first time expressed his condolences to the descendants of Armenians "who died during the events of the early 20th century."
Many international organizations, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and more than 20 countries of the world (including the statement of the Russian State Duma of 1995 "On the Condemnation of the Armenian Genocide") consider the events of 1915 to be the genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire, about 10 countries at the regional level (for example, 43 of the 50 US states).
In some countries (France, Switzerland) denial of the Armenian genocide is considered a criminal offense, several people have already been convicted. Assyrian assassinations as a kind of genocide have so far been recognized only by Sweden, the Australian state of New South Wales and the American state of New York.
Turkey spends heavily on PR campaigns and makes donations to universities whose professors have a position similar to that of Turkey. Critically discussing the "Kemalist" version of history in Turkey is considered a crime, which complicates debate in society, although in recent years intellectuals, the press and civil society have begun to discuss the "Armenian issue". This causes a sharp rejection of the nationalists and the authorities - "dissenting" intellectuals who try to apologize to the Armenians are poisoned by all means.
The most famous victims are the Turkish writer, Nobel laureate in literature, Orhan Pamuk, forced to live abroad, and journalist Hrant Dink, editor of a newspaper for the now very small Armenian community in Turkey, who was killed in 2007 by a Turkish nationalist. His funeral in Istanbul turned into a demonstration, where tens of thousands of Turks marched with placards "We are all Armenians, we are all Grants."
