I would like you to write a summary of this lecture article
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“They Can Live in the Desert b ut Nowhere Else”:
Explaining the Armenian Genocide
One Hundred Years Later
Ronald G. Suny
Keynote address for Genocide Awareness and Action Week, April 11, 2016
Ronald G. Suny is the William H. S ewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor of
History at the University of Michigan
his is the story of why, when, and how the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire
happened. It is a story of a moment of historical passage, when empires attempted to accommodate
themselves to a transforming world in which nations and national states challenged their so urces of power
and legitimacy. Yet those empires were not ready to give in or give up; they were not prepared to
surrender to what later would appear to be irresisti ble pressures of nationalism, popular empowerment,
and regimes based on equality and merit rather than inhe rited privilege and hierarchy. Looking back from
the future , the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of subject nations appear to be
his torically inevitable. But for the actors in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the
twentieth , there were many possible roads that could have been taken.
The recovery of a difficult past is a challenge to the “assassins of memory, ” to those who would ,
through distorting sophistries, deny or minimize the enormity of a human tragedy. 1 Nations and states
have long been in the business of fabricating, sometimes more honestly than at other times, myths and
stories of their origins, gold en ages, heroic deeds, victories , and triumphs, while eliminating the blemishes
of defeats an d failures, even mass murders. What appears to be new in our own time is the brazenness of
what is claimed, the blatant cynicism of the perpetrators, and their pot ential reach through mass print and
broadcast media, film, and the Internet. Historians inevitably have been pulled into this war of images and
words. The only weapon against bad history deployed for political or personal vindication is scrupulous
investig ation that results in evidence -based narration and analysis of what it is possible to know.
TWO NARRATIVES
T
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Revision of history is constant, even necessary; it is what historians do. But in some cases, like
that of the fate of the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, it has led to the creation of two
separate, contradictory narratives that appear to defy reconciliation. On one side, the Turkish state and
those few less -than -scrupulous historians who have rejected the notion of genocide and argued either that
no deliberate mass killings ever took place or that the tragedy was the result of a reason able and
understandable response of a government to a rebellious and seditious population in time of war and
mortal danger to the state’s survival. In the more sophisticated version, which m ight be called “neo -
denialism,” raison d’état justified the suppr ession of rebellion, and mass killing is explained as the
unfortunate residue of legitimate efforts to establish order behind the lines. Still, these denialists claim,
despite the existential threat posed by the Armenians and their Russian allies to the su rvival of the empire,
there was no intention or effort by the Young Turk regime to eliminate the Armenians as a people. 2
On the other side, a counter -narrative has developed among the majority of historians, which
accepts the framing of the events of 1915 as genocide. Yet many sympathetic to the Armenians,
particularly those of ethnic Armenian heritage, have shied away from explanations that might place any
blame at all on the victims of Turkish policies. 3 Because a nuanced account of the background and causes
of the Genocide seemed to concede ground to the deniers, Armenian scholars in particular were reluctant
to see any rationale in the acts of the Young Turks. 4 Explanation, it is claimed, is rationalization, and
rationalization in turn leads to the d enialist position of justification. When explanation has been offered,
it is e ither an essentialist argument Turks are the kind of people who employ massacre and systematic
killing to main tain their imperial dominance or related arguments that deep in delible cultural
characteristics (religion and/or ethnicity) were the underlying causes of the killings.
The argument that I make is different: whatever else they were, the Young Turks who carried out
the Genocide were never purely Turkish ethno -nationalists, never religious fanatics, b ut remained
Ottoman reformers one might say, modernizers in their fundamental self -conception. They were
primarily state imperialists, empire preservers, rather than the founders of an ethnic nation -state. The re
was no thought of giving up the Arab lands that they still controlled, or even eliminate totally their
Christian and Jewish subjects, and when opportunity presented itself in 1918 the Young Turks were
prepared to move north and east into Caucasia to cre ate buffer states using other Muslim peoples. On the
other hand, over time the Young Turks came to believe that Muslims, particularly Turks, were the
appropriate people to rule the empire, were the most trustworthy supporters of the Ottoman state, and
inc reasingly convinced themselves that egalitarian Ottomanism was a political fantasy. Their empire
would be more Islamic, more Turkic, but still multicultural, marked by religious and ethnic
differentiation, with some more equal than others.
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In their ideal forms nation and empire stand at opposite ends of a political spectrum. T he former
(nation) is basically about homogenization of all members of its polity, as much as possible, and the
establishment of equality of all citizens a kind of horizontal equiv alence, at least before the law. The
later (empire) is about institutionalized difference and hierarchy, a ruling elite or people dominating their
subordinates, their rule justified by conquest, divine sanction, their inherent superiority over their
subjec ts, or a civilizing mission. Confronted by the mobilizing efficiencies of the new nation -states of
Western Europe, both the Russian and Ottoman empires were determined in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to reform and nationalize the ir empire s. These efforts were haphazard, sporadic, and
ultimately futile, and in neither case was there a clear or even feasible program of creating an ethno -
national state like France or the Kemalist Turkish republic. Their projects are better characterized as th e
creation of “imperial nations” within their empires. The empire was to continue but in a new form
appropriate for the modern age, what has been called the age of nationalism and nation -states.
Because the eventual deportations and mass murder of Armeni ans, and the expulsion of Greeks ,
resulted in a relatively homogeneous population of Muslims and the foundation of a Turkish national
republic, the history of the last stages of the Ottoman Empire have been subsumed into an organic
nationalist narrative, w hich reads back the emergence of an original, authentic Turkish nation into earlier
centuries. Kemal’s ethno -nationalism attempted to create an ethnically homogeneous Turkish nation,
though ultimately that ambition was thwarted by the millions of Kurds who had lived in eastern Anatolia
long before the first Turks arrived and who after 1915 spread onto lands formerly held by Armenians.
What has been effaced in this narrative are the unique moments of attempted imperial regeneration in the
Tanzimat, Hamidian , and Young Turk periods. My talk and my book are dedicated to reconstructing
those moments, which involved new imaginings of the various peoples of the empire, efforts by state
authorities to construct a new kind of empire, and ultimately the destruction of hundreds of thousands of
Ottoman Armenians and Assyrians.
WHAT HAPPENED IN 191 5
Some two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman lands, most of them peasants and townspeople
in the six provinces of eastern Anatolia. In an Anatolian popul ation estimated to be between fifteen and
seventeen and one -half million inhabitants, Armenians were outnumbered by their Muslim neighbors in
most locations, though they often lived in homogeneous villages, sections of towns, and occasionally
dominated larger ru ral and urban areas. The most influential and prosperous Armenians lived in the
imperial capital, Istanbul (Constantinople), where their visibility made them the target of both official and
popular resentment from many Muslims. What has come to be known a s “the first genocide of the
Twentieth Century ” had its origins in the aspirations of a small group of Ottoman politicians associated
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with the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), popularly referred to as the “Young Turks.” Both the
radicalization of th eir intentions and the final implementation of their plans occurred in the context of a
deepening social and political crisis and the near destruction of the Ottoman state at the hands of external
enemies. Having suffered territorial losses in the Balkan Wars (1912 -1913), and forced to accept a
European -imposed reform in the “Armenian provinces,” the Young Tu rks joined the Central Powers
(Germany and Austro -Hungary ) in 1914 as they waged war against the Entente (Gre at Britain, France,
and Russia) in a desp erate effort to restore and strengthen their empire. Armenians precariously straddled
the Russian -Ottoman front, and both the Russians and the Ottomans attempted to recruit Armenians in
their campaigns against their enemies. Most Ottoman Armenians suppor ted and even fought alongside
the Ottomans against the Russians, while Armenians in Russia, organized in volunteer units, joined the
tsarist campaign.
Violence was inscribed in the Young Turk efforts to survive in power and secure their empire.
The radi cals who came to power in the January 1913 coup d’ état Enver, Talat, and Cemal were
convinced that politics was a kind of warfare ; those who stood in their way mini sters, journalists,
dissenters had to be removed by force. Early in the Great War, in late 1914 and early 1915, massacres
of Chri stians (Armenians and Assyrians) and Muslims occurred in the Caucasus and Persia where
Russians and Ottoman forces faced each other. A major catalytic event occurred in early 1915: the
Ottomans lost a major ba ttle on the Caucasian Front at Sar ıkamış , and important Young Turks attributed
the loss to Armenian treachery. In late February -early March 1915, the Young Turk government, led by
Talat and Enver, ordered the disarming of Armenian soldiers and their trans fer into labor battalions. The
first victims of the state were the demobilized Armenian soldiers, who were easily segregated and
systematically killed. Thus the muscle of the Armenian communities was removed. Almost immediately
the government ordered t he deportation of Armenians from cities, towns, and villages in the east,
ostensibly as a necessary military measure to ensure the security of the rear. Soon Armenians throughout
the country were forced to gather what belongings they could carry or transp ort and leave their homes at
short notice. The exodus of Armenians was haphazard and brutal; irregular forces, local Kurds and
Circassians, cut down hundreds of thousands of Christians, as civil and military officials oversaw and
facilitated the removal o f the empire’s Armenian subjects. When some Armenians resisted the
encroaching massacres in the city of Van in eastern Anatolia, the Committee of Union and Progress had
the leading intellectuals and politicians in Istanbul, several of them deputies to the Ottoman Parliament,
arrested and sent from the city. Most of them perished in the next few months. Thus was the brain of the
Ottoman Armenian people removed, the intellectual and political leadership, and the connective tissue
that linked separate commun ities together. Women, children, and old men in town after town were
marched through the valleys and mountains of eastern Anatolia. Missionaries, diplomats, and foreign
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military officers witnessed the convoys, recorded what they saw, and sent reports hom e about death
marches and killing fields. Survivors reached the deserts of Syria where they languished in concentration
camps; many starved to death; and new massacres occurred.
The year 1915 was a gendered genocide. Men died in greater numbers. Many woman and
children were taken into the families of the local Muslims. Tens of thousands of orphans found some
refuge in the protection of foreign missionaries. By the end of the war ninety per cent of the Armenians of
the Ottoman Empire were gone, a culture and civilization wiped out never to return. It is conservatively
estimated that between 600,000 to over 1,000,000 were slaughtered or died on the marches. Other tens of
thousands fled to th e north, to the relative safety of the Russian Caucasus. Hundreds of thousands of
women and children were compelled to convert to Islam and survived in the families of Kurds, Turks, and
Arabs. Those who observed the killings, as well as the Allied powers engaged in a war against the
Ottomans, repeatedly claimed that they had never witnessed anything like it. The word for what
happened had not yet been invented. There was no concept to mark the state -targeted killing of a
designated ethnoreligious people. At the time those who needed a word borrowed from the Bible and
called it “holocaust.” My great grandparents were among the victims.
AFFECTIVE DISPOSITIO N
Historians love explanations and often pile them on top of one another, and a search for the
caus es of the Genocide, long term and immediate, easily yields a rich and varied crop. The environment
in which Genocide occurred the imperial appetites of the Great Powers, the fierce competition for land
and goods in eastern Anatolia, the anticipated aspi rations and aims of Armenians, and the ambition s and
ideas of the Young Turks provides the context in which mass killing became possible, but ultimately
what needs to be explained is the mind set, the world view what I will ca ll “the affective disposit ion”
the emotional and cognitive universe in which the Young Turk leaders could imagine that they faced
an existential threat from their Armenian and Assyrian subjects and were required to disperse, assimilate,
and murder hundreds of thousands of them. Here I am using “disposition ” to mean a tendency or
proclivity to think or act in a certain way under certain circumstances, a collection of preferences, beliefs,
attitudes, habits of mind, and their associated feelings and emotions that lead people or gro ups to certain
kinds of actions under certain circumstances. In the context of war and invasion a mental and emotional
universe developed that included perceived threats, the Manichaean construction of internal enemies, and
a pervasive fear that triggered a deadly, pathological response to real and imagined immediate and future
dangers. A government came to believe that among its subject peoples whole “nations” presented an
immediate threat to the security of the state. Defense of the empire and of the “ Turkish nation” became
the rationale for mass murder.
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Armenians also had their affective disposition, their own attitudes about Turks, Kurds, and other
Muslims. Armenians were neither passive nor submissive victims they had their own pol itical and
cultural ambitions but their hopes lay with a reformed, tolerant Ottoman realm in which their
particularities and privileges could be maintained. Few Armenians were actual rebels or dreamed of an
independent state, but the leaders of the comm unity sought protection from their rulers and a degree of
self -rule, autonomy in eastern Anatolia where they could improve the lives of their compatriots. The
power, however, to decide their fate was largely out of Armenian hands. In desperation Armenians
appealed to the Great Powers to pressure the Ottoman regime to alleviate the oppression of Christians.
THE GENEALOGY OF AN AFFECTIVE DISPOSITIO N: FEAR, ANGER, RES ENTMENT, AND
ANXIETY
From the time of the formation of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century Armenians in
Anatolia were a subject people who had to accommodate to a ruling elite that was Turkish and Islamic.
Even as Armenians, most notably in urban centers, succeeded in society, grew wealthy, and even entered
state service, they understo od that they had to adapt to the expectations of the ruling Ottoman elite in
order to advance. The Armenian Church, itself institutionally tied into the Ottoman system of
governance, usually preached acceptance of the fate befallen the Armenians, deferenc e toward their rulers
and social betters, both Muslim and Armenian, and opposed rebellion of any kind. Yet even as they
legitimized the system in which their people lived, clerics remained aware of the special burdens they
bore.
Armenians and Turks coexi sted in an unequal relationship. T he sheer power and confidence of
the ruling Muslims worked for centuries to maintain in the Armenians a pattern of personal and social
behavior manifested in submissiveness, passivity, deference to authority, and the need to act in
calculatedly devious and disguised ways. It was this deferential behavior that earned the Armenians the
title “loyal millet” in an age when the Greeks and Slavs of the empire were striving to emancipate
themselves through revolutionary action. The Armenians in contrast worked within the Ottoman system
and accepted the burdens of Muslim administration without much protest until the second half of the
nineteenth century.
Linked primarily by religion and the church, which nurtured a sense of a los t glorious past and
ancient statehood, Armenians before the nineteenth century made up a diffuse ethnoreligious community
whose people were dispersed among three contiguous empires and scattered even further abroad by their
mercantile interests and the opp ressive conditions in eastern Anatolia. Armenians were much more
divided than united, separated by politics, distance, dialects, and class differences. Yet the clerical elite
worked to create a collective identity for Armenians, a notion of their distinc tion from their neighbors of
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different linguistic and religious communities. Religious distinction was foundational to culture and
identity, but local identities, a sense of place and where one came from, seem to have been extremely
important to Armenians . At the same time Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Muslims were also Ottomans,
sharing in cultural commonalities, often speaking Turkish rather than their historic language. Separate
but linked identities were institutionalized in the millets, the official communities recognized by the
sultan as the instruments of his rule over his subjects, which were themselves officially sanctioned
Ottoman institutions. Religion remained the principal official marker of difference, but the lines of
distinction between Mus lims and non -Muslims blurred in many other aspects of daily and official life.
The scanty evidence available provides isolated traces of the attitudes of Muslims towards
Armenians and Armenians toward Muslims, but the narrative of Armenians as an alien an d even
subversive element within the empire appears first, most vividly, in the words of the sultan Abdülhamid II
in the 1870s after the disastrous Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Russi ans. Abdülhamid brought the
reform period of the Tanzimat to an end and eliminated moderate and liberal alternatives within the
system. The sultan created a system of personal, autocratic rule and centralized power within the palace.
A “shrewd tactician,” the sultan played off one religious community and one European s tate against
another, desperate as he was to prevent the dismemberment of his empire. 5 Abdülhamid was determined
to counter “the disruptive forces of liberalism, nationalism and constitutionalism” by promoting the
traditional, Islamic aspects of his realm. 6 The sultan found sentiment in favor of his anti -reform, anti -
Western stance among conservative and religious elements. Liberal and radical Christians and Turks
opposed the “bloody sultan” and saw the restoration of the 1876 constitution as a principal p olitical goal.
In an empire that after 1878, because of the loss of Balkan lands, had become more Muslim and
was now primarily based in Asia rather than Europe, Abdülhamid deployed a conservative Islam as his
state ideology. His solution to the imperial c risis was “to redefine Ottomanism and give it a Muslim
coloring.” 7 In November 1890 Abdülhamid institutionalized an alliance with the Sunni Muslim peoples
of his realm by creating the Hamidiye regiments, similar to the Cossacks in Russia and made up primarily
of loyal Kurds. Organized into official irregular armed regiments ( aşiret ), Kurdish villagers were trained
by Turkish yuzbashis (officers) from the regular army, given special uniforms, a nd access to arms.
Though the Kurds had been much more a threat to Ottoman unity than the Armenians in years past,
Abdülhamid backed these fellow Muslims against Christian Armenians whom he considered the more
disruptive element and one linked to his enemi es abroad. In this way Abdülhamid attempted to secure
Kurdish loyalty and at the same time create a force to extend state power to the Russian and Iranian
borders of the empire. 8 Formed to keep order and reinforce the presence of the state in the east, ac cording
to a historian of the institution, the Hamidiye “actually further antagonized the Armenian population and
exacerbated the very conflict the organization was designed to quell.” 9
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If one accepts sociologist Max W eber’s definition of the state the institution that holds the
monopoly of legitimate violence then at the turn of the twentieth century the Ottoman state did not
function effectively in the eastern reaches of Anatolia. There, Hamidiye units, Muslim refugees, and
Kurdish and Turkmen trib es all competed with the regular army and police. Some Armenians decided
that they had no alternative but to organize for self -defense. Inspired by the Bulgarian struggle for
independence and frustrated by the failure of Europeans to come to the aid of s upplicant Armenians,
young radicals decided that organization, agitation, and resistance were required to push the Ottoman
government to improve the condition of the Armenians. By the 1880s a significant minority of
Armenians, many of them from Russian Tr anscaucasia, conceived of revolution as the only means to
protect and promote the Armenians. A new idea of the Armenian nation as secular, cultural, and based on
language as well as shared history challenged the older clerical understanding of Armenians a s an
ethnoreligious community centered on faith and membership in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Faced
by what they saw as the imminent danger of national disintegration, the Armenian radicals turned toward
“self -defense,” the formation of revolutionary p olitical parties, and political actions that would encourage
Western or Russian intervention into Ottoman affairs. For the young nationalists revolution to stimulate
reform was the “logical conclusion” of the impossibility of significant reforms coming fr om the state.
Against their conscious intentions, the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin had sanctioned nationalist
struggle as an effective means to European recognition of a people’s right to political freedom. It had
worked in the Balkans, why not in other parts of the Ottoman Empire?
The harsh equilibrium that had existed between Kurds, Turks, and Armenians in eastern Anatolia
faltered in the 1880s and then collapsed in the 1890s. Armenian intellectuals and revolutionaries played a
role in bringi ng Armenian acquiescence and acceptance of the existing order to an end, as did foreign
travelers, western diplomats, and increased contact with the outside world. Abdülhamid ’s strategic
decision to align the Ottoman state with the Kurds and back them aga inst the Armenians was the final
precipitating factor. A fierce, uneven struggle began in the 1890s between the autocratic state and the
Armenian “committees.”
HAMIDIAN MASSACRES, 1894 -1896
In 1894 Armenian refusal to pay taxes to Kurdish lords led to clashes between Kurds and
Armenians in Sassun, the intervention of state troops, and the killing of hundreds of Armenians. Abdul
Hamid decided to deal with the Armenian Question “not by reform but by blood.” 10 Unlike the genocide,
these massacres in easter n Anatolia in 1894 -1896, which were largely carried out by Kurdish tribes and
local lords, were part of an effort by the state to restore the old equilibrium in interethnic relations, in
which the subject peoples accepted with little overt questioning the dominance of the Ottoman Muslim
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elite. That equilibrium, however had already been upset by the sultan’s own policies of centralization and
bureaucratization, as well as his strategic alliance with Muslim Kurds against Christian Armenians. This
pan -Islami c policy, which was institutionalized in the formation of irregular Hamidiye units of armed
Kurds, helped to undermine the customary system of imperial rule as much as did the emerging
revisioning of nationality borrowed from the West.
To religious Muslim s the visibility of better -off Armenians in the capital and towns appeared as
an intolerable reversal of the traditional Muslim -dhimmi hierarchy that, in turn, increased resentments
toward Christians. Turkish patriots constructed Armenians as disloyal su bjects suspiciously sympathetic
to Europeans. Whatever resentments the poor peasant population of eastern Anatolia may have felt
toward the peopl e in towns the places where they received low prices for their produce, where they felt
their social inferio rity most acutely, where they were alien to and unwanted by the better -dressed people
were easily transferred to the Armenians. In a particularly toxic mix , religion, anxiety about class
status, xenophobia, and general insecurity about the impersonal tra nsformations of modern life combined
to create resentments and hostilities toward the Armenians. 11
Yet ethnic differences, hostilities, and even conflict need not have become genocidal. That would
require a major strategic decision by elites in power. T hough Abdülhamid used violence to keep his
Armenian subjects in line, he did not consider the use of mass deportation to change the demographic
composition of Anatolia. He remained a traditional imperial monarch prepared to use persecution when
persuasion failed to maintain the unity as well as the multiplicity and diversity of his empire. More
fundamental ideological shifts took place before the images of Armenians as subversive and alien
appeared absolutely incompatible with the empire as it was being r econceived. The Hamidian massacres
were designed to pacify a tro ubled region, repress a people (the Armenians) considered seditious and
insurrectionary, and forge ties of mutual advantage between the state and the Kurdish tribesmen.
TURKISM AND THE “RE VOLUTION” OF 1908
In the second half of the nineteenth century Turkic intellectuals, both in the Ottoman and Russian
empires, stimulated interest in a new conception of a Turkish nation. Identification with a supranational
community of Turks distinguished the “race” or “nation” of the Turks from the multinational Ottoman
state. 12 Yet inherent in that identity with the Turkic was confusion about the boundaries of the nation and
the location and limits of the fatherland ( vatan ). Was the homeland of the Turks Anatolia or the
somewhat mystical Turan of Central Asia?
The “Young Turk ideology was originally ‘scientific,’ materialist, social Darwinist, elitist, and
vehemently antireligious; it did not favor representative govern ment.” 13 Neither liberals nor
constitutionalists, the Young Turks were statists who saw themselves as continuing the work of the
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Tanzimat reformers and the work of the Young Ottomans. Earlier, Ottoman westernizers had hoped to
secure western technology wit hout succumbing to western culture, somehow to preserve Islam but make
the empire technologically and militarily competitive with the West. Reform had always come from
above, from westernizing statesmen and bureaucrats, a response to a sense that the empi re had to change
or collapse. The Young Turks shared those values, but steadily they added new elements of nat ionalism
to their imperial stati sm. Ultimately, however, the launching of genocidal violence in 1915 came, not
from the transmutation of identiti es and the accompanying stereotypes, not from the accumulating
tensions, but from the initiative of the state. How was the mental universe, the affective disposition, of
the Young Turk leaders, and many of their followers, transformed from Ottomanist tole rance to a
Manichean view of us and them?
Only after the insurrection of July 1908 had taken place did people all over the empire come out
in support of the “revolution.” Ottoman Armenians and other minorities joyfully greeted the restoration
of the liber al constitution, hopeful that the new government would provide a political mechanism for
peaceful development within the framework of a representative parliamentary system. People marched
through Istanbul, Izmir, Jerusalem, Damascus, and other cities and towns, praising the sultan whom they
thanked for restoring the constitution. 14 The revolution was more a restoration than a radical turning
point in Ottoman political life. The sultan’s power was reduced, though his continued presence gave a
degree of leg itimacy to the new men in power. A Chamber of Deputies, in which non -Muslims were well
represented, was chosen in quite transparent elections. Prisoners were released. Exiled figures most
importantly for the Armenians, the deposed Armenian Patriarch o f Constantinople, Madteos III
Izmiriliyan, the writer Grigor Zohrap (1861 -1915), and the liberal Prince Sabaheddin were allowed to
return to their homes, to great rejoicing of their followers. 15 Workers expressed their pent up frustrations
in a series of strikes, and peasants petitioned the government for redress of their grievances, most
importantly directed at the perennial problem of arbitrary taxation and illegal land seizures by local
notables and tribal chiefs. Security improved throughout the count ry; for a time Kurdish landlords ceased
their seizures of peasant lands.
Society woke up. Dozens of newspapers appeared; socialists, feminists, and democrats all
expressed their hopes for a freer, more just society. Women appeared more frequently in publ ic, at
concerts and at the theater, and women’s education became more available. Protestant missionaries, who
the Hamidian regime had viewed suspiciously, were permitted to speak at Young Turk clubs as “pioneers
of progress.” 16 In their celebrations, ring ing of church bells, and waving of flags, Armenians became
more visible to the Muslim public. In the eyes of the more traditional Turks and Kurds the public display
and new confidence of the Christians was confusing, offensive, even frightening. The revol ution opened
up a lively public sphere fed by the appearance of newspapers and journals, social clubs, and political
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organizations. Town criers ( tellallar ) brought the news to far off places and to the vast majority who
could not read.
Working within the embryonic constitutionalist order, Armenian politicians faced a dangerous
dilemma: their future depended on the good will and policies of the Young Turks. No matter what
policies were adopted or what positions were proclaimed by Armenians, suspicions ran high among Turks
about their ultimate goals. The Young Turks sought ways to work with the Armenian political parties but
did not trust them. The commitment of the Armenian parties to the territorial integrity of the empire did
not shield Armenians from ac cusations of separatism and subversion. Armenians remained cautiously
optimistic about the revolution’s potential for significant change but remained doubtful and wary about
the intentions of the Young Turks.
APRIL 1909: ADANA
Change came too rapidly and too radically for many, particularly the more religiously
conservative. Resentment grew from liberals and non -Muslims that a small group was running things too
exclusively. Indecision and inaction only intensified the tensions within the population. Expressing the
fierce determination of his party, Enver declared, “All the heads dreaming of sharing power must be
crushed . . . we have to be harsher than Nero as far as ensuring domestic peace is concerned.” 17 These
massacres diffe red from those of 1894 -1896 in that neither Abdülhamid nor the central government
played a direct role. Rather local officials, intellectuals, and clerics inflamed th e inchoate fears of the
Muslims who , anticipating some action by the Armenians , preemptiv ely launched brutal attacks on them.
Even though the Young Turks in Istanbul were not involved, influential adherents of the CUP in Adana
incited people to riot, and soldiers affiliated with the CUP participated in the massacres. In April 1909
Muslims in the Mediterranean town of Adana turned on their Christian neighbors. After days of rioting,
with elements of the army involved, some 20,000 Armenians had been killed. Adana was more like an
urban riot that degenerated into a pogrom rather than a state -initiated mass killing. Underlying the
ferocity of the bloodletting were the hostile emotions of fear and anger directed against Armenians
suspected of ambitions to dominate Muslim lands and peoples. The affective disposition of the instigators
and the crow ds, with its tightly twisted strands of fear, anger, and resentment woven together, had already
been present in its embryonic form in the Hamidian massacres, articulated by the highest circles of the
state, and would grow following Adana as the myth that A rmenians caused their own destruction
continued to fester through the nascent public sphere.
The events of 1909 were in a true sense a counterrevolution. The trend from the April events to
the end of Young Turk rule was toward greater authoritarianism a nd eventually one -party dictatorship.
Suspicions about the motives and aims of the Young Turks grew among Armenians after the massacres in
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Adana, only to intensify during and after the Balkan wars of 1912 -1913 and the January 1913 coup d’état .
The massive displacement of Muslims from the Balkans, their migration eastward into Anatolia, brought
with it stories of loss, humiliation, and violence perpetrated against Muslims. Pamphlets and books,
illustrated with gruesome pictures of slaughtered Muslims, rela ted horrific tales of atrocities by Christians
against Muslims, and depicted rape, bayonetting of children, and crucifixion of Muslims. Many of the
stories told of humiliation of the better -off and better educated at the hands of people of lower status.
W hat Bulgarian Christians might have done to Turks in the Balkans bled over to calls for revenge against
Christians within the empire. The Turkish -language press vehemently attacked Armenians and threatened
boycotts and even massacres. 18
Armenian political leaders protested against the turn toward nationalism among Turks, their
cultivation of the Kurds ( who had been largely indifferent if not hostile to the reforms of the Young
Turks ), and their flagrant neglect of their own initial constitutional impulses. Turkish writers referred to
the Ottoman territory as “Turkish land.” Pamphlets in Turkish extolling the idea of the “National
Economy” increasingly referred not to a cosmopolitan Ottoman economy but one that was Islamized or
Turkified. 19 The tone of the pamphlets was ferocious. Non -Muslims were “sucking the blood of
Muslims,” and as cited in a report by the acting British consul -general in Smyrna, the unsuspecting,
soporific Muslims were the victims of voracious Christians .
As Europe drifted through the last decade before World War I, the Ottoman government
experienced a series of p olitical and military defeats: the annexation of Bosnia -Herzegovina by Austro -
Hungary in 1908, the subsequent declaration of independence by Bulgaria, the merger of Crete with
Greece, revolts in Albania in 1910 -1912, and in Yemen, and losses to Italy in Libya (1911). Four Balkan
states Montenegro , Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece allied in October 1912 against the Ottomans.
Ostensibly the war began over demands for reforms in Macedonia but ended with the quick defeat of the
Ottoman army and the establishment of Albania as an independent state. 20 The Ottoman holdings in the
Balkans were inhabited by over six million people, two -thirds of them Christian, one -third Muslim. The
reformist strategies of the Young Turks had failed to convince the great European powers to support the
empire’s claims to sovereignty in its European lands. Sensing the weakness of their imperial sovereign,
Balkan Christians turned on the Ottomans and fou ght with the various Christian states. Armenians found
themselves on both sides of the front lines: Balkan Armenians sided with their governments against the
Ottomans, while Ottoman Armenians fought with the imperial forces. Important Armenian spokesmen
joined rallies and spoke in favor of defending the fatherland. 21 Defeat and the loss of territories deemed
the patrimony of the Ottomans had a devastating emotional impact on the Young Turk leaders. They
attributed their losses to the treachery of Christia ns, a trope that became dominant in the stories of the
nationalist writer Omer Seyfettin, himself a participant and prisoner -of-war during the Balkan conflict. 22
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The influential CUP member Dr. Nazim reported to the British consul in Izmir that “the nation” was filled
with “the sentiment of hatred.” 23 Despair that is, loss o f hope in an acceptable future colored the
emotional world of the defeated. Loss mixed with an urge to revenge that loss.
The theme of revenge, the urge to set right the wrongs that had been done against Muslims and
Turks, ran through the memories of those who suffered in the Balkan wars . Enver’s anger at the Balkan
humiliations festered even when he became one of the three most powerful men in the empire. In a letter
to his wife, he revealed his inability to come to terms with “the savagery the enemy has inflicted . . . a
stone’s throw from Istanbul.” If she only knew what he knew, she “would understand the things that
enter the heads of poor Muslims far away. But our anger is stre ngthening: revenge, revenge, revenge;
there is no other word.” 24
The most important leaders of the Young Turks were veterans of the struggle to keep Macedonia,
Bulgaria, and Albania within the Ottoman Empire. The losses of these territories were personally
traumatic. When they turned their gaze to Anatolia, however, the y continued to see the situation in that
land, largely unknown to them, through eyes that had witnessed the losses in the Balkans. Both western
Anatolia, where large Greek populations lived relatively harmoniously among Muslims, and eastern
Anatolia, with its complex mix of Kurds, Turks, Armenians, and Assyrians, differed culturally and
socially from the Balkans. Yet the sociological images the desperate leaders of the empire had of the
var ied lands over which they ruled had already been deeply influenced by their experiences in the
Balkans .25
For Turkish nationalists, both intellectuals like Ahmed A ğaoğlu and Ziya Gökalp and Yo ung
Turk offıcials and officers like Talat and Enver, saving the empire went along with strengthening the
Turkish “nation” within the empire. Nationalism a nd imperialism were conjoined: within the boundaries
of the state the Turkish and Islamic peoples would be favored and their demogr aphic weight increased;
outside the boundaries Turks and Muslims would be mobilized to join the Ottoman dream of a great
Turanian or Islamic state. Those who did not fit in would assimilate or emigrate, remain subordinate to
the ruling metropolitan “natio n,” or be physically eliminated.
THE REFORM OF 1914
For the European powers preservation of the Ottoman Empire was more desirable than partition,
which would mean dominance of the various parts by one power or another. For the empire to survive,
they wer e convinced that reform in the Armenian provinces was vital. Agreement by the capitals of
Europe was difficult, however, because the Great Powers were seriously divided diplomatically. The
Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy faced the Triple En tente of Britain, France, and Russia.
All agreed, however, that the Ottoman Empire should neither be partitioned nor divided into spheres of
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influence. The Russians submitted a reform plan in June, which called for the consolidation of the six
eastern vilayet s into an Armenian province to be administered by a Christian governor -general approved
by the Great Powers and Istanbul , as well as a chamber of deputies made up equally of Muslims and
Christians.
For centuries Russian rulers had dreamt and plotted to “recover” Constantinople and bring it into
the Orthodox Russian Empire, but Europe had repeatedly frustrated that ambition. Both Russia and its
Armenians wanted a reformed Armenia under some European supervision but were not prepared to go as
far as a Russian protectorate or Russian occupation. 26 Turkish nationalists were distressed by the idea of
foreign inspectors. The nationalist newspapers Tanin and Jeune Turk wrote about a new European
crusade humiliating the empire at a moment when it needed to recover. The triumvirate stiffened its
opposition to foreigners as administrators of parts of its territory.
The reform of 1914 pointed toward a different kind of O ttoman empire, one in which European
Powers would supervise reforms, particularly land adjudications, in eastern Anatolia. Both Abdülhamid
II and the Young Turks had ultimately sided with the Kurds against the Armenians and abandoned efforts
to deal with land disputes. Had the World War not broken out, the possibility of a more decentralized
Ottoman Empire may have succeeded. But the Young Turks hated the reform, and in their minds Europe
wanted a divided and weak Ottoman Empire, and the 1914 reform was part of that plot against Istanbul.
THE GREAT WAR
What was then known as “the Great War” was a catastrophe for all the peoples of the Ottoman
Empire and most completely for the Armenians and Assyrians. Of the more than twenty million subjects
of the sultan, perhaps as many as five million would perish as a consequence of the CUP’s decision to
join what was for them a war not of necessity but of choice. Most of the victims were civilians. Eighteen
percent of Anatolian Muslims would die, the casualties of battle, famine, disease, and governmental
disorgan ization. About ninety percent of the Armenians would be gone by the end of the war
deported, massacred, forcibly converted to Islam, or exiled beyond the borders of the new Turkey. The
Young Turks entered the war to save, even enhance, their empire, on ly to preside over its demise. The
war laid the foundations for the empire’s successor, the national state created by a Turkish nationalist
movement, by ethnically cleansing what would now become the “heartland” of Turks and mobilizing
millions of ordinar y Muslims to fight for their “fatherland.” “In Turkey’s collective memory today,” a
historian of the Ottoman war writes, “the Ottomans lost the First World War; the Turks won it.” 27
The Ottoman Empire fought from 1914 to 1918 on nine different fronts, from the Dardanelles and
the Balkans to Palestine and Arabia to the Caucasus and Persia. Over three million Ottomans, mostly
Turks, were conscripted to fight the war against the Entente. An estimated 771,844 were killed, over half
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to disease . The mortality rate reached twenty -five percent. 28 Only Serbia suffer ed the loss of a higher
percentage of its population than the Ottomans. The war blurred the distinctions between civilians and
the military. Violence was visited upon all citizens in this total war. Civil society suffer ed enor mously,
while the state’s power extended into society in unprecedented ways. The gross domestic product in
Turkey in the 1920s was half the prewar level. 29 The urban populations of the region did not recover until
the 1950s. Mi llions of people were moved, either conscripted or forcibly deported by their government.
Every tenth person in the Ottoman Empire bec ame a displaced person in the years of war. 30 Hundreds of
thousands were slaughtered as a consequence of state policy, an d other hundreds of thousands were
forcibly converted to Islam, losing their original identity as Christians. In the twelve years from 1912 -
1924, the non -Muslim population in Ottoman Asia Minor fell from roughly twenty percent to two
percent. 31
As European states propelled one another into a ferocious and fratricidal war in 1914, the Young
Turks became convinced that the survival of their empire required two related policies: an effective
alliance with one or more of the Great Powers; and mobiliz ation, indeed militarization, of Ottoman
society in order to deal with the disruptive internal divisions that both weakened the state and provided
opportunities for foreign actors to intervene in the empire’s internal affairs. The Young Turks’ foreign
poli cy was intimately related to their domestic difficulties, their inability to find a solution to the
discontents of their constituent peoples. War, it was thought by some, might provide an opportunity to
free the empire from the aggressive appetites of the Great Powers and to effect a final solution to the
seemingly insatiable aspirations of the empire’s remaining non -Muslims. Ottomanism and European -
style reforms had been tried, the young militants in power thought, but they had not strengthened the
empir e. Enver’s recapture of Edirne in 1913 seemed to confirm that a strong military could repair what
diplomacy failed to achieve. War and the creation of a truly sovereign state were necessary, and
independence and security could be accomplished through a G erman alliance and war. To the Young
Turks Germany was their ally of choice since their principal enemy remained Russia, a country with
which the Ottomans had already fought twelve wars.
The fate of millions of people hung on the notes passed between envo ys and their superiors. Had
Ottoman and Russian decisions been different, had the Ottomans and their allies been able to proceed
with the agreed -upon reforms in Anatolia, in all likelihood there would have been no Armenian Genocide.
Decisions and timing w ere all. The fate of the Armenians was directly tied to the social disintegration and
political radicalization of the Ottoman leaders who accelerated with the coming of war. Enver took
personal command of the army in the east. The fighting raged for almo st a month, from late December
into mid -January. At first Enver was dramatically successful. The Ottomans moved closer to Sarıkamış,
and the Russians were about to pull back when General Iudenich decided to make a stand. The Ottoman
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troops were not prep ared for the harsh winter in the Anatolian highlands; they had marched for days
through deep snow and thousands froze to death. Early in 1915 the Russians, accompanied by Armenian
volunteer units, pushed the Ottoman army back. A disastrous defeat followe d. The Ottomans lost more
than 45,000 men killed; thousands more deserted or were taken prisoner. The Russians lost about 28,000
killed or wounded. 32
It was in this context of desperation and defeat that, beginning in the first months of 1915, the
Ottoma n authorities demobilized Armenian soldiers from the Ottoman Army, at first organizing them into
work brigades and then forcing them to dig their own graves before being shot. As rumors spread of
Turkish violence against Armenian villagers, Armenians in V an organized in April to protect themselves.
Their activity was painted as a revolutionary uprising, and fighting broke out in the streets. The
advancing Russians took the city, but those Armenians who lived behind Turkish lines now became the
targets of a massive campaign to remove them from the region. To prevent any further organized
resistance by the Armenians, the Ottoman government rounded up the leading Armenian intellectuals,
political leaders, and even members of the Ottoman parliament in Istanb ul and exiled them from the
capital on April 24, the date that later would be commemorated as genocide day. Most of them perished
at the hands of the authorities.
The argument often employed by Turkish leaders to the Western and German diplomats who
inqui red and protested against the treatment of the Armenians was that the precarious condition of the
empire and the requirements of self -defense of the state justified the repression of “rebellion.” In a telling
interview with the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, Talat conveyed the complex ities of reasons
that influenced the decision to eliminate Anatolian Armenians. “I have asked you to come to -day,” began
Talaat, “so that I can explain our position on the whole Armenian subject. We base our objectio ns to the
Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of
the Turks. In the second place, they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate state.
In the third place, they have o penly encouraged our enemies.” 33
GENOCIDE
The very word “genocide” conjures images of the most horrendous crimes committed by states
against designated peoples. So powerful is the term itself as a concept in international law, a claim by
governments o f their own victimization, and as powerful sour ces of national identification that the
term “genocide” has been extended to involve almost all instances of mass killing in our world. In this
work I employ the word “genocide ” in a specific way to designate what in German is called Völkermord ,
the murder of a people, and in Turkish soykırım or Armenian tseghaspanutiun , the killing of an ethnicity
or, in an older understanding, “race.”
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The purpose of the Genocide was to elimina te the perceived threat of the Armenians within the
Ottoman Empire by reducing their numbers and scattering them in isolated, distant places. The
destruction of the Ermeni millet was carried out in three different but related ways: dispersion, massacre,
and assimilation by conversion into Islam. A perfectly rational explanation, then, for the Genocide
appears to be adequate: a strategic goal to secure the empire by elimination of an existential threat to the
state and the Turkish (or Islamic) people.
W hile an anti -Armenian disposition existed and grew more virulent within the Ottoman elite long
before the war, and some extremists contemplated radical solutions to the Armenian Question,
particularly after the Balkan Wars, the world war not only presented an opportunity for carrying out the
most revolutionary program against the Armenians, but provided the particular conjuncture that
convinced the Young Turk triumvirate to deploy ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Armenians.
The moment at which dis position became action occurred after the outbreak of war when the leaders’ fear
that their rule was in peril focused on the Armenians as the wedge that the Russians and other powers
could use to pry apart their empire. Had there been no World War there w ould have been no genocide,
not only because there would have been no “fog of war” to cover up the events but because the radical
sense of endangerment among Turks would not have been as acute. Without the war there would have
been less motivation for a revolutionary solution and political opportunities for negotiation and
compromise.
When it came, the Armenian Genocide was the result of long -term, deep -seated elite and popular
hatreds, resentments, and fears intensified by war and defeat an affective disposition in which
Armenians were perceived as irredeemable enemies of Muslims that in turn shaped the CUP’s
strategic considerations as to the most effective ways to save the empire. The Young Turks’ sen se of
their own vulnerability combined with r esentment at what they took to be Armenians’ privileged
status, Armenian dominance over Muslims in some spheres of life, and the preference of many
Armenians for Christian Russia fed a fantasy that the Armenians presented an existential threat to
Turks. Threat must be understood not only as an immediate menace but as perception of potential danger,
of future peril. Within such imagery Armenians were helpless and soon became the victims of both their
success within the millet system and their exposure as religiously marked, largely unarmed subjects.
War and social disintegration, the invasion of the Russians and the British, and the defection of
some Armenians to the Russian side moved the leaders of the Ottoman state to embark on the most
vicious form of “securitization” and social engineering: the massive deportation and massacre of
hundreds of thousands of their Armenian and Assyrian subjects. For Ziya Gökalp , like so many others
who saw the Genocide as necessary or even forced on the Ottomans, h e co uld with confidence write,
“There was no Armenian massacre, there was a Turkish -Armenian arrangement. They stabbed us in the
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back, we stabbed them back.” 34 What was done had to be done in the name of national security, and so a
kind of lawful lawlessness was permitted.
Reversing an older image of ethnic violence as bubbling up from the masses below, the decisions,
permission, and encouragement of a few in power provoked and stoked emotional resonance below. It
turns out that a few killers can cause enorm ous destruction. Thugs, sadists, fanatics, and opportunists can
slaughter thousands with little more than acquiescence from the surrounding population. They in turn can
inspire or let loose the rage of thousands of others who will carry out even greater de struction. Genocide
in particular is an event of mass killing, with massive numbers of victims but not necessarily of massive
numbers of killers. The thugs, set loose by the political elite, create a climate of violence that radicalizes a
population, rend ers political moderates less relevant, and convinces people of the need to support the
more extremist leaders. The context of war, with its added burdens and accompanying social
disintegration, har dens hostile group identities, “ making it rational to fear the other group and see its
members as dangerous threats.” 35 Added to that, thugs and ordinary people use the opportunities offered
by state -permitted lawlessness to settle other accounts with neighbors, take revenge, or simply grab what
they can. 36
Some o f the killers in 1915 simply obeyed orders; others were motivated by much more mundane
feelings than duty or considered ideological preferences. Social and economic inequalities , when
combined with ethnic and religious distinctions , bred resentment at tho se who received more than they
deserved from those who had received less. Fear of the other and the future that it threatened one’s own;
anger at what had been done to oneself and one’s compatriots; simple ambition and careerism all could be
found among t hose who murdered Armenians. Fear, anger, and resentment metastasized into hatred, the
emotion that saw the other as the essential cause of one’s own misery. Hatred required that the other be
eliminated. Killing became familiar and justifiable for reason s of self -defense. A cumulative
radicaliza tion moved inexorably forward: sporadic, uncoordinated massacres along the eastern frontier
gave way to planned deportations, first from frontline areas and then throughout the empire; deportations
were accompanie d with massacres and death marches; finally, at the end of the road, those who had
reached the deserts were starved to death or brutally murdered.
The story as told here argues that the Genocide was not planned long in advance but was a
contingent reactio n to a moment of crisis that grew more radical over time. The Genocide was neither
religiously motivated nor a struggle between two contending nationalisms, one of which destroyed the
other, but rather the pathological response of desperate leaders who so ught security against a people they
had both constructed as enemies and driven into radical opposition to the regime under which they had
lived for centuries. Yet the choice of genocide was not inevitable. Predicated on long standing and ever
more extrem e affective dispositions and attitudes that had demonized the Armenians as a threat that
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needed to be dealt with, the ultimate choice was made by specific leaders at a particular historical
conjuncture when the threat seemed to them most palpable. Threat is a perception, in this case the
perception that one of the empire’s subject peoples was as great a danger as invading armies.
The emotional universe in which the Ottomans constructed themselves and others, made possible
the most brutal reprisals agains t perceived enemies. Although it had developed over nearly half a century,
the emotional coloring of others need not have led to genocide. People made choices. In a particular
conjuncture, when war and invasion threatened defeat and dismemberment of the emp ire, the Young Turk
leaders made disastrous, even self -destructive, policy decisions that ultimately annihilated whole peoples
and accelerated the fall of their regime.
What to denialists and their sympathizers appears to be a rational and justified st rategic choice to
eliminate a rebellious and seditious population, in the account presented here , is the outcome of the
Young Turk leaders’ pathological construction of the Armenian enemy. The actions that the Young Turks
decided upon were based in an emot ional disposition that led to distorted interpretations of social reality
and exaggerated estimations of threats. 37 The conviction that Armenians desired to form an independent
state was a fantasy of the Young Turks and a few Armenian extremists. The great majority of Armenians
had been willing to live within the Ottoman Empire if their lives and property could be secured. They
clung to the belief that a future was possible within the empire. Still, they had been socialized as
Ottomans; this was their hom e and what they knew. Only when their own government once again turned
them into pariahs did some of them defect or resist.
The Armenian Genocide, along with the killing of Assyrians and the expulsion of the Anatolian
Greeks, laid the ground for the more homogeneous nation -state that arose from the ashes of the empire.
Like many other states, including Australia, Israel, and the United States, the emergence of the Republic
of Turkey involved the removal and subordination of native peoples who had lived on its territory prior to
its founding. The connection between ethnic cleansing or genocide and the legitimacy of the national
state underlies the desperate efforts to deny or distort the history of the nation and the state’s genesis.
Coming to terms with that history, on the other hand, can have the salutary effect of questioning
continued policies of ethnic homogenization and refusal to recognize the claims and rights of those
pe oples, minorities or diasporas Aborigines, native Americans, Kurds, Palesti nians, Assyrians, or
Armenians who refuse to disappear.
NOTES
1. Pierre Vidal -Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1987). In the interests of
space, footnotes have been abbreviated. For full details of all sources see Ronald Suny, “They Can
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Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Ar menian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015).
2. In the last ten years a more sophisticated “neo -denialism” has emerged, which elaborated the
argument that the Armenians were involved in insurrectionary activity that necessitated a counter -
insurgency response from the Young Turk government. See,: Edward J. Erickson, Ottomans and
Armenians: A Study in Counterinsurgency (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and M. Hakan
Yavuz, “Orientalism, the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Genocide,” Middle East Criti que , XXIII (2014), 111 -
126.
3. See the pioneering work of Vahakn Dadrian, mostly importantly, The History of the Armenian
Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, RI: Berghahn
Books, 1995). For a critical review of D adrian’s The History of the Armenian Genocide , see Ronald
Grigor Suny, in Slavic Review , LV (Fall 1996), 676 -677.
4. Genocide with a capital “G” will be used in this article to refer to the Armenian Genocide of 1915,
while genocide with a lower case “g” refer s to the phenomenon more generally. This usage is
consistent with the now -conventional employment of Holocaust with a capital “H” to refer to the
genocide of the Jews by the Nazis.
5. M. Şükrü Hanıoğlu, A Brief History of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton : Princeton University Press,
2008), 128.
6. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey, A Modern History (London : I. B. Tauris, 1997), 83
7. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu , The Young Turks in Opposition (New York : Oxford University Press, 1995),
142.
8. Joost Jongerdan, “Elite Encounters of a Viol ent Kind: Milli İbrahim Paşa, Ziya Gökalp and Political
Struggle in Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20th Century,” in Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij (eds.),
Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir , 1870 -1915 (Boston : Brill, 2012), 61 -62. For a view that
emphasizes the repressive role that the Hamidiye played against Armenians, see Stephen Duguid,
"The Politics of Unity: Hamidian Policy in Eastern Anatolia," Middle Eastern Studies , IX (May
1973), 139 -155.
9. Janet Klein, “State, Tribe, Dynasty, and the Conte st over Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20 th Century,”
in Jongerden and Verheij (eds.), Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir , 152.
10. The words are those of the sultan as conveyed by Grand Vizier Said Pasha when he fled to the British
Embassy in December 1895 . Quoted in Stephan Astourian, “Testing World -Systems Theory, Cilicia
(1830s -1890s): Amrmenian -Turkish Polarization and the Ideology of Modern Ottoman History”
(Ph. D. diss. , University of California, 1996), 606.
11. For a particularly telling reading of Turki sh attitudes toward the giaour (unbeliever) and Armenians,
see Stepan Astourian’s analysis of Turkish proverbs in Astourian, “Testing World -Systems Theory,
Cilicia (1830s -1890s),” 409 -431.
12. On the development of the separate nationalisms of the peoples of t he Ottoman Empire, see Fatma
Muge Gocek, “Decline of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of Greek, Armenian, Turkish and
Arab nationalisms,” in Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East (Albany : State
University of New York Press, 2002), 15 -84.
13. Hanioğlu , The Young Turks in Opposition , 32.
14. Bedross Der Matossian shows in great detail how the public sphere of the empire was revived in the
heady months after July 1908 and contributed to the violence in Adana in 1909. “From Bloodless
Revolution to Bloody Counterrevolution: The Adana Massacres of 1909,” Genocide Studies and
Prevention , VI (Summer 2011), 152 -173.
15. On Grigor [Krikor] Zohrap, see A. S. Sharurian, Grigor Zohrapi Kianki ev Gortsutneutian
Taregrutiun (Echmiadzin : Mayr Atʻo r
̣ Surb Ējmiatsni Tparan, 1996 ).
16. Matthias Bj ørnlund , “Adana and Beyond: Revolution and Massacre in the Ottoman Empire Seen
Through Danish Eyes, 1908/9,” Haikazean Haiagitakan Handes , XXX (2010), 125.
228 | Juniata Voices
17. Raymond H. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: a Complete Histoy (New York : I.B. Tauris, 2011),
69; “Enver Pa şainın Gizli Mektuparı,” ed. Şukru Hanıoğlu, Cumhuriyet , October 9, 1989; cited in
Bozarslan, Les Courants de pens ée, I, 210, n. 815.
18. Kévorkian, Genocide , 152; Tanin , 1/14 November 1913; Tasfiri Efkiar , 12/25 and 13/26 November
1913.
19. Y. Doğan Çetınkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the
Working Classes in the Formation of Modern Turkey (London : I.B. Tauris, 2014), introduction, 7;
chapter 1, 13.
20. Cemal Kafadar, “The Question of Decline,” Harvard Middle East and Islamic Review, 4 (1997 -98):
30 -
21. Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide , 135.
22. Omer Seyfettin, Butun Eserleri (Ankara : Bilgi Yayinevi, 1970), passim .
23. Çetınkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement , chapter IV, 117; FO, 195/2458, File of
“Anti -Christian Boycott,” (former reference 306/3080), Enclosure No. 6 (account of the conversation
between Rahmi Bey, governor of Smyrna, and Dr. Naz ım Bey), 553.
24. Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State In Eastern Anatolia , 1913 -1950
(Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011), 45; Letter of May 8, 1913, from Enver Pasha to his wife,
cited in M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (ed.), Kendi Mektuplarında Enver Paşa (Istanbul: Der, 1989), 242.
25. Erik -Jan Z ürcher, “Macedonians in Anatolia: The Importance of the Macedonian Roots of the
Unionists for Their Policies in Anatolia after 1914,” Middle Eastern Studies 50 (2014): 960 -975.
26. Roderic H. Davison, “The Armenian Crisis, 1912 -1914,” American Historical Review , LIII (April
1948), 488 -490.
27. Mustafa Aksakal, “The Ottoman Empire ,” The Cambridge History of the First World War , ed. Jay
Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 464.
28. Ibid., 468; Erik J. Z ürcher estimates 325,000 directly killed in action and between 400,000 and
700,000 wounded. [ “The Ottoman Soldier in World War I,” in his The Young Turk Legacy and
Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atat ürk ’s Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 186]
29. Ibid., 478.
30. Yi ğit Akın, “The Ottoman Home Front during World War I: Everyday Politics, Society, and
Culture,” (Ph .D. diss. , Ohio State University, 2011 ), 245.
31. Mustafa Aksakal, “‘Holy War Made in Germany’? Ottom an Origions of the 1914 Juhad,” War in
History, 18 (2011) p. 12; Erik -Jan Zürcher, Griechisch -orthodoxe und muslimische Flüchtlinge und
Deportierte in Griechenland und der Türkei seit 1912,” in Klaus J. Bade et al ., (eds.), Enzykopädie
Migration in Europea Vom 17 Jahhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn : Ferdinand
Schöningh/Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 623 -627.
32. O. Arslan, “Les faits et les buts de guerre ottomans sur le front caucasien,” (Ph .D. diss., Montpellier
3, 2011 ), 175 -176. Aksakal claims that 80 -90 percent of Third Army was destroyed at Sarıkamış,
which was the “worst milit ary disaster in Ottoman history ” (Aksakal, “The Ottoman Empire,” 467) .
Some historians estimated that Enver’s army suffered 70,000 to 90,000 casualties.
33. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morg enthau’s Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Page, 1918),
336 -337.
34. J.P. Jonderden, “Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind: Milli Ibrahim Pasa Ziya Gökalp and Political
Struggle in Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20 th Century,” in Social Relations in Ottoman Diyar bekir,
1870 -1915 (Boston: Brill, 2012 ), 72.
35. David D. Laitin, “ Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” International
Organization , LIV (Autumn 2000) , 871.
36. On the variety of killers, see Michael Mann, The Dark -Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic
Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially chapter 2.
37. For interpretations of the Genocide that are compatible, though not identical, with my own analysis,
see, for example, the thoughtful essay by Stepan Astourian, “The Arm enian Genocide: An
229 | Juniata Voices
Interpretation, ” The History Teacher , XXIII (February 1990), 111 -160; Mann, The Dark Side of
Democracy ; Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State , 2 vols. (London: Tauris, 2005);
Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass K illing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
