Review of Rouben Adalian’s Paper on Comparative Treatment of Ottoman Armenians and Greeks
Rouben Paul Adalian, “Comparative policy and differential practice in the treatment of minorities in wartime: the United States archival evidence on the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire”, Journal of Genocide Research (2001), 3(1), pp. 31–48.
Rouben Paul Adalian’s eighteen-page paper, “Comparative policy and differential practice in the treatment of minorities in wartime: the United States archival evidence on the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire”, is a definitive example of a text which serves to deny the 1914-1923 Greek Genocide and elevate the suffering of Ottoman Armenians through establishing a hierarchy of victims in which only the fate of Ottoman Armenians can be considered of genocidal quality.
By his own admission, Adalian’s study is a “very limited survey” which is “restricted to a set of documents covering only four months of the spring and summer of 1914” but, regardless of the study’s limitations, Adalian has no qualms about constructing a clear divide between the overall Armenian and Greek experiences right from the very outset: “destruction of the Armenian population” but merely “expulsion of the Greek population of Anatolia.” Moreover, and rather peculiarly, this comparative study examines a select number of atrocities perpetrated against Greeks in 1914 – e.g. massacres of Greeks at Phokia and Englezionisi – against the entirety of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. What prompted Adalian to make this asynchronous and disproportionate comparison is unclear and unfortunately no reasonable justification is provided in the text but, to his credit, Adalian does acknowledge that: “In virtually all its characteristics, the methods employed in inciting and carrying out massacres against the Greeks were consistent with the examples of atrocities against the Armenians” and supports this statement by listing a number of examples of methods and practices employed in both cases.
However, this is promptly discounted when Adalian claims that “in looking at the variances in Ottoman policy toward the Armenians and Greeks, a set of political factors favorable to the Greeks have to be taken into account.” He goes on to list five such factors which he perceives undermine the Greek Genocide thesis but simultaneously strengthen his hypothesis that Armenians suffered more severely. Unfortunately, each of these points has been cited with no qualification and once analyzed amount to nothing more than fallacious reasoning. This is only made worse by the absence of further elaboration in most of the cases. We will briefly examine two of the five factors to illustrate the nonexistence of any legitimacy.
The first of the five factors is given as simply “a state representing the Greeks was in existence” but later in the text he actually expands upon on what this means from a comparative perspective:
“Unlike the Greeks, the Armenians had no state with an army and government. A wide-scale campaign against them would not draw a serious reaction. There was no risk of immediate intervention by a neighboring country.”
The implication being that through the existence of the Hellenic Republic, or the state of Greece, Ottoman Greek suffering was somehow alleviated, unlike in the case of the Armenians who were a stateless minority without the protection of co-ethnic state. With this statement Adalian illustrates his unfamiliarity with Ottoman Greek history and the broader context of regional state policies during the genocide period. In actual fact, the Hellenic Republic was a completely foreign state to the ethnic Greek minority of the Ottoman Empire in terms of citizenship, way of life and, in many cases, even language. Moreover, the Hellenic Republic did not adopt a steadfast protector-state role in response to the suffering of the Ottoman Greeks. In a 1918 article written by a British correspondent of The London Morning Post in Constantinople we read:
“... King Constantine [of Greece] impeded every possible movement for the amelioration of the lot of that unfortunate race [Greeks of Turkey]. Reports sent to the Government by dignitaries of the Orthodox Church in Asia Minor were suppressed. Numberless documents dealing with these massacres were stolen from the [Hellenic] Government archives and destroyed. On one occasion the Bishop of Pera traveled from Constantinople to Athens for the purpose of imploring the King to protest more energetically. He was not received by the King but by Queen Sophia, who cut the conversation short with the words: 'Return immediately to Constantinople. The will of the King is that you live on good terms with the Turks'.”
Another factor given is: “the Greek state had engaged in hostilities against the Ottoman Empire.” This is an awfully slippery slope so far as Armenians are concerned since the “hostilities” argument presented here embodies many of the same ideas that genocide revisionists use in their attempt to counter Armenian Genocide allegations. Revisionists often cite supposed hostile acts perpetrated by Armenians – e.g. rebellions, revolts, Armenian volunteer units in Russian Army, attempts to establish an Armenian state on Ottoman territory, amongst others – in order to undermine the credibility of the Armenian Genocide thesis and now Rouben Adalian is doing exactly the same but with the Greeks. It should be noted that the principal hostile act of Greece towards the Ottoman Empire was their May 1919 Allied-sanctioned occupation of the Province of Smyrna by which time several hundred thousand Greeks had already died through massacres and forced deportations by means of a genocidal program that had commenced in 1914, five years earlier.
Adalian later writes “The procedures undertaken to remove the Armenian population from their homes followed a completely different pattern [than that taken to remove the Greek population]” exhibiting a remarkably poor understanding of the practices employed against both the Ottoman Greeks and the Ottoman Armenians. He continues, “In the campaign against the Armenians, an economic boycott was not necessary.” This is incorrect or at least misleading and incomplete. It is a well known fact that in early 1914 an economic boycott was launched against the Armenians – just as one was launched against the Greeks in the same year which according to Armenian sources proved again to be against the Armenians as well.
Adalian continues, “Inducement to flight was not necessary either. Instead a systematic deportation was organized” implying Greeks were not subject to such measures. In fact, archival evidence consistently documents that hundreds of thousands of Greeks were subject to forced deportation en masse and that they were the first victims of such a program. Even in the memoirs of Henry Morgenthau, United States Ambassador to Turkey, whose writings Adalian routinely cites in the paper, it is affirmed that between 200,000 and 1,000,000 Ottoman Greeks were deported on foot into the Anatolian Interior. In a telegram to the Secretary of State regarding Ottoman Greek deportations conducted in 1915 the United States ambassador to Turkey reports: "Evidently Turkish nationalistic policy is aimed at all Christians and not confined to Armenians."
Perhaps the most explicit piece of genocide denial in the whole article is this simple passage:
“The Greeks were exchanged. The Armenians were disposed. That is the difference that makes a genocide.”
With these three short sentences, Adalian effectively disposes of almost an entire decade of Ottoman history in which Greeks were subjected to massacres and forced deportations involving death marches and instead would have his readers believe that the Greek suffering only really began with an exchange of populations – an act of historical revisionism if ever there was one. He seems blissfully unaware that the 1923 population exchange convention between Greece and Turkey was in practice not between “Greeks and Turks” but “Christians and Muslims” and that Armenians, as Christians, were also transferred from Turkey to Greece by means of this convention. Does this now disqualify the Armenian Genocide since some Armenians were exchanged and survived and not disposed of? He also seems unaware that prior to the Genocide, there were at the very least 2.5 million Greeks living in Ottoman territory and that of these only 1,104,216 were ever recorded as having reached Greece and a far smaller number as ever having been “exchanged”. As might be expected, Adalian fails to provide an explanation for what happened to the unaccounted others. There are also other implications pertaining to Adalian’s apparently limited conceptual understanding of genocide and “what makes a genocide”; in particular, that a systematic program of physical annihilation perpetrated against a group in part does not undermine its genocidal quality – this, of course, applies in the case of both the Ottoman Armenians and Greeks and also in earlier and later examples of Twentieth Century genocides. Given that Adalian has restricted his study to a period of four months in 1914 and has only drawn on a limited number of documents from one principal source, it is awfully bold of Adalian to make such sweeping statements about the entire genocidal period, which spanned a decade from 1914 to 1923.
Towards the end of his text Adalian refers to an assertion made by Hassiotis – a Greek historian who has written extensively on the Armenian Genocide – in his paper “The Armenian Genocide and the Greeks: response and records (1915–1923)”. Hassiotis’ paper contains many interesting parallels between the Armenian and Greek experiences and relevant material to the comparative nature of Adalian’s paper. To give but a few excerpts from Hassiotis’ work “The Armenian Genocide and the Greeks”:
“The calamitous consequences of Turkish chauvinism, especially in the early part of the twentieth century, formed the unvarying common denominator between the Greeks and Armenians. The almost identical fates of the two ethnic elements in Asia Minor drew them together. The similarities were evident in their peaceful and productive activities, as well as in their pursuit of national aspirations, just as they were in the parallel course of their vicissitudes and ultimate elimination.”
“It is strange that both Greek and Armenian historians should have treated the first persecutions of the Greeks in 1913-1914 and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 as two separate phenomena. … the fact that the first persecutions of the Greeks, which were perpetrated in Eastern Thrace and western Asia Minor, did not spread either to Constantinople or to Smyrna and finally came to an end in the vilayet of Aidin, but continued in the interior of Anatolia, ought perhaps to be linked with the same selective tactics that were employed against the Armenian inhabitants of these areas during the genocide. Moreover, the strategy of deporting the women and children to the interior and … to the inhospitable eastern and south-eastern provinces of the empire was significantly similar in both cases. … Moreover, both Armenian and Greek men who were fit to fight were conscripted into the notorious ‘labor battalions’ (amele taburu) at more or less the same time, the purpose being the biological annihilation of both elements.”
“The notion that there was a twofold plan to exterminate both the Greeks and the Armenians was widespread throughout the period of persecution and the First World War. I have no evidence as to how the Greek pogroms of 1913-14 in Ionia were presented to the Armenians, but the Greek diplomatic reports from the time of the Armenian Genocide frequently make no distinction between the persecutions of the one or the other element. Besides, the persecutions were carried out almost simultaneously and sometimes were completely coordinated.”
Adalian ignored this material despite its particular relevance to the subject at hand. The question is why? Perhaps because it did not agree with the myopic discourse Adalian was attempting to formulate and ignoring it was easier than attempting to challenge it. It seems clear that in the writing of his paper Adalian was not interested in establishing an accurate or fair assessment of the key similarities and differences in the experiences of Ottoman Armenians and Greeks but had a specific agenda to pursue – to demonstrate that Armenian suffering far outweighed that of the Greeks and, moreover, that only the Armenian experience was genocidal in nature – and this may well be why such works were of little interest to him. Nevertheless, one would have expected a responsible scholar to have attached at least some significance to the Hassiotis paper, especially since it is one of the only texts that examines the Greek and Armenian genocides from a comparative perspective and as such makes an important point of reference for any follow-up study.
Although commenting on Adalian’s motives amounts to mere speculation, there are a number of things we can take for granted. First, he has avoided referring or challenging works of contrasting points of view. Second, the paper, as a whole, is replete with inaccuracies and sophistries. Third, he has failed to adhere to accepted standards of scholarship. The text is a definitive example of genocide denial literature and should be classed alongside the revisionist works of Justin McCarthy, Stanford Shaw, David Irving et al.
Source: Compiled for Greek-Genocide.org, 21 June 2008