Armenian Genocide

Armenians and Greeks protesting for genocide recognition, Athens, 1980s

Background

The Armenian Genocide (Greek: η Γενοκτονία των Αρμενίων, Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı) is a term which refers to the systematic state-organized policy of physical annihilation perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, against its indigenous Armenian civilian population between 1915 and 1923. It is believed that more than one million Armenians died as a result of massacres and forced deportations involving death marches. In the same period, Turkey's Aramaean/Assyrian minority were subject to genocide and as a consequence several hundred thousand of them perished also. The International Association of Genocide Scholars recognizes the Armenian Genocide, along with the Greek and Aramaean/Assyrian Genocides.

According to Henry Morgenthau, United States ambassador to Turkey, the Turks' "success in deporting in May and June of 1914 about 100-150,000 Greeks without any of the big nations, then still at peace with them, seriously objecting thereto, led them to the conclusion that now, while four of the great Powers were fighting them and had unsuccessfully attempted to enter their country, and the two other Great Powers were their Allies, it was a great opportunity for them to put into effect their long cherished plan of exterminating the Armenian race and thus finish once for all the question of Armenian Reforms which has so often been the cause of European intervention in Turkish affairs."

Armenian Genocide Misconceptions

In this section, we will briefly examine two misconceptions associated with the Armenian Genocide. The first is the representation of Armenians as the sole victims of Turkey's genocidal program. The second is an examination of "The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century" rhetoric as frequently attached to the Armenian Genocide. This text in no way serves to undermine the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide and the sufferings of the Armenian people but highlights exclusivity in certain forums and mediums.

(1) "... Sole Victims ..."

Armenians are sometimes identified as the only victims of Ottoman Turkey's genocidal campaign and although much attention is centred about the fate of Ottoman Armenians it is important to understand that Greeks, as well as Aramaeans/Assyrians and other groups, suffered an equally tragic fate.

In their paper Late Ottoman genocides (2008), Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer assert that the fate of none of these groups "be they Christian as the Armenians, Assyrians or Greek, or be they Muslim as the Kurds, can be treated in isolation." They go on to affirm that "The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious" but also pointed to the suffering of the Kurds: "... the Young Turkish leaders aimed at eliminating Kurdish identity by deporting them from their ancestral land and by dispersing them in small groups. The Young Turks partially implemented these plans during World War I: up to 700,000 Kurds were forcibly removed; half of the displaced perished."

Archival evidence also systematically affirms that the character of Turkey's genocidal campaign was not restricted to Armenians. For example, Sir George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, London, wrote:

"The accounts of these deportations received from Greek and other survivors are as ghastly as any of the accounts of the Armenian atrocities during or after the war."

Such assertions are repeated in numerous other documents. For instance, Stanley E. Hopkins, an American relief worker who travelled extensively throughout Turkey, reported:

"These ... conditions and incidents ... seem to indicate that the Greeks of Anatolia are suffering the same or a worse fate than did the Armenians in the massacres of the Great War.

While in 1915, Johannes Lepsius, a Germany missionary, wrote:

“The anti-Greek and the anti-Armenian persecution are two phases of one and the same program, the extermination of the Christian element in Turkey.”

In certain cases, the genocidal character of the Ottoman Greek plight, if not ignored, is subject to demotion by individuals pursuing a myopic or biased narrative of late Ottoman history. Through false or flawed logic it has been argued that the Armenians were the 'real' victims, while other groups suffered only marginally. For instance, Rouben Paul Adalian argues that since "Unlike the Greeks, the Armenians had no state with an army and government. ... There was no risk of immediate intervention by a neighboring country" and so the Armenians were worse off. Adalian is not alone in citing this view. This rhetoric is repeated by Rudolph J. Rummel, "Unlike the Greeks, the Armenians had no independent, co-ethnic nation that guarded their welfare". This argument illustrates how readily some grasp onto fallacious reasoning in order to promote one cause over another. In fact, the truth is that the state of Greece did not adopt a continuous protector-state role in response to the suffering of Ottoman Greeks. To excerpt from a 1918 article written by a British correspondent in Constantinople:

"... 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 [Greek] 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'. "

Some Pontic Greek groups should be similarly critisized for their exclusion of Thracian and other Anatolia Greeks through the rhetoric of "Pontic Greek Genocide" or "Pontian Genocide" (See Pontus)

However, on the 93rd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, George Shirinian, Executive Director of the Zoryan Institute, rightly pointed out:

"... many genocidal acts ... have occurred during the past 100 years—starting with the Hereros in Southwest Africa at the start of the 20th century, the Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks during and after World War I, the forced famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s, the Nazi destruction of the Jews, Roma, Poles and others during World War II, the Aché of Paraguay beginning in the 1960s, the people of Bangladesh in 1971, the Cambodians in 1975, the Maya of Guatemala from the 1960s, the Bosnians in 1991, the Kosovars and East Timorese in 1999, and, as we speak, the people of Darfur today. This is only a partial list of genocides in the past 100 years, a political act that has caused the death of over 60 million people around the world."

(2) "... The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century ..."

The 1915 Armenian Genocide is often refered to as the "first genocide of the twentieth century". However, the Armenian Genocide was by no means the first genocide of the Twentieth Century.

In 1904-1907 the Herero and Nama people of German Southwest Africa were subjected to genocide. In her book War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Prof. Doris L. Bergen writes:

"In what developed into an act of genocide, the Germans slaughtered more than fifty thousand Herero and ten thousand Nama. They shot many, especially adult men; hunted women, children, and old people into the desert, where they died of thirst and starvation; and forced others into concentration camps, where disease, inadequate food, and horrendous conditions took a terrible toll. In the end, between 75 and 80 percent of all Hereros died; among the Nama the death rate was over 45 percent."

In fact, even in the context of the genocidal campaign implemented against the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire, the genocide did not commence with the Armenians in 1915 but with the Greeks in 1914. Henry Morgenthau, United States ambassador to Turkey, Morgenathau refered to the Greeks as "the first victims" in his book "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story":

"The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians. Indeed the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea."

Prof. Isabel Hull in her book Absolute Destruction: Military Culture And the Practices of War in Imperial Germany writes:

"The Greeks of Thrace and western Anatolia were the first target. The Special Organization (armed irregulars used for guerrilla and terrorist warfare), assisted by government and army officials, deported all Greek men of military age to labor brigades beginning in summer 1914 and lasting through 1916."

Referring to the Armenian Genocide, Turkish historian and sociologist Taner Akcam writes in his A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility:

“The 1914 Greek deportations and massacres were a precursor of what was to come.”

Despite this, the fate of other groups, both those contemporaneous to the Armenian Genocide (e.g. the Greek and Aramaean/Assyrian genocides) and earlier genocides (e.g. Herero and Namaqua Genocide), are overlooked by referring to the Armenian Genocide as the First Genocide of the Twentieth Century. There have been a number of publications on the Armenian Genocide published under this title. For example, "The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century" (1968) by James Nazer. This label has even found home in numerous resolutions. Prof. Donald Bloxham says the term "is still widely used in campaigning by Armenian organizations and in some scholarly works, illustrating the tunnel vision often accompanying the pursuit of one cause in isolation from others."

Greek-Genocide.org

Greek Genocide 1914-23

Armenian Genocide

Armenian Genocide Misconceptions

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