How Far Did the Armenian Genocide Extend? A New Book Examines that Question.

Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2019), 672 pp., $35.00.

ON AUGUST 22, 1939, just ten days before his forces invaded Poland, Adolf Hitler instructed his generals, “our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.” He recounted his orders “to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men women, and children of Polish derivation and language.” He concluded with the query, “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Modern historians, and many others, including governments, legislatures, and, of course, Armenians themselves, today do indeed speak of what is now termed “the Armenian genocide.” Numerous authors have documented Turkish atrocities during the First World War, to which the term generally refers. Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, both professors at Israel’s Ben Gurion University, go much further in The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924.

Morris and Ze’evi offer a history of the ethnic hatred in the Middle East that continues to be replayed to this very day. The players then are much the same as today: Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Christians, Yazidis and Jews. The authors’ work is filled with tales of the most horrifying brutality, though it focuses primarily on Muslim atrocities and on the virtual erasure of any Christian presence in Turkey.

Morris and Ze’evi argue that the Ottoman government, the Young Turks that effectively overthrew it in 1908 and maintained power throughout World War I, and the Nationalist government under Mustafa Kemal (later called Atatürk) that assumed power in 1921 all pursued a consistent policy of repression, and, indeed, planned extermination, of the three major Christian denominations—Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians—who made their homes and earned their livelihoods in territories under Turkish control. While the persecution and murder of as many as 1.5 million Armenians has received considerable attention over the past half century, that is not at all the case with respect to the other two ethnic groups, and to that extent the two authors provide an important contribution to the literature of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Middle East.

TO BUTTRESS their analysis, the authors draw upon a hoard of documents, with the notable exception of Turkish government files, which remain closed. Despite the absence of Turkish material, the story they tell is ghastly enough. Already in 1876, when Sultan Abdülhamid II attempted to crush the Bulgarian rebellion, William Ewart Gladstone, the four-time prime minister of Britain and no lover of the Ottomans, described the “Turkish race” as “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them.”

The Ottoman rulers had long turned a blind eye to persecution and exploitation of Armenians, whether they were rich or poor. This was especially so in eastern Anatolia, where hundreds of thousands of Armenians had lived for centuries. It was not only local Turkish officials who taxed and then re-taxed the Armenians, especially the Armenian peasantry. Nomadic Kurdish tribes constantly swooped down on Armenian villages, terrorizing the population with murder, robbery and rapine. Of course, the Kurds also taxed the Armenians, as did, to a lesser extent, the Circassians.

Kurdish and Circassian exploitation of the Armenians was at times openly supported by the government in Constantinople. When peasants failed to pay off their mounting debts, their properties were foreclosed and handed over to Kurds and Circassians “who, being Muslim, were considered more loyal to the state.” Moreover, the Kurds underwent a religious awakening in the 1870s, inspired by government-supported clerics. Their growing fanaticism justified, at least in their minds, their persecution of Christians—as if they really needed justification at all.

In 1877, the Russians, using the treatment of Bulgarians as a pretext, crossed into Ottoman territory, invaded eastern Anatolia, occupied eastern Thrace (home to thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians) and threatened Constantinople. When hostilities came to an end—thanks to pressure from Britain and Germany—the Ottomans lost much of the Balkans; the Bulgarians became an autonomous principality; and the Russians ensconced themselves in eastern Anatolia, home to hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Many Armenians wished the Russian presence to remain permanent. Indeed, Morris and Ze’evi note that the Armenian exilarch, the head of the Armenian Church, secretly asked the tsar “to hold on to parts of Armenia captured in the war.”

Not surprisingly, the Ottomans viewed the Armenians as a Russian fifth column, and redoubled their support of Kurdish and Circassian predations, as well as those of their Turkish officials and ordinary peasants. Armenian notables were imprisoned and tortured on flimsy allegations of rebellion. They would then be released upon the payment of huge ransoms—a practice that Christian rulers of Europe had liberally employed throughout the Middle Ages against Jewish leaders and their communities.

Exploitation gave way to outright massacres beginning in 1894 and continued for the next two years. Once again, it was primarily the Kurdish tribes, with government connivance, that carried out the beatings and the killings, committed brutal rapes, and carried off young women and children to convert them to Islam and treat them as slaves or concubines, and at times, marry them.

Though some Armenians resisted what at times was literally butchery, they committed their own atrocities as well. In one case, Armenian men and women from the town of Zeytun, upon hearing of massacres of Armenians elsewhere, “killed dozens of Turkish prisoners and burnt a handful of Muslim villages” before Turkish troops overwhelmed them. The Armenians tended to be poorly armed, primarily making use of ancient rifles and the like. But that did not stop the Zeytunlis, who continued to harass Turks whenever they had the opportunity, and murdered them “with hatchets, butchers’ knives and pickaxes.”

Stories of Armenian outrages, which at times were accurate but often exaggerated, and protests against the burdens of taxation only further angered the Ottomans. Protests and resistance meant flouting Sharia law, which relegated non-Muslims to, at best, dhimmi status. That the Armenians appealed to the European great powers for succor only intensified Ottoman anger. The result was yet more atrocities committed by Muslims of all stripes.

BY THE end of 1896, when most of the violence had subsided, thanks to Western pressure on the central government, more than 100,000 Armenians had been murdered. At least a similar number, and perhaps as many as 200,000, died “of causes related to the massacres.” Over six hundred churches and monasteries had been destroyed. Over three hundred churches had been converted into mosques. About five hundred villages had been forcefully converted to Islam. The worst was still to come.

The Armenians began to organize themselves in the 1890s, developing a truly national identity that clearly conflicted with Ottoman dominance. Moreover, there were groups that armed themselves and preached Armenian independence. However small these groups were, any resistance to Ottoman pressure, and certainly the killing of police or officials, begot even more violence on the part of both the government and the Muslim citizenry.

Western European pressure on the Ottomans may have led to an abatement of the massacres by the latter part of the 1890s, but Muslim hostility was rarely far from the surface. Rape, kidnapping, murder, and the burning and seizure of Christian, primarily Armenian, homes and lands never really ceased.

When the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), better known as the “Young Turks,” seized power in 1908, it stressed the primacy of what it saw as the Turkish “race.” Morris and Ze’evi add that the CUP was in essence Islamist. Indeed, they assert that even if Islam was not in the forefront of their assault on Christians, it was always in the background, motivating even Turks who nominally were more “moderate” in religious matters.

The Young Turks, led by Mehmed Talat and Ismail Enver, initially pursued a policy similar to that of Abdülhamid—namely, “to de-Christianize the empire.” Morris and Ze’evi add, however, that

[w]hereas Abdülhamid used winks, nods, and informal allies among eastern Anatolia’s Muslim tribes to carry out his campaign of massacre, the CUP adopted a more systematic approach, issuing direct orders, overseeing the process, and tallying up the results with bureaucratic precision.

It employed its secret police, the Special Organization, to do its dirty work. This accelerated beginning in May 1915, when the mass murders of Armenians began in earnest.

Once Turkey entered World War I in October 1914, they faced a Russian invasion that included two battalions of Armenian volunteers. In the eyes of Constantinople, there could be no better proof that the Armenians were the enemy within. When Turkish forces suffered from setbacks on the battlefield, the government naturally blamed those outcomes on Armenian treachery—even if the Russians showed no mercy to captured Armenians serving in the Ottoman army. Having already been inclined to drive the Armenians out of all Turkish held territory, it did not take much for the CUP to unleash what Morris, Ze’evi and many others, including governments, identify as nothing less than genocide.

Morris and Ze’evi offer report after report from missionaries, diplomats and even Turkish officials of atrocities that foreshadowed the Holocaust and followed a common pattern in town after town and village after village. Initially, Muslims boycotted Armenian shops and businesses. Then Armenian leaders were arrested and killed. Then Armenians were forcibly removed from their villages, forced to vacate their homes and sell their possessions at rock bottom prices. They were then packed into cattle cars, and/or forced to march inland into Anatolia—a distance of hundreds of miles with nothing but the rags on their backs. They were robbed of all their remaining possessions. They were unable to obtain more than scraps of food and were ravaged by disease. They were forced into pits, killed in large groups and buried in unmarked mass graves. Some were beheaded. Others had limbs or ears chopped off, or their eyes gouged out. They were attacked all along their forced marches by Turkish, Kurdish and other predators, including numerous criminals that the government had freed. Men over the age of fifteen were singled out for labor camps, where most of them perished. More generally, as in the massacres of the 1890s, but only more so and with a degree of better organization, the Turks and their Muslim accessories killed males, raped females, and kidnapped women and children, branding them and forcing many to convert—even killing some who converted on the grounds that their conversion was not “sincere.”

Meanwhile, the government engaged in a massive cover up. It expelled missionaries and others who provided eyewitness reports of the massacres. It did its utmost to prevent Western diplomats and officials from visiting eastern Anatolia. It formally denied that any such organized massacres were taking place, instead pointing to the “fog of war” that led to the “unfortunate” death of many Christians. It ordered its officials to bury all corpses so that there would be no evidence of mass murders. Finally, it challenged the scale of the massacres, arguing that the numbers being reported were grossly exaggerated.

The Armenians fought back. They ambushed gendarmes, killed Muslim neighbors, and, when they had arms and ammunition, fought back against Turks and Kurds alike. They too committed atrocities. Being both outgunned and outnumbered, however, their resistance proved futile, and only led to more Turkish and Kurdish atrocities inflicted not only on the Armenian fighters, but on the aged, the weak and the young.

THE ALLIED victory in World War I, which initially resulted in the partition of Turkey and occupation by French, British and Italian forces, brought a temporary end to the massacres. Indeed, Turkey was forced to accept the repatriation of tens of thousands of Armenians and other Christians who had escaped to Syria and present-day Iraq. In addition, the Western victors, especially the British, successfully recovered thousands of women and children who had been taken into Muslim homes and forcibly converted.

Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, however, the Turks slowly but surely regained much of Asia Minor as first the Italians, then the British and finally the French withdrew their forces. As the Western armies withdrew, the effort to rid Turkey of Christians once and for all moved into high gear. The Armenians remained the primary target, especially as they were seen to be allied to the fledgling Armenian republic on Turkey’s northern border.

Kemal, who is considered the father of modern secular Turkey, nevertheless, like his predecessors, sought to Islamize Turkey once and for all by expelling all Christians, regardless of denomination. Armenians no longer were the only victims of Turkish iniquities, however. Greek Orthodox Christians, who in prior years generally had avoided much of the brutality meted out to the Armenians, now began to suffer a similar fate, especially when Greek forces occupied Smyrna (now Izmir), parts of the Turkish coastline, and when Greek Christians attempted to create the so-called Republic of Pontus along the southern shore of the Black Sea. The smaller Assyrian Christian community had neither Western backing, nor particularly nationalist aspirations, yet it too suffered from Turkish and Kurdish atrocities in the immediate aftermath of the Great War.

Kemal launched what Christian missionaries still living and working in Turkey called a “white massacre,” whose objective was to “impoverish and dishearten the survivors of the wartime genocide by boycotting their businesses in the towns and preventing them from farming in the countryside.” Like the Ottomans and the CUP, Kemal attempted to dismiss all claims of violence or discrimination against the Christian minorities. Yet, again like his predecessors, Kemal was not averse to the large-scale murder of the Christian minorities, especially as it was the most effective way to spur mass migration out of Turkey. That some Armenians did commit outrages of their own only encouraged Kemal, as it had his predecessors, to accelerate his efforts to rid the country of them. Similarly, massacres perpetrated by invading Greek forces, and by some Greek Christians who either joined or supported them, likewise spurred Kemal to deport them as quickly as he possibly could.

Hundreds of thousands of Greek Christians whose families had lived in western Anatolia for centuries if not millennia—well before the Turks arrived there—were hounded out of their homes and sent on forced marches inland unless they could manage to emigrate, primarily to Greece. Indeed, about a million Greek Christians found their way into Greece, especially when, in an annex to the Treaty of Lausanne, Greece and Turkey reached a population exchange agreement in 1923. By 1924, thirty years after the Ottomans had launched their first set of major massacres of Armenians, Anatolia had been emptied of its Christians.

It was not the last of what the authors term “pogroms,” however. Another took place in 1955, when the Turks expelled thousands of residents who held Greek passports. Constantinople, now dubbed Istanbul, was once a major Greek city. Now, it has but 2,000 Greek residents.

THERE CAN be little doubt that Turkish governments, whether Ottoman or nationalist, successfully pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing and were consistently guilty of tolerating, indeed instigating, organizing and often perpetrating crimes against humanity—that is, against individuals, as that term was employed at the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazi war criminals. Whether Morris and Ze’evi are correct in pronouncing the actions of the Ottomans, the Young Turks and Kemal as genocide is, however, a more complicated matter. Genocide is a highly charged term, and, as applied by the Polish-born Cambridge scholar Raphäel Lemkin to the destruction of European Jewry, refers to crimes specifically targeted at groups, rather than individuals per se. The term is now at times employed as a political sledgehammer by rival ethnic or religious groups.

On the one hand, institutions such as the Council of Europe and the European Parliament have determined that what happened in Turkey between 1915 and 1924 was indeed a genocide. In addition, the European Court of Human Rights has gone so far as to rule that “Turkey could not criminalize references to the Armenian killings as ‘genocide.’” In 2011, the French National Assembly and the Senate went even further, passing legislation to penalize denial of the Armenian Genocide. (For its part, the U.S. Congress, unlike the French Parliament, has been unable to pass a resolution on the Armenian genocide. The furthest such a resolution has progressed is through the House Foreign Affairs Committee, never to reach the floor of the House.)

On the other hand, if “genocide” is meant as the deliberate extermination of a particular group—ethnic, religious or racial—as Lemkin defined it, then the evidence that Morris and Ze’evi present does not necessarily justify the application of that term to what was inflicted upon Christians living within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire and then what became modern Turkey.

To begin with, there does not appear to have been a deliberate government policy literally to exterminate Christians, as was the case with the Nazi Final Solution, or for that matter, the 1994 Hutu slaughter of Rwanda’s Tutsis. However ruthless they might have been, the Young Turks’ policy and actual practice initially provided for Christians to live in Muslim towns as long they constituted a minority of five percent or less. In addition, while some Armenians and other Christians who converted to Islam were murdered on the grounds that their conversions were insincere, the vast majority of converts, who were overwhelmingly women and children, were integrated into their Muslim families. The government in Constantinople actually convicted and hanged a number of officers who committed the most egregious crimes against Armenians. While this was certainly not common practice, the fact that some officers were tried at all, and then convicted and executed, clearly differentiates Turkish behavior from that of the Nazis, who rewarded those who went the extra mile to kill Jews.

Morris and Ze’evi appear to downplay the fact that, on numerous occasions, Armenians and Greeks both committed their own crimes against Turks and Kurds when they had the opportunity to do so. While they do not gloss over them, Morris and Ze’evi tend to go into far less gruesome detail in discussing these atrocities, mostly providing general statements rather than relating detailed eyewitness accounts, as they do when discussing the sanguinary acts committed by Turks and their allies. Many of these accounts were supplied by Christian missionaries, whose testimony the authors consistently accept at face value, but which may well have reflected a natural bias against a powerful rival religion. On the other hand, the authors invariably dismiss Turkish assertions of Christian atrocities as exaggerations. And they discount the views and reports of officials who concurred with those reports, such as Mark Bristol, the U.S. High Commissioner in Turkey from 1919–1927 as simply being anti-Greek or pro-Turkish. Needless to say, Christian reprisals against Muslims prompted a severe backlash; yet even then government policy under both the cup and Kemal was to cleanse Anatolia of Christians but not necessarily do so by exterminating them.

Finally, whereas the Nazis transported Jews to death camps in Eastern Europe, notably Poland, the Turks—though less so the Kurds—often transported Armenians simply to expel them from their lands. The authors offer little evidence of Turkish attempts to murder Christians once they resided outside Turkish territory.

It is noteworthy that, until the latter part of World War I and then its immediate aftermath, when Greece invaded Turkey, the Turks perpetrated far fewer outrages against Greek Christians, even as the Armenians were being systematically massacred. The authors wish to treat the persecution and killing of all Christians as genocide. Yet if the term is to be applied at all, it is to what was inflicted upon the Armenians. Indeed, in a recently discovered 1949 television interview, Lemkin himself spoke only of the Armenian genocide, rather than the “Christian genocide.” It is not at all clear that the Turks intended to commit genocide against the Greeks, or, for that matter, the Assyrians, whom they also expelled. Mass murders, certainly. Crimes against humanity, for sure. But genocide, as Scottish jurisprudence would put it, is “not proven.”

Morris and Ze’evi emphasize that underlying Turkish behavior was Islamic resentment of Armenian material success and national ambitions; the Christians no longer “knew their place” and had to be put down. Yet there was another dhimmi community that survived the killings virtually untouched: the Jews of the Ottoman Empire. The authors note that, on occasion, Jews were also expelled from their homes. In general, however, Jews were not attacked and, in at least one case, Jewish homes were marked as such so that mobs would refrain from invading them.

 If, as Morris and Ze’evi assert, Islamism underlay much of what was inflicted upon Christians, the Jews, too, should have been victims. Unlike the Greeks, who could look for assistance to the government in Athens and to the Western great powers, or the Armenians, who sought Russia’s protection—whether they received it is another matter—the Jews had virtually no one to turn to for help, apart from perhaps their co-religionists in the West. Moreover, many Jews had prospered under the Ottomans, surely a source of Muslim envy. Indeed, one Joseph Nasi became so close to the Sultans Suleiman I and Selim II that he was actually ennobled as the Duke of Naxos and Count of Andros. The Jews should have been as much the targets of persecution as the Christians, yet the authors never explain why that was not the case, if Islam was as important a factor as they assert it to have been.

Nor is this all. The authors mention neither the Vatican nor the pope throughout the entire volume. One wonders why the leader of the world’s Catholics said nothing about the Turkish atrocities. After all, a small percentage of Armenians were Catholics who accepted papal primacy. Surely the authors might have commented on the Vatican’s silence, which foreshadowed Rome’s seeming indifference to the plight of European Jewry after Hitler rose to power in 1933. Not until November 2000 did Pope John Paul II issue a joint statement with Karekin II, the leader of the Armenian Catholics, which explicitly referred to the Armenian genocide. In so doing, John Paul II became the first pope to employ the term; Pope Francis followed with a similar reference in 2015. Both statements were met with anger by Turkish authorities who not only continue to deny that any such thing took place but also to criminalize references to genocide, as they did in 2006 when they prosecuted the noted novelist Elif Shazam for having one of her characters do so in her acclaimed novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.

Morris and Ze’evi also fail to appreciate the irony that the Kurds, who in the past several decades have been the victims of Turkish efforts to eradicate their identity, were the government’s willing executioners. How was it that the Turks turned on their Kurdish allies? Surely it was not a matter of Islamism, as Kurds are Sunni Muslims just as the Turks are. More likely it was simply the next phase of Turkish nationalism; having eradicated the Christians either through murder or expulsion, the next major target was the Kurds, whom the government designated as “Mountain Turks” as late as 1991. If that indeed is the case, one must ask why Morris and Ze’evi focus so heavily on the Islamic roots of the persecution of Christians.

Perhaps Morris and Ze’evi have an additional agenda, which obliquely surfaces in their concluding chapter. Even as they compare and contrast Turkish treatment of Christians with Nazi treatment of Jews, they also reference the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And in this regard, Morris’ changing perspective on that conflict must be taken into account. Morris initially acquired an international reputation and considerable notoriety as one of Israel’s leading revisionist historians, who argued that, during Israel’s War of Independence, there was a deliberate effort to expel Arabs from Israeli territory. Subsequent to the failure of the Camp David negotiations he took a much harder line against the Palestinians, concluding that the Palestinians would never accept a two-state solution and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is but one aspect of what Samuel Huntington termed “the clash of civilizations.”

MORRIS AND Ze’evi observe that “the de-Christianization, demographically speaking, of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine” is “nearing completion.” They argue that “[t]hese may be the final stages of the Arab and Turkish ‘awakenings.’” As an example, they note that “Bethlehem, once an overwhelmingly Christian town, is now majority Muslim.” Indeed, Christians have been victimized by radical Muslims in a wide range of countries including Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and Indonesia. Their rights are also severely restricted in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, other Arab states, such as Bahrain and Jordan, permit Christian worship and have not been the scene of widespread murder of Christians or attacks on their churches.

Morris, therefore, may have been overstating his case when, in the context of his reevaluation of the Palestinians after 2000, he asserted that

there is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien...Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions.

Might not what appears to be Morris’ apparent antipathy toward Islam have colored the approach that he and his co-author took to detailing Turkish persecution of Christians?

Ze’evi and he certainly provide an exhaustive account of Turkish policies towards Christians from the waning years of the Ottoman Caliphate through the first decade of Atatürk’s rule. Despite its title, however, their work does not conclusively prove that the successive Turkish government deliberately pursued a policy of genocide against all Christians living in Anatolia either before, during or after the First World War. Christians other than Armenians were certainly victims not only of ethnic cleansing but also of crimes against humanity. But successive Turkish governments did not seek to eradicate either Greeks or Assyrians simply because they were members of a distinct group. On the other hand, that was precisely the objective of the crimes that the Turks perpetrated on the Armenians, and the book certainly puts paid any lingering Turkish claims that what took place against these unfortunate victims, especially in 1915–16, was anything other than a genocide. When Hitler referred to the “annihilation of the Armenians,” he knew exactly what he was talking about.

Dov S. Zakheim was an Under Secretary of Defense (2001–2004) and a Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (1985–1987). He is Vice Chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.