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The Forgotten Genocide: Simms applauds this study of Turks' Attempt

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  • The Forgotten Genocide: Simms applauds this study of Turks' Attempt

    SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
    April 04, 2004, Sunday

    The forgotten genocide

    Brendan Simms applauds this study of the Ottoman Turks' attempts to
    wipe out the Armenians

    by Brendan Simms


    The Burning Tigris:
    A History of the
    Armenian Genocide by Peter Balakian
    Heinemann, pounds 18.99, 473 pp pounds 16.99 ( pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870
    155 7222

    THE MASS murder of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey was, as
    the Holocaust scholar Israel Charny put it, the "prototype" of
    20th-century genocide. In 1894, and again with even greater ferocity
    in 1915, the Turkish government engaged in a deliberate strategy of
    straightforward massacre, transplantation, death marches, and forced
    conversion to Islam.

    All this was well known at the time: the Armenian massacres regularly
    made the headlines in the British and American press. Indeed, as the
    Pulitzer Prize-winning study by Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell,
    reminded us recently, it was the Armenian massacres which prompted
    the Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin in the 1920s to start thinking
    about what kind of international legal safeguards could be put in
    place to prevent recurrence. Another, and even more terrible genocide
    later, Lemkin's quest resulted in the United Nations Genocide
    Convention of 1948.

    Peter Balakian's new book, The Burning Tigris, which made the New
    York Times best-seller lists last year, retells the story of the
    Armenian massacres in an accessible way. It is not for the
    faint-hearted. In places, the narrative becomes an almost unbearable
    catalogue of cruelties and killings. If the author seems to dwell on
    these, the reason lies in a revisionist campaign to minimise the
    scope of and intention behind the massacres, sponsored by some
    otherwise rather eminent historians.

    Whether or not the murder of the Armenians was comparable to the
    Holocaust against the Jews is a matter of genuine academic debate;
    but the broad outline of the killings themselves cannot be disputed.
    Even if we discount the testimony of the survivors themselves as
    biased, there are still the grim accounts of American observers, and
    of the horrified German officers seconded to the Ottomans. In any
    case, some senior Turkish figures, such as the Ottoman minister of
    the interior, Talaat Pasha, openly bragged about having "disposed of
    three-quarters of the Armenians".

    The Armenian genocide was driven by three mutually interlocking
    concerns on the part of the Turkish government. First, there was a
    profound suspicion of the Christian "otherness" of the Armenians in
    an overwhelmingly Muslim polity. The Armenians were not alone in this
    respect, of course; the Greeks occupied a similar position.

    Second, attempts to modernise the empire led to an emphasis on
    "Turkishness", rather than simply Islam, as a legitimating force.
    This only reinforced the exclusion of the Armenians. As Mr Balakian
    shows, Armenian converts to Islam were by no means safe: here the
    ethnic argument predominated.

    Third, and most important, there was the fear of Russian subversion.
    The Tsarist empire had been encroaching on the Ottomans in the
    Caucasus for some time and had been using the Armenians as a pawn in
    this great game; the second wave of attacks took place shortly after
    the Ottomans entered the First World War on the German side. In the
    minds of the Turkish leadership, therefore, the massacres were also
    something of a pre-emptive strike.

    The author pays particular attention to the American response to the
    genocide. It was, he notes, the first time that the public was
    exposed to this kind of man-made catastrophe. At the level of civil
    society, the response was overwhelming. Huge sums of money were
    donated for relief, and various committees were set up to raise
    awareness and put the Ottoman government under pressure. All this
    marked the beginning of a global human rights dimension in American
    politics.

    At governmental level, the reaction was rather different. Some State
    Department figures, such as the ambassador to Constantinople, Henry
    Morgenthau, played an important role in bringing the massacres to the
    attention of the outside world. But in general, the received wisdom
    within the administration was that Turkey was a sovereign state, and
    that no direct American interests were involved.

    Mr Balakian is perhaps a little too quick to judge here. It was all
    very well for ex-Presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt to call for
    American intervention, but there were severe practical difficulties
    involved. The kind of military instruments which rendered
    humanitarian interventions possible in the former Yugoslavia in the
    1990s, such as precision air strikes, were still in their infancy;
    and "Johnny Turk" had shown at Gallipoli that he was a much more
    formidable foe than the Bosnian Serbs.

    The Burning Tigris concludes with an epilogue on the memory of the
    Armenian genocide in recent years. It notes that the American
    government continues to defer to Turkish sensitivities on the issue.
    A Congressional Bill, the Armenian Genocide Resolution, designed to
    raise awareness of the massacres, was sabotaged by Clinton's White
    House as recently as the autumn of 2000 after furious Turkish
    lobbying.

    During the Cold War, when Turkey was a key pillar of NATO in the
    eastern Mediterranean, this made some sort of sense. Nor was it
    completely unreasonable to maintain this stance throughout the 1990s,
    when Turkey was a cornerstone of the containment of Saddam Hussein's
    Iraq. No longer: the refusal of the Turkish government to join the
    "coalition of the willing" in 2003 means that the moment may have
    arrived when the American government can finally confront Ankara with
    the truth.

    Brendan Simms's 'Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of
    Bosnia', is published in paperback by Penguin.
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