In resolution 296, passed 405-11, the US House of Representatives has just voted to recognize the fate of Armenians as genocide, not just in 1915 but between 1915 and 1923. The resolution refers to the Ottoman Empire’s (alleged) killing of 1.5 million Armenians as well as a “campaign” of genocide against Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites “and other Christians.” It quotes the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018 and the remark Hitler is alleged to have made just before the invasion of Poland in 1939, “… who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
There are two central points to be made about this resolution. One, it is politically significant because of the damage it will do to Turkish-US relations and the negative flow-on effect for Turkey globally. Two, it is historically meaningless, as none of the people who voted for this resolution would have the slightest idea of what happened in late Ottoman history apart from what they have been told by the Armenian lobby. The complete exclusion of the Ottoman and Turkish versions of history stamps it as racist and true to the orientalist tradition. US congressmen and women apparently have a better grasp of this history than Turks do.
The resolution stretches the time frame of the ‘genocide’ from 1915 to 1923, conflating distinct periods of history for political purposes. The ‘relocation’ of the Armenians was ordered in May, 1915, and was called off in February 1916. The number of Armenians who died during this period or during the whole course of the war is disputed. Ottoman census figures showed an Ottoman Armenian population of 1.2 million in 1912. Allowing for undercounting, especially of women and children, the Armenian population in 1915 would have been about 1.5-6 million at most. As hundreds of thousands of Armenians fled into the Caucasus during the war, 1.5 million Armenians could not have died, at least not ‘Ottoman’ Armenians (which is clearly why the period of the ‘genocide’ has been stretched to 1923). Immediate postwar estimates on the Allied side put the Armenian death toll at 600-800,000, which is still a vast number. Other estimates, on the Ottoman or Turkish side, are much lower.
Furthermore, a vast number of Armenians died of exposure, disease and starvation, as did a vaster number of Muslims, given the fact that they constituted 80 percent or more of the population. Famine in Syria alone took the lives of about 400,000 people. The war was an epic tragedy for the entire civilian population, not just the Armenians and other Christians. The population of the empire dropped from over 18 million in 1914 to just over 14 million in 1918. Most of the dead were Muslim civilians, but for the US Congress, they clearly don’t count.
Many Armenians died in combat. More than 200,000 fought in the Russian army, with thousands of others enlisting in volunteer brigades. Behind the Ottoman lines, Armenian insurgents were massacring Muslims on a large scale even before the ‘relocation’ of the Armenian civilian population was ordered towards the end of May, 1915. The killing of civilians reached a peak during the 1916-18 Russian-Armenian occupation of northeastern Anatolia. As the records show, Armenians, as well as Turks and Kurds, were the perpetrators of extreme violence as well as its innocent victims.
As for 1918-23, the victorious powers sliced up the Ottoman Empire between themselves. Italy invaded from the Mediterranean coast; French forces, accompanied by an Armenian legion, invaded what is now southeastern Turkey; and in 1919 a Greek expeditionary army protected by allied warships landed at Izmir. In the three years before it was driven back to the coast, it committed the most appalling atrocities, described in detail by inter-allied commissions of inquiry, by British diplomats, by US military officers on the scene and by Arnold Toynbee when he traveled to the Aegean coast. He was forced to step down from his Greek-funded professorial chair at King’s College, London, as a result of the controversy that followed.
A faction of Ottoman Assyrians joined the allied war effort. Driven out of their homeland into northwestern Iran, fighters and civilians alike later fled south into Iraq, where they were housed in the Baquba refugee camp north of Baghdad. They expected a reward in the form of autonomy from the British for their wartime services but never got it. In 1933 they opened fire on Iraqi army forces along the Iraqi-Syrian border. In the 36-hour battle which followed, scores of Assyrians and more than 30 Iraqi soldiers were killed. The army retaliated by punitive raids against Simel and other villages in which hundreds of Assyrians were massacred.
In the Caucasus, Ottoman forces advanced on Baku after driving Armenian forces out of northeastern Anatolia. The scramble for territory and resources, particularly the oil of the Caspian Sea, involved Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Turks and British-led forces sent into the region as part of the ‘war of intervention’ against the Bolsheviks. In this period Armenian Christians and Muslim Azerbaijanis slaughtered each other, especially in the struggle for Baku. Yet for the US House of Representatives, only the Armenians were massacred.
As for the Hitler quote, the most reliable evidence indicates that he never said it. A version of his speech written by the American journalist Louis P.Lochner was submitted to the Nuremberg war crimes prosecutors in 1945. They set it aside and decided to look for something more authentic than a newspaper report. The evidence they did eventually submit was taken from the notes and diary accounts of German officers who had heard Hitler speak. In none of them is there any mention of the Armenians.
The resolution quotes the US ambassador to the Ottoman government, Henry Morgenthau, who hardly moved out of Istanbul and whose diary accounts were largely put together by his Armenian assistants. His postwar memoir (An Ambassador’s Story) was ghost-written by a journalist, Burton Hendrick. George Abel Schreiner, a journalist who did travel across the empire during the war, scoffed at Morgenthau’s understanding of what was going on, and concluded that “Turkish ineptness more than intentional brutality was responsible for the hardships the Armenians were subjected to” (The Craft Sinister: Anchor Press, New York 1925, pp.124-5).
As for Elie Wiesel, his accounts of his own history have been widely described as fraudulent, by Noam Chomsky amongst many others. Wiesel, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 as “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world,” in the words of the Nobel committee, was an extreme zionist who remained completely indifferent to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Only a few members of Congress dared vote against this resolution. They included Ilhan Omar, who said the US “first needs to worry about earlier mass slaughters,” including the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of native Americans, adding that “these historical crimes against humanity took the lives of hundreds of millions of indigenous people.” To this list can be added later genocides, in southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. In truth, the US has been soaked in the blood of other people from the beginning of white settlement.
Adam Schiff, who sponsored this dishonest, ignorant and hypocritical resolution, is at the same time a diehard supporter of Israel, whose ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in and since 1948 fits to a letter the criteria of the UN Convention on Genocide passed in the same year.
The human rights situation in Turkey is dire. More journalists are jailed in Turkey than anywhere in the world. The media is almost totally controlled by the government. Private citizens criticize at the risk of being prosecuted. There is strong evidence of war crimes having been committed by Turkey’s proxy forces in Syria. These are all matters of very serious international concern. There are many reasons for the Turkish government being held to account but this resolution is not one of them.
Turkey’s military operations across the Syrian border have been strongly criticized internationally but have strong domestic support. ‘Operation Peace Spring’ has improved President Erdogan’s standing in opinion polls, reversing the slump which followed the government’s loss of Ankara and Istanbul in local elections earlier this year. The Armenian resolution will further close ranks behind him.
It is a foolish, grandstanding resolution anyway, satisfying the Armenian lobby and punishing Turkey for reasons that have nothing to do with what happened in 1915. It is up to the Senate and Trump to put a spoke in this wheel, or watch the relationship with Turkey slide further down the drain.
*The author’s book on late Ottoman history, The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 has just been published by the University of Utah Press.
*(Top image: Armenian Genocide Memorial. Credit: Jelger/ flickr)
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