RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

Explaining Genocide: The Fate of the Armenians in the Late

Ottoman Empire
in
RICHARD BESSEL AND CLAUDIA B. HAAKE (eds.), Removing Peoples.
Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
pp. 209–253

ISBN: 978 0 199 56195 7

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 9
Explaining Genocide:
The Fate of the Armenians in
the Late Ottoman Empire
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

In late February to early March 1915, the Young Turk government

of the Ottoman Empire ordered the deportation and eventually
the massacre of hundreds of thousands of its Armenian subjects.
The first victims were soldiers, who were demobilized, forced to
dig their own graves, and killed; when some Armenians resisted
the encroaching massacres in the city of Van, the Committee of
Union and Progress had the leading intellectuals and politicians in
Istanbul, several of them deputies to the Ottoman parliament,
arrested and sent from the city. Most of them perished in the next
few months. Women, children, and old men were systematically
forced to leave their homes at short notice, to gather what they
could carry or transport, and to march through the valleys and
mountains of eastern Anatolia. The survivors reached the deserts
of Syria where new massacres occurred. Ninety per cent of the
Armenians of Anatolia were gone by 1922; it is estimated conserv-
atively that between 600,000 and 1,000,000 were slaughtered or
died on the marches. Other tens of thousands fled to the north, to
the relative safety of the Russian Caucasus.
Much of the public debate about the events of 1915 has
foundered on the question of whether or not there was a geno-
cide in Ottoman Anatolia during the First World War. Does the
term, invented some decades later, apply to these mass killings?
Were the deportations and mass murder of a designated ethno-
religious group planned, initiated, and carried out by the Young
Turk authorities? These debates, as heartfelt as they are for some
and as cynically manipulated by others, have not advanced the
understanding of the motives of the perpetrators. The research of
most scholars interested in these events has produced over-
whelming evidence that would lead any serious investigator to
2IO RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

conclude that, by any conventional definition, genocide had

occurred. The principal question remains, however, 'why geno-
cide?' In this essay I will review the existing interpretations-
those of the denialists who claim that no genocide occurred, as
well as those who argue for genocide but differ as to why it
happened. I will then suggest my own analysis that brings
together ideological/political factors, social/ environmental
context, and emotions as keys to the framing of the ultimate deci-
sion to commit mass murder. 1

The Denialist Position

Surprisingly, much of the existing literature has either avoided

explanations of the causes of the genocide or implied an explana-
tion even while not systematically or explicitly elaborating one.
For deniers of genocide there is simply no need to explain an
event that did not occur as stipulated by those who claim it did.
What did occur, in their view, was a reasonable and understand-
able response of a government to a rebellious and seditious popu-
lation in a time of war and mortal danger to the state's survival.
Raison d'etat justified the suppression of rebellion, and mass killing
is explained as the unfortunate residue ('collateral damage' in the
now fashionable vocabulary) of legitimate efforts at establishing
order behind the lines. The denialist viewpoint might be summa-
rized as: there was no genocide, and the Armenians are to blame
for it! They were rebellious, seditious subjects who presented a
danger to the empire and got what they deserved. But there was
no intention or effort by the Young Turk regime to eliminate the
Armenians as a people.
Even though the denialist account fails both empirically and
morally, its outrageous claims have shaped the debate and led
many investigators to play on their field. Many historians sympa-
thetic to the Armenians have shied away from explanations that
1 For my version of a social environmental analysis, see Ronald Grigor Suny,
'Rethinking the Unthinkable: Toward an Understanding of the Armenian Genocide', in
id., Looking Toward Ararat: Annenia in Modem History (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), 94-115.For
my version of a strategic political explanation, see 'Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism:
Armenians, Turks, and the End of the Ottoman Empire', in Omer Bartov and Phyllis
Mack (eds.), In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2001),
23-61.
 Explaining Genocide 2II

might place any blame at all on the victims of Turkish policies.

Because a nuanced account of the background and causes of the
genocide seems to some to concede ground to the deniers,
Armenian scholars in particular have been reluctant to see any
rationale in the acts of the Young Turks. Explanation, it is
claimed, is rationalization, and rationalization in turn leads to
the denialist position of justification.
The denialist argument proposes the following theses:
1.that Armenians and Turks lived in relative harmony for many
centuries, and that that peaceful coexistence was undermined by
noxious outside influences-American missionaries, Russian
diplomats, Armenian revolutionaries from the Caucasus-who
worked to undermine the territorial integrity and political
system of the Ottoman Empire;
2. that the response of the government to Armenian rebellion
was measured and justified;
3. that Armenians, therefore, brought on their own destruction,
launching a civil war against the government.
The first fundamental criticism to be made of the idea that
'outside agitators' disrupted the relatively peaceful relationship
that had long existed between the millet i-sadika ('the loyal millet')
and the ruling Turks is that such an imagined past, rather than
being based in 'reality', was the cultural construction of the
dominant nationality, its ideologues and rulers, and was not
shared by the subordinate peoples of the empire who lived in a
limbo of legally enforced inferiority. The Armenians, like the
other non-Muslim peoples of the empire, were not only an ethnic
and religious minority in a country dominated demographically
and politically by Muslims, but, given an ideology of inherent
Muslim superiority and the segregation of minorities, the
Armenians were also an underclass. They were subjects who,
however high they might rise in trade, commerce, or even
governmental service, were never to be considered equal to the
ruling Muslims. They would always remain gavur, infidels inferior
to the Muslims. For centuries Armenians lived in a political and
social order in which their testimony was not accepted in Muslim
courts, where they were subject to discriminatory laws (for
example, they were forced to wear distinctive clothes to identify
themselves), where they were not allowed to bear arms when
212 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

most Muslims were armed, and where their property and person
were subject to the arbitrary and unchecked power of Muslim
officials.
Most Armenians most of the time tried to improve their situa-
tion through the institutions of the empire. Beginning in the late
1870s and through the following decade the Armenians of the
provinces began to petition in ever larger numbers to their
leaders in Istanbul and to the European consuls stationed in
eastern Anatolia. Hundreds of complaints were filed; few were
dealt with. Together they make up an extraordinary record of
misgovernment, of arbitrary treatment of a defenceless popula-
tion, and a clear picture of the lack of legal recourse. 2 Although
the most brutal treatment of Armenians was at the hands of
Kurdish tribesmen, the Armenians found the Ottoman state offi-
cials either absent, unreliable, or just one more source of oppres-
sion. It was hard to say which was worse-the presence of
Turkish authorities or the absence in many areas of any palpable
political authority. Corruption was rampant. Even after the
'bloody Sultan', Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909), abrogated the
Ottoman constitution, the Armenian religious leaders and the
middle class preferred to petition the government or appeal to
the western powers for redress.
When Armenians resisted the extortionist demands of the
Kurds, either individually or collectively, the response from the
Turkish Army was often excessive. Massacres were reported
from all parts of eastern Anatolia, particularly after the formation
in the early 1890s of the officially sanctioned Kurdish military
units known as the Hamidiye. Against this background of
growing Kurdish aggressiveness, western and Russian indiffer-
ence, and the collapse of the Tanzimat reform movement, a small
number of Armenians turned to a revolutionary strategy.
Armenian revolutionaries attempted to protect Armenians but in
general were few in number (though the Turks exaggerated their
strength, organization, and effect). More importantly, they were
allies of the Young Turks, who were themselves active opponents
of the Sultan's regime, and after 1908, when the Young Turks
2 Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers: Accounts and Papers. Turkey, for the years 1877-81; A.
0. Sarkissian, History of theArmenian Question to 1885 (Urbana, Ill., 1938). Sarkissian used the
thirty volumes of records of the Armenian National Assembly in Istanbul, 'a true mine of
information on Armenian affairs in Turkey', Adenakerutiunk Azkayin Zhoghovoi, 1870-1914
(Constantinople, 1870-1914).
 Explaining Genocide 213

came to power, the leading Armenian party, the Dashnaktsutiun,

collaborated with the Young Turk Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP) and gave up revolutionary struggle. The party
called for autonomy within Turkey, not separation or break-up
of the empire.
The revolutionaries were aware that their activities would
result in Turkish reprisals, but they believed that it was no longer
possible to remain hostage to those fears. If they did not act soon,
it was feared, Armenians as a distinct people would disappear.
Undeniably the radicals raised the banner of resistance, but those
historians who see their rebellion, isolated and intermittent as it
was, as a rationale for the horrendous massacres of 300,000
Armenians in the years 1894-6 excuse the government that
carried out those massacres as its preferred method of keeping
order in the empire. Armenian revolutionaries set aside rebellion
as a strategy after the triumph of the Young Turk revolution of
1908. The major party allied with those forces intending to
reform the empire. Therefore, imputed Armenian subversion is
even less justification for mass killing after 1908 than it might
have seemed to some before.

The Argumentsfrom Religion and Nationalism

Confronted by the denialist construction of the Ottoman past,

some authors avoid any explanation for why the Young Turks
embarked on their destructive (even self-destructive) policy.
Avoiding explanation that may be seen as justification, a number
of writers have relied on essentialized notions of how Turks
customarily act. No further explanation is required. An unfortu-
nate consequence of the essentialist argument-that massacres,
even genocide, are intimately connected to the nature of the
Turks, their culture, and fundamental political practices-is the
tendency of some writers to collapse quite distinct historical
events into a single organic narrative. Thus the Hamidian
massacres of 1894-6, the Adana killings of 1909, and the geno-
cide of 1915 (and even the Kemalist battles of 1920) are all parts of
a consistent pattern of Turkish violence aimed at elimination of
the Armenians and Turkification of Anatolia. The differences
between regimes and their various objectives, the different
214 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

contexts of the violence, as well as the perpetrators, are simply

erased. Abdul Hamid's efforts to restore through exemplary
repression a traditional status quo by punishing 'rebellious'
subjects ought to be distinguished from the urban riot of 1909
which, at least initially, was directed against the Young Turks,
and the genocidal deportations and massacres by the Young
Turks in 1915, which aimed at the effective elimination of a
whole people from Anatolia.
Neither denial of such extensively documented events nor
avoidance of causal explanation is acceptable for historical schol-
arship. Briefly, I will survey some of the major interpretations that
have emerged in western writing on the genocide and then offer
an alternative explanation. Two principal questions need to be
answered. Why did the Young Turks embark on a programme of
mass deportation and murder of their Armenian subjects? And
why did ordinary people-Turks, Kurds, Circassians, and other
Muslims (though not Arabs)-participate in these genocidal
events?
Arguments for the genocide have generally circled around two
poles, nationalism and religion, sometimes combining the two.
Those who argue that the motivations were basically religious
argue that:

• the genocide was a religious war, Muslim against Christian, a

jihad, and was part of a long and traditional hostility against
Ottoman Christians.
• As Islamic rulers the Ottomans were tolerant of non-Muslims
as long as they recognized their inferiority and remained loyal.
Religion contributed to conflict when European powers inter-
vened in the empire's affairs in defence of oppressed
Christians; the effect was to raise the political hopes of non-
Muslims and the resentment of Turks. Turkish motives stem
primarily from their religious conviction of inherent and
deserved Muslim Turkish superiority.
• Islam could not tolerate the reforms that Turkish bureaucrats
and European powers attempted to implement in the nine-
teenth century that would have created more egalitarian rela-
tions with the non-Turkish peoples of the empire. The
theocratic dogmas oflslam denied that the gavur could be equal
to the Muslim, and permanent disabilities and inequities were
 Explaining Genocide

imposed on non-Muslims by the Ottoman state. Vahakn

Dadrian writes: 'The reforms were a repudiation of fundamen-
tal socio-religious traditions deeply enmeshed in the Turkish
psyche, and institutionalized throughout the empire .... The
Ottoman Empire, for most of its history, was and remained a
theocracy which, by definition and fact, cannot be secularized;
laws that are predicated upon permanently fixed and
intractable religious precepts cannot be modified, much less
reformed. ' 3
• The Ottoman rulers could not tolerate religious heterogeneity
and sought to Islamicize their empire as much as possible.
A major limitation of the 'religious argument' is that it
removes all agency from the Armenians, who are presented only
as passive victims, rather than as active Ottoman subjects with
their own political aspirations and organizations. In general
Turks acted, Armenians reacted. Secondly, its characterization,
indeed reification, of Islam assumes an unchanging doctrine, a
consistent and coherent dogma from which rules of behaviour
and attitudes may be deduced. The relationship of Muslims to
the doctrine is also consistent and predictable. Yet Islam does not
in all cases preclude political reform. While certain precepts of
Islam may thwart egalitarian reform, some Muslims, like west-
ernizing Ottoman bureaucrats, pushed for reform in a European
direction at the same time that conservative clergy and army offi-
cers opposed the reforms. At the same time, non-Muslims in the
empire resisted ending their privileges and distinctions inherent
in the millet system, even though they desired certain aspects of
equality.
Thirdly, it is not true that a theocracy by definition and fact
cannot be secularized; indeed, this is precisely what happened in
Europe in the transition from medieval to modern times, and to
some degree in Turkey in the nineteenth and (even more so)
twentieth centuries. Religious orthodoxy was certainly a power-
ful inhibitor to effective reform both in Europe and the Ottoman
Empire, but it was not an insurmountable barrier, as reforming
Ottoman bureaucrats, Young Ottomans, Young Turks, and
Kemalists would seek to demonstrate. Fourthly, the argument

3 Vahakn Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements efTurko-Armenian Conflict (New

Brunswick, NJ, 1999), 20.

216 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

that the Ottoman Empire could not tolerate heterogeneity also

fails before five centuries of imperial rule. Empire, indeed, may
be defined by its preservation, even enforcement, of heterogene-
ity. Distinction and discrimination, separation and inequality
were hallmarks of Ottoman imperial rule (and, indeed, of all
empires). That heterogeneity was marked in the millet system, an
imperial structure through which the Islamic state managed
other religious communities. The argument also fails empirically,
for the Young Turks who seized control of the empire in 1908
were not religious fanatics but secular modernizers devoted to
bringing technology, science, and greater rationality and effi-
ciency to their country. Suspicious, even hostile, to conservative
clerics who blocked reform, they were, however, willing to
deploy Islamic rhetoric when it served their strategic ends.
If the genocide was not carried out primarily for religious
motives, and if religion did not prevent other outcomes such as
coexistence or reform, perhaps the source of violence was nation-
alism, the all-purpose explanans for modern mass killing. The
argument that two nationalisms-even two competing nations-
faced each other in a deadly struggle for the same land has been
made repeatedly in the literature. Consider the words of the
eminent scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, which can be read as
an implied rationale for the Turkish massacres of Armenians:
For the Turks, the Armenian movement was the deadliest of all threats.
From the conquered lands of the Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians, and
Greeks, they could, however, reluctantly, withdraw, abandoning distant
provinces and bringing the Imperial frontier nearer home. But the
Armenians, stretching across Turkey-in-Asia from the Caucasian fron-
tier to the Mediterranean coast, lay in the very heart of the Turkish
homeland-and to renounce these lands would have meant not the
truncation, but the dissolution of the Turkish state. Turkish and
Armenian villages, inextricably mixed, had for centuries lived in neigh-
borly association. Now a desperate struggle between them began-a
struggle between two nations for the possession of a single homeland,
that ended with the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half
Armenians perished. 4
In what appears to be a cool and balanced understanding of
why their Ottoman rulers would have used mass violence against
a perceived Armenian danger, Lewis places the Armenians
4 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence ofModern Turkey (Oxford, 1961; 2nd edn. 1968), 356.
 Explaining Genocide 217

'nearer [the Turkish] home' and 'in the very heart of the Turkish
homeland', employing language that already assumes the legiti-
macy and actuality of a nation-state. In this transparent para-
graph Lewis subtly rewrites the history of Anatolia from a land in
which Arrnenians were the earlier inhabitants into one in which
they become an obstacle to the national aspirations of the Turks,
who now can claim Anatolia, rather than central Asia, as their
homeland. His language employs the logic of nationalism as if it
has a kind of universal relevance, even in political structures that
evolved out of and still worked within a contradictory logic of
empire. In 1915 the Ottoman Empire was still an imperial state,
albeit already long existing within an international system of
powerful nation-states and an increasingly hegemonic western
conviction that the nation, however defined, was the principal
source of political legitimacy. The nature of that system and its
self-justifications were changing, but Lewis's reading of a notion
of ethnic homogeneity as the basis for a national republic of the
Kemalist type, which lay in the future, into the moment of
Armenian annihilation is ahistorical and anachronistic.
Such a scenario, that the Armenian genocide was primarily a
struggle between two contending nationalisms, one of which
destroyed the other, presupposes that two well-formed and artic-
ulated nationalisms already existed in the early years of the war.
Among Arrnenians, divided though they were among a number
of political and cultural orientations, identification with an
Armenian nation had gained a broad resonance. Yet Turkish
identity was not clearly focused on the 'nation'. The term 'Turk'
was in the early twentieth century still infrequently used except as
a pejorative for country people. Turkish nationalists were begin-
ning to exploit the concept of Turk, which was based on the
linguistic affiliations of a group of languages, in a more positive
way, but Turkish identification was still weak, confused, and
mixed in with Islamic and Ottoman identities. As he is well
aware, in the last years of the empire conflicting and contradic-
tory ideas of Turkish nationalism, some deeply racist, vied with
pan-Turanism, pan-Islamism, and various strains ofOttomanism
in an ideological contest for new ways of reformulating the state.
The Young Turk CUP was not so much engaged in creating a
homogeneous ethnic nation as it was searching, unsuccessfully
flailing around, to find ways to maintain its empire. Deporting
218 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

and killing Arrnenians was a major, deliberate effort to that end.

Rather than primarily aiming at creating a homeland for an
ethnically homogeneous Turkish nation, something that in the
next decade would become the hallmark of the Kemalist repub-
lic, the Young Turks sought to preserve their multi-ethnic, poly-
glot empire. The imperial mission of the CUP still involved
ruling over Kurds and Arabs, as well asjews, Greeks, and even
Armenian survivors, in what would essentially still be a multina-
tional Ottoman Empire. In the vision of some, like Enver Pasha,
that vision was now greatly expanded to include the Turkic
peoples of the Caucasus and possibly central Asia. Even as some
thinkers, notably 'Turks' from the Russian Empire, advocated an
empire in the more ecumenical civic sense of the Ottomanist
liberals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the poli-
cies of the Young Turks never were purely Turkish nationalist,
but remained Ottoman in fundamental conception. In a word,
they were primarily state imperialists, empire preservers, rather
than ethno-nationalists.
It should be noted, however, that neither religion nor national-
ism was wholly absent in the political discourse of the time.
Religion was important as a marker of difference, the pre-
modern equivalent of ethnicity. The key difference in early
Ottoman society was religion, rather than ethnicity or language,
which took on relevance only later. The millets, the various
communities headed by religious leaders that were systematized
only in the nineteenth century, were based on religion, rather
than some idea of primal origin, language, or culture. The state
ruled over the millets indirectly and interfered little, delegating
much authority to the religious head of the millet. Certainly no
effort was made to break down the boundaries of these commu-
nities and homogenize the population of the empire, or even
Anatolia, around a single identity. There was no state project of
'making Ottomans' or turning 'peasants into Turks' in the
Ottoman Empire, at least not before 1908, as there was to a
degree in the absolute monarchies of western Europe or the
French state after the revolution of 1789. There was also no idea
until the Tanzimat reforms of the mid nineteenth century of
equality under the law, a notion of equal citizenship for all
members of Ottoman society. From the eighteenth century the
term reaya was applied only to non-Muslims, underlining their
 Explaining Genocide 219

inferior status. 5 The Ottomans, particularly in the early modem

period but even during the nineteenth century, were not engaged
in any kind of nation-building project but in an imperial state-
building effort that sought at one and the same time to maintain
the distinctions of hierarchy between rulers and ruled, Muslim
and non-Muslim, without integrating a disparate society into a
single, homogeneous whole. Unity in the empire came from the
person of the sultan-caliph to whom all peoples regardless of reli-
gion or ethnicity owed allegiance.
As for Turkish nationalism, the Young Turks increasingly over
time gravitated away from the liberal Ottomanism from which
they had sprung and perceived that the security and unity of the
empire required it to become more Turkic. Key leaders perceived
Turks and Muslims to be more trustworthy and dependable allies
in the imperial mission than Christians, with their ties to Europe,
Greece, and Russia. Ottoman Turkey was to become an imperial
nation, with Turks as the Herrenvolk ruling over subordinate
nationalities and religious communities, rather than a multina-
tional state of distinct nations with institutionalized privileges. At a
certain point, early in the war, the Armenians were seen as a
deadly threat to this conception and the continuance of the
empire.

Emotional Dispositions and Strategic Imperatives

Arguments from neither religion nor nationalism adequately

explain the genocide, though both provide hints as to the general
disposition of the Young Turk leaders and many ordinary Turks
and Kurds that would contribute to mass murder. The question
'why genocide?', after all, is primarily about a mental world that
permitted, even encouraged, the Turkish government to carry
out the extermination of their Armenian subjects, and ordinary
Turks and Kurds to participate in that extermination of their
neighbours. My argument is that the genocide occurred when
5 Roderic Davison, 'Nationalism as an Ottoman Problem and the Ottoman Response',

in William W. Haddad and William Ochsenwald (eds.), Nationalism in a Non-National State:

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Columbus, Oh., 1977), 36; Stepan Astourian, 'Testing
World-Systems Theory, Cilicia (183os-189os): Armenian-Turkish Polarization and the
Ideology of Modern Ottoman Historiography' (Ph.D. thesis, University of California at
Los Angeles, 1996), 367.
220 RONALD GRIGOR SONY

state authorities decided to remove the Arrnenians from eastern

Anatolia in order to realize a number of strategic goals-the
elimination of a perceived Armenian threat to the war against
Russia, punishment of the Armenians for activities which the
Turkish authorities believed to be rebellious and detrimental to
the survival of the Ottoman state, and possibly the realization of
grandiose ambitions to create a pan-Turkic empire that would
extend from Anatolia through the Caucasus to central Asia.
Rather than resulting primarily from Turkish racial or religious
hatred of the Armenians, which existed in many and was avail-
able for exploitation, or long-term planning by militant national-
ists, the genocide was a rather contingent event that was initiated
at a moment of near imperial collapse when the Young Turks
made a final, desperate effort at revival and expansion of the
empire that they had reconceived as more Turkic and Islamic,
shifting the meaning of what had been Ottoman. The year 1915,
then, can be understood as the moment of imperial decline,
when a fundamental reconceptualization of the nature of the
state along more Turkic, Islamic, and pan-Turkic lines took
place, and Young Turk policies became increasingly radical in
the fierce context of the First World War.
Rather than arguing that the genocide was planned long in
advance and was continuous with the earlier policies of conserva-
tive restoration through massacre, I contend that the brutal poli-
cies of killing and deportation (surgu.n) that earlier regimes used to
keep order or change the demographic composition of towns and
borderlands must be distinguished from the massive expulsions of
1915, the very scale of which, as well as their intended effects, to
rid eastern Anatolia of a whole people, made the genocide a far
more radical, indeed revolutionary, transformation of the impe-
rial set-up. As in earlier and later massacres of Armenians,
victims and victimizers were of different religions, but these mass
killings were not primarily driven by religious distinctions or
convictions. Rather than spontaneously generated from religion
or even ethnicity, the motivations for murder arose from decades
of hostile perceptions of the 'other' exacerbated by a sense ofloss
of status, insecurity in the face of perceived dangers, and the
positive support and encouragement of state authorities for the
most lawless and inhumane behaviour. In order to understand
the mentality and motivations of the Young Turk leaders as well
 Explaining Genocide 221

as ordinary people to engage in mass murder, it is necessary to

explore the affective disposition of these state actors and of ordi-
nary perpetrators, the fear, resentment, and hatred that shaped
their understandings and led to their strategic calculations to
eliminate what they perceived to be an existential threat to the
empire and to the Turks.
What I seek to understand is the aetiology and evolution of
that emotional disposition, the affective universe within which
things were understood and in which decisions were made. A
cascade of social, political, and international destabilizations
battered older ways of thinking, feeling, and acting and gener-
ated a particularly pathological interpretation of the Armenians.
Rather than religion or nationalism in isolation being catalysts to
genocide, a toxic mix of past experiences, conflicts over land and
status, and anxiety over their future all contributed to the disposi-
tion of the Young Turks that led them to genocide. At a moment
when the Ottoman Empire was in danger-its very existence was
at stake-and the Russians on one front and the British on
another launched attacks, the Young Turks acted on the fears
and resentments that had been generated over time. They
directed their efforts to resolve their anxieties by dealing with
those they perceived as threatening their survival: not with their
external enemies, but an internal enemy they saw as allied to the
Entente-the Armenians. What to denialists and their sympa-
thizers appears to be a rational and justified strategic choice to
eliminate a rebellious and seditious population, in this view is
seen as the outcome of a pathological construction of the
Armenian enemy, a mental picture shaped by deep emotions and
perceptions of the Ottoman world whose origins and costs must
be examined. The actions decided upon were based on an
emotional disposition that led to distorted interpretations of
social reality and exaggerated estimations of threats. 6
The Armenians of Anatolia were a conquered people, an
ethno-religious community that had lost both political and
6 For interpretations of the genocide that are compatible with my own analysis see e.g.
the thoughtful essay by Stepan Astourian, 'The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation',
History Teacher, 23/2 (Feb. 1990), 11-60; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy:
Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2005); Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation
State, 2 vols. (London, 2005); Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and
Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of
Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005).
222 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

demographic hegemony over its own historical homeland

between the fall of the last Armenian kingdom in 1375 and the
national 'awakening' of the early nineteenth century. Their
survival through those five centuries can, in part, be attributed to
the religious and linguistic tenacity of many Armenians (those
who did not convert or emigrate), to the continued efforts of
clerics and intellectuals to maintain the Armenian literary tradi-
tion, but also must be credited to the remarkable system of indi-
rect rule through religious communities (the millet system) that
the Ottoman government eventually sanctioned. Whatever
discrimination, abuses, and inferiority the Armenians were
forced to endure must be weighed alongside the considerable
benefits that this cultural and political autonomy provided. The
Church remained at the head of the nation; Armenians with
commercial and industrial skills were able to climb to the very
pinnacle of the Ottoman economic order; and a variety of educa-
tional, charitable, and social institutions were permitted to flour-
ish. Without exaggerating the harmony of Turkish-Armenian
relations between 1453 and 1878 or neglecting the considerable
burdens imposed on non-Muslims, particularly Anatolian peas-
ants, we can safely, nevertheless, characterize this long period in
which the Armenians came to be known as the 'loyal millet' as
one of 'benign symbiosis'.
Linked primarily by religion and the Church, which nurtured
a sense of a lost glorious past and ancient statehood, Armenians
before the nineteenth century made up a diffuse ethno-religious
community whose people were dispersed among three contigu-
ous empires and scattered even further abroad by their mercan-
tile interests and the oppressive conditions in eastern Anatolia.
Armenians were much more divided than united, separated by
politics, distance, dialects, and class differences. Yet the clerical
elite worked to create a collective identity for Armenians, a
notion of their distinction from their neighbours of different
linguistic and religious communities. Though we know very little
about the identifications of ordinary Ottoman Armenians, many
of whom spoke Turkish rather than Armenian, the Armenian
clerical and merchant leadership in the Ottoman Empire main-
tained a sense of Armenian distinctiveness, marked by a particu-
lar form of Christianity, and a memory of past glory. At the same
time they preached deference to the rulers that God had imposed
 Explaining Genocide 223

upon them. Religious distinction was foundational to culture and

identity, but local identities, a sense of place and where one came
from, seem to have been extremely important to Armenians. The
historiographical and literary tradition, family, place of origin,
occupation, and religion, as well as recognition of the power of
the state and its authorities, all played parts in the construction of
Armenian identity. And that identity was institutionalized in the
miUets, the official communities recognized by the Sultan as the
instruments of his rule over his subjects. 7 The lines of distinction
between Muslims and non-Muslims drew people of one religion
together with their fellow-religionists and distanced them from
those of different religions. Yet millets did not correspond exactly
to ethno-linguistic lines. The Ermeni millet, for instance, included
not only the Armenians of the national ('apostolic') Church, but
also Copts, Chaldeans, Ethiopians, Syrianjacobites, and others,
while Armenian Catholics and Protestants gained their own
millets in the early nineteenth century. Even as, over time,
Armenians borrowed the idioms of the nation, blending them
with their own religious distinctions, religion remained the prin-
cipal official marker of difference.
The turn from a primary identification with an ethno-religious
community to an ethno-national identity was gradual and
prolonged. The genesis of Armenian nationalism occurred in the
diaspora, in far-removed places such as Madras, where the first
Armenian newspaper was published at the end of the eighteenth
century, and Venice, where the Catholic Mekhitarist fathers
revived the medieval histories of the Armenians and commis-
sioned new ones. The literary and cultural revivalists of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the
Mekhitarist monks, saw themselves as cultivating the national
spirit through promotion of the language. 8 But even as they
promoted enlightenment and borrowed the idiom of the nation
from the west, the generation of religious teachers rejected the
7 Minorities had to obey restrictions in the way they dressed and interacted in society.

These restrictions prevented them from developing social ties with Muslims through
marriage, inheritance, or attending the same places of worship and bathhouses. Instead,
they developed social ties with other non-Muslims, who were either members of other
Ottoman minorities or foreign residents of the empire, who were often connected to
European embassies. Fatma Müge Göcek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman
Westernization and Social Change (New York, 1996), 35.
8 For an appreciative treatment of the Mekhitarists, see Kevork B. Bardakjian, The
Mekhitarist Contributions to Armenian Culture and Scholarship (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
224 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

more radical and democratic aspects of western and eastern

European nationalism that they observed. The precise connec-
tion (or disconnection) between religion and nationality became
the ground upon which clerics and secular intellectuals would
contest the nature of being Armenian.
The new images of community generated in Europe and by
diaspora activists fitted well with the new forms and institutions of
Armenian life emerging in Ottoman cities, particularly Istanbul.
As capitalist production and exchange penetrated the empire,
different millets (and even segments within millets) benefited (and
suffered) unevenly from the new economic opportunities. With
the Greeks suspect as rebels (and after 1821 possessing their own
independent state), the Ottomans favoured the Armenians as the
'loyal millef (millet-i sadika). In the late eighteenth and first half of
the nineteenth centuries urban Armenians profited enormously
from their association with the Porte. The amiras and sarafs, the
wealthy money-lenders and bankers who financed the tax-
farming system, along with the less affluent esnafs, the craftsmen
and artisans of the towns, accumulated wealth with which they
subsidized schools, hospitals, and philanthropic organizations. 9
Though highly placed, the amiras were always vulnerable to the
arbitrary power of the Sultan, and when reforming officials
progressively eliminated the tax-farming system, the wealthy sarafs
suffered financially. When social tensions between the rich and
the not-so-rich tore at the Armenian community and threatened
the peace of the Ottoman capital, the Sultan responded to the
pleas of leading Armenians and reluctantly granted a 'constitu-
tion' to regulate the Armenian millet. Community identity and
self-sufficiency solidified, as well-to-do Armenians settled in
Galata and other discrete sections, adopted European styles, and
established close ties with and even came under the formal
protection of foreign states. They published the first newspapers
in the empire, sent their children abroad for specialized and
higher education, and became visibly distant from the demo-
graphically and politically dominant Muslims. Armenians ran the
imperial mint; an Armenian was chief architect to the Sultan; and
Armenians ran the government's Foreign Correspondence Office.
But for all their success and visibility, Ottoman Armenians were
9 Hagop Barsoumian, 'Economic Role of the Armenian Amira Class in the Ottoman

Empire', Armenian Review, 31/3-123 (Mar. 1979), 310-16.

 Explaining Genocide 225

also the victims of unequal treatment and 'other doubts and suspi-
cions that emerged increasingly as faith in the viability of the
Ottomanist synthesis of nationalities-a synthesis to which the
official commitment to egalitarianism was directly linked-began
to erode'. 10
The 'nationalization' of Armenians occurred not in isolation
or primarily from within, but in synergy with and in response to
the developing discourses of liberalism and the nation in Europe
and the nationalisms of other peoples, most notably the French
and the Greeks. Nationalist movements of the Ottoman peoples
of the Balkans, along with the western imperialist incursions into
and defeat of the Ottoman Empire, contributed to a general
sense of Ottoman decline that stimulated westernizing bureau-
crats to attempt to reform the empire and Europeanized
Christians to consider either separating from the empire or, in
the case of the Armenians, to petition for internal reform along
more liberal lines. In a vision shared by many in power and those
they ruled, the Ottoman Empire was 'backward', 'sick', and was
expected to collapse, for it was an unfit pre-industrial power in an
age of ruthless international competition, an imperial victim of
western imperialism.
Appropriately for a dispersed people faced by three imperial
authorities, the nationalism of many Armenian thinkers was not
primarily territorial. Neither the clergy nor the powerful conser-
vatives in the capital, who benefited from their privileged posi-
tions within Ottoman society and close to the state, were
interested in creating a territorial nation. Armenians were
dispersed throughout the empire, and Istanbul Armenians were a
distinct community living both geographically and mentally
distant from the Anatolian peasants of historic Armenia to the
east. Armenian leaders in Turkey hoped for reform from above
and spoke of their 'benevolent government'. Until the end of the
1870s, Ottoman Armenians conceived of themselves as a reli-
gious community that needed to work within the context of the
empire to improve its difficult position. Encouraged by the
Tanzimat reformers and the theorists of Ottomanism, liberal
10 Carter V. Findley, 'The Acid Test of Ottomanism: The Acceptance of Non-
Muslims in the Late Ottoman Bureaucracy', in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis
(eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning ofa Plural Society i: The Central
Lands (New York, 1982), 363-4.
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

Armenians petitioned and pressured the Porte and tried occa-

sionally to enlist foreign support for reform. 11

The Hamidian Empire

The horizons for Armenians changed radically with the coming

to power of Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909), the Russo-Turkish War
of 1877-8, his abrogation of the Ottoman constitution in 1877,
and the turn towards a pan-Islamic policy that involved repres-
sion of the Armenians in the 1890s. As an Armenian national
discourse took shape, the more liberal and radical elements
focused on the eastern provinces and the poverty and oppression
suffered by the Armenian peasantry. A sense of a 'fatherland'
(hairenik) developed among Armenian writers, and a distinction
was drawn between azgasirutiun (love of nation), which heightened
the sense of a cultural nation beyond a specific territory, and
hairenasirutiun (love of fatherland), with emphasis on the people in
Armenia (haiastantsiner). Imbued with a deeply populist national-
ism, centred on the peasants of eastern Anatolia, Armenian intel-
lectuals travelled as teachers to the east in an effort characterized
as depi Haiastan (to Armenia). The government responded by
removing prominent teachers, such as Mkrtich Portukalian in
Van and Martiros Sareyan in Mush, from their home provinces
and exiling the patriotic priest Khrimian to Jerusalem.
Though most Armenian leaders wished to work within the
Ottoman system, on a number of discrete occasions they made
overtures to the Russians and the British. In 1872 merchants in
Van requested that the Russian government send a consul to
their city to guarantee 'the safety of trade routes and protection of
religion, lives, and goods of the down-trodden Christian people of
Vaspurakan'. 12 Six years later, in the aftermath of the war with
Russia, the Patriarch Nerses Varjabedian made contact with the
Russians at San Stefano and sent Khrimian to Berlin to plead the
11 The classic work on the reform period known as Tanzimat is Roderic Davison,
Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-76 (Princeton, 1963). See, also, his very useful essay
'Millets as Agents of Change in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire', in Braude and
Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews, i. 319-37.
12 Gerard Libaridian, 'The Ideology of Armenian Liberation: The Development of
Armenian Political Movement before the Revolutionary Movement (1639-1885)' (Ph.D.
thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1987), 145-6.
 Explaining Genocide 227

Armenian case before the great powers. When the Russians were
forced by Europe to retreat from their demands on Turkey, the
Patriarch attempted to interpret the new role taken by Britain as
the principal protector of the Ottoman state in the most positive
light. These overtures to the great powers, along with the western
styles affected by some wealthy Armenians, conspired to create in
the minds of many Turks an image of an alien population within
an Islamic empire. Armenians in eastern Anatolia and Cilicia
competed with Muslims for the most desired and scarce resource,
land.
From the middle of the nineteenth century through to the First
World War, Muslims migrated into and were deported and
settled in regions where Armenian peasants worked the land.
When tsarist Russia defeated the Cherkess (Circassians) in the
North Caucasus, thousands chose to move to Anatolia, where the
government welcomed Muslim settlers. For the next century, as
the Ottomans lost territories in the Balkans, Muslims left Europe
for the hinterlands of the east. In some areas Armenians fell
victim to Muslims favoured by local officials and courts. In
others, not only were Armenians prominent in urban trades and
crafts, finance, and international commerce, but their superior
economic position allowed them to buy up large landholdings,
for example, in Cilicia from the 1870s on. 13 Once the Sultan
permitted non-Muslims and foreigners to buy Muslim lands
(1856), Armenians and Greeks began purchasing properties that
Muslim debtors could no longer pay for. Armenian emigrants to
America and Europe sent home their savings and on their return
brought new machines and technology to their farms. At the
same time Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the Balkans,
displaced by the Russian victory in the North Caucasus and the
independence of the Balkan states, migrated to Anatolia, and an
intense competition for land developed. Petitions to the govern-
ment and the Armenian Patriarchate enumerate hundreds of
cases of Muslim usurpation of Armenian lands. The state most
often supported Muslim claimants, and many Armenians reluc-
tantly moved to the towns. Only after the 1908 revolution were
they able to renew efforts to return to their lands.
13 Astourian, 'Testing World-Systems Theory', 552-63. See also Donald Quataert,

'The Commercialization of Agriculture in Ottoman Turkey, 1800-1914', International

Journal of Turkish Studies, 1/2 (Autumn 1980), 38-55.
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

While Armenian clerics taught submission and deference and

often allied with state authorities to persecute those modernizing
intellectuals who attempted to bring western enlightenment to
young Armenians, Abdul Hamid II brought the reform period of
the Tanzimat to an end and eliminated moderate and liberal
alternatives within the system. The Sultan created a system of
personal, autocratic rule and centralized power within the
palace. Both Christians and Turks who opposed the 'bloody
Sultan' saw the restoration of the 1876 constitution as a principal
political goal. By the 1880s a significant minority of Armenians,
many of them from Russian Transcaucasia, conceived of revolu-
tion as the only means to protect and promote the Armenians. A
new idea of the Armenian nation as secular, cultural, and based
on language as well as shared history challenged the older cleri-
cal understanding of Armenians as an ethno-religious commu-
nity centred on faith and membership in the Armenian Apostolic
Church. Faced by what they saw as the imminent danger of
national disintegration, the Armenian radicals turned towards
'self-defence', the formation of revolutionary political parties,
and political actions that would encourage western or Russian
intervention in Ottoman affairs. For the young nationalists, revo-
lution was the 'logical conclusion' of the impossibility of signifi-
cant reforms coming from the state. 14
With the failure of reform-the end of Tanzimat, the with-
drawal of the constitution in 1878, the steady replacement of
Ottomanism with policies preferential to Muslims-and in the
face of European lack of interest in the fate of the Armenians
through the 1880s, the situation of the Ottoman Armenians
began to deteriorate rapidly. At the same time the Armenians
had themselves changed dramatically in the four middle decades
of the nineteenth century. The increase in social communication
among Armenians had fostered a powerful sense of secular
nationality among many Armenians. Influenced by western
ideas, Armenian intellectuals had developed a new interest in the
Armenian past, and instead of conceiving themselves solely as
part of a religious community, more and more Armenians began
to acquire a western sense of nationality, a feeling of kinship with
Christian Europe, and a growing alienation from the Muslim

14 'Logical conclusion' comes from Libaridian.

 Explaining Genocide 229

peoples among whom they lived. The depth or spread of this new
nationalism should not be exaggerated. Certainly more potent in
the larger cities and in localities where Armenian or missionary
schools helped to shape new ways of thinking, Armenian nation-
alist ideas spread slowly into eastern Anatolia. Equally if not
more influential in shaping Armenian attitudes in the late nine-
teenth century than the positive images created by Armenian
and foreign intellectuals was the negative experience of poor
Armenians at the hands of their Muslim overlords.
The former equilibrium between the millets was rapidly disap-
pearing by the last decades of the century. And nowhere was this
more brutally evident than in the Armenian provinces. The rise
in tension in eastern Anatolia and the resultant resistance and
massacre must be understood not only as the product of the
failure of the traditional Ottoman political structure to adapt to
the new requirements of the non-Muslim peoples, but also as the
result of fundamental social changes in eastern Anatolia itself.
The mountainous plateau of historic Armenia was an area in
which the central government had only intermittent authority.
An intense four-sided struggle for power, position, and survival
pitted the agents of the Ottoman government, the Kurdish
nomadic leaders, the semi-autonomous Turkish notables of the
towns, and the Armenians against one another. Local Turkish
officials ran the towns with little regard to central authority, and
Kurdish beys held much of the countryside under their sway.
Often the only way Istanbul could make its will felt was by
sending in the army.
Diplomatic reports and eyewitness accounts by travellers and
missionaries testify to the 'great severity' with which the
Ottoman government suppressed any effort by Armenians to
clefend themselves. A series of massacres began with clashes in
Sassun. In the summer of 1893 Kurdish tribes entered the kaza of
Sassun and attacked the Armenian village ofTalori. The Turkish
mutessarif of Guendj arrived with his troops, arrested several
Armenians, but no Kurds. The soldiers then plundered the
Armenians, and the mutessariftold the authorities at Bitlis that the
Armenians were in revolt. The villagers retreated into the moun-
tains for several months, returning only the next spring. They
refused to pay taxes because of the state's failure to protect them
from the Kurds. This led to a second visit by the army, along
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

with Hamic:liye troops. 15 Abdul Hamid decided to deal with the

Armenian Question 'not by reform but by blood'. 16 This
violence would later be read by Armenians as the first stage of a
series of massacres that would culminate in the genocide of 1915.
But unlike the genocide, these massacres in eastern Anatolia in
1894-6, which were largely carried out by Kurdish tribes and
local lords, were part of an effort by the state to restore the old
equilibrium in inter-ethnic relations, in which the subject peoples
accepted with little overt questioning the dominance of the
Ottoman Muslim elite. That equilibrium, however had already
been upset by the Sultan's own policies of centralization and
bureaucratization, as well as his strategic alliance with Muslim
Kurds against Christian Armenians. This pan-Islamic policy,
which was institutionalized in the formation of irregular
Hamidiye units of armed Kurds, helped to undermine the
customary system of imperial rule as much as did the emerging
revisioning of nationality borrowed from the west. 17 When
British consuls in eastern Anatolia complained to the Sultan
about the excessive force used against the Armenians, Abdul
Hamid replied to the British ambassador:
The Armenians, who for their own purposes invent these stories
against the Govt., and finding that they receive encouragement from
British officials, are emboldened to proceed to open acts of rebellion,
which the Govt. is perfectly justified in suppressing by every means in
its power.... His Imperial Majesty treated the Armenians with justice
and moderation, and, as long as they behaved properly, all toleration
would be shown to them, but he had given orders that when they took
to revolt or to brigandage the authorities were to deal with them as
they dealt with the authorities. 18

15 Letter of Sir Currie to the Earl of Kimberley, Great Britain, Foreign Office, Tur"9,
no. 1 (1895), (Part I) Correspondence Relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Tur"9, Part I. Events at
Sassoon, and Commission ofInquiry at Moush (London, 1895), 8-IO.
16 The words are those of the Sultan as conveyed by Grand Vizier Said Pasha when he

fled to the British embassy in December 1895. Quoted in Astourian, 'Testing World-
Systems Theory', 606.
17 On state reform, inter-ethnic relations, and economic developments in Abdul
Hamid's reign, see Carter Vaughn Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The
Sublime Porte, 1789-1922 (Princeton, 1980); and Stephen Duguid, 'The Politics of Unity:
Hamidian Policy in Eastern Anatolia', Middle Eastern Studies, 9/2 (May 1973), 139-55;
Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908
(New York, 1983).
18 Quataert, Social Disintegration, 20-1.
 Explaining Genocide

This policy of massacre, which crested in the killings of 1894-6,

was a means of maintaining the decaying status quo as
the preferred alternative to reform and concessions to the
Armenians. 19 Encouraging the anti-Armenian hostility of
the Muslims, the state created an Armenian scapegoat on which
the defeats and failures of the Ottoman government could be
blamed. The social system in eastern Anatolia was sanctioned by
violence, now state violence, and the claims of the Armenians for
a more just relationship were rejected. No right of popular resist-
ance was recognized, and all acts of rebellion were seen as the
result of the artificial intervention of outside agitators. 20
The Sultan's language would be repeated by other officials
and would echo in the justifications of the Young Turks and the
apologist historians who would later attempt to reconceive state-
initiated massacres as 'necessary', figments of Armenian imagina-
tion, or a Muslim-Christian civil war. Yet the continuity in the
rhetoric about these events should not obscure the difference
between Abdul Hamid's essentially conservative and restora-
tionist policy towards unruly subjects and the Young Turks' far
more revolutionary attempt surgically to remove a major irritant.
The revolutionary nationalism of the Armenian committees and
parties was exaggerated both by the revolutionaries themselves
and by their opponents. While they struggled to convince villagers
of the 'Armenian cause' and threatened businessmen who refused
to contribute to their movement, the Armenian nationalists were
forced to rely on a handful of activists, many from Persia and
Russia. They engaged in a number of spectacular activities, culmi-
nating in the seizure of the Imperial Ottoman Bank in August
1896, but this revolutionary act was followed by riots and

19 Robert Melson, 'A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894-1895',
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24/3 (July 1982), 503, 509.
20 Less understandable than the Sultan's justifications of his actions is the defence of
those policies by western historians. William Langer, for example, writes: 'Whether Abdul
Hamid deserves the black reputation that has been pinned to him is a matter of debate. If
he was "the bloody assassin" and the "red Sultan" to most people, he was the hard-
working, conscientious, much harassed but personally charming ruler to others. Those
who have spoken for him have pointed out that the Sultan felt his Empire threatened by
the Armenians, who, he knew, or at least believed were in league with the Young Turks,
the Greeks, Macedonians, etc. They believe that Abdul Hamid was the victim of what we
modems call a persecution complex.' William Leonard Langer, The Diplomacy of
Imperialism, 1890-1902, 2 vols. (New York, 1935), i. 159. Langer does not ask if what Abdul
Hamid 'felt', 'knew', and 'believed' was accurate, or a fantasy, or self-delusion.
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

massacres in the city that left 6,000 Arrnenians dead. The number
of militants remained small and divided, but the nationalist
framing of the Arrnenians' plight gained followers. In the period
after 1908 the Arrnenians elected socialists, liberals, and national-
ists to the Ottoman parliament, where they collaborated (and
competed) with the Young Turks. Resented by the more conserva-
tive clerical and merchant leaders in Constantinople whom they
displaced over time, the revolutionary nationalists became the de
facto leaders of a nation that they had helped to create through
their teaching, writing, and sacrifice. The leading party, the
Dashnaktsut:iun, made it clear in its ten-point 'Platform' (December
1908) that it was in favour of 'Turkish Armenia [as] an inalienable
part of the empire, reorganized in accordance with the principle of
decentralization'. 21 Their commitment to the territorial integrity
of the empire, however, did not prevent the Arrnenians from accu-
sations of separatism and subversion, particularly when the Young
Turks developed a quite different idea of what their empire should
look like.
Social differentiation among millets and the resultant tensions
existed throughout the nineteenth century, but the frames in
which they were given meaning changed. Ottoman westernizers
recognized that the Muslims were the least prepared of the millets
to adopt western ways and would require the state to assist their
progress. To religious Muslims, the visibility of better-off
Armenians in the capital and towns appeared as an intolerable
reversal of the traditional Muslim-dhimmi hierarchy that, in turn,
generated resentments towards Christians. The inferior status of
Muslims in the industrial and commercial world only intensified
the sense of exploitation at the hands of Armenians and foreign-
ers. After 1877, Turkish patriots constructed Armenians as
disloyal subjects suspiciously sympathetic to Europeans. Anxiety
about status, xenophobia, and general insecurity about the
impersonal transformations of modern life combined to create
resentments towards and anxieties about the Armenians. 22
21 Anahide Ter Minassian, 'The Role of the Armenian Community in the Foundation
and Development of the Socialist Movement in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey,
1876-1923', in Mete Tuncay and ErikJ. Ziircher (eds.), Socialism and Nationalism in the
Ottoman Empire, 1876-1923 (London, 1994), 140.
22 For a particularly telling reading of Turkish attitudes towards the gawur (unbeliever)
and Armenians, see Stepan Astourian's analysis of Turkish proverbs in Astourian,
'Testing World-Systems Theory', 409-31.
 Explaining Genocide 233

Social grievances in towns, along with the population pressure

and competition for resources in agriculture, were part of a toxic
mix of social and political elements that provided the environ-
ment for growing hostility towards the Armenians. Whatever
resentments the poor peasant population of eastern Anatolia may
have felt towards the people in towns-the places where they
received low prices for their produce, where they felt their social
inferiority most acutely, where they were alien to and unwanted
by the better-dressed people-were easily transferred to the
Armenians. The catalyst for killing, however, was not sponta-
neously generated out of the tinder of social and cultural tensions.
It came from the state itself, from officials and conservative clergy
who had for decades perceived Armenians as alien to the Turkish
empire, dangerous revolutionaries and separatists who threatened
the integrity of the state. Armenians were seen as responsible for
the troubles of the empire, allies of the anti-Turkish European
powers, and the source of politically radical ideas, including trade
unionism and socialism, entering the empire. 23
Under Abdul Hamid, ethnic differences, hostilities, and even
conflict did not become genocidal. That would require a major
strategic decision by the elites in power. Though Abdul Hamid
used violence to keep his Armenian subjects in line, as he and his
predecessors had done against other non-Muslims, he did not
consider the use of mass deportation to change radically the demo-
graphic composition of Anatolia. He remained a traditional impe-
rial monarch prepared to use persecution when persuasion failed
to maintain the unity as well as the multiplicity and diversity of his
empire. More fundamental ideological shifts took place before the
images of Armenians as subversive and alien appeared absolutely
incompatible with the empire as it was being reconceived.

The Young Turks and the 'Modernizing' Empire

In the second half of the nineteenth century Turkic intellectuals,

both in the Ottoman and Russian empires, stimulated interest in
a new conception of a Turkish nation. Responding to the works
23 The Union of Employees of the Anatolian Railroad, which briefly flourished in 1908
before the Minister of the Interior outlawed unions and prohibited strikes, was largely a
non-Muslim affair.
234 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

of European Orientalists who discussed an original Turkic or

Turanian race, men such as Ismail Gasprinskii in Crimea, Mirza
Fethali Akhundov in Transcaucasia, and Huseynizade Ali Bey
from Baku attempted to teach pride in being Turkish and speak-
ing a Turkic language. Identification with a supranational
community of Turks distinguished the 'race' or 'nation' of the
Turks from the multinational Ottoman state. Yet inherent in that
identity with the Turkic was a confusion about the boundaries of
the nation and the location and limits of the fatherland (vatan).
Was the homeland of the Turks Anatolia or the somewhat mysti-
cal Turan of central Asia?
Several scholars have traced the roots of Kemalist Turkish
nationalism back into the late Ottoman period. Their discussion
has focused exclusively on intellectuals and has revealed little
about a popular response to nationalist or pan-Turanian ideas.
In a population in which multiple identifications competed, such
as religion, ethnicity, empire, or subnational communities, such
as tribes, clans, or regions, an ambiguity about what constitutes
the nation thwarts (or at least delays) the development of a strong
and coherent nationalism. In the late Ottoman Empire alle-
giance to the 'nation' of Turks was quite weak. The word 'Turk',
which referred to the lower classes of rural Anatolia, was in the
nineteenth century contrasted to 'Ottoman', a term usually
reserved for the ruling elite, and Islam probably had a far more
positive valence among ordinary Turks than identity with being
Turkish. There were signs of change, however, in the latter part
of the century, and the shift came from the top down. The
Ottoman constitution of 1876 established Turkish as the official
state language and required members of government and parlia-
ment to know Turkish. At the tum of the century Young Turk
nationalists, such as Ahmed Riza, began to substitute the word
Turk for Ottoman. 24 Though Ottomanist views remained domi-
nant among the first generation of Young Turk intellectuals, rival
visions of the future led to tensions between the dominant Turks
and the non-Turkish millets and reduced the commitment to
Ottomanism.
The Turkish revolutionary elite at the tum of the century,
including those who emerged from the Young Turk committees
24 M. Sukru Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York, 1995), 216. This
occurred around 1902 at the time of the Congress of Ottoman Oppositionists in Paris.
 Explaining Genocide 235

to lead the Kemalist movement, grew out of an intellectual

milieu that exalted science, rejected religion, and borrowed freely
from western sociology. Influenced by the ideas of Charles
Darwin, Claude Bernard, Ludwig Buchner, even the phrenology
of Gustave Le Bon (who 'proved' that intellectuals have larger
craniums by doing research in Parisian millinery shops), 'the
Young Turk ideology was originally "scientific," materialist,
social Darwinist, elitist, and vehemently antireligious; it did not
favor representative government'. 25 Neither liberals nor constitu-
tionalists, the Young Turks were etatists who saw themselves as
continuing the work of the Tanzimat reformers-Mustafa Reshid
Pasha, Mustafa Fazil Pasha, Midhat Pasha-and the work of the
Young Ottomans. According to Sukru Hanioglu, the historian of
its early years: 'The Young Turk movement was unquestionably
a link in the chain of the Ottoman modernization movement as
well as representing the modernist wing of the Ottoman bureau-
cracy.'26 Earlier, Ottoman westernizers had hoped to secure
western technology without succumbing to western culture,
somehow to preserve Islam but make the empire technologically
and militarily competitive with the west. Reform had always
come from above, from westernizing statesmen and bureaucrats,
a response to a sense that the empire had to change or collapse.
The Young Turks shared those values, but steadily they added
new elements of nationalism to their imperial etatism.
The first generation of Turkish revolutionaries was divided in
their attitudes towards working with Armenians in a common
struggle. After Damad Mahmud Pasha, brother-in-law of Abdul
Hamid, fled to Europe with his two sons, he made an agreement
with the Dashnaks and published an open letter urging joint
action. The Dashnak newspaper, Droshak, wrote: 'Dashnaktsutiun
would not accept the re-establishment of the Constitution of
Midhat as a solution of the Turkish problem, but look to a demo-
cratic federative policy as the way out.' The Armenian party
'would fortify the Young Turks if first it received a guarantee
that the situation of the peoples would be bettered'. 27 The more
liberal Young Turks believed that an alliance with the
Armenians would reap a favourable response in western Europe.
But the dual issue of an alliance with the Armenians and inviting

25 Ibid. 32. 26 Ibid. 17. 27 Ibid. 150.

 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

European intervention to secure the end of autocracy in the

empire exposed the ultimately unresolved tension among Young
Turk activists between their ecumenical Ottomanist impulses
and the growing influence of an exclusivist Turkish nationalism.
On 4 February 1902, the First Congress of the Ottoman
Opposition opened in Paris. The nationalist minority at the
Congress, led by Ahmed Riza, categorically rejected foreign
intervention and special arrangements for the Armenians in the
six eastern Anatolian vilayets, while the majority, led by
Sabahaddin Bey, favoured such concessions as a basis for an
Armenian-Turkish alliance. When the majority came out in
favour of mediation by the great powers to implement the
treaties that the absolutist regime refused to execute, the minority
essentially broke with the rest of the movement. Efforts by the
majority to appease the minority failed. The Armenian delegates
submitted a declaration that the Armenian committees were
ready to collaborate with the Ottoman liberals to transform the
present regime; that outside of common action, the committees
would continue their own efforts with the understanding that
their actions were directed against the present regime and not
against 'the unity and the organic existence of Turkey'; and that
their particular actions would be directed towards implementa-
tion of Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin and the Memorandum
of 11 May 1895 and its annexe. 28
Mutual suspicions were high between the Armenians and the
Turkish opposition, and the Armenian activists could conceive of
collaboration only with the implementation of special reforms in
the east guaranteed by Europe. For many Turks this was an
outrageous demand. As Ismail Kemal, a member of the majority,
put it: 'I recognize you not as an independent element but as
Ottomans. You have rights as Ottomans. [However,] you do not
have the right to bargain with us and make offers as if you were
[representatives of a] state.' 29 In response to this statement, the

28 Ibid. 193. 'This text', writes Hanioglu, 'reveals how antithetical the vantage point of
the members of the Armenian committees was to the rest of the movement and how they
had divorced themselves from the notion of "liberaux Ottomans" by emphasizing their
willingness to work with them' (p. 193). In my own reading, this Armenian declaration
makes a clarification, which Sabahaddin Bey then declared had been accepted by the
majority, that the clauses of the treaties signed by the Sublime Porte must be imple-
mented.
29 Ibid. 195.
 Explaining Genocide 237

Armenians walked out of the congress. Only later, after the

Armenians sent a letter to Sabahaddin stating that they 'were
ready to participate in all efforts to overthrow the present regime'
and that 'they did not oppose the establishment of a constitu-
tional central administration that would execute' special reforms
for the six provinces, was a compromise reached between the
majority and the Armenians. 30 The Young Turks even agreed
that an Armenian was to sit on their central committee.
Ominously for the Armenians, however, it was the minority at
the Congress, not the majority, that actually represented the
more powerful, even dominant, tendency in most of the Young
Turk committees and newspapers.
Most analysts agree that in the first decade of the twentieth
century there was a significant shift among the Young Turks
from an Ottomanist orientation, in which emphasis was on
equality among the millets within a multinational society that
continued to recognize difference, to a more nationalist position
in which the superiority of the ethnic Turks (already implicit in
Ottomanism itself) and their privileged position within the state
was more explicitly underlined. 31 In the years after the Paris
Congress a Turkish nationalism based on linguistic ties among
Turkic peoples and notions of a common race spread among
Turkic intellectuals, like Yusuf Akcura, outside the Ottoman
Empire and influenced those within. After the 1908 coup that
brought the Young Turks to power, a number of small national-
ist organizations were formed that put out occasional newspapers
or journals-Turk Demegi, Genç Kalemler, Tiirk Yurdu, and Turk
Ocagi-in which the conception of a Turkish nation extended far
beyond the Ottoman Turks or Anatolian Turks to a pan-Turkic
ideal celebrating the ties between all the Turkic peoples stretch-
ing from Anatolia through the Caucasus to central Asia. This was
expressed most vividly in Ziya Gokalp's famous poem Turan:
'The fatherland for Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan, I
The fatherland is a vast and eternal land: Turan!' Many of the
Turanists argued for a purified Ottoman Turkish language, freed
of Arabic and Persian words, that would serve as the language of

30 Ibid. I 97.
31 See e.g. Ernest Edmondson Ramsaur,Jr., The Young Turks: Prelude to the Revolution of
1908 (Princeton, 1957); and Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and
Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908-1914 (Oxford, 1969).
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

this Turkic nation and also a.s the official language for the non-
Turkic peoples of the empire, those that made up the Ottoman
millets. The Young Turk government passed resolutions reaffirm-
ing Turkish as the official language of the empire, requiring all
state correspondence to be carried on in Turkish, and establish-
ing Turkish as the language for teaching in elementary and
higher education, with local languages to be taught in secondary
schools. Not surprisingly, the Young Turk promotion of Turkish
was seen by non-Turks as a deliberate programme of
Turkification. 32 Not only Greeks and Armenians, but Arabs as
well, resisted some of the modernizing programmes of the CUP
that at one and the same time attempted to universalize rules and
obligations for all peoples of the empire and threatened to under-
mine the traditional privileges and autonomies enjoyed under the
millet system.
Turkish nationalism, pan-Turanism, pan-Islam, and Ottoman-
ism were all part of a complex, confusing discussion among
Turkish intellectuals about the future of the Ottoman state and the
'nation'. Uncomfortable with the supranational ideal of
Ottomanism, the Turkish nationalists criticized the thrust of the

32 Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and lslamism in the Ottoman
Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley, 1997) argues that the Young Turks 'subscribed to the supra-
national ideal of Ottomanism' rather than to 'a Turkish nationalist cultural or political
program' (p. 14). 'The Young Turks did not turn to Turkish nationalism but rather to
lslamism as the ideological underpinning that would safeguard the unity and continuity of
what was left of the empire. Islam became the pillar of the supranational ideology of
Ottomanism, with religion imparting a new sense of homogeneity and solidarity' (p. 15).
Therefore, the perception ofTurkification on the part of non-Turks, he claims, was incor-
rect. My own understanding is that rather than being primarily dedicated to a pan-
Islamic policy, as Kayali argues, the Young Turks adopted different orientations towards
different constituencies and that there was no overriding consensus, let alone unanimity,
among the Young Turks on ideology. He seems closer to the mark when he writes: 'The
Young Turks envisaged the creation of a civic-territorial, indeed revolutionary-demo-
cratic, Ottoman political community by promoting an identification with the state and
country through the Sultan and instituting representative government. Though they
remained committed to the monarchy within the constitutional framework, they
conceived of an Ottoman state and society akin to the French example in which religion
and ethnicity would be supplanted by "state-based patriotism" ' (p. 9). The difficulty of
assessing the weight of nationalism and Ottomanism among the Young Turks is reflected
in the work of Nyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal, 1964).
Writing about the period just before the First World War, Berkes argues: 'When, later,
rival parties became harbingers of anti-Ottoman nationalisms, Turkish nationalism
gained some influence in the Society, but never replaced Ottomanism' (p. 329). Much of
his book is concerned with three competing schools of thought among the Young Turks
from 1908 to 1918: the westernist, the lslamist, and the Turkist.
 Explaining Genocide 239

universalism of the Tanzimat reforms. Gokalp tried to clarify the

differences:
If the aim of Ottomanism (Osmanlilik) was a state, all the subjects would
actually be members of this state. But if the aim was to construct a new
nation whose language was the Ottoman language (Osmanlica), the new
nation would be a Turkish nation, since the Ottoman language was no
other than Turkish.33
Four choices were possible for the empire after 1908: either to
remain an empire dominated by Turks, subordinating the non-
Turks, and perhaps expanding eastward to integrate other
Turkic peoples into a Turanian empire; to transform the empire
along pan-Islamic lines, allying Turks with Kurds and Arabs; to
adopt the programme of the Ottomanists and become an egali-
tarian multinational state with the different religious and ethno-
national communities within it constituting a single civil nation of
Ottomans; or, finally, to cease to be an empire altogether and
become an ethno-national state of the Turks. This last option
was not yet clearly envisioned, for it would require both the
dismemberment of the empire state, the loss of the Arab territo-
ries, and the physical removal from Anatolia or assimilation
of millions of Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds. Though the
Ottomanist option remained part of the official rhetoric up to the
First World War, many of the leading Young Turk theorists and
activists gradually abandoned the liberal, multicultural approach
for more intensive Turkification. After the coup of 1913 the CUP,
though never completely in full agreement on a clear ideological
orientation, moved away from liberal Ottomanism and towards
Turkism, the pan-Turanian form of Turkish nationalism, and
pan-Islam. 34
The pan-Turanian form of Turkic nationalism seemed to key
leaders to offer the most effective alternative for preserving the
empire and the political hegemony of the Turks. This steady shift
towards Turkism and pan-Turanism presented the Armenian

33 Cited in Masami Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden, 1992), 61.
34 This position is reflected in Jemal Pasha's statement: 'Speaking for myself, I am
primarily an Ottoman, but I do not forget that I am a Turk, and nothing can shake my
belief that the Turkish Race is the foundation stone of the Ottoman empire ... In its
origins the Ottoman empire is a Turkish creation.' Djemal Pasha, Memories of a Turkish
Statesman, 1913-1919 (London, n.d. [1922]), 251-2; quoted inJacob Landau, Pan-Turkism in
Turkey: A Study ofIrredentism (London, 1981), 50.
240 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

political leadership with an extraordinarily difficult choice-

remaining in alliance with the increasingly nationalist Young
Turks or breaking decisively with the government. The
Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun) decided to
continue working with the Young Turks, while the Armenian
Church leaders and the liberal Ramkavar party distanced them-
selves from the government party. Even when the Marxist
Hnchaks denounced the Young Turks for their steady move away
from Ottomanism towards Turkism and their failure to carry out
agricultural and administrative reforms, the Dashnaks maintained
their electoral alliance with the CUP.

From Massacre to Genocide

Ottoman Armenians and other minorities joyfully greeted the

1908 revolution that brought the Young Turks to power. They
hoped that the restoration of the liberal constitution would
provide a political mechanism for peaceful development within
the framework of a representative parliamentary system.
Armenians favoured the promised reforms of the Ottomanists,
but many conservative elements in the empire feared loss of
status to the upwardly mobile Christians or loss of property to the
wealthy Armenians. Armenians were now able to bear arms, and
some defiant clergymen boldly proclaimed that their people
would never be massacred again without defending themselves. 35
The initially liberal programme of the Young Turks met oppo-
sition from the leaders of the non-Muslim millets, who were
fearful that a civil order without ethnic distinctions would cost
them their privileged status. Powerful Greek and Armenian
clergy opposed the laws that would have eliminated the separate
(and usually superior) educational institutions and the exemption
from the draft of non-Muslims. The goal of the Young Turks to
restore full sovereignty to the Ottoman state, thus ending the
privileges of foreign powers within the empire, also challenged
the advantages that the non-Muslims had gained from their asso-
ciation with the European states.
35 Aram Arkun, 'Les Relations armeno-turques et les massacres de Cilicie de 1909', in
Hrayr Henry Ayvazian et al. (eds.), L'Actualitédu genocide des arméniens: actes du coll.oque organ-
isé par leComitéde Défensede la Cause Arménienne àParis-Sorbonne les16, 17 et 18 avril 1998 (Paris,
1999), 60.
 Explaining Genocide 241

The social tensions arising from competition for land and

work, the new freedom felt by the Armenians, and the accumu-
lating resentments and fears of Muslims erupted in a massacre of
Armenians in the eastern Mediterranean region of Cilicia. When
supporters of the Hamidian regime revolted against the CUP
government in Istanbul on 12-13 April 1909, anti-reform and
anti-Armenian groups in the city of Adana turned on the
Armenians. Within a few days the CUP was restored to power in
the capital, but before order could be re-established in Cilicia
some 20,000 Armenians and 2,000 Muslims were dead. Not only
crowds of ordinary people took part in the massacres, but also
the police and army. 36
As Europe drifted through the last decade before the First
World War, the Ottoman government experienced a series of
political and military defeats: the annexation of Bosnia-
Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908, the subsequent decla-
ration of independence by Bulgaria, the merger of Crete with
Greece, revolts in Albania in 1910-12, losses to Italy in Libya
(19n), and in the course of two Balkan wars (1912-13) the diminu-
tion of Ottoman territory in Europe and the forced migration of
Turks from Europe into Anatolia. As their liberal strategies failed
to unify and strengthen the empire, the Young Turk leaders
gradually shifted away from their original Ottomanist views of a
multinational empire based on guarantees of civil and minority
rights to a more Turkish nationalist ideology that emphasized the
dominant role of Turks. In desperation a group of Young Turk
officers, led by Enver Pasha, seized the government in a coup d'état
injanuary 1913, and for the next five years, years fateful for all
Armenians, a triumvirate of Enver,Jemal, and Talaat ruled the
empire. Their regime marked the triumph of Turkish national-
ism within the government itsel(
Less tolerant of the non-Turks in the empire, the triumvirate
scuttled the liberal Ottomanism of earlier years and amalga-
mated the views of pan-Islam and Turanist nationalism. 'Pan-
Turanism, like Pan-Islam', writes Feroz Ahmad, 'was an
expansionist ideology which suited the mood of the Young
Turks, then in full retreat at the opposite front [in Europe] ....
Turkish nationalism, centered around the Turks in Anatolia, was
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

in the process of development in 1914. It was to emerge out of the

defeats in World War I, only after Pan-Turanism and Pan-Islam
had proved to be mere dreams.' 37
This shift towards Turkism and pan-Turanian expansionism
left the Armenian political leadership in an impossible position.
Torn between continuing to cooperate with the Young Turks in
the hope that some gains might be won for the Armenians, and
breaking with their undependable political allies and going over
to the opposition, the Dashnaktsutiun decided to maintain its
alliance with the ruling party. Other Armenian cultural and
political leaders, however, most notably the Hnchak party and the
Armenian Patriarchate, opposed further collaboration with the
government. As Turkey entered the First World War, the
Dashnaks agreed that all Ottoman Armenians should support the
empire's war effort, but they rejected the request from the Young
Turks that they agitate among Russia's Armenians to oppose the
Tsar. Even as Armenian soldiers joined the Ottoman Army to
fight against the enemies of their government, the situation grew
extremely ominous for the Armenians. They were dangerously
exposed. The bulk of their population lived in the mountainous
plateau that lay between the two belligerents, Turkey and Russia.
Everywhere in their historic homeland, except for an occasional
town or cluster of villages, they were a minority living among
Turks and Kurds, and the Muslim perception of Armenians as a
disloyal, treacherous people, one that favoured the Christian
government of the tsars over that of the Turks, seemed to be
reinforced by the events of the First World War.
Anxious to fight the Russians in 1914, the Turkish government
instigated the war by attacking Russian ships in the Black Sea.
Enver led a huge army against tsarist forces on the eastern front
late in the year, and at first he was dramatically victorious. Kars
was cut off and Sarikamish surrounded. But the Turkish troops
were not prepared for the harsh winter in the Armenian high-
lands, and early in 1915 the Russians, accompanied by Armenian
volunteer units from the Caucasus, pushed the Turkish Army
back. A disastrous defeat followed in which Enver lost three-
quarters of his army, perhaps as many as 78,000 men killed and
12,000 taken prisoner. Ottoman Armenians fled to the areas
37 Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics,

1908-1914 (Oxford, 1969), 154-5.

 Explaining Genocide 243

occupied by the Russians, confirming in Turkish minds the

treachery that marked the Christian minorities.
Enver's defeat on the Caucasian front was the prelude to the
'final solution' of the Armenian Question. The Russians posed a
real danger to the Turks, just at the moment that Allied forces
were attacking at Gallipoli in the west. In this moment of defeat
and desperation, the triumvirate in Istanbul decided to demobi-
lize the Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman Army and to deport
Armenians from eastern Anatolia. What might have been ration-
alized as a military necessity, given the imperial ambitions and
distorted perceptions of the Ottoman leaders, quickly metamor-
phosed into a massive attack on their Armenian subjects, a
systematic programme of murder and pillage. An act of panic
and vengeance metastasized monstrously into an opportunity to
rid Anatolia once and for all of the one people now blamed for
Enver's defeat.
With the defeat at Sarikamish and the approach of the British
towards the Turkish capital, a general panic gripped Istanbul. It
was feared that the city would fall to the Bulgarians who might
join the war on the side of the Entente or to the British who were
rumoured to be about to break through the Dardanelles. The
American ambassador to the Porte, Henry Morgenthau,
reported that Talaat 'was the picture of desolation and defeat' in
January 1915 as the thunder of the British guns at the straits
seemed 'to spell doom'. 38 There was fear ofrevolution in the city,
and posters denounced Talaat. The Prefect of Police, Bedri Bey,
rounded up unemployed young men and expelled them from the
capital. Towards the end of the month Enver returned from the
front, unsure of his reception by the public, after the devastating
defeat at Sarikamish. The Young Turk leaders planned to bum
down the city if the British broke through, a wanton act that
shocked Morgenthau. 'There are not six men in the Committee
of Union and Progress', Talaat told him, 'who care for anything
that is old. We all like new things.'39
The mood in Istanbul in early 1915 needs to be carefully
assessed, for many historians believe that it was precisely in this
atmosphere that the Committee of Union and Progress took the
decision to deal with the Armenians. As a friend of the Young
38 Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Detroit, 2003), 135.
39 Ibid. 138.
244 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

Turk leaders, Ambassador Morgenthau's account of the atmos-

phere in the government and the mentalities ofTalaat and Enver
is an essential source. He reports that the authority of the CUP at
this time 'throughout the empire was exceedingly tenuous'. At
the moment when the Allied fleet attacked the Dardanelles on 18
March, the Ottoman state 'was on the brink of dissolution'.
Among the subject races the spirit of revolt was rapidly spread-
ing. The Greeks and the Armenians would also have welcomed
an opportunity to strengthen the hands of the Allies. 40 But the
Allies did not break through; the Germans and Turks held them
off, and the fleet pulled back. A month later the Allies landed
troops at Gallipoli in another futile campaign. The Turks
responded by rounding up foreigners to use as hostages placed
among the Muslim villages in the Gallipoli region. 41
Morgenthau elaborates a number of causes for the deportations
and massacres of the Armenians, many of which have been foun-
dational for western and Armenian historiography of the geno-
cide. He begins with the nationalist perspective that the Young
Turks were committed to a Turkified empire and adopted the
policy of Abdul Hamid. 'Their passion for Turkifying the nation
seemed to demand logically the extermination of all Christians-
Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians. ' 42 The error of past Muslim
conquerors had been that they had not obliterated the Christians,
'a fatal error of statesmanship' that 'explained all the woes from
which Turkey has suffered in modern times'. 43 The war presented
an opportunity, for Russia, France, and Britain could no longer
stand in the way as they had during Abdul Hamid's reign. 'Thus,
for the first time in two centuries the Turks, in 1915, had their
Christian populations utterly at their mercy. The time had finally
come to make Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks.' 44
The Armenians, in Morgenthau's account, are innocent.
While the fact 'that the Armenians all over Turkey sympathized
with the Entente was no secret', the Armenians acted with
restraint. Their leaders urged them not to be provoked. 45 Rather
than being primarily a matter of religious difference or conflict,
the decision to carry out the deportations and massacres was a
strategic choice. 'Undoubtedly religious fanaticism was an
impelling motive with the Turkish and Kurdish rabble who slew
40 Ibid. 158. 41 Ibid. 176, 190-1. 42 Ibid. 200. 43 Ibid.
44 Ibid. 201. 45 Ibid. 203-4.
 Explaining Genocide 245

Armenians as a service to Allah, but the men who really

conceived the crime had no such motive. Practically all of them
were atheists, with no more respect for Mohammedanism than
for Christianity, and with them the one motive was cold-blooded,
calculating state policy.'46
Already injanuary and February 1915, 'fragmentary reports
began to filter in' to the American embassy of killings of
Armenians, 'but the tendency was at first to regard these activi-
ties as mere manifestations of the disorders that had prevailed in
the Armenian provinces for many years'. 47 Talaat and Enver
dismissed such reports 'as wild exaggerations'. 48 What the
Armenians would later call 'the defense of Van' was declared by
officials 'a mob uprising that they would soon have under
control'. 49 When prominent Armenians in the capital were
arrested on 24 April, Morgenthau brought the issue up to Talaat,
but the Young Turk leader argued that the government was
acting in self-defence, that the Armenians in Van 'had already
shown their abilities as revolutionists', and that Armenian leaders
in Istanbul 'were corresponding with the Russians, and he had
every reason to fear that they would start an insurrection against
the Central Government'. 50
Yet inseparable from their cool strategic calculation was the
emotionally generated preference for the ends anticipated and the
appropriate means to be used to achieve them. Talaat explained to
Morgenthau his reasoning for the Young Turks' treatment of the
Armenians: 'These people . . . refused to disarm when we told
them to. They opposed us at Van and at Zeitoun, and they helped
the Russians. There is only one way in which we can defend
ourselves against them in the future, and that is just to deport
them.' 51 When Morgenthau protested that that was not a reason
for 'destroying a whole race' or 'making innocent women and chil-
dren suffer', Talaat simply added: 'Those things are inevitable.' 52
In a later, extended conversation-this one without Morgenthau's
Armenian dragoman present-Talaat spoke most frankly:
I have asked you to come today ... so that I can explain our position
on the whole Armenian subject. We base our objections to the
Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have
enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. In the second place,
46 Ibid. 221-2. 47 Ibid. 224. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid.
51 Ibid. 230. 52 Ibid.
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate

state. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our enemies.
They have assisted the Russians in the Caucasus and our failure there
is largely explained by their actions. We have therefore come to the
irrevocable decision that we shall make them powerless before this war
is ended. 53
When Morgenthau attempted point by point to refute Talaat's
argument, Talaat interrupted: 'It is no use for you to argue ...
we have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians;
there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzeroum. The
hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense
that we have got to finish with them. If we don't, they will plan
their revenge.' He told Morgenthau that he had 'asked you to
come here so as to let you know that our Armenian policy is
absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have
the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert
but nowhere else.' 54 In despair, Morgenthau told Talaat: 'You
are making a terrible mistake', and repeated that three times.
'Yes, we may make mistakes', he replied, 'but-and he firmly
closed his lips and shook his head-"we never regret" .' 55 Later
he told Morgenthau: 'No Armenian ... can be our friend after
what we have done to them.' 56 On 3 August 1915 Morgenthau
wrote in his diary of his meeting with Talaat: 'He gave me the
impression that Talaat is the one who desires to crush the poor
Armenians.' 57 Talaat reportedly told friends with pride: 'I have
accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in
three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years.' 58
As more and more evidence came into the American embassy
that Armenians were being deported and murdered, Morgenthau
requested a meeting with Enver, who was extraordinarily frank
about what was happening.
The Armenians had a fair warning ... of what would happen to them
in case they joined our enemies. Three months ago I sent for the
Armenian Patriarch and I told him that if the Armenians attempted to
start a revolution or to assist the Russians, I would be unable to prevent
mischief from happening to them. My warning produced no effect and
the Armenians started a revolution and helped the Russians. You know
what happened at Van. They obtained control of the city, used bombs
53 Ibid. 231. 54 Ibid. 232. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 233. 57 Ibid. 229.
58 Ibid. 234.
 Explaining Genocide 247

against government buildings, and killed a large number of Moslems.

We knew that they were planning uprisings in other places. You must
understand that we are now fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles
and that we are sacrificing thousands of men. While we are engaged in
such a struggle as this, we cannot permit people in our own country to
attack us in the back. We have got to prevent this no matter what
means we have to resort to. It is absolutely true that I am not opposed
to the Armenians as a people. I have the greatest admiration for their
intelligence and industry, and I would like nothing better than to see
them become a real part of our nation. But if they ally themselves with
our enemies, as they did in the Van district, they will have to be
destroyed. I have taken pains to see that no injustice is done. 59
Enver argued that European sympathy only encouraged the
Armenians:
I am sure that if these outside countries did not encourage them, they
would give up their efforts to oppose the present government and
become law-abiding citizens. We now have this country in our absolute
control and we can easily revenge ourselves on any revolutionists ....
The great trouble with the Armenians is that they are separatists. They
are determined to have a kingdom of their own, and they have allowed
themselves to be fooled by the Russians .... You must remember that
when we started this revolution in Turkey there were only two hundred
of us .... It is our experience with revolutions which makes us fear the
Armenians. If two hundred Turks could overturn the Government,
then a few hundred bright, educated Armenians could do the same
thing. We have therefore deliberately adopted the plan of scattering
them so that they can do us no harm. 60
Morgenthau went on:
In another talk with Enver I began by suggesting that the Central
Government was probably not to blame for the massacres. I thought
this would not be displeasing to him.
'Of course. I know that the Cabinet would never order such terrible
things as have taken place,' I said. 'You and Talaat and the rest of the
Committee can hardly be held responsible. Undoubtedly your subordi-
nates have gone much further than you have ever intended. I realize
that it is not always easy to control your underlings.'
Enver straightened up at once. I saw that my remarks, far from
smoothing the way to a quiet and friendly discussion, had greatly
offended him. I had intimated that things could happen in Turkey for
which he and his associates were not responsible.
59 Ibid. 236. 60 Ibid. 236-8.
 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

'You are greatly mistaken,' he said. 'We have this country absolutely
under our control. I have no desire to shift the blame on to our under-
lings and I am entirely willing to accept the responsibility myself for
everything that has taken place. The Cabinet itself has ordered the
deportations. I am convinced that we are completely justified in doing
this owing to the hostile attitude of the Armenians toward the Ottoman
Government, but we are the real rulers of Turkey, and no underling
would dare proceed in a matter of this kind without our orders.' 61
Morgenthau noted differences between Talaat and Enver.
'Enver always asserted that he wished to treat the Armenians
with justice-in this his attitude to me was quite different from
that of Talaat, who openly acknowledged his determination to
deport them. ' 62 He reported a conversation with the German
naval attache, Humann, who told the ambassador of Enver's
hesitance about the deportation of the Armenians: 'At first Enver
wanted to treat the Armenians with the utmost moderation, and
four months ago he insisted that they be given another opportu-
nity to demonstrate their loyalty. But after what they did at Van,
he had to yield to the army, which had been insisting all along
that it should protect its rear. The Committee decided upon the
deportations and Enver reluctantly agreed.' 63 But even with
these differences, the attitudes towards the Armenians of most of
the Young Turk leaders were quite similar. Foreign Minister
Halil Bey 'regarded the elimination of this race with utmost good
humour', and defended the analysis of Enver. 64
Morgenthau's account gives a compelling interpretation of the
motivations of the principal Young Turk leaders. Fear was the
driving emotion, insecurity compounded by the defeats in the
winter of 1915 and the threats from Allied forces. Armenians
were seen as an internal subversive force allied to the Russians.
The war presented a unique opportunity to eliminate a long-
term existential threat to the empire and the plans of the Young
Turks for a more Turkified empire. Reason, strategic advantage,
and emotion-fear, a sense of future danger, humiliation at the
hands of Armenians, and a sense of betrayal-conspired together
to generate plans for mass deportation and massacre.
Morgenthau's account is corroborated by Talaat in his posthu-
mously published memoirs, where he revealed the thinking of
the state authorities at the moment of decision and how the
61 Ibid. 240-1. 62 Ibid. 240. 63 Ibid. 258. 64 Ibid. 246.
 Explaining Genocide 249

deportations escalated into mass killing that involved ordinary

civilians. Although he attempts to apologize for unintended
excesses, he tells more about the motivations for mass killing than
more recent apologists have.
The Porte, acting under the same obligation, and wishing to secure the
safety of its army and its citizens, took energetic measures to check these
uprisings. The deportation of the Armenians was one of these preven-
tive measures.
I admit also that the deportation was not carried out lawfully every-
where. In some places unlawful acts were committed. The already exist-
ing hatred among the Armenians and Mohammedans, intensified by
the barbarous activities of the former, had created many tragic conse-
quences. Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many
places people took preventive measures into their own hands and inno-
cent people were molested. I confess it. I confess, also, that the duty of
the Government was to prevent these abuses and atrocities, or at least
to hunt down and punish their perpetrators severely. In many places,
where the property and goods of the deported people were looted, and
the Armenians molested, we did arrest those who were responsible and
punished them according to the law. I confess, however, that we ought
to have acted more sternly, opened up a general investigation for the
purpose of finding out all the promoters and looters and punished them
severely....
The Turkish elements here referred to were shortsighted, fanatical,
and yet sincere in their belief. The public encouraged them, and they
had the general approval behind them. They were numerous and
strong....
Their open and immediate punishment would have aroused great
discontent among the people, who favored their acts. An endeavor to
arrest and to punish all those promoters would have created anarchy in
Anatolia at a time when we greatly needed unity. It would have been
dangerous to divide the nation into two camps, when we needed
strength to fight outside enemies. 65
Both Talaat and Morgenthau affirm that the murder of
Armenians was not motivated primarily by religious fanaticism,
though distinctions based on religion played a role. While most
victims of the massacres were condemned to deportation or worse
because of their ethno-religious identification, there were many
cases in which people were saved from death or deportation when
65 Talaat Pasha, 'Posthumous Memoirs ofTalaat Pasha', Current History, 15/I (Oct.
1921), 295.
250 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

they converted to Islam. 66 The identity of Arrnenians for the Turks

was not as indelibly fixed as the identity ofJews would be in the
racist imagination of the Nazis. Still, the collective stereotypes of
Arrnenians as grasping and mercenary, subversive and disloyal,
turned them into a alien and unsympathetic category that then
had to be eliminated.
In yet another memoir of a Turkish leader, this one written
after his trial and conviction for crimes committed during the
massacres and just before his suicide, the Young Turk governor
of Diarbekir in 1915, Resid Bey, draws a vivid picture of the
chaos that accompanied the deportations. 67 As the Russians
approached and order in the city disintegrated, Armenians,
encouraged by the revolutionary committees, refused to be
drafted. By this point the events at Van had already occurred,
and Arrnenians were preparing for the worst. Muslims expected
vengeful attacks by Armenians. The governor sent troops into
Armenian homes and discovered caches of arms. At this point,
he writes, he received the 'temporary law' (Muvakkat Kanuni) of 27
May 1915 that ordered deportation of the Armenians. He
complained that there were not instructions on how to carry out
the expulsions, which Armenians to deport. At first he deported
only the men but then was ordered to send all Armenians into
exile. With inadequate troops, no planning or provisions, the
governor relied on Circassian gendarmes, decommissioned
soldiers from the Balkan Wars, and local recruits from the peas-
antry and esnaf class. Thousands of Armenians deported from
Bitlis, Kharput, and Trabizond passed through Diarbakir
province. Looters and pillagers set upon them, following the
Armenians for days to pick up what they could. Like Talaat,
Resid Bey claims that an orderly deportation was impossible,
particularly in the face of frightened Muslims. Resid Bey turned
the homes of exiled Armenians over to Muslims, who then
destroyed the houses in a mad search for hidden wealth. What is
most vivid in this somewhat apologetic and self-serving account is
the weakness and disorganization of the state authorities and the
66 See Ara Sarafian, 'The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim
Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide', in Bartov and Mack
(eds.), In God's Name, 209-21.
67 Ahmet Mehmetefendioglu (ed.), Dr. Recid Bey'in Hatiralari, 'Sürgünden Intihara'
(Istanbul, 1992), esp. 43-76. My thanks to Fatma Miige Göcek for translating the relevant
passages.
 Explaining Genocide

massive participation of ordinary people m the looting and

killing.
The Armenian genocide was the central event in the last stages
of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The traditional impe-
rial paradigm that had reigned in the Ottoman Empire was
steadily undermined by a number of factors: the revolutionary
changes in the west that rendered the Ottoman Empire a back-
ward and vulnerable society; the attempt to modernize along
western lines by the Tanzimat reformers; the differentially success-
ful adaptations to modern life by different millets, with the
Christians and Jews ahead of the Muslims; and the discourse of
the nation that created new sources of political legitimization and
undermined the traditional imperial ones. After centuries of
governing the Armenians as a separate ethno-religious commu-
nity, the Ermeni millet, and conceiving of them as the 'loyal millet,
the Ottoman state authorities and Turkish political elites, includ-
ing the Young Turks, began to see Armenians as an alien people,
as disloyal, subversive, 'separatist', and a threat to the unity of the
empire, which now required greater homogenization. This
perception was compounded more broadly by anxiety about the
relative economic success of Armenian businessmen and crafts-
men, the competition for the limited economic resources, partic-
ularly land, between Kurds, Turks, and Armenians in eastern
Anatolia, and a sense that Armenian progress was reversing the
traditional imperial status hierarchy with Muslims above the
dhimmi. A hostile disposition towards the Armenians made Turks
more likely to see their actions not as defensive but rebellious, not
as loyal but treacherous, and allowed Turks to take vengeful
action against these traitors.
When in the first year of the First World War the Young Turks
suffered a series of defeats in the east, their sense of an imminent
Armenian danger became acute, and they decided to carry out a
vicious policy of deportation and massacre to clear the region of
Armenians. Initiated by the state in the brutalizing context of
war, the removal of the Armenians soon became a massive
campaign of murder. Social hostilities between Armenians and
Turks, Kurds and Armenians, fed the mass killings, which the
state encouraged (or at least did little to discourage). More than
any other instance of surgun, the genocide came to be seen as an
opportunity to rid the empire of the Armenian problem, which
252 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

had been used as a wedge by Russians and other Europeans to

interfere in the Ottoman Empire. While fear and resentment,
anger and hatred contributed to the disposition of the leaders
who ordered the deportations, so did a perverse sense of justice
and revenge against an internal threat.
Social science, at least political science and economics, has in
the last decades moved away from affective explanations towards
a model of human action directed by rational assessment of costs
and benefits. Yet emotions are central to human beliefs, values,
actions, group formation, and social relationships, and therefore
must be incorporated into explanations of ethnic and national
identification, ethnic, religious, and national conflict, and
violence. Among the most salient political emotions related to
ethnic identification and conflict, national identity, and national-
ism are fear, anger, hatred, and resentment, but also, on the posi-
tive side, empathy, compassion, love, and pride. In his reports on
the Young Turk leaders, Morgenthau saw fear as prevalent. The
Armenians' role in Ottoman society, their successes at the
expense of Turks, their lack of gratitude, and, in general, the
reversal of traditional status relationships in which Muslims were
meant to be on top and Christians below, all contributed to a
generalized resentment of Turks towards Armenians. Anger and
fear were also expressed-anger at rebellion and fear produced
by the perceived Armenian threat to the war effort given their
relationship with the Russians. But anger is an emotion directed
at what someone has done to you, while hatred is an even more
powerful and destructive emotion directed at someone for what
they are. For the Young Turks anger had turned into hatred of a
group that was now conceived as an existential threat to their
empire and their rulership.
The Armenian genocide had its origins in the minds of a small
group of Turkish politicians associated with the Committee of
Union and Progress (Young Turks). Fear and anger, resentment
and hatred are all found in the affective disposition of Enver and
Talaat as related by Ambassador Morgenthau. Given their
strategic aim to preserve the empire, and their conceptualization
of the Armenians as internal traitors threatening its existence,
Young Turk anger metastasized into hatred and made possible
the choice to deport and murder the Armenians. Here was an
ethnic cleansing combined with mass annihilation carried out not
 Explaining Genocide 253

by a nation-state, but by a decaying empire determined to save

itself. That salvation required, in the minds of the Young Turks
and many of their German allies, the elimination of the
Armenians. Both the radicalization of their intentions and the
final implementation of their plans occurred in the context of a
deepening political and military crisis and the near destruction of
the Ottoman state at the hands of external enemies-a crisis that
consolidated a hostile affective disposition that biased the Young
Turks to suspect that Armenians presented a mortal danger to
the empire.
But these attitudes, seemingly confirmed by isolated instances
of Armenian behaviour, were self-deceptive; they were patholog-
ical and led to a misrepresentation of the actual political and
social environment in the Ottoman Empire. Armenians served in
the Ottoman Army; they were productive citizens; most were not
disloyal or interested in separatism. The very actions taken by the
Young Turks pushed Armenians to act in ways that conformed
to the CUP's image of treacherous Armenians. Defence became
rebellion. Turkish state violence against Armenians then put the
empire in greater danger and helped to bring about its clefeat. In
one aspect genocide was instrumentally irrational, based on
incorrect beliefs, self-deception, driven by a distorted emotional
disposition and web of beliefs that constructed an Armenian
enemy-the same Armenian enemy that the current Turkish
deniers and their pseudo-scientific allies claim actually existed
and was engaged in a civil war against the empire. Yet in
another, retrospective perspective, ethnic cleansing and mass
murder appear more rational-the founding crime on which the
succeeding regime, the Republic of Turkey, a relatively homoge-
neous nation-state, was built.