II

One of the most crucial problems in analysing the evolution of the Armenian crisis in Anatolia and the Caucasus has been the fictionalisation of history. This is a region and a people where fact and story telling have become inextricably combined. If one wants to get a feel for the “Armenian Genocide” one is better served by reading a novel on the subject, or one of the dramatised biographies, than the dense pseudo-scientific treatises that are regularly churned out by the genocide industry. A.H. Hartunian’s dramatised biography “Neither to Laugh nor to Weep” is a good example. Another is the collaborative novel written by Hacikyan and Soucy “A Summer Without Dawn — An Armenian Epic” and published in 1991. It isn’t a particularly good novel and it abounds with clichés. However it does cover the salient components of the myth — the meetings between Morgenthau and Talaat, complete with the conversations explaining the government’s policy of genocide as reported in Morgenthau’s book, and early in chapter I the often repeated myth that “it was said that around 300,000 Christians had been killed” in massacres ordered by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II in 1894 — all of this in order to set the scene. The novel contains all the familiar themes (and contradictions) of innocent Armenian victims and valiant Armenian freedom fighters; Armenian orphans raised as Muslims never to know their Armenian birthright; women forced into sexual slavery; bad Turks and (a few) good Turks; manipulated and misled Kurds — the agents of genocide and, of course, the wholesale government sponsored massacre of Armenians and eventual salvation in America. The epilogue briefly covers the “war crimes” trials in Istanbul, the betrayal of the Armenians by the allies and the establishment of the Republic.

A ripping yarn. (9)

But stories are not constrained by fact and one does not need to understand the roots of a problem to soak up the message — the tree is visible, the roots are not. The roots are to be found in Russia and in Russia’s expansion into the Caucuses; with their frequent resulting wars against the region’s inhabitants and the Persian and Ottoman empires. The Russians first sought to subvert local populations to their cause whether they were Christian, Muslim or animist. The pattern was a cascade of trade, bribery, division, assault, occupation and then expulsion, deportation and genocide.

A Russian civil servant called Platon Zubov tried to formalise this hitherto ad hoc policy in 1834 in a book called “A Picture of the Caucasian Region and Neighbouring Lands Belonging to Russia.” Zubov’s thesis involved the subversion of mountain tribes by stimulating a demand amongst their women for luxury goods. These goods were to be offered by Christian missionaries who would combine trade with conversion and propaganda to primitives who would then see the benefits of Russification. Lowland inhabitants would remain in their homes served by the Russian government and ministered to by the Orthodox Church. Mountain peoples would be sent to inner Russia and would be replaced by Russian settlers. Native language, religion and culture would eventually die out. Clearly a naïve plan because the peoples of the region would hardly appreciate benefits of deportation and cultural extinction. The initial parts of Zubov’s thesis were never implemented with enthusiasm or efficacy, but the latter parts certainly were. (10) 

One of the earlier attempts to co-opt the Armenian population in the frontier zones with the Ottoman Empire occurred in 1829. On the 11^th of January 1829 Field Marshall Paskievitch wrote, in a dispatch to the Emperor, “We can defeat the enemy by the help of our troops; we can only retain our conquests by inspiring confidence in the population.” He was referring to the Armenians in this instance who as a result, according to the contemporary writer John F. Baddely (one of the few westerners to write about this period and region) “were utterly compromised with their Muhamadan neighbours.” When the Russians eventually withdrew from Turkish territory, some 90,000 Armenians went with them.(11) This is also the period where we start to see the mythologizing of the Armenian struggle for freedom. Khattchur Abovian, an influential writer and ideologue, considered by many to be the father of modern Armenian literature, was born between 1804 and 1810 in Erivan, which was then part of Persia. He was an eye-witness to the Russo-Persian war of 1827-28 and saw the absorbtion of his homeland by Russia. He wrote what is described as an important historical novel — “The Woes of Armenia” — as a result. In the book, he tells “how joyous the Armenians were at the prospects of having a “Christian” power to rule their country…and describes the ravages that had taken place in the homeland that the reader wonders if any other country has suffered as much as Armenia……Abovian made an emotional appeal to his countrymen to be mindful of the sorrows of their native land and to mourn its martyrs. He drew the mind and heart of his readers toward their fatherland and, in doing so, awakened in them the desire for revolution.” (12)  

General Alexei Yermolov wrote to the Tsar in 1818: he "would find no peace as long as a single Chechen remained alive" because "by their example they could inspire a rebellious spirit and love of freedom among even the most faithful subjects of the Empire."

The defeat of both Persia and Turkey during this period left Russia with a free hand for many years to follow and was characterised by brutality, especially in the conquest of Chechnya. In Chechnya, the Russian general Yermolov campaigned with real barbarity saying when questioned about his tactics “out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of Russians from destruction and thousands of Muslims from treason.” Villages with their inhabitants were regularly destroyed and captured women were distributed among Russian officers as winter entertainment. Following Yermolov, Veliaminov tried the same tactics against the Circassians where he resorted to deliberate brutality and scorched earth without success. For a time there was stalemate in the Caucusus and Circassians were said by Prince Kochubey (to an American writer) to be like the American Indians “untameable and uncivilized….and…extermination only would keep them quiet.” (13) Ultimately, this was to be their fate. Baddely said of this time “it would be unfair to the natives to forget that, time after time, from their earliest contact with the northern invaders down to the last shameful act of conquest, the wholesale expatriation of the western tribes in 1864, we come upon evidence of Russia’s unjust and even treacherous dealing with them, and this though we are perforce confined to Russian sources for our information.” The same is, of course, true of other nationalities; the Karbadians were destroyed by Yermolov and finished off by plague so that barely 10,000 of them remained by 1834 — Russia’s policy can be encapsulated by Yermolov's dictate to “destroy auls [villages], hang hostages, and slaughter women and children” (14) 

Ultimately, by 1864, some 1,2000,000 Abkhaz and Circassian people were expelled to the Ottoman Empire 400,000 of them dying in the process. (15) The Russians burned villages, destroyed livestock and burned crops thus, according to a British diplomatic report, “obliging them to fly.” It goes on to say “As the Russians gain ground on the coast, the natives are not allowed to remain there on any terms, but are compelled either to transfer themselves to the plains of Kouban or emigrate to Turkey……..The Ubikh and Fighett tribes are fast embarking for Trebizond. In fact, after their land had been laid waste by fire and sword, emigration to Turkey is the only alternative allowed to these mountaineers who refuse to transfer themselves to the Kouban steppes………Most of the Abkhaz have been plundered of everything by the Russians before embarking and have barely been allowed to bring with them the strict necessities of life for a short period. In many villages….their houses have been wantonly burnt by the Cossak soldiery and their cattle and other property forcibly taken away or sold under compulsion to Russian traders at a nominal price.”

And in another report “The Russian government has now acquired the territory of that brave and devoted race who have only prized one thing more than country — liberty, or at least the life that is free from the domination of a foreign foe. They are flying the shores immortalized by their defence and seeking asylum in a neighbouring empire. In short, Circassia is gone……” (16) One has to ask — does any of this sound familiar?

Mortality was very high. Many drowned in the Black Sea as they had been embarked upon boats that were simply unseaworthy and crowded to capacity. To this day, there is a folk memory among the descendants of some of these people that they should not eat fish because their ancestors were, themselves food for fishes.

Many died of murder, disease, starvation and exposure on the overland trip to Turkey and many succumbed after they had reached safety. For example, a tug, arriving at the Dardanelles in tow of two ships “laden with 1,300 Circassians from Samsoon. The original number shipped was 1,800 and during the voyage, which lasted 35 days, 670 died from disease, exhaustion, hunger and, above all, from horrible crowding.”

In 1865 some 5,000 Chechen and Ingush families were forced to flee to Turkey. This was a typical occurrence and the pattern was repeated after the Russo-Turkish war of 1876-8. In fact, by Royal Decree of 31^st May 1880, the entire Abkhazian people were officially declared guilty of treason and those that had not already fled were exiled to eastern and northern provinces of Russia. Large swathes of central Abkhazia were almost completely depopulated. (17) And in 1895 in “The Memorandum on the Colonisation in the Sukhumi District” drawn up by one Colonel Brakker there is the statement:”It is desirable to save as much free land as possible for the settlement of exclusively native Russian people.” Some Abkhaz endured and the supply of Russian settlers was limited — according to statistics collated in 1918 the population of Abkhazia was 21.4% Abkhaz, 42.1% Georgians, 11.7% Russians, 11.7% Greeks, 10.2% Armenians and 2.9% other nationalities. (18) In the province of Erivan, roughly now modern Armenia, the population was predominately Muslim. By 1827 the majority was Armenian. And so the pattern continued. (19)

Louise Nalbandian

The pattern of manipulation of Armenians by Russia in order to further their Caucasian and Anatolian goals, and the apparent willingness of Armenians to co-operate continued unabated with the Russians being frustrated only by the restraints put on them by the western powers and the Armenians by their inability to control Russian ambitions. As Louise Nalbandian puts it “The Armenians had always nurtured the thought of freedom during the centuries of foreign domination, but now they believed they could move effectively against it. Even after the great disappointment at the Congress of Berlin, this hope for a brighter future did not die.” (20) During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-88 the Tiflis based Armenian newspaper Mushak said, as Russian troops marched into Turkey, “If Turkey vanishes from the face of the earth as a nation, the Armenians of Turkey must try every means to join Russia.” (21) And from Armenian intellectuals such as Mikael Nalbandian, Rafael Patkanian (aka Kamar Katiba) and Hakob Melik-Hakobian (aka Raffi) came works of popular literature that all aimed at the encouragement of “armed force against the Ottoman government.” Greek and Bulgarian revolutionary experiences encouraged the setting up of guerrilla bands on the back of Russian support. Groups in Russia sought to stir up unrest amongst Armenians in Turkey by encouraging them to emulate the Greeks and Bulgarians by producing brochures with romanticised accounts of revolt with titles such as “Bulgar Avazakapet “ (Chief of the Bulgarian Brigands) and “Sarkavag” (Deacon) (22) Beyond the romantic literary output was, of course, the more sinister terroristic byproduct. Armenian revolutionaries were, by the early 1890s, involved in military and incendiary operations aimed at destabilising the Ottoman Empire — men were sent across the border for military actions against Kurds since it was believed that “such encounters would attract the attention of the European Powers…..and to collect information about the condition of the people and the possibilities of uprising: preparing men in Russian Transcaucasia for possible future armed combat on Turkish soil; and smuggling arms into Turkey through the Persian frontier.” (23) All of this is prior to incidents that produced major uproar in western countries such as the Kum Kapi riots (1890), the riots at Bab Ali (1895) and the Ottoman Bank attack (1896) and most importantly, the 1896 uprising in Van . It is interesting that in the matter of arms smuggling into eastern Anatolia in this period the Armenians were very clever in exploiting the political dynamics of the area and the mutual suspicions of Russians, Armenians, Persians, Turks and Kurds — the Dashnaks set up an arms factory in 1891 in Tabriz. This arms factory was an assembly plant — or what we call today a “screwdriver plant”— skilled men from the Tula arms factory in Russia, using equipment from the government armoury in Tiflis, manufactured components for modern arms and ammunition. These components were then transported to Tabriz for assembly and then stored in various arsenals for use by guerrilla forces in Turkey. The Turks knew about this but were able to do little due to limitations placed on their scope for action by international borders. (24) Into this developing environment of hostility and terror in the heartland of the Ottoman Empire came the millions of refugees and survivors of massacre, disease and human calamity from the Caucusus, the Balkans and Greece.

In the context of all this human misery the deportation of Armenians in WWI was small beer. In the context of a war of national survival it is surprising that the government resorted to deportation and not genocide (as the Imperial Russian Government actually did) and it is hardly surprising, given the recent nature of the sufferings of Muslims and the incendiary and racist nature of Armenian propaganda that the local responses to the proximity of Russian armies and the actions of Armenian irregulars was so extreme. As Rafael de Nogales, an artillery officer with the Ottoman army put it — after the war started almost all Armenian officers and men of the Third Army joined the Russians soon to return “burning hamlets and mercilessly putting to the knife all the peaceful Mussulman villagers that fell into their hands. The altogether unjustifiable desertion of the Armenian troops, united to the outrages they committed afterwards, on their return, in the sectors of Bash-Kaleh, Serai and Bayacet, did not fail to alarm the Turks and rouse their fear lest the rest of the Armenian population in the frontier provinces of Van and Erzerum revolt likewise, and attack them with the sword.” (25)

The difference between Muslim and Armenian experiences lay only in the fact that there was no vociferous lobby in America or Western Europe campaigning on their behalf; there was no missionary investment in the souls of the Greek Muslims, Bulgarian Turks, the Crimean Tartars, the Chechen, the Ingush, the Abkhaz, the Circassians and the numerous other small nations and tribes who suffered and, in some instances, no longer exist. Double standards were even more entrenched then than they are today and a similar pattern unfolded after the Greeks invaded Anatolia in pursuit of a neo-Byzantine imperial dream in 1919. When George Horton, Christian missionary in Smyrna and a Turcophobe of no small distinction (author of “The Blight of Asia”), asked a Greek about reports of wholesale massacres carried out by Greeks against Turks in Western Anatolia during 1921-22, the answer that he got was that Greek actions were modeled after the punitive expeditions carried out by U.S. forces in the Philippines between 1899-1905. (26)

It should be noted that there are some estimates that put the direct and indirect mortality among Filipinos due to American military action at about 200,000. Mr. Horton’s Greek advisor would certainly have been familiar with the purpose and format of U.S. operations in the Philippines but the comparisons seem to have prompted no further comment. In the context of the Philippines, non Christian Filipinos were referred to, in official texts, as “wild” thus reducing them to the level of beasts. (27) This was a sentiment that would have been integral to Horton’s view of the Muslim Turks. He even compares the policy of laying waste to the land carried out by the Greeks as being similar to Sherman’s march to the sea during the American Civil War, and therefore justifiable. (28) The British historian Arnold Toynbee was considerably more blunt. He dedicated an entire chapter (in his book “The Western Question of Greece and Turkey”) to this disgraceful episode. He simply called the chapter “A War of Extermination.” and powerfully validates his testimony as a witness saying “I was for some weeks in intimate contact with Greek soldiers and civilians then engaged in atrocities upon Turkish peasants, and with the survivors of their victims whom the Ottoman Red Crescent was attempting to rescue.” and “I personally questioned a number of survivors from groups of Turkish villages around Fistikli about the temper of the Greek chettes during their operations. They all agreed that they were not in a state of fury or excitement. They plundered first and killed afterwards, and they sang at their work, even when they got to the killing. It was the exhilaration of a cat who has caught a mouse to play with.” (29) This last comment having an uncanny similarity with events in the Morea a century earlier and at the start of our story.

So there we have it. When Armenians talk of the “First Genocide of the 20^th Century” they are talking meaningless rhetoric. When Greeks talk about a Pontic Genocide there are simply trying to slip stream behind the Armenians who are, themselves, aping the Jewish Holocaust for national, political and financial gain. No one, beyond specialised academics, has yet seriously looked at the suffering of Muslims in Balkans and Caucasus during this period and no one has bothered to write the novel; no one is interested in producing a biographical masterpiece or an epic film. Until then Turks must continue to confront a history produced by ideologues that are fundamentally dishonest in their aims and disingenuous in their arguments. When commenting on the Russian atrocity in the Caucasus, Baddely condemned them on Christian and moral grounds but he was aware of the actions of other countries, including his own, that criticism would invariably be muted because, as he put it…..”let it be emphatically repeated that, while individually any man may have the right to condemn it, collectively, as nations, it is a case of glass houses all round.” (30) We are long past the point where Armenians and Greeks should have realised, and accepted publicly, that they, themselves, are sitting in a very exposed and obvious glass house.