Case Study:

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During the First World War, the Young Turkish dictatorship deported and destroyed the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Estimates of the numbers of victims range from 800,000 to over 1,000,000. This case study explores the genocide as it developed in the southeastern Ottoman province Diyarbekir. It will provide an overview of the context, including the perpetrators, victims, and witnesses involved in the process, and focus on aspects of memory.

 A. Context

The genocide of Ottoman Armenians developed out of the dynamic interplay of three alternate forces and processes: the profound political crisis affecting the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turk Revolution and the First World War.

On October 17, 1912, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria declared war on the Ottoman Empire out of discontent with its rule and in the hope of possible territorial expansion. The Ottoman Army decisively lost the war and within months the Empire was heavily truncated for good. The defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912-13) plunged the Ottoman Empire into an existential political crisis. The total and permanent loss of the Balkan peninsula was a watershed that affected the very ontology of the Empire, and it is no exaggeration to say that the effect of the losses on Ottoman society was nothing short of apocalyptic. The loss of major Ottoman cities, enormous amounts of property, countless human lives, and honor was unbearable for a proud Ottoman elite who were dismayed at the helplessness of the Imperial Army. The shock of the war would have a severe and lasting impact on Ottoman society, culture and identity. From 1913 on, the hitherto universal Ottoman identity was no longer seen as feasible by hardliners in the political arena. The wars had not only accelerated the long-term shift of the empire’s demographic composition in favor of Muslims, their loss also bolstered the myth of the Christian “stab in the back”, part of a general discourse of non-Muslim treason and disloyalty. The deep suspicion cast on Christian loyalty to the Ottoman Empire would remain pertinent for years to come (Ginio, 2005).

A second event that contributed to the radicalization and brutalization of Turkish politics was the Young Turk Revolution of January 23, 1913. The Young Turk regime was never elected into power, but seized it through a violent coup d’état. It proceeded to install a single-party dictatorship by silencing or destroying all opposition and filling the ranks of the Ottoman state bureaucracy with loyal Young Turks. Moreover, the revolutionary regime had been born in the midst of a total war, a conjuncture that substantially reduced traditional constraints on state power and greatly heightened the potential and willingness of Young Turk leaders to deploy massive coercion in their bid to transform a multi-ethnic Ottoman society into a homogeneous Turkish Nation-State. The revolution in turn engendered profound fears of counter-revolution based on internal instability and external threats, a combination of factors which gave birth to a permanent state of emergency. Throughout their rule, the Young Turks attempted to ward off this permanent political crisis by using coercion and violence against parts of their own population. Furthermore, violence became a normal tool of statecraft for the regime since it never enjoyed widespread support among the population (Zürcher, 2000).

The Young Turk Party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), came to power in 1913, and a generation of Young Turk officers and politicians continued to rule Turkey arguably up to 1950. The regime that ruled from 1913 to 1918 has often been called a “triumvirate”, consisting of the Young Turk nationalists Mehmed Talaat (1874-1921), Ismail Enver (1881-1922), and Ahmed Cemal (1872-1922). There is some truth to this claim, Talaat became Minister of the Interior and later Grand Vizier, Enver was promoted to Minister of War, and Cemal became Minister of the Navy and later Viceroy of Syria. However, a more accurate and sophisticated account of the regime would be that the Young Turk Party consisted of an inner circle of about 50 men. This core was comprised of certain factions, dominated mostly by Talaat and Enver, and to a lesser extent by Cemal. Local party bosses called “Responsible Secretaries” or “Inspectors”, as well as Young Turk Provincial Governors wielded considerable, relatively autonomous, power. The doctors Bahaeddin Shakir (1874-1922) and Mehmed Nazim (1872-1926) were also influential and exercised power from behind the scenes. The party ideologue, the sociologist Mehmed Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924), was an intimate member of the inner circle and his nationalist ideas were highly influential in the shaping of CUP population politics. But the Young Turk dictatorship was not a perfectly harmonious Moloch. There was considerable rivalry and intrigue within the dictatorship, most notably between Enver and the army versus Talaat and the Interior Ministry. Bureaucrats at all levels competed to satisfy their superiors’ desires and invent solutions to lingering problems and questions. In addition to rivalry, ideology too was contested at times (Hanioglu, 2006).

Finally, and most importantly, the outbreak of the First World War was an unexpected but fatal development for the Ottoman Christian minorities. World War I was not an incidental event for the Ottoman Empire. Powerful cadres in the Young Turk Party’s radical nationalist wing consciously sought a belligerent route. Participation in the war was seen as a radical solution to many of the Empire’s problems (Akçam, 2001: 260-5). The regime forged an alliance with Germany and pulled the ill-prepared country into a devastating war. From the first day of the war, Young Turk dictatorial rule became more repressive towards domestic oppositional groups. Discordant behavior was dealt with systematically and ruthlessly. The war also released constraints on population policies, giving the regime a window of opportunity to launch large-scale programs of ethnic homogenization: the deportation of Armenians and Kurds (among others) coupled with the settlement of Turks served this purpose. As the war became more brutal on the eastern front and in the trenches of Gallipoli, the persecution was radicalized. Defeats triggered new waves of persecutions, especially in the eastern provinces. The blanket deportation orders of April 24, 1915 and May 23, 1915 signified a sharp intensification of the anti-Armenian measures, escalating in the summer of 1915 into genocidal destruction. The local effects of these national policies have been left largely unexplored, save for a few exceptions (Suakjian, 1981; Kaiser, 2001; Öktem, 2004).

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