The mass murder of Armenians by the Turks during the first world war, has been compared, more than any other genocide to the Holocaust. This had occurred due to the many similarities and parallels that exist between two of the most disturbing examples of man's inhumanity to man this century. The Armenian Genocide also played a fundamental role in influencing the Nazis towards pursuing an Armenian type solution to their "Jewish Question". "The international community failed to try the perpetrators, Hitler was able to see what crimes a state was able to get away with."1 Hitler also,
used the excuse of the world's indifference to Armenian suffering to silence his cabinet opposition and as a licence to proceed at will with the destruction of the Jews without the fear of permanent negative consequences. If our aim is to teach that remembrance of the Holocaust might prevent further catastrophe, not only to Jews but to other people as well, then what better example then the Holocaust.2
Numbers are often quoted in the comparative analysis of genocides, however, numbers do not make an atrocity unique. Many writers often quote percentages of the total populations murdered which is approximately fifty and thirty per cent, in the Armenian and Jewish cases respectively, although in absolute terms, the number of Jews murdered exceeded that of the Armenians. However, it is important to remember that one murder is one too many and we have to be careful not to belittle such sufferings by debating about statistics.
We ask for no statistics of the killed .....
However others calculate the cost,
To us the final aggregate is one,
One with a name, one transferred to the blest ....
Karl Shapiro, Elegy for a Dead Soldier
Helen Fein in her book, Accounting for Genocide, proposes an explanation for both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, she does this by identifying four conditions which facilitated these two atrocities. Firstly, both the Jews and the Armenians were defined outside the dominant group. The Armenians were excluded as non-Muslims, while the Jews were excluded as non-Christians and labelled as deicides. Fein identifies internal strife or defeat as a second condition. The Ottoman Empire had been in decline since the seventeenth century, while the German state had been defeated in the First World War. The Germans did not seem able to accept their defeat and regressed under Hitler to a "primitive Volk-community," with a need "to find a magic enemy of omnipotent proportions upon whom the terrible happenings could be blamed."3
Thirdly, their exists an elite "that adapts a new political formula to justify the nation's domination and/or expansion, idealizing the singular rights of the dominant group." This refers to the rise of the Young Turks and Pan Turanian ideology, which "legitimated" their domination in Turkey, and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Finally, Fein identifies,
the calculus of costs of exterminating the victim ...changes as the perpetrators instigate or join a (temporarily) successful coalition at war .. The calculus changes for two reasons: the crime planned by the perpetrators becomes less visible and they no longer have to fear sanctions.
Turkey was allied with Germany and the Central Powers during World War One, making her immune to the sanctions and protests of the Western Allies. Regarding Germany, "the decline in the visibility of the Jews, German motives to protect them for instrumental reasons and their accountability for them as world war two increased the number of Jews under German rule and led to the redefinition of the final solution from that of expulsion to that of annihilation of the Jews (both of which presume their end is their elimination)."4
Melson also identifies four preceding factors to the Armenian Genocide, which he suggests are applicable to other genocides. Melson, like Fein, identifies the victimised group as being a communal minority. However, Melson's second preceding factor, unlike those proposed by Fein, concerns the success of the group to be victimised. This group, according to Melson, enjoys rapid socio-economic, cultural and political progress. Such success by the minority creates resentment by the majority, who view such social mobilisation as a threat to the old established order. Thirdly, the victimised minority becomes associated, ideologically or geographically with the enemies of the larger society and state. Melson's final factor corresponds with the second condition identified by Fein, that is, the experience of significant military and political disasters by the state, which undermines its state security and world view.5 Melson concludes with the following paragraph:
Together these factors allow for the emergence of an ideology that links the crisis of the state and the majority to the social mobilisation or progress of the minority and to its outside connections with the state's enemies. The progress of the minority is seen as having been gained at the expense of the majority and the targeted group is blamed for the disasters engulfing the state and the larger society. In the grip of its new ideology the state radically redefines its identity and decides to eliminate the offending minority from the social structure.6
The above factors, identified by Fein and Melson, give us an indication of what prompted both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. However, I do not believe that these conditions necessarily create such atrocities as we have witnessed, although their existence in two of the most dreadful examples of man's inhumanity to man, is not a coincidence, and cannot therefore be ignored. The similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and the factors which preceded them may enable us to develop an early warning system preventing such atrocities from ever happening again in the future.
The similarities to be found within both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust themselves, are very striking. Firstly, and most obviously, both the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide were perpetrated under the cover of war. War often enables social rules to be changed, allowing for many atrocities to be perpetrated. This sealed the fate of both the Armenians and the Jews, during the First and Second World Wars, respectively. "It is no accident that the opportunity for both the Armenian and Jewish genocides appeared in the context of a general war. Wartime conditions heighten feelings of threat, permit administrative measures that would not be tolerated otherwise, and provide a cover from, external interference and condemnation."7 Both the Jews and the Armenians were religious minorities with little political influence, there was also much propaganda surrounding these two minorities, which portrayed them both as sub-human. According to Melson, the propaganda campaigns embarked upon, successfully supplanted a tolerant view of the two minorities with one that blamed them for the ills of society, "once the minority has been socially segregated and culturally alienated and the instruments of destruction have been readied, the state waits for an opportunity to eliminate the offending minority from the social structure."8 Such an opportunity presented itself with the outbreak of war. According to Fein, war was used in both the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, "to transform the nation to correspond to the ruling elite's formula by eliminating the groups conceived as alien, enemies by definition."9
Behaetin Shakir, on reminding the three-man Turkish Executive Committee, charged with a solution to the "Armenian Question", is quoted in Katz as saying that, "The suitability of this exceptional turn of events (ie. the war) must be exploited to the fullest. Such an opportunity does not present itself every day."10 Whereas Rubenstein maintains that, "for the die-hard Nazis the war was not a means to a victory, but an end in itself, wherein they permitted themselves behavioural freedoms, impossible in peacetime. They won the war that really counted for them, the war against the Jews."11
The deportations of the Armenians began on the night of 24 April 1915, when Armenian political, religious and educational leaders were arrested in Anatolia and put to death. In May, Talaat Pasha, the Minister of Internal Affairs ordered the deportations of Armenians from the war zones to "relocation centres", actually the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Pasha claimed that the Armenians were untrustworthy and were in a state of imminent nationwide rebellion. The Armenians serving in the Ottoman armies were placed in unarmed labour battalions and murdered. After the Armenian troops had been massacred, the able-bodied men were murdered. Those left were deported, these were mainly women and children, who were marched through mountains and deserts, the women often being stripped naked and abused, consequently many threw themselves over ledges to avoid such degradation. Such humiliation and dehumanisation endured by the Armenians is comparable to that endured by the Jews in World War Two. Both groups of victims were not only murdered physically, but were also stripped of every dignity beforehand. Many of those who survived the deportations later perished of starvation, epidemic or exposure. The Young Turks attempted to destroy every memory of the Armenians that had ever existed by destroying their churches and cultural monuments. Of those children that had managed to survive, they were snatched (from their parents if they had also miraculously survived), renamed and brought up as Turks.12 However, Current History Magazine stated that, Talaat and other officials, "had ordered the wholesale extermination of the Armenians including little orphan children," the magazine goes on to publish the following document,
We hear that certain orphanages which have been opened have received also the children of the Armenians. Whether this is done through ignorance of our real purpose or through contempt of it, the Government will regard the feeding of such children or any attempt to prolong their lives an act entirely opposed to its purpose since it considers the survival of these children as detrimental. Minister of the Interior Talaat.13
From this document we can only deduce that the snatching and adoption of Armenian children was strictly against the wishes of the government. It appears that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) intended the annihilation of all the Armenians in Turkey, as was the case with the Nazis regarding the Jews in Germany. However the CUP had no designs to wipe the Armenians off the face of the earth, unlike the Nazis who wished to erase every last Jew from existence. The different intentions of the Nazis and Young Turks regarding the Jews and Armenians respectively, can be elucidated by looking at the two different ideologies held by each ruling elite. "The intentionality behind Turkish inhumanity was essentially nationalist in character."14 The Young Turks desired to replace the Ottoman Empire with a new National State. Thus the Armenians had to be destroyed as a people because they were regarded as an alien nationality occupying the very heartland of Turkey and therefore preventing the formation of the Turkish Nation State. "The Armenians were perceived as a profound internal force seeking the dismemberment of the Turkish national entity both politically and geographically."15 The Jews on the other hand, were regarded as the carriers of an evil seed, by the Nazi regime.16 The Jews were regarded as deicides, they were the "magic enemy" upon whom all the terrible happenings could be blamed.
They were regarded as possessing a terrible magic potency, both as the people in whose midst God-in the -flesh had been born and His murderers. This helps to explain the irrational delusion, so persistently held, that the Jews must be destroyed lest they destroy the non-Jewish world.17
Armenians who had converted to Islam and spoke fluent Turkish, were able to save themselves from the genocidal plan, this was not even a remote possibility for the Jews under Nazism, as it challenged their racialist theory. Finally, as Melson points out, the Armenian Genocide has demonstrated to all that radical nationalism can create genocidal actions. And although the Nazi ideology of millenarian anti-Semitic radicalism is unique, "it is not uniquely necessary in order that a regime commit total domestic genocide."18 This is an important point to be remembered.
There are also many similarities in the implementation of both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, such as the deportations of the Armenians and Jews, to the barren deserts and the death camps, respectively. Special squads of Turkish ex-convicts were also established to murder the Armenians, just as the role of the Einsatzgruppen was to murder Jews. There are, however, significant differences. The Armenian genocidal plan evolved much more rapidly than the Holocaust. Melson identifies three different stages of the Holocaust. These are the pre-war stage (1933-39), the interim stage (1939-41) and the final stage (1941-45). The first stage began with the distinction between, and the definition of Jews and Aryans. The second stage is characterised by "indecision in the machinery of destruction." This concerns the question of whether to deport or exterminate the Jews in the conquered Polish territories. Thus, while the "final solution" was taking shape, Jews were deported from the countryside to the cities, where they were concentrated in ghettoes. The final stage concerns the formulation and implementation of the final solution, the extermination of the Jews.19 The significant difference with regard to the implementation of the Armenian Genocide is that the different stages occurred in one process of identification-expropriation-deportation-destruction.
Germany was far more industrially advanced than Turkey, at the time of the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide, respectively. Germany was therefore able to utilise her superior technological capabilities to carry out mass murder in the most efficient way. Turkey, although less industrialised than Germany, was still able to exploit the industrial facilities it did have to aid the process of genocide. For example, the telegram enabled the coordination of activities and the railway transported many Armenians to their deaths in the Syrian desert. There were no gas chambers operative during the Armenian Genocide, however, the Turks managed to improvise, their equivalent to the Nazi gas chambers consisted of locking the Armenians into churches which were set alight. Many Armenians also perished, as mentioned earlier, through shootings, forced marches, famine and epidemic, just as did many Jews in the Holocaust.20
Unlike the Jews, the Armenians were fully cast out of their homeland, this has facilitated in the denial of the Genocide by Turkey and other countries. The Holocaust is better acknowledged the world over.21 The post war German governments have never denied the Holocaust, and have even extended reparations to survivors, the families of victims and also to the State of Israel. Discussions regarding the implications of the Holocaust appear in the media, educational curricula and varied literature around the world. Unfortunately this is not the case with the Armenian Genocide, on the contrary, the Turkish State does everything in its power to suppress discussion of the Armenian Genocide. An example of which is the intimidation by the Turkish government in 1982, regarding the participation of Armenians at the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv. The New York Times (3 June 1982) interviewed Elie Wiesel (the spiritual leader of the conference), "the Turks let it be known there would be serious difficulties if Armenians took part in the Conference."22 The Conference took place despite the intimidation, and the attempts by the Israeli government to close down the conference due to the high level of such intimidation.
It as a powerful lesson that Armenians and Jews - and all other peoples- must stand together in a common battle against those responsible for past events of genocide, and against all those who seek to deny the truth of such past events."23
Unbelievably, in the years since the Armenian Genocide, even the media appear to collaborate and "eventually the public can be convinced that it had previously held the wrong view."2
ch1 ch2 ch4 ch5 Conclusion Bibliography