- subtitled: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire
A collection of essays on the Armenian genocide in the early years of the 20th century. The authors come from a variety of backgrounds - Armenian, Turkish, American, European - and have been having yearly conferences on this topic for some time now, with the emphasis on scholarly research, examining original source material, and establishing facts and trends as best as possible. The essays look at a variety of topics: CUP ideology and policy evolution, the unfolding of events in specific regions, the implication of Germany as Turkish ally in the Armenian genocide, the awareness at the time of these events, the continuity of CUP and Turkish Republic policy with regards to minorities in Turkey, the Assyrian genocide, the level of involvement of Armenians in revolutionary parties and groups, the role of Armenians within Russian ranks as the Russians moved into Eastern Anatolia during the early years of the war, a short political and ideological biography of an important figure in the organization and execution of the Armenian Genocide, continuities between policy towards Greek and Armenian minorities and towards Kurds under Ataturk. There is also discussion at various points of the relations between Kurds and Armenians, and Kurds and Turks during the period.
Some important points made or clarified in the course of the book:
1) Anti-Christian and anti-Armenian policy dates back to the late 1800's and the reign of Sultan Abdulhamit. He was very suspicious of minority Christian groups as they presented an opening for foreign powers to meddle in Turkish affairs. He was actively looking for ways to create an homogeneous society based on religion more so than ethnicity. During his reign, pogroms against Armenians occurred, arbitrary land confiscations and kidnappings occurred, and Armenians were generally marginalized in the East.
2) Once the CUP was in power, Armenians tried to get these grievances dealt with through consultation and parliament but they got nowhere.
3) A small percentage of Armenians were involved in revolutionary activity and supported the invading Russians, but when you consider their treatment over the preceding 20 or 30 years, they didn't really seem to have another option to guarantee security and basic rights. One essayist points out that the CUP very early on developed a fear of minorities and in a way, through their treatment of these groups, ended up creating the very internal revolutionary groups they had originally feared.
4) This whole time period needs to be seen against the backdrop of other wars and population displacements that had been going on since the mid-1800s. Turkey received several waves of Muslim refugees through that period - from the Caucasus due to Russian ethnic cleansing policy, from the Balkans and Greece due to the wars of independence that pushed out Muslim inhabitants. They had many refugees that needed to be settled. These refugees also carried anti-Christian feelings due to their own treatment in their original homelands. Interesting to note that all the leading CUP figures, and Ataturk as well, were all from the areas in the Balkans that produced large groups of Muslim refugees. It was these refugees who created the myth of the Anatolian homeland of the Turks and then set about shaping the facts on the ground to match the myth, the daydream.
5) There is no doubt that this genocide (an the other ethnic cleansing affecting different groups) was planned and ordered centrally. The details were often worked out locally, but it was a central government policy. It was a policy that developed over time and became progressively more harsh in response to different events and developments, but it was centralized. It was a part of what was seem as a social engineering project to increase the percentage of Turks in Eastern Anatolia.
6) In the 1914-1915 period the Kurds were a major instrument in carrying out this policy. They were used to form the Hamidiye brigades first created under Abdulhamid more or less for this purpose.
7) Policy plans developed in Ankara in 1925 to "deal with" the Kurds strongly resembled the policy pursued towards the Armenians - expulsion, relocation, cultural and linguistic repression.
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