The question has resurfaced again, as it so often does. Was what happened to the armenian people mainly in 1915 a genocide? Germany now officially thinks so. And Turkish president Erdogan responds with calling it blackmail. Personally, I don't quite understand Turkey's stance in this since the solution seems so easy: blame it on the Three Pashas. I know it takes a bit more than that, but bear with me.
This has some history to it, so for those of you who don't know these events took place during the World War I, also called the Great War, which raged from 1914 to 1918. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled over much of the Middle East, entered the war late 1914 when Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, disguised two German warships as Ottoman and attacked the Russian Empire without informing the rest of the cabinet. Basically he tricked the whole empire into war, a war that would dissolve said empire. Towards the winter that year he launched a campaign into the Caucasus Mountains to attack the Russians, but he didn't give his soldiers proper winter clothing, this proved disastrous to say the least. Numbers differ here, but generally you could say that out of the whole Third Army, roughly 118 000 people, more than half of the Ottoman soldiers never returned home, and more than half of those froze to death. This, the Battle of Sarikamish was but the first battle of a war that would continue for years. Enver Pasha, who also led the attack and forced his troops to attack against impossible odds, blamed the whole failed attack on the Armenians.
Some background on minorities in the Ottoman Empire, I'm going to try to keep this simple: the empire was big. At its height the corners of the empire was in today's Algeria, Ethiopia, Iraq and Hungary, as you can imagine this includes a whole bunch of minorities. But this was in the 17th century. By the time of the Great War mostly only the Middle East was under Ottoman rule, and the Balkans had successfully rebelled only recently. This leaves four major ethnicities left in the empire, namely the Turks, Arabs, Kurds and Armenians. The Arabs has a fascinating story of their own during the war, so I won't cover them here. And of course there are many more ethnicities here, but these are what I see as the main players in this.
Towards the end of the 19th century there was a series of massacres of Armenians by the ruling Turkish elite as a response to a growing Armenian nationalist liberation movement, so there was some resentment over this by early 20th century. And what happened in the years prior to the Great War was a series of Balkan wars, which ended with many provinces in the Balkans leaving the Ottoman Empire to create their own independent states, as previously stated. The Armenians and Kurds saw this and began to wonder if they should perhaps govern themselves as well and began looking for ways to achieve this. When war broke out with the Russians, many Kurds and Armenians joined or otherwise helped the Russians in this fight in the hope that Russia would support Armenian and Kurdish independence. This was seen as traitorous by the Ottoman government. Their response? Disarm all Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman forces and use them as labour, start killing off many able bodied young Armenian men and arrest and/or kill over two thousand Armenian intellectuals around the empire. What then started was a mass deportation of most of the Armenian population with the purpose of stripping the Armenians their ability to organize any kind of opposition to the Ottoman government. What this mass deportation included was death marches through the Syrian deserts, starvation, confiscation of property, concentration camps and straight up massacres. The death toll of these events is hard to say exactly. The low estimate is the official Turkish one at 300 000 dead, the high estimate is that of Armenia, at 1 500 000 dead.
Is this genocide? The official story of Turkey today is that these mass deportations didn't include deliberate killing, but that seem to clash with many witness reports, some of those Turkish, any many Turkish officials who protested at the time against what some called the "annihilation" of the Armenians.
So where does this put Turkey today? Are they responsible for genocide? I would ultimately say no, they are not. The genocide was orchestrated by the three men who pretty much ruled the empire at the time, namely Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Ismail Enver Pasha and Ahmed Djemal Pasha, collectively known as the Three Pashas (Pasha is an honorary military name given upon being promoted to the rank of Mirliva). I mainly blame them for what happened. And if you hadn't noticed, the Ottoman Empire doesn't exist today. After the war the Three Pashas fled into exile and Turkey got caught in a war for independence with Mustafa Kemal, also known as Atatürk (who hated Enver Pasha by the way), leading the Turks to victory and establishing the Republic of Turkey, the one that exists today.
This creates a bit of a conundrum as to how responsible modern Turkey is, and what it seems to have ended in is an acknowledgement by Turkey that bad things happened, but they refuse to agree to the word "genocide". And they have arguments for this, some more or less solid. But their arguments are not as strong as the ones of the Armenian people. One thing Erdogan said yesterday was "The countries that are blackmailing us with these Armenian genocide
resolutions have the blood of millions of innocents on their hands.", referring to the Holocaust and the Herero and Namaqua genocide. The difference in my eyes is that Germany has without a doubt owned up to that, but I have yet to see that attitude from Turkey. Apologies for atrocities made by generations before have to my knowledge been a pretty good thing for the apologizing nations.
So back to my point, the way I see it, the best way for Turkey to get past this is to clearly apologise as a people while at the same time laying the blame with the individuals who planned and executed the whole thing, the Three Pashas.
This has been my slightly condensed view and thoughts on a very big and complicated, so I assume you will not agree with everything written here. If I have made any mistakes here, please let me know. Anyway, if nothing else, I hope this at least can be some food for thought.
Prosperity and peace
Joakim Henberg
